CategoriesMedium and Techniques
Documentary Photography
Photographs made to record real people, places and conditions, usually as sustained projects, from Atget's Paris to the Depression era and after.
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About
Documentary photography sets out to record real people, places and conditions, usually through extended projects rather than single news pictures. Roger Fenton photographed the Crimean War in 1855, and Eugène Atget spent some thirty years recording the streets, shopfronts and courtyards of old Paris before they vanished.
The 1930s gave the genre its classic form. The US Farm Security Administration sent photographers across rural America during the Depression; Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother (1936) became the programme's defining image, and Walker Evans photographed sharecropper families with plain, frontal clarity. In Germany August Sander built a portrait of an entire society, and Robert Frank's The Americans (1958) later showed how personal a documentary book could be. Bernd and Hilla Becher applied a strict, repeated format to water towers and blast furnaces. Debates about objectivity have always shadowed the genre, since framing, sequence and captions shape what a document seems to prove.
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