Documentary and photojournalism: issues and definitions
Defining the real in the digital age
Victorian surveys and investigations
The construction of documentary
The Farm Security Administration (FSA)
Documentary: new cultures, new spaces
Theory and the critique of documentary
Cultural politics and everyday life
Documentary and photojournalism in the global age
2.1 Susan Meiselas, mask picture from Nicaragua, 1978
Susan Mieselas’s 1970s book, Nicaragua, documented the armed struggle in that country in striking colour images. It has become a central work which has influenced many other photographers. These elegant masks were used to conceal the identity of the wearer.
Photography out and about
Within a decade or two of its invention, photography was used to chronicle wars, to survey remote regions of the world and to make scientific observations. Life on the streets of great cities was recorded, but so were the monuments of Egypt and Syria, the vast ranges of the Himalayas, the USA railroad as it moved West, the fishing village of Whitby and the architecture of Paris. Pornographic images were soon in circulation, as were charity shots of the poor and homeless. Montage techniques were used to produce pictures of fairies, ghosts and elves. Less sensationally, the dead were recorded as they lay in their coffins (photography was hailed as an excellent substitute for the death mask), while all the living seemed appropriate subjects for the camera’s gaze.
montage or photomontage The use of two or more originals, perhaps also including written text, to make a combined image. A montaged image may be imaginative, artistic, comic or deliberately satirical.
In this chapter we examine some of the ways photography has been used in order to bring us images of the wider world. We are essentially concerned with documentary photographs and with the history through which they were shaped and developed, but documentary is closely associated with other kinds of photography, especially those of war, travel, and photojournalism. There are often no clear lines of demarcation between these genres, nor is it possible to find exclusive descriptions of them. They cannot be defined simply by studying the intrinsic characteristics of the photographs themselves, but have to be understood through an examination of the history of their practices and social uses in particular places at determinate times. In this sense the chapter is centrally concerned with questions of history, but it does not aspire to provide a chronicle of events around the world, or a register of great practitioners over the last 150 years. Indeed, so all-pervasive has been documentary, and its associated forms, that such a chronicle would need to include many of the major figures in the history of photography. We discuss particular photographers in order to illustrate some aspect of the documentary project, rather than to provide a description or evaluation of their work.
As elsewhere in the book, our concern is with critical questions about the nature of documentary realism and the way in which debates about its form, status and characteristic practices change over time in response to social, political, economic and technological pressures and opportunities. Our approach has been to explore the connections between documentary, social investigation, modes of representation and forms of reportage at particular times.
In the first section we look at the relationship of documentary to photo-journalism and explore the ways in which both may be said to offer authentic images of life. This question was made particularly pertinent by the development of increasingly sophisticated forms of digital imaging. We then examine the ways in which nineteenth-century debates and preoccupations often pre-figure our contemporary concerns and we look at the archetypal subjects of documentary – workers, the poor, the colonised and victims of war.
The following section focuses on the 1930s as the decade in which most of our ideas about documentary, together with its characteristic social and political objectives, were formed. To illustrate this we discuss the work of the US Farm Security Administration Project.
Next, we consider the way documentary loses its stable identity and is dispersed through a variety of other, related, practices, for example, American street photography, French humanism, and new kinds of work in Britain.
We then examine how documentary has been critiqued and consider its ability to reveal significant features of everyday life before, finally, looking briefly at what the future may hold for documentary and photojournalism.
We begin by noting photography’s inexhaustible ability to provide us with pictures of the world; images which we are asked to accept as faithful to the real appearance of things. We want to examine the medium’s putative capability to furnish us with accurate transcriptions of reality, an ability once thought to be guaranteed by the technology itself. Later this naive view was challenged and, as we shall see, the relationship of photography to reality was problematised and contested.
Documentary has been described as a form, a genre, a tradition, a style, a movement and a practice; it is not useful to try to offer a single definition of the word. John Grierson coined it in 1926 to describe the kind of cinema that he wanted to replace what he saw as the dream factory of Hollywood, and it quickly gained currency within photography. The word had an imperialist tendency, and rather different kinds of photography were soon being subsumed within it. Some nineteenth-century photographers had regarded their work as ‘documents’, but many more were innocent of the fact that they were documentary photographers. Indeed, Abigail Solomon-Godeau (1991a) has pointed out that in the nineteenth century almost all photography was what would later be described as ‘documentary’.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau (1991) Photography at the Dock, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
But, if most photographs were a kind of documentary, how can we make distinctions between them? Historians and critics have frequently drawn attention to the difficulty of defining documentary that cannot be recognised as possessing a unique style, method or body of techniques. One answer to the question is to define documentary in terms of its connection with particular kinds of social investigation. Karin Becker Ohrn argues:
The cluster of characteristics defining the documentary style incorporates all aspects of the making and use of photographs. Although not rigid, these characteristics serve as referents for comparing photographers working within … the documentary tradition – a tradition that includes aspects of journalism, art, education, sociology and history. Primarily, documentary was thought of as having a goal beyond the production of a fine print. The photographer’s goal was to bring the attention of an audience to the subject of his or her work and, in many cases, to pave the way for social change.
(Ohrn 1980: 36)
straight photography Emphasis upon direct documentary typical of the Modern period in American photography.
Martha Rosler (1989) ‘In, Around and Afterthoughts (on Documentary Photography)’ in R. Bolton (ed.) The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Our concern in this chapter will be to unpick some of the components of this tradition and examine ways in which we can distinguish documentary from other kinds of straight photography. Certainly the nature of an image itself is not enough to classify a particular photograph as in some essential way ‘documentary’; rather we need to look at the contexts, practices and institutional forms within which the work is set. Documentary work may be seen to belong to the history of a particular kind of social investigation, although it employed its own forms, conventions and tropes. Martha Rosler (1989) tells us that to understand it we need to look to history, and she characterises documentary as ‘a practice with a past’. A past, we might add, which, despite changing technologies, practices and fashions, was always concerned to claim for documentary a special relationship to real life and a singular status with regard to notions of truth and authenticity.
Documentary and photojournalism are intimately linked, and many practitioners of straight photography are interchangeably described as either photojournalists or documentary photographers. However, photojournalism does, as the name indicates, have a special relationship to other texts and is seen, in its classic form, as a way of narrating current events or illustrating written news stories. While announcements of the news have existed since antiquity, and newspapers have been around for hundreds of years, the word ‘journalism’ entered the language only in the 1830s, so we may say that journalism as a modern profession grew up at the same time as photography. A modern press catering to the needs of a newly literate, urban population sought easy, graphic ways of spelling out the news while, at the same time, seeking to validate the truth and objectivity of their publications. Photographs seemed able to satisfy both of these demands – although print technology made it impossible to reproduce them until the 1880s. Nevertheless, magazines that told stories with the help of pictures were extremely popular. The Illustrated London News sold 26,000 copies of its first issue in 1842, and by 1863 had a weekly print run of 310,000. The illustrations were in the form of wood engravings that were produced with machine-like speed and precision through the use of a complex division of technical and artistic labour.
The spread and new excitement of photojournalism from the 1930s also owed much to the fact that there were many outlets through which such work could be shown and for which it could be commissioned. These magazines, which were based on the extensive use of photographs to tell stories, constitute the start of the modern movement of photojournalism. They include Look and Life in the USA, Vu in France, and Illustrated and Picture Post in Britain. There was also a host of new or revitalised publications in Germany where the movement began and most of the rhetorical devices of presentation were established – devices that allowed picture editors and designers to create powerful stories through the juxtaposition of image and text. Many of the German Illustrierte disappeared after Hitler came to power in 1933 and the editors and photographers who had worked for them went into exile, taking their skills with them to their adopted countries. Within a few years photojournalism became a worldwide phenomenon and attracted very large readerships; however, the spread of television, and changes in the patterns of newspaper ownership and financing put pressure on the illustrated magazines. By the 1960s readerships had fallen and several well-known magazines had ceased to exist. At the same time, new kinds of newspaper supplements appeared. These were full colour productions and contained many photographs, but they were advertising-led and their primary purpose was to sell goods rather than to report the news. Photojournalists had to find new outlets for their work and new strategies in order to continue their practice.
2.2 Moises Saman, Libya, 2011
In the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 a Libyan supporter of Quaddafi holds up a photograph of him while fireworks light up the sky. An example of a new kind of photojournalism, this image can be read as comment, reportage or art – a potent mixture that informs modern photojournalist practice.
Almost every aspect of social, political and personal life has been told through photojournalism and, despite the fact that television and video have become the dominant means of reportage, it is still an important source of news. However, the lack of photo magazines, the development of online reporting and the decline of photo stories in newspapers (in favour of single shots to illustrate the news) together with a new interest in personality based stories, have all led to a growing crisis in photojournalism, which can only flourish where there are editors to commission work and outlets in which to publish them.
One major factor in the development of photography around the world was the desire to record wars. Even today most people’s understanding of the nature of war comes from photographic images rather than literary accounts. It was, however, the highly critical reports of the London Times reporter William Russell on the progress of the Crimean War that led to Roger Fenton being sent to take photographs that would reassure the public. Fenton used the newly invented wet collodion process to produce more than 350 photographs which did, indeed, show scenes of calm and disciplined order. He produced a number of handsome albums with original photographs ‘tipped in’, but his images were also used as the basis of illustrations in the Illustrated London News. Illustrated newspapers produced hundreds of woodcuts, often laid out to create a narrative of events. It seems that an added sense of realism was given to the piece if it was ‘based on photographs’ rather than being the work of an artist or illustrator, even though the engraver would omit or add material in order to make a visual point or a more pleasing aesthetic effect.
collodion This process, known as wet collodion (or Ambrotype), invented by English photographer Frederick Scott Archer in 1851, increased the speed of photography as the glass plate was treated and exposed while still ‘wet’ (i.e. gummy) but it had the drawback of involving bulky equipment. It became one of the major processes until the invention in the 1870s of gelatin-coated plates known as dry plates.
Fenton spent only a short time in the Crimea and his work did little to reveal the hardships or horrors of war. The American Civil War (1861–5) was the first to be photographed extensively throughout its duration, and in which photography was seen not only as providing realistic images of the struggle, but also as ‘news’. In this sense, it also provided one of the foundation stones for the development of photojournalism. Michael L. Carlebach comments that:
Two weekly newspapers that were established in America in the years just preceding the Civil War made photographs and other visual materials equal partners of the printed word in the reporting of news. These new publications would provide the public, or at least the northern public, with accurate and timely illustrations of the war. The pictures they published, many based on photographs, offered vivid, graphic and reliable glimpses into all aspects of the conflict. For the first time, Americans would see through the eyes of a score of photographers, exactly what was going on at the front.
(Carlebach 1992: 63)
But, as Carlebach makes plain, these significant images were not the most numerous of the photographs produced in the war. A boom was experienced by photographic studios trying to deal with the demand for portraits of those who were going into battle. In addition, photographs of the commanders of the Federal army were turned out by the hundred; purchased by people anxious to support the cause and made the subject of a special tax.
The most important photographer of the Civil War was Matthew Brady. Already celebrated for his portraits, ‘Brady of Broadway’ produced photo graphs that showed scenes of action, together with shots of the dead on the battlefield, and more tranquil views of soldiers relaxing at their camps. Brady put teams of photographers into the field of battle, including Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan and George Barnard, and published this work under his own imprint. Alan Trachtenberg describes his function in the following terms:
‘Brady’s pictures’ did not mean pictures made by Brady himself but those he displayed or published…. Organiser of one of several corps of private photographers, collector of images made by others, a kind of archivist or curator of the entire photographic campaign of the war, Brady played many roles, swarmed with ambiguities, in the war.
(Trachtenberg 1989: 72)
Since Brady’s time, no war or violent conflict has lacked its photographic record and interpreters. For example, hundreds of thousands of images of the First World War were made, most of which have been rendered anonymous by the system of classification and archiving that was subsequently employed. Despite the sheer number of photographs of that conflict, there is little work that really gives us a sense of the nature of trench warfare, and the poetry, films and paintings of the time are often more moving and revealing.
Photography was considerably more important as a means of depicting the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). The many illustrated journals of the day carried photographs and these images were influential in shaping people’s view of the war. The single most famous photograph was Robert Capa’s Death of a Loyalist Soldier which later became the subject of speculation as to its authenticity. Capa was also one of the photographers of the Second World War whose work became very familiar to the public, along with that of Bert Hardy, W. Eugene Smith, Carl Mydans and Life photographer David Douglas Duncan, who went on to produce heroic images of American soldiers in Korea and Vietnam. After the Spanish Civil War, Capa was one of the founders of the photo agency Magnum, which has enrolled many distinguished photographers over the years.1 Many histories of documentary and photojournalism in the last half century are written essentially around the work of members of the agency. Photo agencies are vital to the work of independent photographers and the archives they establish and support are a most important resource.
The Second World War (1939–45) blurred the distinction between combatant and civilian and, thereafter, war photographers concentrated as much attention on those caught up in conflict as on the soldiers themselves. This is, of course, also true for violent conflict which is not defined as a ‘war’, as in Cyprus or Northern Ireland.
Jorge Lewinski has commented that:
It is only in the post-war period, starting with the Korean war, that the immediacy of war photographs begins to have a significant effect. Since then, a stream of authentic images has overwhelmed us with cumulative power. The images from Korea, Cyprus, Israel, the Congo, Biafra and Vietnam have left their indelible mark on our imaginations.
(Lewinski 1978: 12)
Certainly, it is often said that the stream of images revealing the death, injury and sorrows of the people of Vietnam was a major factor in the public’s eventual repugnance for that war. In the sophisticated photographic work of the time the themes of martial conflict and civilian anguish are inter-twined. An excellent example is given in the work of Philip Jones Griffiths, who produced one of the most important photographic records of the war (Griffiths 1971).
War has been seen as an important subject for photography for a number of reasons: the photographer might reveal scenes and actions which would not otherwise come to the attention of the public; war inevitably throws up scenes of great emotional force which can best be captured by the camera; it has a dark psychic fascination for us, which coexists with our feelings of revulsion. The person who has most mused on this ambivalence is the English photographer Don McCullin, who has documented many wars and violent uprisings since the early 1960s (McCullin 2003).
We might ask why we particularly remember some photographs of war and what social function they might serve. It has been suggested that certain images are given iconic status within a society because they evoke and structure ideas about the culture of that place and are congruent with how its citizens feel about themselves.
Michael Griffin puts it succinctly:
The enduring images of war are not those that exhibit the most raw and genuine depictions of life and death on the battlefield, nor those that illustrate historically specific information about people, places and things, but rather those that most readily present themselves as symbols of cultural and national myth.
(Griffin 1999: 123)
On this reading, there are no unequivocally great photographs of war, only those that structure or re-enforce feelings already extant within a particular culture.
We should remember that war reporting, like other kinds of reportage, has depended historically on the ability of the photographer to bear witness to the action taking place. But, so powerful has been the influence of war reporting that military authorities make every effort to control journalists and photographers working in scenes of conflict. The unattached freelance reporter has all but disappeared and photographers increasingly find themselves forced to work at a distance from violent action. For some photojournalists, war reporting has, in consequence, taken on new forms that are more akin to meditations on the nature of war than direct reportage. For example, the French photographer Luc Delahaye (who is a member of Magnum and worked for Newsweek) became famous for his close-up pictures of war and scenes of violence. However, he abandoned this photojournalistic approach in favour of working with large-scale or panoramic cameras to produce big images that were designed to be shown in galleries. Instead of the vibrant confusion of struggle we are given a more distanced, considered and detached view of conflict.
2.3 Paul Seawright, Room 1, 2003
The Irish photographer was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to photograph the aftermath of conflict in Afghanistan. This haunting image is from the collection Hidden.
This new kind of retrospective work, which has been called ‘aftermath photography’, may be seen in the pictures of a number of photographers, including those the Irish photographer Paul Seawright took in Afghanistan for the Imperial War Museum, London. These are large, colour works, that have no images of direct conflict, but show the traces of war, the scarred buildings and furrowed earth, together with the characteristic debris of battle. They have none of the busy activity of war photography, but are carefully composed works through which we can explore the nature of violent conflict.
Sarah James has described work in this kind in the following terms:
Surveying sites ruined by war and catastrophe – Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Beirut, Baghdad, Lebanon, Palestine, or Manhattan’s Ground Zero – photographers such as Simon Norfolk, Paul Seawright, Joel Meyerowitz and Sophie Ristelhueber have developed this strange new genre. Each works in saturated or subdued colour, often on a monumental scale and with thrilling precision … The surreal landscapes and alien environments charted by these photographers are as abstract, inhuman and incomprehensible as the wars that caused them.
(James 2013: 115)
Describing the work of Anne Ferran, Geoffrey Batchen points out that:
Refusing to tell us anything about what we are seeing, to give us the explanatory information we crave, these photographs challenge us to bring our own knowledge and desires to them. They might be said to represent the ground of history itself, waiting to be inscribed with meaning.
(Batchen et al. 2012: 228)
Susan Sontag (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others, London: Hamish Hamilton.
This strategy raises a number of questions: the old assertion based on authenticity (‘I saw it; I was there’) no longer holds good, but is replaced by a new implicit claim to respect the suffering of others by producing more structured and complex works that function as objects of critical contemplation. This moves the photographer out of the world of the media with its insatiable demand for immediate images and into the world of art. These pictures are no longer to be found in newspapers and magazines, but are to be seen on the walls of galleries. An apparent opposition is sometimes seen to exist between the world of concerned photography and the realm of art. Susan Sontag has argued that this is an exaggerated distinction:
Transforming is what art does, but photography that bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticised if it seems ‘aesthetic’; that is, too much like art.
(Sontag 2003: 68)
To escape the voyeuristic position of photojournalism, then, one may be accused of making elegant art objects out of the victims of disaster. But photojournalism is also under attack from quite different kinds of image-making. Commenting on the images of tortured Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Andy Grundberg laments the fact that the old disciplines of photojournalism have all but disappeared:
These photographs tell us that the codes of objectivity, professional ethics and journalistic accountability we have all relied on to ensure the accuracy of the news – at least in rough draft form – are now relics. In their place is a swirling mass of information, written as well as visual, journalistic as well as vernacular, competing to be taken as fact.
(Grundberg 2005: 108)
Andy Grundberg (2005) ‘Point and Shoot: How the Abu Ghraib Images Redefine Photography’, American Scholar, 74(1), Winter 2005: 108. Quoted in ERINA DUGANNE (2007) ‘Photography After the Fact’ in MARK REINHARDT, HOLLY EDWARDS and ERINA DUGANNE (eds) Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 73.
The Abu Ghraib photographs, then, were seen all over the world, and their shocking claim to authenticity resided in part in the fact that they were not presented as objective documents. Taken with cheap digital cameras and on mobile phones they were a species of personal photograph, of snapshots, made for the amusement of the photographers and their putative audience of colleagues and friends. Freed from any of the codes that govern the practice of photojournalism, they had a rawness and immediacy that contributed to their appalling power. We should observe, however, that carrying on the old task of ‘bearing witness’ while working outside the structures of professional photography has become quite common. Many of the photographs of the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York or the effects of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans were similarly made by amateurs using very simple devices. In both cases they were exhibited together with work by artists and photojournalists. This new promiscuous heaping together of work made for different reasons and from different professional standpoints makes it very difficult to be clear about the current state of photojournalism.
2.4 Abu Ghraib, 2004
The photographs from Abu Ghraib were shocking and were seen all over the world. They also drew attention to the ways in which informal snapshots might be more potent than carefully composed images.
D.L. Strauss (2003) Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, New York: Aperture Books.
Certainly, in recent years the relationship between photographer and suffering subject has become increasingly the subject of debate. The argument that photography gives an aesthetic gloss to anguish is a very old one, but is far from being resolved. David Levi Strauss has argued that:
The idea that the more transformed or ‘aestheticized’ an image is, the less ‘authentic’ or politically valuable it becomes, is one that needs to be seriously questioned…. To represent is to aestheticize: that is, to transform. It presents a vast field of choices but it does not include the choice not to transform, not to change or alter whatever is being represented. It cannot be a pure process in practice. This goes for photography as well as for any other means of representation.
(Strauss 2003: 9)
Susie Linfield argues that photojournalists now find themselves in a Catch 22 situation:
Some are criticized for taking too-beautiful pictures, while others are chided for images that are too ugly to bear; some are criticized for a gruesome realism, while others are accused of being overly romantic in their approach.
(Linfield 2010: 44)
She argues that these dichotomies are inevitable when trying to ‘show the unshowable’ and suggests that:
These critics seek something that does not exist: an uncorrupted, unblemished photographic gaze that will result in images flawlessly poised between hope and despair, resistance and defeat, intimacy and distance.
(ibid.: 44)
Photographers and editors still have to make crucial choices about the technical means of production; the intended audience, the medium through which photographs are displayed and the relationship of any particular images to the vast number already in circulation.
Reviewing the prestigious World Press Photo awards, the artists Adam Broomberg and Olivier Chanarin described photojournalism as ‘a photographic genre in crisis’ and went on to list the dominant themes of the 81,000 photographs submitted for consideration:
Again and again similar images are repeated with only the actors and settings changing. Grieving mothers, charred human remains, sunsets, women giving birth, children playing with toy guns, cock fights, bull fights, … [etc]
(Broomberg and Chanarin 2008: 99)
In their own work Broomberg and Chanarin combine photographs and texts in order to unpick the nature of documentary photography. In 2013 they won the Deutsche Börse photography prize and were praised for their book War Primer 2, which uses internet screengrabs and photographs taken on mobile phones to rework Berolt Brecht’s War Primer of 1955. The piece is a sustained exploration of the role of photography in what the Americans called ‘the war on terror’.
2.5 Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Plate 80 from War Primer 2, 2011
2.6 An-My Lê, 29 Palms: Mechanized Assault, 2003–4
Here An-My Lê has photographed US military exercises as troops prepare for war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Well removed from the field of battle, these staged photographs evoke the destructive power of the military machine.
Photojournalism and documentary are linked by the fact that they claim to have a special relationship to the real; that they give us an accurate and authentic view of the world. This claim has often been challenged on a number of grounds. Perhaps the simplest and most obvious test of authenticity is to ask whether what is in front of the lens to be photographed has been tampered with, set up, or altered by the photographer.
Early in its history photography had been presented with many cases of fraud, as, for example, when the French photographer E. Appert published his book Les Crimes de la Commune in 1871. This purported to be a record of the vile behaviour of those who took part in the rising of the Paris Commune and was received with relish by many bourgeois commentators of the time. It consists, for the most part, of crudely montaged and retouched photographs, but was convincing enough for a public who were confident that the camera could not lie. It would, however, be incorrect to deduce that in the nineteenth century only outright deception was commented upon. Many sophisticated arguments about the ability of photographs to be true to appearances were rehearsed at that time. Indeed the Victorians were to stage a dramatic debate on the relationship between truth and representation in the public trial of Dr Barnardo.
In 1876 the philanthropist Dr T. J. Barnardo appeared at a hearing, having been charged with deceiving the public. His detractors claimed, and Barnardo finally conceded, that he had misled the public in his use of ‘before and after’ photographs of the orphans in his care. He had produced a series of cards which purported to reveal the transformative power of his project: one card was of dirty, ragged children lounging about against a background of urban decay; a second card showed one of these children cleaned up and neatly dressed, undertaking some useful task. Dr Barnardo used child models for these cards and one, Katie Smith, is pictured in several of them, posing as a crossing-sweeper or a match-seller. At the hearing Barnardo agreed that Katie had never sold matches, but he pointed out that she was a child of the streets who might well have ended up as a beggar and that, in any case, she represented the appearance and state of a match-girl in an honest manner. Moreover, Katie could easily have stumbled into that kind of life had she not been saved by his mission.
As a result of the public hearing Barnardo gave up using photographs in this way, but his case raises questions that were to recur throughout the next century. Why should we trust the camera to be true to appearances? What is the relationship between the accurate portrayal of a single case and a general truth about the nature of things? Cannot something arranged or set up offer us an authentic insight into reality? It was questions of this kind that were rehearsed, long after Barnardo, in the furore that broke out over a photograph made in the USA.
In 1936 the American photographer Arthur Rothstein photographed a steer’s skull that had been bleached by the sun and left lying on the earth. This was a simple still life, then, but one that was clearly intended to exemplify the contemporary crisis in agriculture. Rothstein took two photographs of this object, the most famous of which shows it lying on cracked, baked, waterless earth. The second, however, revealed it as resting on the less symbolically charged ground of a stretch of grass. The photographer acknowledged that he had moved the skull a few metres in order to obtain a more dramatic pictorial effect. When the presence of these two rather different images was discovered there was an outcry from Republican politicians, who claimed that the public had a right to see photographs that were objectively true rather than those that had been manipulated in order to make a rhetorical point. Two kinds of truth were in play; for, while the right-wing politicians demanded a truth at the denotative level, the photographer, like Dr Barnardo, laid claim to a greater truth at the connotative level. Nevertheless, Rothstein was at pains to draw attention to the smallness of his intervention in the ‘real’ state of things and would certainly have subscribed to the view that the authentic could only be guaranteed by a relatively unmediated representation of things as they are.
So, the practice of documentary was and is problematic and, over time, a number of conventions and practices evolved to mark ‘authentic documentary’ from other kinds of work. These included, for example, printing the whole of the image with a black border around it to demonstrate that everything the camera recorded was shown to the viewer. At another time, scenes lit by flash were deemed illegitimate, as only the natural light that fell on the scene should be used. A kind of rudimentary technical ethic of documentary work emerged which ‘guaranteed’ the authenticity of the photograph. We may note that studio-based photography, whether for commercial purposes or as art, was made by suppressing what was contingent within the photographic frame. The scene was designed in such a way that all aspects of the image were controlled and carefully placed. We have already observed that any attempt to arrange and structure the location by a documentary photographer would be regarded as illegitimate behaviour, yet the aesthetic demand for well-composed shots remained.
Documentary photographers, too, took considerable pains to control the nature of a scene without making any obvious change to it. Thus, the celebrated French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson lay in wait for all the messy contingency of the world to compose itself into an image that he judged to be both productive of visual information and aesthetically pleasing. This he called ‘the decisive moment’, a formal flash of time when all the right elements were in place before the scene fell back into its quotidian disorder. Increasingly, documentary turned away from attempting to record what would formerly have been seen as its major subjects. Instead, it began to concentrate on exploring cultural life and popular experience, and this often led to repre sentations that celebrated the transitory or the fragmentary. The endeavour to make great statements gave way to the recording of little, dislocated moments which merely insinuated that some greater meaning might be at stake (Cartier-Bresson 1952). Cartier-Bresson’s humanist work is often regarded as documentary or as photojournalism but he is also seen as working outside the constraints of labels of this kind. As photographer and theorist Allan Sekula has pointed out,
Documentary is thought to be art when it transcends its reference to the world, when the work can be regarded, first and foremost, as an act of self-expression on the part of the artist.
(Sekula 1978: 236)
Allan Sekula (1978) ‘Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation)’ in J. Liebling (ed.) Photography: Current Perspectives, Rochester, NY: Light Impressions Co.
The problem, then, becomes how we define ‘reference to the world’ and how documentary photographers can demonstrate their fidelity to the social world. To have to engage with particular conventions, technical processes and rhetorical forms in order to authenticate documentary undermines the notion of the objective camera and with it, one might imagine, any claim of documentary to be any more truthful to appearances than other forms of representation.
We are now so used to the dominance of digital media in photography that we scarcely need reminding that the convergence between computing and audio-visual technologies has produced new technologies which have transformed the means of image-making together with its social, commercial and aesthetic practices. Digital media are marked by more than simply radical changes in photographic technologies. Their ability to create, manipulate and edit images has given new prominence to arguments about the nature of photography and taken them into the popular domain. These may briefly be summarised as questions about the nature of the photographic image and about new ways of defining and understanding ‘the real’. At first digital technologies simply copied those of traditional photography and there is still a sense in which a world of pixels and bytes has simply replaced that of chemicals and paper. However, all profound changes in technology begin by aping the past before going on to offer novel ways of using a medium. Fred Ritchin notes that:
Digital media … will not merely simulate an older style of photography, but strategies will emerge that are more capable of depicting an evolving universe. Rather than attempting simply to imitate previous media while offering an increase in efficiency, digital media, including their visual aspects, will eventually involve a more flexible, integrative, ‘hyperphotography’ that takes advantage of the many potentials of digital platforms, including links, layers, hybridization, asynchronicity, nonlinearity, nonlocality, malleability, and the multivocal. The results may at first resemble gimmickry, but eventually they will be transformative.
(Ritchin 2013: 57)
It is commonplace now to note that images with all the appearance of ‘real’ photographs may have been created from scratch on a computer, montaged from many sources, altered in some respects, or radically transformed. Figures may be added or removed and the main constituents of the picture rearranged to suggest new relationships or bizarre conjunctions. Does all this not destroy the claim of photography to have a special ability to show things as they are and raise serious doubts about those genres with a particular investment in the ‘real’ – documentary and photojournalism?
We can, of course, observe that, as we have already seen, the manipulation of images is nothing new and that photographs have been changed, touched-up or distorted since the earliest days. But we are not looking here merely at a technically sophisticated way of altering images, but at much more profound changes that challenge the ontological status of the photograph itself. If a photograph is not of something already existing in the world, how can we regard it as an accurate record of how things are? Roland Barthes’ influential conception of the nature of the photograph is that it is the result of an event in the world, evidence of the passing of a moment of time that once was and is no more, which left a kind of trace of the event on the photograph. It is this trace which has been considered to give photographs their special relationship to the real. That is that they function, in the typology of signs offered by the American semiotician C.S. Peirce, as indexical signs.
The nature of the sign within semiological systems is important, but it is interesting to note that we have always known that photographs are malleable, contrived and slippery, but have, simultaneously, been prepared to believe them to be evidential and more ‘real’ than other kinds of images. It is possible to argue that the authenticity of the photograph was validated less by the nature of the image itself than through the structure of discursive, social and professional practices which constituted photography. Any radical transformation in this structure makes us uneasy about the status of the photograph. Not only do we know that individual photographs could have been manipulated, but our reception and understanding of the world of signs may have been transformed.
Writing in the French newspaper Liberation in 1991, the social theorist, Jean Baudrillard famously remarked that ‘the Gulf war did not take place’ (Baudrillard 1995). He was commenting on the nature of the real and the authentic in our time and suggesting that in the world of the spectacle, it is pointless to posit an external reality that is then pictured, described and represented. In his view everything is constructed and our sense of the world is mediated by complex technologies that are themselves a major constituent of our reality. What took place, then, was not the first Gulf War but a whole sequence of political, social and military actions that were acted out in a new kind of social and technical space. While this may be an extreme way of formulating the argument, it is clear that a complex of technical, political, social and cultural changes has transformed not just photography, but the whole of visual culture. For example, David Campany points out that ‘almost a third of all news “photographs” are frame grabs from video or digital sources’ and comments that:
The definition of a medium, particularly photography, is not autonomous or self-governing, but heteronymous, dependent on other media. It derives less from what it is technologically than what it is culturally. Photography is what we do with it. And what we do with it depends on what we do with other image technologies.
(Campany 2003: 130; emphasis in original)
One significant consequence of this has been a new merging and lack of definition between photographic genres. It is increasingly difficult to distinguish one kind of photographic practice from another. As we shall see later, titles such as ‘documentary’ are of little use as labels for the new kind of work that is being produced. Indeed, all descriptive titles have been freely appropriated and find themselves used in curious couplings, for example one sub-genre of photography now well established in the USA is that of ‘wedding photojournalism’.
In more recent years there has been a huge increase in the number of news story photographs taken by amateurs. A new figure has come onto the stage: that of the citizen photographer. These are people who may have no particular training in photography, who are answerable to no editor, and do not necessarily subscribe to any journalistic ethic. Sometimes these are individuals who happen to record some exciting event on a single occasion, but a growing number are people who set out in a systematic way to record the scenes around them using a mobile phone or small digital camera. Where they are caught up in dramatic events their work may be seen around the world and may help shape the dominant perceptions of these events. Elsewhere, the pictures may simply be shared with family and friends.
For decades documentary and photojournalism depended on a system that had a clear separation, but interdependence, between its various parts. Between photographers and the subjects of photographs, between the publishers of these photographs (with a staff of people who influenced the nature of the final image – editors, picture editors, layout artists, printers) and the consumers of the photographs – the readers of the newspapers or illustrated magazines in which they appeared. Editors could commission photographs or draw on specialist agencies or picture libraries for them. It is this system that has gradually disappeared. The illustrated magazines gave way to the influence of television and newspaper colour supplements. These were, at first, a rich site for serious photojournalism, but were primarily vehicles for advertising and came to specialize in fashion, lifestyle and celebrity stories. This system is now largely a thing of the past. The citizen journalist can upload images to a number of sites without intervention from editors or other gatekeepers and the consumers of these pictures are usually also producers. Not only are social networks acting as publishers of photographs and news stories, but, increasingly, the mainstream media are accessing and referencing them to follow events as they unfold.
Newspaper and magazine editors, then, can commission work of this kind or draw on online sites as a source of images. The presence of citizen photographers is changing the nature of reportage, a process that is also driven by the economic imperatives of modern journalism. Noting that the profession of photojournalism has been in decline since the fall of the illustrated magazines, Julian Stallabrass comments that:
Economically pressed news organisations often prefer to provide c ameras (but little training) to willing locals rather than fly out professionals to a scene of conflict. Rates paid for the publication of newspaper photographs have been in steep decline. Foreign news – and indeed all hard news – has been squeezed for resources and space by cheaper and more advertising-friendly features on lifestyle, products and celebrity.
(Stallabrass 2013: 44)
Steven Hoelscher (ed.) (2013) Reading Magnum: A Visual Archive of the Modern World, Austin: University of Texas Press.
If we add to these economic forces the fact that some governments and participants make it increasingly difficult for photographers to work in scenes of conflict, the rise of the on-the-spot amateur would seem to be irresistible. They might be seen to be carrying on the old task of ‘bearing witness’ while working outside the structures of professional photography. Indeed, it is possible that the pictures of conflict returned from a simple camera or a mobile phone may imprint the notion of the authentic more securely than the sophisticated images presented by a professional photographer.
Of course, professional and highly developed photo agencies are still a source of images for editors. Even here, though, the world is changing. Many major agencies are now storing only digital images. Magnum, for example, has given up sending paper-based photographs to those who wish to use them. Digitized and stored online, it is now quick and easy to download images, but some people regret the passing of material objects and the ability to handle an actual print. The Magnum archive has passed to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas where it will be available to scholars who want to explore the nature of photography in the twentieth century.
Photography has always had to take its place within a range of discourses and visual practices. One reason why the veracity of the camera was readily accepted in the nineteenth century was that photographs appeared to confirm ideas about the world that had been the subject of other artistic and cultural forms. The camera reinforced journalistic and literary accounts of aspects of social life that had rarely been seen or experienced by middle-class people. Moreover, we may argue that Victorian actuality photographs were regarded as ‘authentic’ precisely because they were images of the poor and the dispossessed; people whose lives had about them (to the middle-class spectator) an air of being simple, real and untrammelled by the overt complexity of middle-class existence. Photography’s subjects were those that had already been the topic of examination in reports, surveys, philanthropy and literature. It established itself as part of a tradition of enquiry into the health, housing, educa tion, economic condition and moral state of the poor. Enquiries emanated from government departments, newspapers, independent scholars, medical practitioners, religious leaders and philanthropic bodies.
Alan Thomas (1978) The Expanding Eye: Photography and the Nineteenth-Century Mind, London: Croom Helm.
Photography also became a mode of surveying the unknown, and apparently mysterious and threatening city streets were being visually inspected and hauled into the light of day. Describing the anonymous photographers of the time, the historian Alan Thomas comments that:
They entered the back streets, it appears, in the same spirit as expeditionary cameramen journeying in strange lands, for one of the commonest documentary photographs of the century shows a line of back street dwellers, generally women and children, with perhaps a man lurking in the rear, who are ranged across the middle of the composition, gazing expectantly into the camera. From the 1860s to the end of the century, and from every great city comes this photograph; it always seems worth looking at because of the candid directness with which the subjects give themselves to the camera – like those foreign aboriginals photographed for the first time by expeditionary photographers.
(Thomas 1978: 136)
If the professional reporter journeyed to the dark places of the city, an army of amateur photographers snapped away in the more salubrious areas, but here the presence of photographers was considered to be undesirable, and by the 1880s they had been defined as a public nuisance. In London, licences were required to film in many places, while the photographic press carried articles deploring the activities of those who photographed respectable people without their specific consent.
Codes of conduct were beginning to emerge and a range of permissible and impermissible subjects was being informally drawn up. If the photographers were middle class, the posed anonymous subjects were likely to be poor or working class. What distinguished documentary photographers within this ferment of picture-making was that they worked with some notion of improving or ameliorating the lot of their subjects. But this, in turn, led to some curious social interactions. To illustrate this point it is worth looking at the work of the photographer who is generally taken to be the first of the American documentary photographers, Jacob Riis.
Danish-born Riis emigrated to the USA in the 1860s. He worked as a police reporter firstly for Tribune and later for the Evening Sun and began to concentrate on reporting the conditions of life in the East Side slums of New York City. Like many philanthropists and reporters before him, Riis was frustrated by his inability to convince people of the nature of the poverty, overcrowding, sweated labour and sheer misery that existed at the heart of a prosperous city.
He produced a picture of social conditions that is of considerable interest, despite the lack of formal aesthetic qualities in his images. In a typical Riis picture a crude flash of light in an otherwise dark room illuminates a scene of woeful overcrowding, with ragged people huddled on wooden benches or asleep on the floor. Others show garment-workers at their trade and, of course, children sleeping in doorways or labouring alongside their parents in tiny rooms. Riis worked at a time when the conventions of documentary photography had yet to be established, and he certainly wasted no time by seeking the cooperation of his subjects. Perhaps inevitably, his photographs provide us with ethnographic detail of material life and social conditions rather than more complex subjective readings of the nature of poverty and destitution. Work of that kind was left to his successors, but Riis is important as a forerunner, and as a figure who directly connected photography to the journalistic enterprise. He was in no doubt of the power of photography to be a witness to the true nature of things. Describing a case of gross overcrowding, he writes:
When the report was submitted to the Health Board the next day, it did not make much of an impression – these things rarely do, put in mere words – until my negatives, still dripping from the dark-room, came to re-enforce them. From them there was no appeal. It was not the only instance of the kind by a good many. Neither the landlord’s protests nor the tenant’s plea ‘went’ in the face of the camera’s evidence, and I was satisfied.
(Riis 1918: 273)
‘Mere words’ were to give way, in Riis’ opinion, to the irrefutable veracity of the camera, and he saw his contribution as being that of bringing evidence to bear on what might otherwise be problematic. But he would not have seen his own personal vision as being of importance: the facts would speak for themselves and the people of the slums had, through the power and authority of the camera, been converted into ‘facts’ whose function was to exemplify and embody social problems. If complex and difficult lives are simplified into iconic statements of social deprivation, this is a problem not merely for Riis, but for the documentary project itself. Riis captured his photographs as if he were shooting game; he inscribed ‘objectivity’ into his images by refusing to allow his subjects to negotiate in any way the manner in which they might be recorded. Sally Stein has commented perceptively on this:
We can indeed marvel at the consistency of Riis’s photography in which so few of the exposures presented a subject sufficiently composed to return the glance of the photographer. That he rejected those rare photographs in which the subject did happen to look back suggests how premeditated the effect was…. The averted gaze, the appearance of unconsciousness or stupefaction, were only a few of the recurring features which gave Riis’s pictorial documents stylistic unity and ideological coherence in relation to the text.
(Stein 1983: 14)
A history of documentary could be structured around an account of the association between photographer and subject, and of the power relationships that are mediated between them. In the ostensible interest of revealing (and subsequently ameliorating) harsh conditions of life, photographers often rendered those they recorded into passive sufferers of poverty, rather than active agents in their own lives.
Documentary photographers were always keen to represent the life of the poor. Constituted as ‘the Other’, workers, the poor, lumpen-proletariat or criminals, were often ill-distinguished in the middle-class mind, despite the efforts of people such as the social observer and writer Henry Mayhew to provide detailed typologies of the ‘labouring poor’. Mayhew’s approach to his investigations – a mixture of interview, statistics and descriptive writing – was to be one of the dominant modes through which working people were surveyed. Nor is it any accident that his monumental study of London life was illustrated with engravings that were based on photographs (Mayhew 1861).
In the last decades of the nineteenth century a number of significant British photographers recorded the life of the poor in great cities: John Thomson and Paul Martin in London, and Thomas Annan in Glasgow are three examples. Working several decades before Jacob Riis, they were influenced by the studies of the poor being carried out in literature and by philanthropists and social investigators. John Thomson directly cites the work of James Greenwood, the journalist, and Mayhew’s monumental study, London Labour and the London Poor. Thomson is anxious to demonstrate that photography was a guarantor of authenticity and that his studies transcended the casual illustration of idiosyncratic types. He asserts that he is:
bringing to bear the precision of photography in the illustration of our subject. The unquestionable accuracy of this testimony will enable us to present true types of the London Poor and shield us from the accusation of either underrating or exaggerating individual peculiarities of appearance.
(Thomson 1877: n.p.)
2.7 Jacob August Riis, Lodgers in a Crowded Tenement – ‘five cents a spot’, 1880s
A typical scene of poverty and overcrowding is revealed in the harsh light of Riis’ flash gun.
Thomson may also have been attempting to distinguish his work from the staged productions of other photographers. In the 1860s and 1870s the poor were seen as suitable subjects for art. Notable photographers, such as Oscar Gustav Rejlander, produced picturesque studies of ragged street children that were much admired and, indeed, were used by Dr Barnardo to justify his own practices.
This preoccupation with the poor was not matched by a similar concern with capturing images of the world of work. Photography came into existence at a dynamic period in the development of capitalism, a time of technical innovation and of major engineering feats. Little of this energy is represented in the photographic archives; nor is the sheer drudgery of work and the army of labourers who carried it out made visible. Where there are shots of workers they tend to be inadvertently caught in a corner of the frame, or deliberately placed so as to give a sense of scale to some major building scheme.
There are many reasons for the absence of portraits of workers, not least that photographers tended not to live in the sites where industrial work was carried out. Moreover, notions of what made a good subject for a photograph were determined by convention, and also by such factors as the subjects set by the juries of photographic competitions. In the 1890s many clubs established ‘street characters’ or ‘city trades’ as subjects for competition, but they would have been very unlikely to establish categories based on industrial labour or domestic work.
Photographers were deeply influenced by conventional subjects and ways of treating the poor, and there are some examples of sustained and careful recording of working life. For example, Frank Meadow Sutcliffe diligently documented the village of Whitby as both a fishing village and a holiday resort over a long period of time. This work drew on the picturesque qualities of much of the labour involved, but also added new qualities of directness and close observation.
But such detailed, long studies were rare, and confined to one or two trades. Other workers passed without any great notice; of the vast army of clerks and domestic workers there is scarcely a sign, and those photographs of workers that do exist are usually of male labourers engaged in heavy, manual tasks. There are few images of women carrying out any kind of work and they are absent from the ranks of manual labourers. Indeed, if it were not for the curious obsession of Arthur Munby, women manual workers would have disappeared with scarcely a trace (Hudson 1972).2
Alan Trachtenberg (1989) Reading American Photographs, New York: Hill and Wang.
Of course, some documentary photographers were able to undertake sustained studies of labour, as did Lewis Hine in the United States from the turn of the nineteenth century. Hine was a most committed and subtle photographer of people at work and was dedicated to the cause of using his images in the service of social reform. His output spans the time from Jacob Riis to the Farm Security Administration project of the 1930s. An excellent account of the work of Lewis Hine is given in Trachtenberg’s Reading American Photographs (1989).3
2.8 Sabastião Salgado, Serra Pelada (Workers in Mud), 1986.
Salgado’s study of landless Brazilian families struggling to make a living was published in his book, Terra: Struggle of the Landless, in 1997. The powerful images of poverty and work connect with the themes of earlier documentary practitioners.
For a good account of Salgado’s work, see PARVATI NAIR (2011), A Different Light: The Photography of Sebastiãno Salgado, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Despite the physical difficulties of transporting large, unwieldy cameras and portable darkrooms, photographers covered the world in search of images of historic sites, sacred places and curious people. Photography developed in Europe at the height of the British Empire and amongst the first subjects of the lens were colonised peoples around the world. There has been a great deal of scholarly and critical work that explores the way in which the camera was used as an instrument of symbolic control. Indeed, Thomas Richards has pointed out that the British ruled huge parts of the world with little military presence and that its control was exercised through its extraordinary grasp of systems of information – its passion for inventories, lists, maps and pictures.
From all over the globe the British collected information about the countries they were adding to their map. They surveyed and they mapped. They took censuses, produced statistics. They made vast lists of birds. Then they shoved the data they had collected into a shifting series of classifications. In fact they often could do little other than collect and collate information, for any exact civil control, of the kind possible in England, was out of the question. The Empire was too far away, and the bureaucrats of Empire had to be content to shuffle papers.
(Richards 1993: 3)
While photographs are an important part of these archives, they derive their importance from their relationship to other kinds of material and from the body of scientific ideas by which they were validated. So great was this passion that some critics have argued that it was the driving force behind the collection of a diverse range of material:
Colonial exploitation opened up vast new populations as much to scientific study as to economic exploitation, and although the need to organize and control was clearly important to the task of classification of racial and other types, the ‘taxonomic imperative’ of Victorian science appears to have been sufficient motivation in itself to promote anthropological photography.
(Hamilton and Hargreaves 2001: 87)
The Victorian fervour for classification, then, extended to whole peoples, who were categorised and ranked according to ‘anthropological type’. Sup ported by theories of physiognomy, these sought to demonstrate the ‘objective’ differences between peoples, races, castes and social categories. Those who were subjected to the coloniser’s gaze were often seen as merely representative of racial or social groups, and were usually posed so as to embody particular kinds of dress, social roles and material cultures. Peter Quartermaine, in his discussion of the photographs of Johannes Lindt of the native peoples of Australia and New Guinea, comments that:
These people were photographed as ‘other’: the white settler population was interested in learning about them, a quasi-scientific attitude, which presupposed a controlling, position. The photographic images produced by Australian photographers sold to a metropolitan and international consumer market. Such prints doubly privileged the purchasers since, although reflecting their own aesthetic (natives clothed and posed with decorative artefacts), they also supposedly granted direct access to the culture depicted; their use as raw evidence by anthropologists and ethnographers certainly assumed this.
(Quartermaine 1992: 85)
The concept of the Other is of central importance to this argument. The phrase has been used in feminist, psychoanalytic theory to indicate that men construct women as ‘the Other’; that is, as an opposite, in reaction to which their own maleness can be defined. Similarly, European culture was defined against ‘the Other’ of colonised peoples:
Photography is here no mere handmaid of empire, but a shaping dimension of it: formal imperial power structures institutionalised the attitudes and assumptions necessarily entailed in viewing another individual as a subject for photography.
(Quartermaine 1992: 85)
We must remember that, unlike the body of painting and engravings of ‘exotic’ peoples that had been popular Victorian subjects, photography claimed to be able to create objective, ‘scientific’ records that were free from the bias of human imagination. Carefully contrived and constructed photographs were consumed as though they were unmediated and offered a neutral reflection of the world. They were, however, far from being transparent and dis passionate images, for, as Jill Lloyd puts it: ‘both photography as a medium and anthropology as a discipline masked their ideological standpoints and connotative potential with the appearance of scientific objectivity’ (Lloyd 1985: 13). What were returned to the Western spectator were images of native peoples that established them as primitive, bizarre, barbaric or simply picturesque. In the service of these images, people were photographed in what appeared to be archetypal ways. While ‘primitive’ dress was sometimes stressed, there was also a great emphasis on nudity:
Throughout the colonial and postcolonial periods, photography was a major tool in the framing of a confrontation between local and external cultural styles. In this confrontation, nudity was used as a visual marker of specific, but contradictory, local characteristics. It stood variously for primitivity, underdevelopment, indecency and indigeneity.
(Van Schendel 2002: 34)
While nudity was employed as an indicator of particular kinds of sub jectivity, this quotation from Van Schendel also reminds us that control of the body is central to colonial modes of power, including the processes of representation. Much of the critical work in the study of colonialism and postcolonialism has been concerned with the body, and, at the symbolic level, photography was, as we have noted, of central importance in mediating the relationship between the colonised and coloniser. John Urry tells us that:
To photograph is in some ways to appropriate the object being photographed. It is a power/knowledge relationship. To have visual knowledge of an object is in part to have power, even if only momentarily over it. Photography tames the object of the gaze, the most striking examples being of exotic cultures. In the USA the railway companies did much to create ‘Indian’ attractions to be photographed, carefully selecting those tribes with a particularly ‘picturesque and ancient’ appearance.
(Urry 1990: 139)
Victorian notions of progress allowed colonised people to be seen as occupying a lower scale of human existence than Europeans, but it was a stage from which, it was imagined, they would evolve in the long march to civilisation. A cluster of ideas such as these underpin the colonial enterprise, so that James R. Ryan has argued that:
Despite claims for its accuracy and trustworthiness, however, photography did not so much record the real as signify and construct it. Through various rhetorical and pictorial devices, from ideas of the picturesque to schemes of scientific classification, and different visual themes, from landscapes to ‘racial types’, photographers represented the imaginative geographies of Empire. Indeed, as a practice of representation, photography did more than merely familiarise Victorians with foreign views: it enabled them symbolically to travel through, explore and even possess those spaces.
(Ryan 1997: 214)
It is this ‘imaginative geography of empire’ with which we are concerned and which has absorbed the attention of critics working on questions of postcolonialism. We need to remember here the scale of modern empire and understand that the structures of power established by colonialism are still active
2.9 William Thomas, Mrs Lewis Waller with a Kaffir Boy, 1903
The relationship between coloniser and colonised is sharply focused in this portrait of Mrs Waller and her African servant.
in our globalised world, albeit often disguised in a variety of social and cultural practices. We can, to take just one example, see many of the tropes through which colonised peoples were pictured, drawn on in modern tourist photography. Like colonial photographers they stress the indigenous nature of people, their settled lives, picturesque or exotic appearance and timeless existence. In contrast to this, postcolonial commentators draw attention to the vast diasporic movement of peoples around the globe; examine the sets of appropriations and relations of hybridity between coloniser and colonised, and problematise questions of identity and subjectivity. Work of this kind is being made in many places by very different kinds of artists and photographers.
While a number of important critical and analytical concepts have emerged from postcolonial work, we need to remember that each society was very different in terms of its history, its indigenous forms of image-making and its cultural practices. Critically informed photography often works across the terrain of the local, as that has been constructed, reflected, transformed or employed in the imaginative geography of Empire. Ryan investigates the range of work which collectively produced the geography of imperialism and he looks at a number of individuals, places and activities – from African explorers, travellers in India, commercial photographers, military campaigns and the study of racial types – all of which helped to construct an archive of the achievements of the Victorian colonial and imperial project.
The public appetite for images of native peoples was accompanied by a demand for photographs of historic sites, many of which were familiar from paintings and engravings, but which were given a new authenticity by the camera. It is difficult now to gain any idea of just how many travel photographs were made and sold, but the market for them was certainly vast. In addition to the beautifully mounted and bound albums that are now preserved in archives and museums, the new commercial photography firms that were established in the years after 1850 sold thousands of cheap postcards and single prints. For example, in 1865 the London Stereoscopic Company sold half a million pictures, many of them scenes from foreign places. At the same time we see the emergence of the professional travel photographer of whom Francis Frith is probably the best known. In addition to his own work, he established a company bearing his name that was to become the largest publisher of photographs in its time. The camera and travel became linked together and, as tourism slowly developed into a mass industry, photography functioned both to set the scene in advance of a trip and to provide a record of the journey when it was over. Soon there were few places in the world that had not been surveyed by the camera and few people who had not been subjected to the photo-eye; wildernesses gave up their seclusion as surely as cities yielded their secret places to the new image-makers.
For a series of stimulating essays on this subject see: Ali Behdad And Luke Gartlan (eds) (2013) Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute.
During the 1930s the paradigmatic form of documentary was produced: one which cast its subjects within a ‘social problem’ framework, and which argued for a politics of reform, and social education. Describing photographs produced much earlier as ‘documentary’ was not a simple act of labelling, but meant that we were invited to reconsider this work within the framework of the 1930s documentary project.
Photography in the 1930s was influenced by a number of factors. Technically the development of new, lightweight 35mm cameras made the act of photographing people less obtrusive and increased the range of possible camera angles. There was a growth in the number of illustrated magazines and, within these, an increasingly sophisticated approach to the role of photo editors and the construction of photo-essays. Not least, there was a new and vast public with a hunger to see images drawn from real life. Following Grierson, documentary was regarded as a tool of education that would militate against foolish distractions and anchor people in a rational world of work and social obligation.4 It would offer, in an exciting form, facts about the social order that everyone would need in order to play a part in modern society. But how would documentary function in order to achieve these objectives? In an influential book on documentary, William Stott (1973) writes:
This is how documentary works…. It defies comment; it imposes its meaning. It confronts us, the audience, with empirical evidence of such nature as to render dispute impossible and interpretation superfluous. All emphasis is on the evidence; the facts themselves speak … since just the fact matters, it can be transmitted in any plausible medium…. The heart of documentary is not form or style or medium, but always content.
(Stott 1973: 14)
William Stott (1973) Documentary Expression and Thirties America, London: Oxford University Press.
On this reading the documentary genre is held to be able to transcend the discursive structures of any particular form: imposing rather than creating meaning; disempowering the reader or spectator from any acts of interpretation vis-à-vis the text. Documentary, on this definition, becomes a kind of ideologically charged common sense that is inaccessible to critical engagement. It is a fascinating definition because it spells out, 40 years after the time, what lies at the heart of 1930s notions of documentary. There was an assumption that the world was productive of facts and that those facts could be communicated to others in a transparent way, free of the complex codes through which narratives are structured.
In the 1930s a plethora of conventional and novel means of investigation were employed by a variety of people. In addition to formal reports based on statistical investigation, there were varieties of journalistic reportage, travel books, diaries, films, photographs and newsreels. The study of the exotic was now accompanied by an attempt to look at ordinary life through objective eyes.
The best-known organisation that set out to make an anthropological survey of British life in the 1930s is Mass Observation which was founded early in 1937 by Tom Harrison and Charles Madge. Harrison was an anthropologist newly returned from Borneo, and Madge a poet. What their project has in common with the documentary movement is the sense that the world could no longer be taken for granted and understood; that ordinary day-to-day lives needed to be made strange by being examined with the supposedly ‘impartial’ eye of the social scientist. Mass Observation recruited many respondents who, through the use of diaries and formal reports, would scrutinise and record their own day-to-day actions and behaviour, together with that of other people. The organisation was particularly interested in examining what happened on buses, in pubs, at the seaside and other areas where collective behaviour in public places could be observed.
Mass Observation used respondents, editors, painters and photographers in its attempt to build up an accurate picture of everyday life. Photographers adopted a range of techniques in order to capture their subjects; while some sought cooperation, most were concerned not to be observed and to work without the knowledge of the photographed. One characteristic response of photographers to the political and moral debates of the time was to see themselves as part of the camera, merely recording what was in front of them. Bert Hardy, who worked his way up from being a delivery boy to becoming a major photographer on Picture Post, described his practice in Camerawork:
I didn’t think of it politically. I was never a political animal. I mean the journalists had that sort of job to do. I think I just photographed what I saw. I never angled anything.
(Hardy 1977: 9)
However, Humphrey Spender (in a later issue of the same journal) comments on the work he did in Bolton for Mass Observation and makes clear his desire to work voyeuristically:
My main anxiety, purpose, was to become invisible and to make my equipment invisible, which is one of the reasons I carried around an absolute minimum of equipment…. Summing up the relics of feelings toward Mass Observation I think I can remember the main enemy being boredom and tedium and embarrassment.
(Spender 1978: 7)
Working for a number of magazines and newspapers as well as for Mass Observation, Humphrey Spender made many of the pictures of working-class life which were later thought to be exemplary images of the time. In one account of this work he described his procedure as allowing ‘things to speak for themselves and not to impose any kind of theory’. However, many people have noted the admixture of realism and Surrealism within his work (see Walker 2007). Spender described the difficulty of his journey as the fact that:
I had to be an invisible spy – an impossibility which I didn’t particularly enjoy trying to achieve … I was somebody from another planet intruding on another way of life…. A constant feature of taking the kind of photograph we’re talking about even when people were unaware that they were actually being photographed – was a feeling that I was exploiting the people I was photographing, even when … the aim explicitly was to help them.
(Spender 1978: 16)
2.10 Humphrey Spender, Men Greeting in a Pub, Worktown Series, 1937
This carefully composed, gentle and humorous photograph reveals the influence of both realist photography and Surrealism on Spender’s work.
Spender’s description of himself as an alien and a spy is a dramatic way of emphasising social distance, and in his account of his own feelings he points up the fact that ‘our way of life’ might also be seen as distinct and separate ‘ways of life’. The notion of the workers as productive of useful facts gives way to a consideration of the subjects of representation as potentially exploited by the encounter. Spender worked for Mass Observation, but his photographs also appeared in the Daily Mirror and in Picture Post, and by the 1930s the market for actuality photographs had grown to very large proportions. While the styles and approaches of photographers differed one from another, it is also possible to see continuities and influences from the past as well as gender differences in the way in which documentary photographers carried out their work. Val Williams has argued that women photographers did not adopt
candid photography as exemplified in the discreet, detached observation of photographers like Frank Meadow Sutcliffe and Paul Martin. Both Sutcliffe and Martin had pictured the world as full of vitality, as a kaleidoscopic spectacle of trades and crafts and distinguishing costume…. The style which they evolved affected the production of British documentary photography enormously, and reverberated through to Picture Post and beyond. For many of those who later took up photojournalism – a hybrid of press, candid and documentary photography – the stance became obligatory, particularly for war photographers working from the late thirties onwards. It indicated not only a kind of political detachment, allowing photographers to see themselves as reporters rather than participants, but also a particular machismo.
(Williams 1986: 25)
Williams describes women photographers as using the medium for ‘diverse and often very personal reasons’ while ‘women documentarists usually set out to record rather than to captivate and the avoidance of the dramatic and the candid was a primary influence upon each of them’ (Williams 1986: 26).
Together with these gender differences in the approach to photography, we might also consider uses of the medium that were influenced by con siderations of social class. We have seen that the documentary movement was part of a reformist political project and we should remember that, politically, it was concerned with the promulgation of liberal social values rather than with the revolutionary politics to which so many people in the 1930s subscribed. Closely associated with this is the charge that the political project implicit in much documentary work was unlikely to succeed given that documentary can, at best, show suffering, degradation, despair, but can do nothing to illuminate the causes of these woes. Power and causality are difficult to express through photographic images, as are collective struggle and resist ance. Martha Rosler has critiqued this political stance in the following terms:
In contrast to the pure sensationalism of much of the journalistic attention to working-class, immigrant and slum life, the meliorism of Riis, Lewis Hine, and others involved in social work propagandizing argued, through the presentation of images combined with other forms of discourse, for the rectification of wrongs. It did not perceive those wrongs as fundamental to the social system that tolerated them – the assumption that they were tolerated rather than bred marks a basic fallacy of social work.
(Rosler 1989: 304)
Of course, many people in the 1930s did see poverty and dispossession as consequences of the prevailing social system and this belief gave rise to a vibrant left oppositional practice of radical theatre, film and photography. Workers’ film and photo leagues were established in both Britain and the USA and opened up the medium of photography so that workers could make their own records of their lives and struggles. This was an important principle, but there is little evidence that the results challenged the nature of docu mentary reportage or established new kinds of image-making. Perhaps more interesting were those groups who maintained that questions of representation were a central part of political struggle, and developed an alternative photographic practice to exemplify those ideas. Their intention was not to reveal how things looked in the ‘real world’, but to disrupt the surface appearance of the image in order to construct new meanings out of the old pictorial elements. The painter, sculptor and photographer Alexander Rodchenko in the USSR and the German Dadaists at the end of the First World War elaborated this practice. Working against the central tenets of documentary, these artists argued that, in order to arrive at the meaning that lies below the surface of a photograph, it was necessary to contrive and manipulate the image. John Heartfield’s incisive, politically charged photo montages, which developed from his work with the Berlin Dadaists, are the best-known constructions of this kind.
The function of documentary in the service of radical politics was affected not only by the beliefs of individual photographers, but also by the uses for which pictures were commissioned; the professional practices through which they were produced, and the source of the finance that made them possible. In this respect the Farm Security Administration project is of considerable interest.
This was a government agency established in 1935 as part of the Roosevelt administration’s attempt to rebuild the economy of the United States. A young social scientist, Roy Stryker, was appointed to head the photography section of the FSA. His main responsibility was to provide contemporary images to illustrate and support the written accounts of conditions in agriculture that were published in official reports.
The enterprise became the most important example of a major state-funded documentary project in the world and many of its participants have entered into the pantheon of ‘great photographers’: Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Marion Post Walcott. We saw in Chapter 1 how Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother became an iconic work, but many other photographs from the project have been reproduced extensively on book jackets, as illustrations, on gallery walls, even in advertisements. They are often described in histories of photography as having revealed the human face of Depression Day America.
Their initial task, however, was to show America at work and to provide images of workers rather than the displaced poor. Once on the road, though, the photographers were free from the constraints of Washington and often returned very different kinds of photographs to those that were expected. Some critics claim that their genius as visual artists allowed them to go beyond the mundane business of recording labour to penetrate to the secret heart of things. In fact, among the many thousands of negatives of the project there are very many which concern themselves with human toil.
But the huge archive has been used as a resource from which some photographs have been selected more often than others, so that our social and political sense of the project is constructed from the editing that has taken place over the years. In some ways this body of work does present us with an apparently coherent critique of American life. The most famous photo graphs are those of the sharecroppers of the southwest and their migration west out of the ‘dustbowl’ to the orange groves and fruit farms of California in search of work as itinerant labourers. This is a familiar story and was the subject of one of the most celebrated ‘social’ novels and movies of the time, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
Through the interest shown in them by photographers, writers and painters, these people were to become emblematic of the US Depression. What we remember about them is that the winds eroded their fields, destroying their livelihood, and that they were forced, though desperately poor, to travel long distances to try to find work in the low-wage fruit and cotton fields. The FSA photographs are almost always of individuals and families, and often show them as weary and defenceless. They evoke images of strain, of mental fatigue, but they also tease out the bonds of affection and connection between people, especially between mothers and children. And, of course, they show people on the road, moving out; their possessions packed away, their furniture roped to the tops of cars or heaped on to a rickety truck. In these images the solid elements of domestic life are often dissolved and relocated in strange, outdoor spaces. Objects do service as carriers of emotion; objects that are stranded, dislocated, treasured though cheap. For instance, Russell Lee shows us a harmonium upright, ready to be played, out in a field, all by itself, surrounded by mud. Walker Evans records a roughly piled grave of loose earth topped with the impermanent and unstable memorial of a dinner plate. Nothing appears to be anchored or solid, instead dust is everywhere; a friable earth is heaped against the walls of houses, has shawled over the gas pumps and the Coca-Cola signs, and is etched into the lines of faces and hands.
These documentary photographs, like all others, are densely constructed works which use certain techniques and forms to produce a desired response in the spectator. They do contain ‘facts’ in a simple sense: a woman wears a dress made from a flour sack, a family lives under a hastily constructed tent of twigs and tarpaulin. There is, in other words, plenty of evidence of poverty indicated by the traditional markers of lack of material prosperity. But, in their more complex versions, they are photographs of the (literally) dispossessed, carefully constructed to produce a meaning that transcends what is shown.
2.11 Arthur Rothstein, Dust Storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936
One of the original FSA photographers, Rothstein contributed many striking images to the archive.
These people were not chosen merely for their ‘representative’ qualities: they are not simple icons of dispossession. Although they are anonymous subjects of the camera, their singularity is often stressed and their individual gestures carefully recorded. This is emphasised by the closeness of the camera and the informal stances people are allowed to take up in front of it. We feel that we are not in the presence of representatives of a class, but of ordinary people, much like us, who have fallen on hard times and are doing the best they can in the circumstances. Poverty and misery thus cease to be possessions of particular social groups living at a particular time in determinate conditions, and become a kind of dislocation or breakdown into which any one of us might stumble. In other words, we are asked to accept that we can make immediate connections between this body of work and our own life and condition; but also that these are photographs which sum up the specific experience of the migrant workers in the USA. We are invited to accept that these are ‘honest’ images drawn from life, but are also the product of extraordinarily gifted photographers. Some of the central contradictions of the social project of documentary photography are revealed here, for these photographs are treated as historical, but timeless; densely coded, but trans parent; highly specific, but universal. And these various readings militated against the idea that the photographs should have been immediately accessible as evidence against the social and political system.
In 2004 Zola Maseko directed Drum, a feature film which explored life in South Africa in the 1950s and depicted the forced clearance of Sophiatown and other violent acts carried out by the apartheid regime. It was widely distributed and won an award at the Durban Film Festival. The film was based on the life of the South African journalist Henry Nxumalo who worked for the illustrated magazine Drum. Founded in South Africa in 1951 Drum has been described as Africa’s first lifestyle magazine. It was launched at the beginning of a decade that was to see an extension of the powers of the apartheid state. At the same time, the African National Congress launched its Defiance Campaign and the anti-racist Freedom Charter was produced. This political ferment was encouraged by the growth of a sophisticated, urban black population that formed the core of Drum’s readership.
Despite its justly deserved reputation for investigative journalism, Drum was not an overtly political magazine. Rather it embraced popular culture and was a heady mix of sport, jazz, fiction, gangsters and glamour. It also ran a famous Lonely Hearts column and, of course, told stories in pictures as well as words. Soon after it grew out of a short-lived magazine, African Drum, it was selling close to 200,000 copies a month and it was to spread, through the energy and ambition of its most important founder, Jim Bailey, the son of a mining millionaire, to many other African countries, including Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Produced and circulated with great difficulty, it was often banned, but is now remembered as one of the most influential of illustrated magazines.
It was important because of the writers it found and encouraged, several of whom have become well-known journalists, novelists and critics. In addition to Henry Nxumalo there were Lewis Nkosi, Bloke Modisane, Can Themba, Arthur Maimane and Todd Matshikiza. It was influential, too, because of its ability to train and nurture excellent photographers: people such as Bob Gosani, Peter
2.12 Drum, March 1952
Drum, Africa’s most famous illustrated magazine, offered a unique blend of investigative journalism, sport and crime to a new, urban readership.
Magubane, and the German photographer, Jürgen Schadeberg who was for many years the senior figure in the group. Also working for the magazine were Ernest Cole, whose photographic book House of Bondage became essential reading for anyone interested in life in South Africa, and the white photographer Ian Berry who later joined Magnum and whose photographs for Drum of the Sharpeville massacre (21 March 1960) circulated around the world.
This extraordinary array of talented individuals was led in the first years by an English editor, Anthony Sampson, who had no experience of magazine editing, but was a friend of Jim Bailey’s from their time together at Oxford. Sampson established the characteristic content of the magazine, its relaxed way of working and its central concerns. His book Drum, published in 1956 and updated in the 1980s, gives a fascinating account of the early years of the magazine (Sampson 1983). Sampson was succeeded as editor first by Sylvester Stein then by Tom Hopkinson who had developed and inspired the famous British illustrated magazine Picture Post. Hopkinson has also given an account of his years with the magazine as it developed in a number of African countries (Hopkinson 1962).
Although Drum found a ready readership for its social and entertainment content, it is as a crusading magazine that its early years will be remembered. It is not too extravagant to claim that a single story established Drum on its first anniversary. The story was an exposé of the brutal conditions of life and work suffered by black people arrested for failing to carry a pass and sentenced to work on a white-owned potato farm. In the persona of Mr Drum, Henry Nxamalo infiltrated the farm together with the writer Arthur Maimane and photographer Jürgen Schadeberg. The success of the piece meant that exposés became the order of the day and over the years Mr Drum went, with great success, on trips to many sites of oppression and injustice.
Despite this investigative work, Drum could only exist because it did not directly challenge the government of the day, or overtly proselytise for any political party. This lack of direct political struggle was criticised by some people on the Left in Africa. Graeme Addison sums up the position in the following terms:
The Magazine remains a problem for the critic because it sprang from a matrix of white entrepreneurship, editorial opportunism, and non-militant black talents, none of whom had a prime interest in the liberation of the masses. Drum did not aim to mobilise these masses, but it did educate and inform them, perhaps better than any other medium.
(Addison 1984)
We might add that Drum was witty, caustic, brash and knowing. It provided its early readers with an irreplaceable mix of ideas, fashions, insights and information that was conveyed through a mix of pictures and text. The magazine continued with varied journalistic success through the 1960s and 1970s until in 1984, to everyone’s surprise, Jim Bailey sold it to the pro-government Afrikaaner group, Nasionale Pers. It became a weekly in 1996 and now describes itself, with its mix of fashion, advertising and leisure interest features as ‘a vibrant magazine for the young, upwardly socially mobile South African’. Although it has lost its political edge its archives are increasingly seen as a vital resource for people researching the nature of political and social life in the country during the apartheid years.
The archetypal documentary project was concerned to draw the attention of an audience to particular subjects, often with a view to changing the existing social, cultural, or political situation. To achieve this goal, documentary photographs were rarely seen as single, independent images. They were usually accom panied by or incorporated into written texts. Within this context the images functioned both to provide information about the nature of things and to confirm the authenticity of a written account. Individual photographers were rarely credited for their work in magazines, and photographs were treated as though they were anonymous productions. The postwar consumer boom, exemplified in the introduction of television and the growth of car ownership, produced a very different society to that of the 1930s. In com menting on this new social scene some photographers produced work that was to transform the nature of documentary photography. Especially in the USA, documentary began to be concerned with new kinds of cultural spaces, in particular those that were encountered in everyday life, rather than places that were exemplary of grinding poverty or social injustice.
Documentary and photo-journalism are two closely related genres of photography, but there are other kinds of work that connect closely with them, not least that of street photography. This is difficult to define precisely for, as Clive Scott puts it:
Street photography certainly puts us in a taxonomic quandary, not only because it stands at the crossroads between the tourist snap, the documentary photograph, the photojournalism of the fait divers (news in brief) but also because it asks to be treated as much as a vernacular photography as a high art one.
(Scott 2007: 15)
2.13 Melanie Einzig, Spring Corner, New York City, 2000.
This picture is characteristic of contemporary street photography that explores the bizarre, random and diverse nature of modern cities.
So, we find street photography difficult to define precisely because it cuts across a number of genres and practices. As we have seen, what were once thought to be fixed and immutable practices have more recently become fluid in response to technological, social and cultural changes. However, in recent years there has been an increased interest in the activity of street photography as people capture life in public places or record unexpected events on their mobile phones. It seems that every moment of urban life can be recorded and, via social networking sites, distributed to family, friends or thousands of followers.
We should remember, though, that throughout its history images from the street have been a mainstay of photographic practice, so that there might already be said to be a tradition of street photography, which is defined by Westerbeck and Mayerowitz as ‘candid pictures of everyday life in the street’ although they also add that by ‘the street’ is meant any public space, including bars, cafés, parks, dance halls, etc. (Westerbeck and Meyerowitz 1994: 34–5).
This was a tradition that produced a number of great practitioners, but many of the photographs that now seem so evocative of a particular place at a particular time were taken by anonymous photographers and often for reasons that we can only guess at.
Although difficult to distinguish precisely from documentary or casual tourist snaps, we can explore street photography in terms of its predominant styles and subject matter. These are often pictures that have a casual air, but prize the representation of a moment sealed in time from the everyday confusion of the street. They are of ordinary people, although they may be pictured at an extraordinary moment in their lives.
In the nineteenth century photographs of people working, lounging or playing in the streets were posed, and photographers often worked with the intention of creating a typology of trades or games or practices. With the rise of the docu mentary movement photographs in the street were frequently made in order to illuminate a social point – one thinks of the unemployed man lounging on a street corner so often used to illustrate the wastefulness of unemployment or the shoeless child that became an icon of poverty. These were often com missioned together with articles on social or political topics. Even when the coming of lightweight cameras freed photographers to wander the streets with ease and make images in every milieu, there was always a particular interest in the people who occupied the marginal, dangerous or neglected parts of the city.
Paris is regarded as the predominant site of modern street photography not least because street photography has been seen as a component of, and deeply influenced by, the development of modernity. It is, for example, coeval with the birth of department stores, of tabloid newspapers and other forms of the press. Certainly by the 1920s and 1930s there was an extraordinary outpouring of work made on the city’s streets by photographers who are now regarded as great photographers, for example Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Cartier-Bresson, Brassaï, and Robert Capa.
French humanism and a particular kind of populism helped to sustain an interest in the appearance of ordinary people. These people were not seen as exemplary subjects of some social cause, as they might be by documentary photographers. Rather, the fascination of street photography was with the infinite ways of being that were acted out in little moments in public spaces. By the 1950s this mood was changing in France and the dominant practice of street photography moved to the USA, which, of course, already had a developed tradition of such work. Amongst the distinguished US street photographers we may name Robert Frank, Roy de Caverra, William Klein, Helen Levitt, Joel Meyerowitz and Diane Arbus. The streets of the United States were very different to those of European cities and the world seen from an automobile becomes a central feature of some of this work.
In his collection The Americans, Robert Frank offered his own version of American life in which he eschewed the usual subjects of documentary investigation and presented us instead with cool and ironic images of the fleeting moments of ordinary life. Significantly enough, the introduction to the book was written by the Beat writer Jack Kerouac, who said: ‘After seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing any more whether a juke box is sadder than a coffin’ (Frank 1959: 5).
Born in Switzerland, Robert Frank brought an outsider’s eye to bear on the USA of the 1950s. He went on the road with a camera, an old car and a Guggenheim scholarship and photographed not only juke boxes and coffins, but cowboys, long empty roads, tract houses on lonely fields, flags and bikers, drive-in movies and barbers’ chairs. Frank caught America at the point where commonplace life was about to be turned into myth; where even the banal and the prosaic were soon to be commodified into spectacle. People in these photographs are not constituted as ‘poor’ or ‘workers’ or, indeed, as any particular kind of social being. They exist as spectators, gazing out at some invisible scene: other people, the road ahead, a movie screen, a parade going by. In these closed, watchful faces we can read no significant facts, and if we have a sense of ‘being there’, it is as a witness to nothing of any great importance. Frank refused a documentary project that saw life as productive of weighty events that the photographer might chronicle and analyse. He seems to be saying that none of the many scenes that happen in the world are invested with any special meaning, although some may be made distinctive by the very act of being photographed. It is important to notice that coffins are no sadder than juke boxes precisely because an old hierarchy of importance has been abolished; hereafter the subject matter of documentary is both dispersed and
2.14 Helen Levitt, New York (broken mirror), c. 1942
Levitt photographed New York as a place of community and neighbourhood as in this wartime shot of children playing cheerfully in a lively street.
expanded to include whatever engages or fascinates the pho tographer. Facts now matter less than appearances. The old documentary project is fractured into work that explores the world in terms of particular subjectivities, identities and pleasures.
Frank was not alone in offering new, less monumental images of America in the 1950s. Around the same time William Klein was photographing New York in a manner that stressed the disorder and randomness of life in great cities. Halla Beloff comments on them in the following terms:
It is the truth value of American street photographs … that gives them their special artistic and psychological interest. Their style and their subject matter in a state of consonance, they randomly sample their subject matter. They show fragments, randomly set out, arbitrarily cut off, with bizarre juxtapositions, and these epithets invite us to move from the photographs to the culture and people in them.
(Beloff 1985: 99)
In Klein’s crowded streets the point of photographic interest may lie in a half-concealed detail somewhere in the background of a shot. His city is restless, crowded, neurotic and alienating, and was to become one dominant version of how cities were perceived and represented by later commentators. A different version of urban life was created by some French or British pho tographers; for example, Roger Mayne’s photographs of street life in West London provided a portrait of the lives of people in a particular place that was relaxed, incisive, intimate and very different from earlier British documentary work (Mayne 1986).
Work from the streets was changing the nature of ‘realist’ photography both by presenting new subject-matter and by treating old themes in novel ways. Sometimes called ‘subjective’ documentary, this work was very influential in both the USA and Britain. It liberated documentary from the political project with which it had formerly been associated, and allowed photographers to move away from both the traditional subjects of documentary and the conventions of documentary representation. Now, Lee Friedlander could make a series of photographs full of visual ambiguity and allow his own sil houette to fall across his subjects to celebrate his shadowy presence on the scene. Gradually, there was an extension of the subjects that were deemed suitable for documentary. For example, Tony Ray-Jones’ A Day Off: An English Journal (1974) attempted to cover a spectrum of social class in looking at the English at play, from Glyndebourne and Eton to Butlins and Brighton’s Palace Pier. In the 1930s, perhaps the most famous photographer of British life, Bill Brandt, had compared photographs of rich and poor; for example, putting maids and mistresses into a double-page spread so that we could observe difference and privilege. By the 1960s, however, photographers were concerned to offer more personal versions of the nature of social existence.
Street photographers depended on their work being published in illustrated magazines and in monographs, although they were also included in exhibitions. The decline of these outlets and the rise of televised pictures of streets and public spaces led to a lack of interest in the movement for some decades. Now, however, street photography is back as more and more people want to capture curious or poetic moments on the street and share them with others. Indeed, few street scenes would be complete without someone using a phone as a camera. The Brooklyn-based photographer Gus Powell puts it like this:
It’s harder and harder to take a picture without somebody in the picture who’s also taking a picture. We all take pictures now, that’s just what we do.
(Powell in Howarth and McLaren 2010: 9)
Most of these photographs remain as personal documents or may be shared on social networks, but there are many committed photographers working regularly in public spaces. How the presence of so many images of our ordinary existence will change our social and cultural life remains to be seen. And we should remember that there have often been times when cities seemed to be overwhelmed by amateur photographers, to the considerable annoyance of many of their citizens. Jennifer Tucker has noted that:
As cameras became smaller, cheaper, and easier to use in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, thousands of amateurs armed with cameras joined professional photographers in recording pictures of urban public spaces not only in the United States, France and Britain but also in cities across India, Russia, Japan and many other nations, raising a new set of issues around the appropriation of public spaces for private purposes.
(Tucker 2012: 11)
If many of these people were seen as a social nuisance, the present position is made more complex by the fact that, in addition to thousands of casual recorders of our actions, we are all the photographic subjects of a stream of images made by the dispassionate eye of surveillance cameras. Millions of these now exist in urban spaces around the world. Owned by government bodies and private commercial organisations they constantly survey public spaces by day and night and many have the sophisticated ‘face recognition’ technology, so that particular individuals or types can be picked out from the urban mass. Many people welcome these cameras as offering a potential deterrent to crime, but others see them as voyeuristic and intrusive.
Some people seek to oppose the power of this kind of systematic observation. One of the key weapons of those who engage in performances designed to challenge street surveillance systems is that of wearable technologies – small computers that are attached to the body and record the world without the direct intervention of the wearer. Wearable computer technologies are being developed by commercial and business organisations, who see their power to increase sales, as well as by those who want to challenge or disrupt the existing systems. Increasingly, small and relatively cheap cameras that will take a stream of photographs based on changes in light, direction, colour and temperature are coming onto the market. Using very wide-angle lens they produce up to 2,000 pictures a day that can be uploaded to a computer in order to be edited.
It seems, then, that we may be drawing close to a time when every moment of our lives is capable of being recorded, not by street photographers or happy snappers, but by ourselves.
From the 1970s, a stream of critical work began to reject the notion that acts of looking and recording can ever be neutral, disinterested or innocent, and described them instead as containing and expressing relations of power and control. Perhaps the single most important influence on British documentary after 1970 came from the new ways in which photography was theorised and the functions it was considered to be able to play in cultural politics. Semiological analysis treated films and photographs as texts in order to investigate the components of sign systems through which meaning is structured and encoded within a work. The point of concern was not whether the work adequately revealed or reflected a pre-existing reality, but the way particular signifying systems imposed order and created particular sets of meaning. Inscribed within the photograph, then, was not some little likeness to reality, but a complex set of technical and cultural forms that needed to be decoded. Far from being innocent transcriptions of the real, photographs were treated as complex material objects with the ability to create, articulate and sustain meaning. Using theoretical tools that often derived from Film Studies or Literary Studies, critics began to explore the way in which photography functioned as a signifying system. One of the characteristics of photography is, as we have seen, the fact that it appears to have a special relationship to reality. We speak of taking photographs rather than making them, because the marks of their construction are not immediately visible; they have the appearance of having come about as traces from the scene itself, rather than as carefully fabricated cultural objects. As spectators we are positioned as the eye of the camera and we gaze upon an apparently natural and unmediated scene. Our acts of looking were no longer considered to be disinterestedly innocent, but were analysed in order to distinguish the kinds of psychic pleasure and relations of power that are invested in the process. The concept of power that is being used in this analysis owes much to the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. (See note p. 67.)
Power is not seen by Foucault as a force held by a particular social group that enables it to coerce another, but is located within all parts of the social system. Power resides in all aspects of a knowledge system including the construction of archives, the codification of information and the com munication chains through which it is disseminated. Nor is ‘truth’ a special kind of knowledge that allows us to escape the pervasive reach of power: truth and power are also intertwined. Each society has constructed its own ‘regime of truth’, elaborating frameworks, institutions and discourses which validate particular procedures and permit us to distinguish true from false statements.
Power, on this account, flows through the processes of science; through discourses and the apparently trivial encounters of everyday life. Nor is power an abstract force that is only occasionally employed in order to enforce obedience, but, within a disciplinary society, it is inscribed on the body through the processes whereby the body is objectified as a source of know ledge. Photography’s obsessive concern to record, catalogue, explore, reveal, compare and measure the human body was one way in which it could be seen to be an important form within the disciplinary process (see ch. 4, pp. 196–201).
John Tagg (1988) The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, London: Macmillan.
In his collection of essays The Burden of Representation (1988), John Tagg analyses the vast increase in the power of photography in the latter half of the nineteenth century and traces the ‘complicity’ of photography in the articulation of particular kinds of surveillance and observation. Documentary is seen as part of the process of examination described by Foucault as ‘a pro cedure of objectification and subjection’, in which ordinary lives are turned into accounts – into writing or, for that matter, into photographs. Such an analysis of the function of documentary clearly casts considerable doubts on the reformist social and political project with which it had been identified for so long. Its overt or implicit use as a means of surveillance and control was now being stressed, rather than its ability to reveal the nature of suffering or destitution in the service of social reform. Photography is seen as being complicit in the discourses which function to exert social control. ‘Documentation’ cannot act to reveal inequalities in social life, for there can be no document that is merely a transcription of reality. Rather, as part of a discursive system, it constructs the reality that it purports to reveal. But this is not a random creation, for it is made within the ideological positions framed by the discourses which are themselves part of the system of power. Cultural critic Julian Stallabrass has commented on Tagg’s analysis in the following terms:
Tagg presents ‘documentary’ – which includes documentary photography – as ‘a liberal, corporatist plan to negotiate economic, political and cultural crises through a linked programme of structural reforms, relief measures, and a cultural intervention aimed at restructuring the order of discourse, appropriating dissent, and rescuing the threatened bonds of social consent’. In this retrospective view which entirely discounts the beliefs of those individuals involved – including some who were committed to overthrowing capitalism – the complex and diverse currents of documentary photography serve the conspiracy by which the system survives.
(Stallabrass 1997: 136)
Documentary was grounded in the recording and delineation of commonplace life, but the idea of ‘ordinary, everyday life’ was itself now understood to be a problematic concept. Rather than being seen simply as a method of recording, photography begins to be regarded as a means through which we can express and articulate our own particularity and difference. We can move, as Don Slater has put it, from being consumers of images to becoming active producers:
The camera as an active mass tool of representation is a vehicle for documenting one’s conditions (of living, working and sociality; for creating alternative representations of oneself and one’s sex, class, age-group, race, etc; of gaining power of analysis and visual literacy) over one’s image; of presenting arguments and demands; of stimulating action; of experiencing visual pleasure as a producer, not consumer of images; of relating to, by objectifying, one’s personal and political environment.
(Slater 1983: 246)
If we can actively work on ‘representations of ourselves’, it seems that documentary, with its historic weight of practice and ostensible claim to transparency, might not be the perfect photographic form by which this could be achieved. Documentary began to be deserted in favour of contrivance and artifice. Work of this kind came from community groups and feminist collect ives, and was to be found in certain kinds of gallery practice. For example, the East London community group Hackney Flashers used their photographic project to politicise activities and concepts such as motherhood, housework and child-care. They used a variety of montage techniques, together with text and slogans, to overcome the perceived limitations of documentary photography, a limitation that was outlined by Angela Kelly when making her 1979 selection of feminist photographs:
The ‘analytical’ approach sees conventional documentary as problematic in the sense that the medium itself is a complex signifying process. Photographic images are presented as constructs and the viewer is forced to read the system of signs and to become aware of being actively involved in the process of the creation of meaning. This approach stands in opposition to the notion of the photograph as a transparent ‘window on the world’.
(Kelly 1979: 42)
Kelly makes it clear that she does not endorse the documentary project, which she considers to confirm, at least implicitly, photography’s claim to be ‘true to appearances’. Similarly, more than a decade later, Tessa Boffin and Jean Fraser introduced their book of lesbian photography with an explanation that, since sexuality is socially constructed, documentary realism might be an inappropriate form for its representation:
Lesbianism exists in a complex relation to many other identities; concerns with sexuality intersect with those of race, class and the body … we looked for work which concentrated on constructed, staged or self-consciously manipulated imagery which might mirror the socially constructed nature of sexuality. We have not included much documentary work as the realism of documentary has often been used ideologically to reinforce notions of naturalness. We do not want this book to claim a natural status for lesbianism but rather to celebrate that there is no natural sexuality at all.
(Boffin and Fraser 1991: 10)
Photography has been used in projects of this kind in order to explore subjectivity, but, while working-class life has been surveyed through documentary, it seems that gender, race and sexuality have been analysed in terms of other kinds of photographic discourses and practices – those which stress a Brechtian concern with construction and fabrication in photography. Called into question was the ability of realist practices adequately to unmask the nature of the prevailing social conditions or to explore the social and political nature of our subjective lives. John Roberts has suggested that the movement away from documentary is associated with the ‘downgrading of class within cultural politics’ and a retreat from class politics itself. Rather than simply endorse the documentary movement, however, he argues:
There can be no representation of class subjectivities without the photographer intervening in the process of the production of meaning. Whether you are studio-based or working with conventional documentary images then, work on the representation of class cannot proceed without a recognition of those symbolic processes that shape and determine the construction of class identity.
(Roberts 1993: 13)
Throughout the twentieth century, there were documentary photographers who were still concerned to represent the nature of work and the lives of work ing people in a style that owed a great deal to classic forms of documentary photography. Today, work and class relationships are less important subjects for practicing photographers. Perhaps more interest lies in an examination of the ecological consequences of industrialisation on a global scale as exemplified in the works of Edward Burtynsky. These show the dereliction brought about by huge land projects – strip mining, dams, quarrying, etc. In this work the woeful destruction of the earth is counterpoised by the aesthetic beauty of the large, colour images. Burtynsky’s work is discussed in detail in Chapter 6.
In the 1960s, not only were themes changing, but the very technical and aesthetic basis on which documentary photography was founded was being challenged. Colour photography was largely confined to advertising and the publicity industry until the American William Eggleston started to use it in his work. With the support of John Szarkowski he mounted a now famous exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The colour photographs had been made using the dye-transfer process, which gave them intense colour saturation, and became the subject of great debate as to their validity and artistic merit. His subjects were mundane, everyday, often trivial, so that the real subject was often seen to be colour itself. Thomas Weski describes it in the following way:
Eggleston’s particular interpretation of pictorial colour is largely responsible for the fact that his photographs often induce the feeling that we have never before consciously seen the situations and objects depicted, or that we are discovering a side of them that has hitherto been hidden from us. This was the first time that colour had been used in art-photography not simply to replicate reality but to express and induce feelings.
(Weski 2003: 25)
Important as Eggleston is in making colour an acceptable part of art and documentary photography, he was not, of course, alone in employing it. Paul Outerbridge, Stephen Shore, John Divola and Alex Harris all worked in different ways with colour. This American-led innovation spread to Britain where, in very different ways, a number of photographers moved from monochrome work to the expressive use of colour photography. Writing in Creative Camera, Susan Butler saw the use of colour by British photographers as a way of making visible aspects of life that had been largely ignored in the struggle to reveal class positions and social problems:
But one can shift the perspective yet again to make the case that in the area of new colour work in Britain, many ‘straight’ photographers are expanding documentary concerns to include a broader range of social and, in effect, anthropological readings as opposed to a more overtly political but rather confined range of social issues based mostly in class and work, although these concerns as well have begun to figure in colour work, and are being revitalised by it.
(Butler 1985: 122)
2.15 Sanjeev Saith, Between Houses, Ranikhet, 1992
Here Saith uses colour and the pattern of shadows to charge an ordinary street scene with emotion.
Indeed, many British-based photographers were being influenced by the demands and possibilities of colour at the time. They include Paul Graham, Anita Corbin, Jem Southam, Martin Parr, John Podpadec and Peter Fraser, and many others who clearly did not share a common practice or approach to photography in other respects. An example of Martin Parr’s work is reproduced in this book (Figure 2.15). It is important to realise that the use of black and white film and, in the case of documentary, a particular kind of subject-matter, were considered to be the necessary markers of a serious photographer. Colour not only belonged to the world of commerce, but was regarded as lacking the technical control and aesthetic order of black and white photography. Moreover, in earlier years people were nervous about the possibility of using what seemed to be the unstable medium of colour. In 1952 the famous French humanist photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson said:
Colour photography brings with it a number of problems which are hard to resolve today, and some of which are difficult even to foresee, owing to its complexity and its relative immaturity…. Personally, I am
half afraid that this complex new element may tend to prejudice the achievement of the life and movement which is often caught by black and white.
(Cartier-Bresson 1952: 48)
Today, the victory of colour over black and white is complete in documentary, street photography and photojournalism. To work in black and white now is to make a deliberate aesthetic statement or to reference work from the past in a particular way. The effect of the coming of colour has been to introduce new subjects (drawn from the whole range of everyday life) and to create new expressive approaches to those subjects from many photographers.
H. Cartier-Bresson (1952) The Decisive Moment, New York: Simon & Schuster. Quoted in Clive Scott (2007) Street Photography from Atget to Cartier-Bresson, London: I.B. Tauris.
We have seen that all over the world people continue to make documentary photographs, which are shown in journals, books and newspapers, exchanged on social media sites and flashed around the world by mobile phones. But we should notice that much of this work has become largely dislocated from any social or political project. Moreover, much documentary work is now to be seen on gallery walls and the archetypal small, monochrome print has frequently given way to large colour images. As we have noted, even that most rigorous practitioner Sebastião Salgado exhibits his photographs in gallery settings before reproducing them as books, while photographers increasingly seek out new kinds of commercial and cultural spaces in which to show their work. The conditions of reception, then, have changed dramatically and the gallery has become an important space not only for documentary, but also for photojournalism. It may seem strange that works created to comment on current events are shown, divorced from any serious text, in the contem plative space of the gallery. Certainly, this has been partly a response to the decline in outlets for print-based photojournalists, but it is also a consequence of a change in intention on the part of photographers in response to the pressures of the structure of contemporary communications. The globalisation of news and the demand for information around the clock has changed the organisational structure of magazines and newspapers and brought about a new division of labour. For example, it has been noted that the growth of digital photography means that photographers tend to select images and edit in camera. Not only are potential archives (formerly built around retaining negatives) lost, but fewer photographers are employed on the staff, and the availability of digital cameras has made it possible for print journalists to send images directly to the picture desk (Burgess 2001). David Bate has pointed out that manipulation of press images by the computer has transferred power away from the photographer and to the picture editor who, increasingly, controls the nature of what is seen (Bate 2001). In response to this apparent lack of either immediate relevancy or control of their own work, some photographers have chosen to adopt (at least in some respects) the condition of the artist: to organise their images in a gallery setting, and to sell them in the growing commercial market for photographs. Inevitably, this has led to an abandonment of the well-worn tropes of photojournalism in favour of work that is allusive rather than direct and that cannot be seen and understood in an instant.
This blending of genres is leading to new kinds of extremely interesting work, but we ought to remember that there are still many photojournalists working in a more traditional way and contributing to newspapers and magazines around the world, and that long-established debates on the ethics, efficacy, political bias, or objectivity of realist photography are still vigorously conducted.
The development of a consumer culture displaced photography from its more traditional functions and sent out images in vast numbers to sell goods. In the 1980s and 1990s, postmodernists questioned the nature of ‘originals’ and ‘copies’, and regarded images as transmutable objects that are involved in endless, complex acts of circulation and exchange. Such objects have no necessary context, so that documentary photographs of the 1930s unemployed might be massively enlarged and used as part of the decor of restaurants; images of the dispossessed could be used to sell jeans, while the homeless of earlier generations might find themselves presented as picturesque urban characters on gallery walls. The growth of the heritage industry has led to a great demand for pictures that show us something of the world as it was. Indeed, in many of the new sites that celebrate older forms of life and labour, it is the ‘original’ black and white photographs that act as guarantors of authenticity. These multiple uses of documentary photography, and the lack of demarcating boundaries between them, were explored by theorists of postmodernity. Postmodernist movements existed at many levels, from serious philosophical reflection to particular kinds of surface style and fashions. Linking them all was a concern with the nature of images and their circulation; an elision between high and popular culture; a scepticism about the nature of ‘the real’ or ‘the authentic’ (for the ‘simulacrum’ was held to have taken over from the original); and a suggestion that the discourses which once bounded and structured knowledge (such as history or science) had broken down.
Under these conditions, what future might there be for documentary; is it a practice that has run out of history? In this context it is useful to look at the output of practising photographers whose work is of a kind that would formerly have been labelled ‘documentary’. A good example is the 1990s exhibition and book by Martin Parr, Small World, which has a commentary by Simon Winchester (Parr 1995). Parr returns us to the world of travel photography, for his images were taken in several places around the world. Like any good Victorian photographer, he visits Egypt and the Far East, Switzerland and Rome. What he returned with, however, are not carefully composed shots of temples and pyramids, nor artfully posed portraits of
2.16 Martin Parr, The Spanish Steps, Rome, 1993
Parr’s photograph of tourists in Rome is illustrative of the way in which, photography and tourism are linked in a modern way of experiencing the world as spectacle.
picturesque native peoples, but images of other tourists; those who form part of the movement of mass tourism. Photographed in rich colour, the tourists struggle with maps, follow the raised umbrellas of guides, buy beads in Goa, take photographs and pose for photographs. What connects the world in this exhibition is the multiple presence of the camera. Images are intertwined with what would once have been called the ‘original’ object; signs have broken loose from their former anchorages and float freely around a world that has been constituted as a site of spectacle. Can we consider work of this kind, with its multiple references to other images and its unwillingness to make authoritative statements, to be documentary? Certainly it fulfils a minimal condition of documentary: that it provide an account of events that have their own existence outside the frame of the photograph or the confines of the studio walls. We are no longer asked to accept that such images are impartial or disinterested; instead we inhabit a space between scepticism, pleasure and trust, from which we can read documentary images in more complex ways.
It would be unwise, however, to assume that documentary was once an easily understood practice, which has only lately been made more complex. Regis Durand reminds us that:
… the question is and will remain: in documentary photography, what is it that is really documented? Not only is it not usually what is supposed to be the document’s obvious object … but that object can be shifted and reconstituted again and again during the course of our historical perception of it. And this still leaves the essential question of the subject (what the photograph is about, what is recorded and done when it is taken) and even more the problem of reception.
(Durand 1999: 38)
These are central questions that have been at the heart of enquiries into documentary throughout its history and ones that, in a world of constantly changing technologies and photographic practices, will become increasingly pertinent.
1 Magnum Photos is one of the world’s most prestigious photographic agencies. It was founded in 1947 by four photographers: Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David (Chim) Seymour. Its membership now reflects a range of different styles and practices and includes in its distinguished list: Eve Arnold, David Hurn, Josef Koudelka, Susan Meiselas, and Martin Parr.
2 Arthur Joseph Munby (1828–1910) Munby was a barrister and minor poet who is now best known for his diaries and notebooks which tell us something about the fashionable and artistic life of the time, and also reveal his obsession with working women. In journeying round England and Wales, he sought out women working in coalmining, fishing and farming and commissioned local photographers to make portraits of them. A collection of these photographs at Trinity College, Cambridge provides an invaluable historical resource for anyone exploring the way in which labour has been depicted. Munby did not confine his passion to organising these pictures; he also secretly married his maidservant, Hannah Cullwick, and they lived together for many years. A useful book on Munby is Derek Hudson (1972) Munby: Man of Two Worlds, London: John Murray.
3 For an account of the connections between photography and other kinds of social investigation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries see Derrick Price (1983), ‘Photographing the Poor and the Working Class’, Framework 22(22), Autumn.
4 John Grierson (1898–1972) was one of the founders of the British documentary film movement. He stressed the educative function of film, which he saw as one means of creating an informed public able to play an active part in running a democratic society. Grierson’s philosophy and ideas influenced the way in which ‘documentary’ was understood in film and also in other media such as literature and photography. See Ian Aitken (1990) Film and Reform, London: Routledge.