A brief history in early documentary photography.
"the term “documentary” was first used by John Grierson in 1926" but documentary images were being made much earlier than this the photographers just did not call it that at the stage. - http://www.gaslight.me.uk/archives/2802
1819 Roger Fenton is born, a student of the painter Paul Delaroche and now Vice-Chairman of the Photographic Society of London, was one of the first to make the distinction between reportage and High Art.
1854 Fenton became one of the first war photographers, when he photographed the Crimean war. Fenton avoided making pictures of dead, injured or mutilated soldiers. Fenton managed to make over 350 usable large format negatives during this trip.
1855 Felice Beato and Robertson travelled to Balaklava, Crimea, where they took over reportage of the Crimean War following Roger Fenton's departure. In contrast to Fenton's depiction of the dignified aspects of war, Beato and Robertson showed the destruction. They had no problem depicting corpses.
1857 Felice Beato photographed the second Opium war. His influence in Japan, where he taught and worked with numerous other photographers and artists, ensured that he became synonymous with documentary photography in his time. He also became the first to document a military campaign as it unfolded. Dating each image gave the viewer a timeline.
1857 Beato's photographs the Second Opium War.
1858 Felice Beato arrived in India and began travelling throughout Northern India to document the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. During this time he produced possibly the first-ever photographic images of corpses. It is believed that for at least one of his photographs taken at the palace of Sikandar Bagh in Lucknow he had the skeletal remains of Indian rebels disinterred or rearranged to heighten the photograph's dramatic impact.
1860 John Thomson produced some of the earliest images of the newly discovered Angkor Wat in Cambodia after spending two weeks at the site. After this Thomson spent time taking portraits of the Cambodian Royal family before returning to Britain.
1861, Mathew Brady gets permission from President Lincoln himself to photograph the civil war, as long as Brady finances it himself. He sets out and takes his mobile studio and darkroom to the battlefield. Even though most images are taken after the battle he gets caught in direct cross fire in the First Battle of Bull Run.
1861 Brady recruits 23 photographers including names like Alexander Gardner,[10] James Gardner, Timothy H. O'Sullivan, William Pywell, to do the photography on his behalf, he acts more as director than physical camera operator. As a result many of the images in Brady’s collection are, in reality, thought to be the work of his assistants.
1862 the organising committee for the International Exhibition in London announced its plans to place photography, not with the other fine arts as had been done in the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition only five years earlier, but in the section reserved for machinery, tools and instruments - photography was considered a craft, for tradesmen. For Fenton and many of his colleagues, this was conclusive proof of photography's diminished status, some of the pioneers drifted away.
1862 Brady opened an exhibition of photographs from the Battle of Antietam in his New York gallery titled "The Dead of Antietam." This was the first time that many Americans saw the realities of war in photographs rather than the usual sketches of war.
1862, O'Sullivan followed the campaign of Maj. Gen. John Pope's Northern Virginia Campaign. He had forty-four photographs published in the first Civil War photographs collection.
1863, O'Sullivan created his most famous photograph, "The Harvest of Death," depicting dead soldiers from the Battle of Gettysburg.
1863, Fenton sells his equipment and returns to the law as a barrister.
1864, O'Sullivan following Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's trail, he photographed the Siege of Petersburg before briefly heading to North Carolina to document the siege of Fort Fisher.
1865, John Thomson undertook a series of photographs of the King of Siam and other senior members of the royal court and government.
1869, O'Sullivan was the official photographer on the United States Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel. His role was to take photos of the West to attract settlers. (again if one is being paid to document an area with this goal in mind, can it be done objectively?) He became one of the first geo-photographers, making images about the land, unindustrialised land.
1869 William Henry Jackson won a commission from the Union Pacific to document the scenery along the various railroad routes for promotional purposes. Only a few months separate Jackson's commision from O'Sullivan's.
1870 the sale of his albums had become the mainstay of Beato's business. (is this the start where documentrary is photographed with one eye on the reward?)
1870 O'Sullivan joined a survey team in Panama to survey for a canal across the Isthmus.
1871 Beato served as official photographer with the United States naval expedition of Admiral Rodgers to Korea.
1877 Beato sold most of his stock to the firm Stillfried & Andersen,[32] who then moved into his studio. Beato retired to become a trader, but this did not work out too well.
1881 Thomson was appointed photographer to the British Royal Family by Queen Victoria, from this point on he concentrated on studio photography, where he photographed the rich and famous which was a much easier way to earn a living than tracking around in treacherous conditions as he did before.
1885 Beato was the official photographer of the expeditionary forces led by Baron (later Viscount) G.J. Wolseley to Khartoum, Sudan.
1886, Beato lectured the London and Provincial Photographic Society on photographic techniques.
1896 Edward S. Curtis began a survey of Indian Life in North America.
1896, Brady dies, pennyless, the US Congress paid only $25,000 for his war photos, where it cost him over $100,000 to produce this bankrupted him as the public and private investors just wanted to forget about the harrowing images of the war. A bit of trivia, Brady did photograph 18 of the 19 American Presidents from John Quincy Adams to William McKinley missing out on William Henry Harrison, who died in office three years before Brady started.
1909, Beato dies in Florence, Italy, by this time Beato became known as much of a business man as he was a photographer, with a string of businesses from health insurance to silver trade. For the next 50 years his images of Asia are the mainstay of images published in travel journals and helps shape the way the West sees Asia.
1930 saw the Farm Security Administration funded a number of luminaries to record the plight of farmers during the Depression. These photographers, including Walter Evans, Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange and others produced “the most important example of a state-funded documentary project in the world” (Wells p97) and included iconic works such as Lange’s Migrant Mother.
1942 After his death Jackson was honoured by the Explorer's Club for his 80,000 photographs of the American West, Mount Jackson in the Yellowstone National park is named in honour of Jackson for his contribution towards convincing US Congress to create the first national park in 1872.
I downloaded the atricle Making Sense of Documentary Photography by James Curtis to see what I could learn about the history and more so the truthfulness of documentary photography as we know it. Following are a couple of excerpts i found interesting and my comments below them.
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/photos/photos.pdf
"A picture may be worth a thousand words, but you need to know how to analyse the
picture to gain any understanding of it at all."
"Susan Sontag captured the essence of that faith in her
monumental reverie On Photography when she wrote “Photographed images do not
seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it.”"
"In the aftermath of the 1863 battle of Gettysburg, photographer Alexander
Gardner ordered that one of the fallen bodies be dragged forty yards and propped in a
rocky corner. The resulting image, Rebel Sharpshooter in Devil’s Den, continues to
command attention despite the recent discovery of the photographer’s manipulations."
Image: Alexander
G, Rebel Sharpshooter in Devil’s Den, 1863
I have seen this image before and like most viewers I took it at face value and believed the title and the image, one of the thoughts today when viewing an image is, "is it real?" Due to the powers of photoshop and the relative ease of using it, it's easy to question every image, however when viewing old film images we believe that they are "real" seeing that photoshop was not around, but in this image and the images to follow we can see emotional diversion or manipulation by often excluding information from the image is just as "fake" as a photoshopped image.
Who Took the Photograph?
"If we are to determine the meaning of a documentary photograph we must begin
by establishing the historical context for both the image and its creator."
"Documentary photographs are more than expressions of artistic skill; they are conscious
acts of persuasion. "
"But how did
Riis gain the cooperation of these stealthy and suspicious subjects? He hired the young
“toughs” in this picture to reenact a common crime by having them mug one of their
own. He then paid all the boys with cigarettes."
Image: Jacob A. Riis (Richard Hoe Lawrence),
A Growler Gang in Session (Robbing a Lush), 1887
Why and For Whom Was the Photograph Taken?
"Lewis Hine took many of his most famous photographs while working for social
reform agencies, such as New York’s Charity Organization Society and the National
Child Labor Committee."
Rothstein neglected to
identify his main subject as the village elder who stood proudly before his extended
James Curtis, “Making Sense of Documentary Photography,” page 10
family. The man was a grandfather and great grandfather, and this is a
multigenerational portrait. The fathers of the children do not appear in the picture,
either because Rothstein excluded them or because they were working at the time the
photo was taken."
By doing this Rothstein let the viewer believe that each of these families were this large with only one father to all these children. Without any further reference readers of magazines where these images were published took them as gospel and did not question the images influencing an entire nation into believing something that was in the interest of the photographer.
How Was the Photograph Taken?
"Even with subsequent advances in film speed and camera technology, documentary
photographers of the 1930s continued to direct the actions of their subjects, although
they steadfastly denied doing so. Walker Evans was the most outspoken of the FSA
photographers in his renunciation of any arrangements prior to exposure. Yet Evans’s
camera of choice was a bulky 8X10 view camera that had to be mounted on a tripod.
James Curtis, “Making Sense of Documentary Photography,” page 11
Like Riis, he needed the cooperation of his subjects, who agreed to remain motionless
while he made the exposure. If they moved, they would blur the image. Evans chose the
large view camera" I think the reason people do not question images like this is because we take images at face value, 99% of people do not know or even care what equipment was used and could care even less about the difficulty the photographer had to make the image. So it is understandable that the photographers of this era had to pose their subjects. But are they then becoming studio photographers on location?
What Can Companion Images Tell Us?
"Near the small hamlet of Smithland, Lee took a series of
pictures of a tenant farmer struggling to make a living on a landscape that had been
ravaged by drought. The photograph below shows the farmer’s children standing at a
table eating dinner on Christmas day. The place at the head of the table is vacant and
the image raises the troubling prospect of parental abandonment." "Lee was
asked about the circumstances surrounding Christmas Dinner in Iowa. Lee remembered
the name of the farmer, Earl Pauley, and recalled taking a number of pictures on the
farm. He told an interviewer that Pauley was a widower and was doing his best to
provide for his needy children. These recollections added power and poignancy to Lee’s
portrait.
Yet in this instance, Lee’s memory betrayed him, for the FSA file contains a
photograph of Pauley’s wife standing in the doorway of the shack with two of the
children who later posed for the dinner photograph. This hitherto unpublished image
provides clear evidence that Lee assigned places at the dinner table. He asked the father
to step out of the scene but never made room for the mother. Her presence would have
undercut the dramatic scene that Lee had in mind."
This clearly shows that this again was not an image of the truth but one thought up by the photographer. Without this companion image the viewer will be none the wiser.
Image: Russell Lee, Christmas Dinner in Iowa, 1936
How Was the Photograph Presented?
"To illustrate how families were victimized when the
head of the household could no longer work, Hine posed an amputee father in the
foreground with the man’s wife and four children slightly to the rear. From a
standpoint of composition and aesthetic design, the image left much to be desired"
Here the title of the image makes the image more powerful, it tells the viewer what to think. But by the actions of the photographer this is no longer a documentary photo. Or is it?
Image: Lewis Hine, One Arm and Four Children, 1910
Something else to look at that might be interesting is the 1930's and 1940s in colour flickr group published by the library of congress.
References
"A Brief History Of Documentary Photography - Gaslight Photography". Gaslight Photography. N.p., 2013. Web. 10 May 2016.
"Alexander Gardner (Photographer)". Wikipedia. N.p., 2016. Web. 10 May 2016.
"Documentary Photography: Characteristics, History". Visual-arts-cork.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 10 May 2016.
"Early Documentary Photography | Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline Of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum Of Art". The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. N.p., 2016. Web. 10 May 2016.
"Felice Beato". Wikipedia. N.p., 2016. Web. 10 May 2016.
"John Thomson (Photographer)". Wikipedia. N.p., 2016. Web. 10 May 2016.
"Mathew Brady". Wikipedia. N.p., 2016. Web. 10 May 2016.
"Robert J. Flaherty". Wikipedia. N.p., 2016. Web. 10 May 2016.
"Roger Fenton". Wikipedia. N.p., 2016. Web. 10 May 2016.
"Timothy H. O'sullivan". Wikipedia. N.p., 2016. Web. 10 May 2016.
"William Henry Jackson". Wikipedia. N.p., 2016. Web. 10 May 2016.
Curtis, James. N.p., 2016. Web. 15 Feb. 2016.
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