Documentary Photography An Overview

The Beginnings – Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine

Jacob Riis

In 1877 Riis became a police reporter for the New York Tribune. Riis constantly argued that the "poor were the victims rather than the makers of their fate". In 1888 Riis was employed as a photo-journalist by the New York Evening Sun. Riis was among the first photographers to use flash powder, which enabled him to photograph interiors and exteriors of slums at night. In 1890 Riis published a book entitled ‘How the Other Half Lives’. It was seen by Theodore Roosevelt, the New York Police Commissioner, who then had the city police lodging houses that were featured in the book closed down.

Riis often wrote and lectured on the problems of the poor Riis often wrote and lectured on the problems of the poor. This included magic lantern shows where one observer noted "his viewers moaned, shuddered, fainted and even talked to the photographs he projected, reacting to the slides not as images but as a virtual reality that transported the new York slum world directly into the lecture hall."

Lewis Hine

Hine was an American sociologist who took up photography in 1905 and used it as a documentary tool, to show the poor living conditions of immigrants from Europe. From 1911- 1916 he toured the US as official photographer for the National Labor Committee, where he depicted the plight of child workers in the mills. "I wanted to show things that had to be corrected", Hine declared.

Hine's contracting supervisor, wrote: "The work that you did under my direction was more responsible than any or all other efforts to bring the facts and conditions of child labor employment to public attention."

Equipment

A New Era – The Leica First introduced in 1923 specifically for use with 35mm film. Still going strong today with digital as well as film versions

Robert Capa

Robert Capa was a founder of Magnum Photos and a full Member since 1947. "If your photographs aren't good enough, you're not close enough.“ His career came to an abrupt end when he stepped on a land mine on an obscure battlefield in Indochina.

Marc Riboud

Diane Arbus

Henri Cartier Bresson

Famous for coining the term ‘The Decisive Moment’: "the decisive moment, it is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression." Helped to develop the genre of documentary that we know as ‘Street Photography’

Street Photography Lee Friedlander

Gary Winogrand

Moral and Ethical Considerations

Kevin Carter

This picture captivated the world in 1993 and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994. A few months later, Carter taped a garden hose to the exhaust of his pick-up truck and fed the other end into the passenger side window. Broke and depressed, his suicide note read, in part, “I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain . . . of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killers and executioners . . . “

Richard Drew – Falling Man

“This photographer is no stranger to history; he knows it is something that happens later. In the actual moment history is made, it is usually made in terror and confusion, and so it is up to people like him - paid witnesses - to have the presence of mind to attend to its manufacture” “This photographer, when he was twenty-one years old, was standing right behind Bobby Kennedy when Bobby Kennedy was shot in the head. His jacket was spattered with Kennedy's blood, but he jumped on a table and shot pictures of Kennedy's open and ebbing eyes, and then of Ethel Kennedy crouching over her husband and begging photographers - begging him - not to take pictures”