Social documentary Photography

Social documentary photography

Social documentary photography is the recording of humans in their natural condition with a camera. Often it also refers to a socially critical genre of photography dedicated to showing the life of underprivileged or disadvantaged people.

Origin of social documentary photography

Bandit's Roost (1888) by Jacob Riis, from How the Other Half Lives.
Social documentary photography has its roots in the 19th Century work of Henry Mayhew, Jacob Riis, and Lewis Hine, but began to take further form through the photographic practice of the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The FSA hired photographers and writers to report and document the plight of poor farmers. Under Roy Stryker, the Information Division of the FSA adopted a goal of "introducing America to Americans." Many noted Depression-era photographers were fostered by the FSA project, including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks. The photographers documented the situation of poor farmers, whose economic existence was threatened, and created a new style with photographic documentation of social problems. FSA made 250,000 images of rural poverty, but only about half survive. These are now housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress and online.From these some 77,000 different finished photographic prints were originally made for the press, plus 644 color images from 1,600 negatives.

Characteristics of social documentary photography

Social documentary photography or concerned photography may often be devoted to 'social groups' with socio-economic and cultural similarities, showing living or working conditions perceived as shameful, discriminatory, unjust or harmful. Examples include child labor, child neglect, homelessness, poverty among segments of society, impoverished children and the elderly, and hazardous working conditions. The poor, the social outcasts, or lower classes are portrayed in compassionate observation. The documentary power of the images is associated with the desire for political and social change.

History

As early as in the 19th century the living conditions of the lower classes were the subject of photography. Henry Mayhew photographed the book London Labour and the London Poor, a representation of the depiction of London's working class.[2] The book was illustrated by woodcuts, from photographs by Beard. Thomas Annan published "Photographs Of The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, 1868-77", a documentation of the slum areas in Glasgow. Yet another example is the book published by Smith and Thompson in 1877 "Street Life in London", which also documented social life. England was the birthplace of social documentary photography, given the advanced stage of industrialization, and its impact on society.


Child laborer (Lewis Hine, USA, 1908).
In the United States two outstanding photographers got involved at the end of the 19th century in favor of people on the margins of society, Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. For them the camera was an instrument of accusation against social injustice. In 1890 Jacob Riis documented the living conditions of the unemployed and homeless in New York ("How the Other Half Lives"). He was also interested in the fate of immigrants, many of whom lived in extreme poverty in the New York slums. Riis clearly takes sides for the people he photographed and appeals to the social conscience of society. In 1908 the National Child Labor Committee hired Lewis Wickes Hine, a sociology professor who advocated photography as an educational medium, to document child labor in American industry. In the early 20th century Hine would publish thousands of photographs designed to pull at the nation's heartstrings.[3] Child Labor was widespread in the U.S. in the early 20th century. Lewis Hine equally drew attention to the situation of immigrants. The work of Riis and Hine had political influence. Riis' commitment to the people in the Mulberry Bend neighborhood led to its demolition. The building of schools and educational programs can also be attributed to Riis. Lewis Hines work culminated in a law against child labor, which was repelled shortly after its introduction as a result of the entry of the U.S. into the 1st World War.
An English pioneer of socially committed photography is Bill Brandt who as a photographer was a great artist. Brandt is particularly renowned for his experimental studies of the nude. Brandt moved to England in 1931 and worked for several magazines, for which he published coverages on people affected by the Great Depression. In 1936 he published the illustrated book "The English at Home", in which he portrayed the English class society. He traveled to the Midlands and to northern England where he photographed the effects of the Great Depression.
After 1945 the dedicated, collectively organized social documentary photography no longer was able to gain ground, except in England, where the tradition lingered on a bit longer. The vigorous anti-communism of the McCarthy era had anathematized the engaged, liberal social documentary photography with the verdict of evil. Great documentary photographers of the postwar era, such as W. Eugene Smith, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, William Klein or Mary Ellen Mark were either lone fighters or were forced to work as story-suppliers for the large illustrated magazines (especially Life). Squeezed into the economic restraints of circulation increases, political outsider positions found little room. Nevertheless photographers devoted themselves to social issues in the second half of the 20th century. Thus W. Eugene Smith documented in the late 1960s the fate of the inhabitants of the Japanese fishing village of Minamata who had fallen ill as a result of mercury poisoning.
A important social documentary photographer of the present is Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, who has published an impressive documentation of the industrial age ("Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age", 1993, includes photos from 26 countries). Another central theme of his work is the global phenomenon of migration, which he documented in the publications "The Children: Refugees and Migrants" (2000) and "Migrations" (2000, includes photos from 39 countries). In both documentaries he demonstrated the incredible plight of refugees in many countries around the world Salgado contributes to a differentiated public awareness and supports the work of UNICEF.


Manuel Rivera-Ortiz: Tobacco Harvesting, Valle de Viñales, Cuba 2002
British photojournalist Don McCullin has specialised in examining the underside of society, and his photographs have depicted the unemployed, downtrodden and the impoverished. He is also recognised for his war photography and images of urban strife. A younger representative of social documentary photography of the present is Manuel Rivera-Ortiz, an independent photographer documenting the lives of people in developing countries. Affected by his own experience of growing up poor in rural Puerto Rico, Rivera-Ortiz refers to his work as a celebration of life, in poverty.


Since the late 1970s, social documentary photography has increasingly been accorded a place in art galleries alongside fine art photography.

Border areas and related genres

Some photographers address social issues without dedicated advocacy for the victims of social inequality and grievance, such as Diane Arbus or Tina Barney. While Arbus created haunting images of disabled and other people on the margins of society, Barney documented the life of the white upper class in New England. Social documentary in the literal sense are multifaceted documentations from workaday life in certain cities, landscapes and cultures. The examples are equally varied as the opportunities. Roman Vishniac may be mentioned as a characteristic representative, who documented Jewish life in Eastern Europe prior to the Holocaust (Verschwundene Welt, A Vanished World)|. Another genre close to the procedures and results of social documentary photography can be found in the ethnographic photography that often documents people in precarious situations, however intending to document disappearing traditions, clothing or living conditions.
Social Realism is an artistic movement, expressed in the visual and other realist arts, which depicts working class activities as heroic. Many artists who subscribed to Social Realism were painters with socialist political views. The movement therefore has some commonalities with the Socialist Realism used in certain Communist nations.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_documentary_photography


REINVENTION BY US PHOTOGRAPHERS

In the late 1950s and early '60s American photographers reinvented the documentary tradition once again. This time the subjective tradition that had emerged in the 1940s and early '50s became a kaleidoscope through which photographers like Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and Lee Friedlander looked at the world. Trained in the "astonish-me" aesthetics of Alexey Brodovitch's Design Workshops, Winogrand (1928–1984) claimed to make photographs in order "to see what the world looks like in photographs." Although he possessed a particular fondness for visual puns and tilted exposures, his images belie a mastery of the 35mm camera and a seriously innovative point of view. His formal acuity is undeniable in El Morocco (1992.5107), in which the photograph's slapdash style mirrors the thrill of the moment as a woman whirls around a dance floor. Such technical sophistication abetted an absurdist appreciation for the visual world, as is evident in works like Untitled (1994.107), where the disposition of three figures on the street enact an unspoken "Waiting for Godot" scenario. As these images and others prove, the significance of Winogrand's chance observations of daily life delved far beneath their whimsical surface appearance.

Photographers like Eggleston and Shore have succeeded in conveying the atmosphere of their subjects photographically, making their works among the most incisive in contemporary art.

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) was another 1960s photographer whose work deepened rapidly after its initial impact. Her training with Lisette Model encouraged her to develop her naturally perspicacious view of the world to produce photographic portraits with a disarming psychological frankness. While Child with Toy Hand Grenade (2001.474) may at first seem to portray a knobby-kneed kid goofing off in the park, he quickly becomes a cipher for the barely contained discomfiture that branded the country as it embarked on another war in Southeast Asia and picked at the frayed edges of 1950s conformist culture. Even a pillar of that culture, such as Mrs. T. Charlton Henry (2001.399), seems to bristle against the surface of Arbus' image of her, revealing Arbus' uncanny ability to evoke without overwhelming either her subject or her time.

The third in a trio of photographers that redefined social documentary photography in the 1960s was Lee Friedlander (born 1934). While Winogrand constructed existential situations with his camera and Arbus analyzed the inhabitants of the era with her lens, Friedlander sought to understand his era by examining society's cultural furniture. In Nashville (1995.168.2), the television becomes a surrogate for humanity, dramatizing the unsettling idea that all experience—even our sense of self—is dwarfed by the power of media. Friedlander also inserted himself into his photographs using shadows and reflections, as in Colorado (1993.360), in effect transforming a street photograph into a self-portrait that attempts to ferret out the significance of individuality within the flotsam and jetsam of an increasingly mediated world.

While these photographers imaged the "social landscape" of America in the 1960s, others like Robert Adams (born 1937) addressed the actual outdoor landscape. In works such as Outdoor Theater, Colorado Springs (1971.531.6), mankind's incursion into the natural world becomes a blatant threat to the integrity of the nation's natural resources—a dangerous situation not because it is a deliberate campaign of destruction but because it is the product of developmental forces (such as the popularity of drive-in movies) that, if left unfettered, will envelop everything in their path. Adams' work was included in a seminal 1975 exhibition at the George Eastman House in Rochester entitled New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, along with other contemporary landscape photographers including Lewis Baltz, Frank Gohlke, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Stephen Shore. Training his lens on the topography of suburbia, Shore (born 1947) often worked in color, which punctuated his scrutiny of the area perfectly (2003.452).

Another great innovator in color documentary photography is William Eggleston (born 1939) (1991.1271), who by the mid-'60s had virtually abandoned black-and-white photography. Eggleston is one of the few photographers to have overcome the problem inherent in color photography, which curator John Szarkowski described in the introduction to Eggleston's debut exhibition in 1976: "Outside the studio … color has induced timidity and an avoidance of those varieties of meaning that are not in the narrowest sense aesthetic. Most color photography, in short, has been either formless or pretty. In the first case the meanings of color have been ignored; in the second they have been considered at the expense of allusive meanings. While editing directly from life, photographers have found it too difficult to see simultaneously both the blue and the sky." By allowing the contemporary world's colors to speak for the character and flavor of contemporary life—instead of enhancing them so they become saturated blocks of designer hues—photographers like Eggleston and Shore have succeeded in conveying the atmosphere of their subjects photographically, making their works among the most incisive in contemporary art.

.El Morocco, 1955
Garry Winogrand (American, 1928–1984)


El Morocco was one of New York's hottest nightclubs in the 1950s—a perfect site for Garry Winogrand to test his talents as a street-smart photographer working for Harper's Bazaar, Collier's, Pageant, and Sports Illustrated. Like his earlier pictures of the prizefighter Floyd Patterson in the ring, this photograph of a couple dancing explodes the idea of the snapshot. Focusing on his subjects' telling responses (here the face and hands revealing a ferocious animal spirit), Winogrand introduced a new, exceedingly confrontational style of 35mm photography. Direct, invasive, yet intuitively choreographed, this approach soon placed the artist alongside Robert Frank as one of the preeminent street photographers of the day.

.Untitled [3 figures], 1960
Garry Winogrand (American, 1928–1984)


This is an unusual image in the oeuvre of a photographer known chiefly for a confrontational style that made instances from everyday life on the street look like snippets from a well-choreographed farce. Rather than dancing about to the rhythm of urban life, these people seem suspended for eternity as static weights in a three-dimensional balancing game predicated on their own insubstantial shadows. If Winogrand's normal mode was one of witty graphic innovation, here he probes the tragic undertones in life's dark comedy

.Child with Toy Hand Grenade, 1962
Diane Arbus (American, 1923–1971)

An iconic image that embodies the awkward tension between childhood tomfoolery and primal violence, this has become one of the most celebrated photographs in the history of the medium. America's historic transition from the complacent isolationism of the 1950s to the sociopolitical turmoil that would emerge in the late 1960s and 1970s seems to seethe beneath the surface of this image, underscoring Arbus' prescience and intuitive understanding of her time.

.Nashville, 1963
Lee Friedlander (American, born 1934)



In the early 1960s, Friedlander made a small series of photographs of television sets while traveling across America on two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships and on editorial assignment for several popular men's magazines. The witty, often ironic pictures provide intuitive commentary on the then-new medium as "the plug-in drug"; most were made in an appropriately modern, artificial space—a motel room—which is at once bedroom, living room, and theater.

5.Russian midget friends in a living room on 100th Street, N.Y.C., 1963
Diane Arbus (American, 1923–1971)

Mrs. T. Charlton Henry in her Chestnut Hill home, Philadelphia, PA., 1965
Diane Arbus (American, 1923–1971)

When this portrait of a society lady was published in Harper's Bazaar, the feature writer's text for the image noted: "Mrs. T. Charlton Henry … weighs a fragile, feminine ninety pounds, but moves through life like Trojan." Although Mrs. Henry—with her jeweled dress and formidable helmet of hair—may have been an atypical Arbus subject, the photographer employed her trademark classical style to capture the power and poignancy of this wealthy upper class woman in the elegant confines of her milieu.

Colorado, 1967
Lee Friedlander (American, born 1934)

This image was included in Friedlander's first book of photographs, Self Portrait (1970), in which each picture contained either a shadow or a reflection of the photographer. By including a trace of his presence within the frame, Friedlander acknowledged his role as a participant in the social landscape that he photographed, thereby disturbing the illusion of objective transparency normally associated with documentary photography.

Outdoor Theater, Colorado Springs, 1968
Robert Adams (American, born 1937)


While teaching English at Colorado Collage and practicing photography as a hobby, Adams photographed residential areas around Colorado Springs at the request of the organizers of a conference on the western landscape. This experience further ignited his interest in the medium, and he continued to focus on the relationship between contemporary society and the natural world. This photograph—included in his first extended publication of images on the subject, The New West: Landscapes Along the Colorado Front Range (1974), an extraordinary summation of the current, frayed state of the country's natural environment—encapsulates the situation of the western landscape, as the pathetic space of a deserted drive-in abuts a majestic mountainscape just beyond. Robert Adams describes his photography as an attempt to reconcile his disappointment with the behavior of civilization toward nature with his heartfelt respect for the unique landscape of the west, a resource that has been visualized and celebrated throughout the history of photography, from Timothy O'Sullivan to Ansel Adams. However irreconcilable man and nature may appear today, by making images of the often unfortunate interaction of people with their environment, he forces us to reflect on the situation and, perhaps, to remedy it.

Huntsville, Alabama, ca. 1970
William Eggleston (American, born 1939)


One of the first photographers whose images in color were accepted as successful works of art, Eggleston made his debut in 1976 at the Museum of Modern Art with the exhibition William Eggleston's Guide. In the catalogue for the exhibition, curator John Szarkowski wrote: "Eggleston … shows us pictures of aunts and cousins and friends, of houses in the neighborhood and in neighboring neighborhoods, of local streets and side roads, local strangers, odd souvenirs, all of this appearing not at all as it might in a social document, but as it might in a diary, where the important meanings would be not public and general but private and esoteric." Because Eggleston shows us the in-between moments of life in tones that are almost too true-to-life, his work makes us look anew at our lives in the present tense. In photographs like this one, with its charmingly outdated details, our sense of place in the world is heightened by an unnerving familiarity with this unknown visitor in a dank and cheerless hotel room. It is our own intimate knowledge of similar situations, as well as the solid masses of nondescript, lifeless colors—hues with that well-worn feeling of irrelevant memories—that charms the picture and lodges it permanently in the mind's eye.

Natural Bridge, New York, 1974, printed 2003
Stephen Shore (American, born 1947)


In the mid- to late 1970s, Shore traveled the country by car photographing the banal vernacular details of the national scene—from main streets and parking lots to office buildings and apartment complexes. Inspired by the sweeping documentary projects of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, Shore's quiet, almost subdued sensibility differed greatly from the gritty social commentaries of his predecessors; he was also working in color at a time when it was considered vulgar, beneath the realm of serious art photography. In addition to his remarkably assured palette, Shore was also well aware of recent photo-based Conceptual Art by Ed Ruscha and Dan Graham that chronicled the depopulated and commercially overrun spaces of middle America. The results—such as this harmonic convergence between a patch of grass and a beat-up Plymouth on a suburban street—were deceptively straightforward yet formally refined, and opened the door for photographers working in color, from Nan Goldin to Thomas Struth.



http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2003.452