Documentary Photography, 1890-1990

Mel Rosenthal and Mari Jo Buhle

DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY, 1890-1990. Left and progressive reformers played major roles in the development of documentary photography in the United States. Since the late nineteenth century, they have followed the course of social and political movements to build a rich portrait of working-class people and activism.

The earliest and most famous were Jacob Riis and Lewis Wickes Hine. The Danish-American Riis documented the inadequate living conditions of New York City’s poor. His photographs, which illustrated his book How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890), contributed to the improvement of the housing laws in New York City. Lewis Wickes Hine, ranged more broadly than Riis but with no less dedication to social justice. In his 1909 speech “Social Photography: How the Camera May Help in the Social Uplift,” Hine argued that photography could be used as a major weapon in the fight against social injustice. He believed that the condensed meaning in a photograph and the faith most people have in the honesty of the medium made photographs powerful “levers.” Often posing his subjects, he wrote that “the picture is a symbol that brings one immediately into close touch with reality.... In fact, it is often more effective than the reality would have been, because, in the picture, the nonessential and conflicting interests have been eliminated.” Working as the staff photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, Hine used photography to document the miserable working conditions that children were forced to endure. He was also known for his moving photographs of immigrants, his documentary work on life in Pittsburgh, and his inspiring photographs of workers, particularly his series on the construction of the Empire State Building.

The Great Depression provided the context for numerous photographers, many funded by New Deal agencies. The Farm Security Administration, under the direction of Roy E. Stryker, sponsored an important documentary project with serious political implications. Although there is debate about the extent to which this work was put to overly reformist uses, there is no disagreement about its extraordinary achievement. The photographers in this federal project—John Collier, Jack Delano, Walker Evans, Theo Jung, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, and Marion Post Walcott—were successful in portraying and documenting the lives of the people suffering the terrible deprivations brought on or exacerbated by the Great Depression, particularly in rural areas. Their photographs of the living conditions of poor and working-class people helped motivate people to work for social justice or at least to have some sympathy for those suffering from the deteriorating economic situation. Their work resulted in a huge archive of photographs –more than 100,000 black-and-white images--, housed in the Library of Congress.

The Great Depression also sparked the organization of the Photo League, founded by Sid Grossman and Sol Libsohn in 1936. Its members shared the belief that photography could and should be used to further the struggle for peace, freedom, and justice. In the late 1930s the Photo League was known for its documentary projects and its school, which taught photography to many who would go on to be excellent photographers, including women, who constituted one-third of its membership. Its programs of exhibitions and lecture series attracted some of the most important photographers in the world, including Ansel Adams, Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Harold Corsini, Morris Engel, Robert Frank, Lewis Hine (whose work they saved for posterity), Leo Hurwitz, Jerome Liebling, Elizabeth McCausland, Jack Manning, Lisette Model, Paul Strand, Roy Stryker, Weegee, Dan Weiner, and Edward Weston. Many of these photographers also lectured to the students at the school and contributed to Photo Notes, a newsletter that offered articles, reprints from other newspapers and magazines, book reviews, and analyses of exhibitions.

The work that came out of the Photo League was important and impressive. Documentary projects included Sid Grossman and Sol Libsohn’s Chelsea Document and Walter Rosenblum’s Pitt Street. The Feature Group, led by Aaron Siskind, produced a number of important projects such as Portrait of a Tenement (1936), Dead End: The Bowery (1937–1938), Park Avenue: North and South (1937), and The Catholic Worker Movement: St. Joseph’s Home (1939–1940). Their most famous and most successful project was The Harlem Document, which was undertaken to be a book. Much of this work was exhibited and published in magazines, and some of it was exhibited in New York City in 1988.

The League succeeded in supporting a socially oriented, humanistic photography that documented the complexity and contradictions of American society in the 1930s and 1940s. The organization was a victim of the Red Scare after World War II. Harassed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and listed by the US attorney general as a Communist-front group in 1947, the League closed its doors in 1951. Many of its old members maintained their social commitments and continued to document life as they saw it. A new generation of photographers and critics rediscovered their work in the 1980s and made it available to the public.

In the postwar years, independent documentary photographers consciously worked to use photography for socially useful purposes, but managed no successful attempts to organize anything like the League. One of the new photographers was Milton Rogovin, who began working in 1958 on what he called “the forgotten ones.” His photographs of gospel services and of workers in Buffalo show a strong political consciousness. In the 1980s, he worked on a documentary project on the life of coal miners. He photographed miners in Chile, Appalachia, France, Scotland, Spain, and China.
The rising social and political movements of the late 1950s and 1960s provided a new focus. Former seaman marine and union organizer, Harvey Wilson Richards excelled in the production of documentaries in both film and still photography. His earliest work highlighted California farm workers, the impact of mechanization, and the union struggle and included the much-reprinted photograph of Dolores Huerta during the Delano grape strike of 1965. Richards also documented civil rights activism in the California Bay Area and in various locations in the South. In the 1960s, he covered protests against the US war in Vietnam before turning to environmental issues, his most notable dealing the deforestation in the United States.

Even during the tumultuous 1960s, there were few successful attempts to organize photographers or for photographers to work together in politically oriented groups. For a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s Liberation News Service attempted to set up an alternative photo service that could provide the many countercultural newspapers and magazines with relevant and useful photographs. But it died with the atrophying of the movements that supported it. Occasionally a photographer succeeded in getting politically motivated work out to the public, but it was rare and frequently the audience was very limited. During the Vietnam War, however, a number of photographs were published to political acclaim. Malcolm Browne’s 1963 photograph of a Buddhist monk burning himself to death in protest against the corrupt Diem regime; Eddie Adams’s photograph of the Saigon police chief shooting a prisoner in the head; Nick Ut’s photograph of a naked child, Kim Phuc, running down a road after a napalm attack; and Ron Haeberle’s famous photograph from the My Lai massacre all had political repercussions though the photographers denied political intent.

In addition to the Vietnam War, environmental degradation began to draw in photographers by the early 1970s. W. Eugene Smith, never a Left activist, although he did at one time serve as Photo League president, a politically influential book in the 1970s. An important photojournalist who worked with Life, he traveled with his wife, Aileen, to the small Japanese city of Minimata. Many people who lived in the fishing villages near Minimata were suffering from mercury poisoning from the wastes being dumped into the Shiranui Sea by the Chelso Chemical Company. For years, Smith photographed the results of this environmental disaster. He not only photographed the dumping of the chemicals but also the tragic results of the chemical companies’ utter disregard for their workers and neighbors. He photographed the deformities and diseases that resulted from the chemical dumps. He also photographed the struggle to bring the company to account, including the demonstrations, the violence of the company guards, and finally the court trials that resulted. Badly beaten by company guards himself, he sustained injuries to his head that affected his eye.

By the mid-1980s, progressive photographers and graphic artists in New York began to organize. In 1986 they formed set up Impact Visuals, a cooperative whose purpose was to provide alternative media with affordable visual images regarding issues of political importance. The cooperative quickly grew to 200 members throughout the nation and established contacts with like-minded organizations in other nations. Impact Visuals served as a renewed effort in the tradition pioneered by the Photo League and Liberation News Service.

At the same time, new generation of photographers whose political consciousness could be traced to the civil rights, anti–Vietnam War, and countercultural movements began to produce photographic work with a decidedly political orientation. Among those who worked on labor problems were Fred Lonidier (health and police repression), Earl Dotter (factory and agricultural workers), George Cohen (health workers), Builder Levy (miners), Ken Light (migrants, undocumented workers, prisoners), and Allan Sekula (worker boundaries in advanced capitalist societies). Dealing critically with American foreign policy were Susan Meiselas (Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Kurds), Dona DeCesare (Salvadorean refugees), and Steven Cagen (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba). Taking on various aspects of racism were Diane Neumaier (sexism and racism), Pat Ward Williams (the MOVE community in Philadelphia), Mel Rosenthal (South Bronx and Puerto Rico), Connie Hatch (gentrification in California), Roland Freeman (African American Life in the South), and Ricky Flores (South Bronx and Latino culture). Still other topics were taken on by Lisa Lewenz (nuclear energy and Nazi history), Donna Ann McAdams (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power and gentrification of New York’s Lower East Side), and Carrie Mae Weems (political change in the light of race, class, and gender).

The rapid rise of electronic and digital photography began a revolution in the way people relate to photography, including the manipulation of imagery. Academic photography departments invested millions of dollars in computer and digital equipment to teach students how to work with this new technology. As a consequence, the power of photography to bear witness raised anew the ethical and political questions about representation. At the same time, these changes in technology and access increased participation in the creation of political imagery and sharing across social media such as Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook. Well-circulated images of protests against the Republican ascendancy of 2010, Occupation Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and police and mass shootings, for example, more likely came from protesters’ mobile phones than from seasoned photojournalists. Documentary photography had become a mass participation hobby and political practice, realizing in some ways the democratic aspirations of its founders.

Recommendations

Verso Gift Card

Gaza: The Story of a Genocide

The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and the Planet

Freud and the Non-European

Nuclear is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change

A Philosophy of War: Why We Fight

The Homegrown City: Reclaiming the Metropolis for its Users

Berlin Childhood around 1900

You’re viewing our site

Documentary Photography, 1890-1990

Further reading