When was documentary photography first used

In this case, is it the desperate look of the Migrant Mother while her children embrace her inside a precarious tent. Although war photography is mostly linked to the immediacy of photojournalism, some photographers like Robert Capa employed their technical skills for long-term projects too. Taken during the Spanish Civil War, the image was later disputed because of its unclear location and the identity of the subject, as well as the discovery of staged photographs taken at the same time and place by Robert Capa.

The photographer explained he took the picture by accident while in a trench, by holding his camera above his head and pointing it toward the unknown. It is not just one photo, it is an entire book of them. It was the result of a Guggenheim Fellowship that the photographer won, and in he traveled across the United States for a series of road trips and social documentations. His images were technically imperfect: blurry, grainy and sloppy in general, yet their approach was direct, thus revealing the rawness and honesty of the people and places he photographed.

The book received harsh criticism in the beginning, as the country fought communism and endorsed national ideals, which this project appeared to be derogative to.

Its value, however, was eventually recognized, and it is still maintained. It is a photograph taken during the Vietnam War on June 8, The iconic photo, taken in Trang Bang by Associated Press photographer Nick Ut , shows a nine-year-old girl running naked on a road after being severely burned on her back by a South Vietnamese napalm attack. The girl was later identified as Phan Thi Kim Phuc, and she was among other children in flight from the bombing.

Before he handed in his film with the photo, the photographer took the girl to the hospital, ultimately saving her life, and the publication of the photo was delayed because it showed full frontal nudity, and of a child too. Eventually, the New York photo editor, Hal Buell, agreed that the news value of the photograph overrode any reservations about the nudity. In one of the most iconic images of the event, and the 20th century altogether, we see an unidentified man standing in front of a row of tanks, preventing them from surpassing him.

Although there were many photographic and video documentations of the event, this photo, famous by the title Tank Man and Unknown Rebel , was taken by Jeff Widener of the Associated Press, from a sixth-floor balcony of the Beijing Hotel.

It is a legendary image that emphasizes the power of people and it is often used as a symbol during demonstrations worldwide. In China, this photo has been censored by the government and cannot be found anywhere on the Internet. It was widely believed that this photo was taken during the demonstrations in Greece. The truth is that it was taken in Vancouver, Canada, after the Vancouver Canucks hockey team lost in a final game, sending their entire city into chaos.

Over the next thirteen years, Hine made thousands of negatives—often undercover—of children working across the country in mills, sweatshops, factories, and various street trades, such as newspaper delivery Through a steady accumulation of specific, idiosyncratic facts, the photographer hoped to reveal the larger, hidden patterns of child exploitation upon which the American city was rapidly expanding.

More important, his reports and slide lectures were not meant solely as tools for labor reform but as ways of triggering a more profound, empathetic response in the viewer, one that would cause him to reconsider his relationship to society. Ernest J. Bellocq — was born into an aristocratic Creole family in New Orleans. A prominent member of the New Orleans Camera Club, he worked as a professional photographer specializing in shipbuilding. When discovered by the photographer Lee Friedlander in the s and published in , Bellocq was immediately recognized as a master of the modern, psychological portrait—an instant ancestor for a whole generation of contemporary artists including Diane Arbus.

Sheeler and Schamberg were both academically trained painters from Philadelphia who had studied modern art in Europe and New York. Although each believed painting was their true vocation, they took up photography to earn a living; Sheeler specialized in architecture, Schamberg in portraiture. When Charles Sheeler took up the camera sometime in —11, he was already a modestly accomplished painter.

By , Sheeler had begun to turn his camera from commercial work to subjects of personal significance, such as the eighteenth-century farmhouse in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, that he and Schamberg used as a studio. This was also the first step toward endowing documentary photography with an aesthetics of its own, beyond a functional value. Her book Changing New York , published in , was the fruit of extensive labor of documentation nourished by her encounter with Atget.

She sought to dovetail the historical, utilitarian project into a distinctive artistic approach, giving it a modernist touch by using the specificities of architecture and urban planning as formal motifs.

Since the first large-scale nineteenth-century undertakings, there have been countless photographic projects aiming to produce documentation of a particular subject.

A panorama of these endeavors would be an imposing project in its own right. It is worth noting, however, that this field continues to expand to include ever-new approaches and themes.

The work of the Bechers is a case in point. Berndt — and Hilla Becher — , a duo of German photographers, became known for the obsessive quality of their work. By taking German industrial heritage as the exclusive subject of their work, they have redefined the documentary intention by adopting a conceptual approach: they photograph only with a view camera; in gloomy weather, for the sake of neutral light; and always frame their object from the front such that it fits squarely within the frame.

The highly structured character of their work earned them a prize at the Venice Biennale normally awarded to sculptors: the Bechers thus helped usher documentary photography into the field of contemporary art. As evidenced by the many initiatives that helped forge an image-based collective memory, interest in the documentary function of photography at the end of the nineteenth century began to build on encyclopedic, pedagogical, and archival practices. This ideal was embodied above all in the development of a new kind of institution, which shouldered the civilizational project: the museum of documentary photography.

His project received little recognition as such, but it broke ground for a series of similar projects and brought the idea of a photographic archive into popular consciousness. The culmination of this trend was the First International Congress for Photographic Documentation, held in in Marseilles. Inspired by the library model, the congress focused on methods of organizing photographic documentation, on the assumption that a photograph was not a document as such but would become one when filed and classified.

Paul Otlet — is credited with taking the idea of photographic documentation a step further. Otlet devoted most of his life to developing a global system of documentation and was the father of the Universal Decimal Classification still in use today.

He set up the Mundaneum , which incorporated every available medium of information: image, sound, film, as well as microfiche. He sorted and stored some , photographic images using his decimal classification and index card system. He thus placed image on a par with text in terms of the knowledge either was able to convey.

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