Documentary Photography

By Catherine Lynn

What is Documentary Photography?

• “One could argue that any photographic image…..that image is a document or something”.

• Portrays much more “authority” than other art forms

• “we know the photographer had to have been on the scene – indeed this serves as a further guarantee of the image’s truth… we are seeing what the photographer saw at the moment of exposure”`

Bernice Abbott

• American Photographer• “Changing New York”• “documentary value – to be inherent in the

photographic process itself and present in every good photograph whose image had not been falsified by technical manipulation”.

Bernice Abbott

Dorothea Lange Migrant Mother

FSA• American Photographer (New Jersey)• Migrant Mother• Japanese Internment Camps• Farm Security Administration• “these documentary photographs… use

certain techniques and forms to produce a desired response in the spectator”

Dorothea Lange + Migrant Mother

“America Survives the Depression”

Richard Billingham

• Studies Fine Art at University of Sunderland

• He photographed his father, an alcoholic, mother Liz and his younger brother Jason

• Exposes Social Taboos in photographs

Richard Billingham

Martha Rosler

• American Photographer• In Around and Afterthoughts

– Quite Critical of Documentary Photography– “pacifies any stirrings of conscience in its

viewers the way scratching relieves an itch and reassures them about their relative wealth and social position”

1967-1972

2004