Zemni Photography Blog

Photography projects, inspiration and research by Linda Mayoux

Documentary photographers today

Category: Theory and Concepts

  • Documentary photographers today

    Task

    Do your own research into the work and techniques of the Magnum agency photographers and include your findings in your learning log or blog.

    The list below represents a range of styles and approaches and has been selected to support your development and give  a feeling of the industry today.
    Look briefly at the website of each of the photographers to get an overall feel for the range of work that’s out there. Pick out five or six photographers whose work appeals to you (more if you have time) and analyse their approach:

    • What is the main strength of their practice?
    • What makes them different to other photographers working in a similar genre?
    • Where do your chosen photographers fall in the social documentary–photojournalism spectrum? Does this matter?

    Richard Billingham
    Briony Campbell
    Luc Delahaye
    Melanie Dornier
    David Gillanders
    Nadav Kandar
    Steve McCurry
    Mimi Mollica
    Zanele Muholi
    Nicholas Nixon
    Ingrid Pollard
    Brent Stirton
    Medford Taylor
    Ed Thomson
    Albrecht Tübke
    Donovan Wylie

  • The Decisive Moment

    The idea of the decisive moment is underpinned by the notion that this is something that emerges from the scene, i.e. it happens independently of the viewer. Magnum stressed the ‘moment’ as being crucial to the interpretation and communication of the image.

    Henri Cartier Bresson

    It could be argued, though, that the decisive moment is effectively created by the observer who decides that it is in some way ‘decisive’. Moments only become ‘decisive’ through the act of observing and analysing.

    What is ‘decisive’ depends on interpretation and meaning. Different moments of coincidence and contrast have different meanings.

    There are also generally a continuum of decisive moments, corresponding to a multitude of observers. Different observers will produce different decisive moments.

    The concept of the ‘moment’ raises questions about the photographer’s motivation and integrity.

    • Is it acceptable to engineer this moment or should a photographer wait to capture it in its honesty and purity?

    Sources:

    Simon Bainbridge 2011 Hereford Photography Festival

    Graham Clarke, The Photograph (pp.145–87). Discussion of how Cartier-Bresson, Werner Bischof, Robert Capa and others put their personal style into an image, for example in Capa’s war photography. ’the moment’ and social class as a motivating issue for the documentary photographer.

    Importance of technology

    Getting the moment is still a challenge for modern photographers but current practice is based on portability, with a return to the smaller but very high-quality digital camera. Much of Magnum’s style and the numerous ‘moments’ they captured were delivered through a technology breakthrough – the Leica 35mm rangefinder camera. The Leica gave flexibility and the ability to be inconspicuous, unlike the full- and half-plate cameras that had been used before and which involved setting up a tripod and a wood or metal 5×4 camera. Quick and instant, the Leica was made to capture the moment. The camera itself changed the photographers’ practice and delivered an ability to move quickly and get in close. (Capa later used Contax and Rollei cameras, but not until after the Spanish Civil War.)

  • Henri Cartier Bresson

    The French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004).

    short film about Cartier-Bresson’s work

    The Decisive Moment

    He discovered that the camera could give him ‘instants’, moments captured in a way that used the camera to its best advantage.

    Photojournalism

    Bresson has been described as the ‘father of modern photojournalism’. Along with several other photographers, he founded the influential Magnum Photos agency in 1947.

    His approach was simple. Using the fixed lens camera popular
    amongst the early Magnum photographers, Cartier-Bresson tried to make himself invisible; he tried to not be part of the scene or affect the image with his presence and waited for ‘the decisive moment’. Many of his images are successful because of his ability to time when to press the shutter. Cartier-Bresson didn’t have motor drives giving 12 frames a second or blitz whole rolls of film through the camera – he waited until it felt that something was about to happen
    and caught it as it happened.

    “Photography is not like painting. There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative.”
    (Cartier-Bresson interview, Washington Post 1957)

    Art Photography

    Cartier-Bresson is an example of a successful photographer who always saw himself as an artist. He was a talented painter who discovered photography in his mid thirties. Interestingly, he returned to drawing rather than photography in the last 10 years of his life. In an article included in the collection The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers (2004), Cartier-Bresson discusses the issue of creativity relative to the camera:
    “In photography creation is a quick business – pulling the camera up to the eye line of fire, suddenly with that economical little box whatever it was that surprised you, collecting it in mid air, without tricks, without letting it get away. You are making a painting at the same time that you are take a photo. That moment, that fraction of a second is valuable for freshness of its impression – but does it preclude a more studied experience? Whether you are on the move or on the same spot in order to show a country you have to establish a close working relationship, to be supported by a human community. Living takes time, roots form slowly. Thus that fraction of a moment can be the fruit of a long acquaintance or one of surprise.”

  • Gordon Parks

    Composer, film-maker and photographer Gordon Parks (1912–2006) was born into a society
    which was segregated and where black people could not make it out of menial work and poverty.
    Like other black people, Parks was on the receiving end of intolerable bigotry in New York. He
    vowed to document this after being made to eat at the back door of restaurants and being
    refused service in shops. However, he soon found that photographing bigotry was no easy task;
    the type of experience he had endured eluded the camera so he set off to photograph the plight
    of black people in New York City. His work straddles documentary (his work on the FSA project),
    photojournalism and editorial photography.
    American Gothic is Parks’ most famous image,
    taken in 1942 during his involvement with
    the FSA project. It shows the subject (a black
    woman) as object, an object to be pitied
    or derided, as well as the conflict between
    nationhood and nationality.
    For the story of how Parks came to take this
    photograph, visit:
    http://layersofmeaning.org/
    archives/000246.html
    In American Gothic Parks uses the medium
    of photography to expose aspects of the
    treatment of black people in America.
    However photography has also been used in a
    less positive way in relation to race.

  • Can documentary photography ever be entirely value free?

    Exercise: Positive and negative spin
    Look at some different newspapers and note how racial issues are covered in the modern
    press. Don’t just look at stories that specifically involve race – look, too, at stories where one
    or more of the people involved just happens to be black (or Asian, member of a traveller
    community, etc.). Concentrate particularly on the photographic imagery used to accompany
    the stories. Is there a difference between the ‘quality’ broadsheet press (e.g. The Guardian)
    and the tabloid press (e.g. The Sun)? Make some notes in your learning log or blog.
    Next, compare an image from a broadsheet newspaper with a tabloid image. If possible,
    choose two images portraying the same (or similar) person or event. The story you choose
    could involve race, but it doesn’t have to. The idea of this exercise is to show you how public
    perception of a person or event can be influenced by the photographic imagery used.
    Read the commentary and the headlines to see how the person or event is being portrayed
    in words, then study the images carefully. For example, look to see whether the images have
    been cropped differently.
    • Where different images have been used for the same story by different papers, what do
    you think is the editorial basis for each choice?
    • Is each story positive or negative, sympathetic or sensational?
    • If a reader was just given the headline and the image for each story, what different
    conclusions might they draw? Or is there no difference?
    • How has the imagery been used to influence/manipulate the reader?
    Place the images and your analysis in your learning log or blog.

  • Dorothea Lange

    Lange was finishing a month’s trip photographing migrant farmhands for what was then the Resettlement Administration. In 1960, Lange gave this account of the experience:

    “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”
    (From Popular Photography, Feb. 1960, quoted in Wells, p.42)

    The six images in the series were made using a Graflex camera. The original negatives are 4×5” film. This type of camera needs and demands careful composition and is one sheet of film for one exposure. There were other children and a husband in the family but Lange moved these out of the image
    in an effort to construct the connotations she wanted. For example, the image may have recalled the traditional iconography of the Madonna and child in the mind of some

    pp.39–49 of your course reader. This is an in-depth look at the cultural impact of Lange’s Migrant Mother and the FSA project, examining the image in context from the original through to the Black Panther version of the sixties. This is essential reading and expands on what has been introduced here.

    Getty Museum film about Dorothea Lange’s documentary work:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQPS3KI5-yM

  • Early Social Documentary

    To Do

    What moved or motivated the photographer to get hold of his or her camera and get involved?
    Where did it start? What was its purpose?

    Many of the early practitioners of documentary photography remain quite famous today within visual culture for the way that they contributed to the development of film and cinema.

    Early Social Documentary

    Note was not ‘objective’ – long shutter speeds meant was empty. Often moved objects for better effects.

    United States

    Alfred Steiglitz

    Roger Fenton

    Matthew Brady

    Jacob Riis

    Lewis Hine

    The FSA project

    In 1935 the Farm Security Administration (FSA) project was set up to document the experiences of peasant farmers and sharecroppers and rural poverty in the Mid West of America. Led by Roy Stryker and funded by the US government, the project’s team of 17 photographers produced some 80,000 images from 1935–44. Some of these images were made available via newspapers and magazines to a target audience of middle-class city dwellers to help justify the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal, an economic programme designed to transform America’s economy in the wake of the Great Depression.

    The FSA project saw the social documentary genre, with its enquiring insight, recording for posterity and mission to elicit change, begin to cross over into photojournalism or editorial photography. The paid commissioned photographer began to emerge, as opposed to the independent and individually motivated social documentarist. The emerging genre photographer may have had an altruistic motivation but needed the pay to make it happen.

    Prominent amongst the FSA project’s image-makers were Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks, the first black American photographer to work for Life magazine.

    UK

    Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79)

    Frank Meadow Sutcliffe (1853–1941)

     Henry Peach Robinson (1830–1901)

    Modernism

    Henri Cartier Bresson

    Magnum Photos

  • Lewis Hine

    Source: Wikipedia

    Lewis Wickes Hine (1874–1940)  was an American sociologist and photographer. After his father died in an accident, he began working and saved his money for a college education. Hine studied sociology at the University of Chicago, Columbia University and New York University.

    Hine used his camera as a tool for social reform.Both Riis and Hine made their social reforming images more widely available through magic lantern shows, arguably the YouTube of the time, with the aim of reaching a middle-class audience with some political influence. Whereas Riis presented the urban poor as helpless victims, Hine was committed to social change. Hine was more than sympathetic to the cause and used the setting of the people in his images in a way that endorsed the points he and the committee were making. He wanted to see labour law reform and felt that he could help achieve this by shedding some light on the plight and daily struggle of previously ‘invisible’ people like immigrants and child workers.

    He became a full-time photographer when he was hired by the National Child Labor Committee in 1908 to travel around America for four years documenting and providing evidence of the working and social conditions of children. His photographs were instrumental in changing the child labour laws in the United States.

    Hine was also aware of the dangerous nature of the high rise race – the pace that buildings were going up in New York and the number of fatalities that were involved. The industry guideline at the time was that there should be no more than one death per floor – the Empire State Building has 102 floors. Whilst his images have an almost relaxed feel, the stark background and the drop below reveal the danger that these workers were exposed to.

    During the Great Depression, he again worked for the Red Cross, photographing drought relief in the American South, and for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), documenting life in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. He also served as chief photographer for the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) National Research Project, which studied changes in industry and their effect on employment. Hine was also a member of the faculty of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School.

    The Library of Congress holds more than five thousand Hine photographs, including examples of his child labor and Red Cross photographs, his work portraits, and his WPA and TVA images. Other large institutional collections include nearly ten thousand of Hine’s photographs and negatives held at the George Eastman House and almost five thousand NCLC photographs at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

    In 1936, Hine was selected as the photographer for the National Research Project of the Works Projects Administration, but his work there was never completed. The last years of his life were filled with professional struggles due to loss of government and corporate patronage. Few people were interested in his work, past or present, and Hine lost his house and applied for welfare. He died at age 66 on November 3, 1940 at Dobbs Ferry Hospital in Dobbs Ferry, New York, after an operation.

    After Lewis Hine’s death his son Corydon donated his prints and negatives to the Photo League, which was dismantled in 1951. The Museum of Modern Art was offered his pictures but did not accept them; but the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York did.

     Notable photographs

    •  Child Labor: Girls in Factory (1908)
    • Breaker Boys (1910)
    • Young Doffers in the Elk Cotton Mills (1910)
    • Steam Fitter (1920)
    • Workers, Empire State Building (1931)
    • Two Boys Working on a
    • Loom in Massachusetts
    • The Spinning Room at Carver Mill.

    Documentary film about Lewis Hine’s involvement with the child labour reform movement

    Lewis Hine pdf

    Google Images

  • Jacob Riis

    Danish-born Jacob Riis (1849–1914) was a pioneer in social documentary photography which included identifiable people and was one of the first photographers to use the new technology of magnesium flash. Riis photographed the flop houses where people were stacked at night
    on every available horizontal space. Again these were usually immigrants and Riis showed the squalor they inhabited in his book How the Other Half Lives (1890) which featured the infamous Mulberry tenements in New York.

    For a New York Times (2008) article on Riis visit:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/opinion/12tue4.html?th&emc=th

    Watch a 10-minute film clip about Riis and his use of the new magnesium flash:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EACoIbokOcc

  • Shirley Baker

    Images on Mary  Evans Picture Library

    Google Images

    Shirley Baker, (1932-2014), was one of the rare female photographers who chronicled life in the north of England from the 1950s onwards. Her street photography was in the ‘flaneuse’ tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, whom she named as influences. Unposed snapshots of people going about their business were juxtaposed with telling graffiti. She had a great eye for composition that has been under-appreciated next to her compassionate documentation and concern for social injustice, with a particular focus on women and children.

    From the 60s, Baker taught photography at Salford College of Art and would always carry her camera modestly stowed in her handbag. In free periods, she began a body of work, spanning 15 years, of the social housing in the area that was being demolished as people lived in semi-derelict slums. Shirley’s work in Salford and Manchester (shot mainly between 1960 and 1973) captured a time of rapid social and economic change in the lives of working class people in Manchester and Salford.”It was a time of much change: people were turfed out of their homes and some squatted in old buildings, trying to hang on to the traditional life they knew.”

    Slum clearances, started in the 1930s, resumed in earnest in the 1950s, and in the twenty years between 1955 and 1975, around 1.3 million homes were demolished nationwide. When Shirley Baker began photographing the streets of her native Salford, it seemed that no-one was interested in recording the human story of these soon-to-be demolished communities. Old ladies sitting on doorsteps in a row of condemned houses, men with handcarts searching for refuse to be recycled, children playing inventively among rubble and abandoned cars. That she chose to preserve these moments on film, now seems like the only perceptive response to a vanishing environment. It was not until 1989 that her first book, Street Photographs: Manchester and Salford, was published and Baker began to be more widely appreciated.

    In addition to her work in Manchester and Salford, she spent a considerable amount of time capturing Camden Market at the height of punk. Her work was often humorous and she added over the years to collections such as owners who look like their dogs and people falling asleep in public.

    Remembering the work of Shirley Baker Phil Coomes  BBC

    Life

    (from Guardian Obituary)

    Born in Salford, to Alec, a furniture maker, and Josephine, a housewife, Shirley had an identical twin, Barbara, who would also become an artist. They both went as boarders to Penrhos College, in Colwyn Bay, from where during the second world war they were evacuated to Chatsworth House, in Derbyshire. Their parents were unfazed by their daughters pursuing the arts professionally after they left school.

    Baker married Tony Levy, a GP, in 1957, and the couple eventually settled in Wilmslow, Cheshire, where their daughter, Nan, was born in 1963. Baker never displayed any of her photographs around their home, although she did like to take pictures of the family. This perhaps summed up the private, almost secretive, nature of her work.

    When Baker studied  photography at Manchester College of Technology, there was only one other woman on the course. On finishing, Baker’s plan was to work in-house at a company, recording processes and producing promotional images. She started at Courtaulds fabric manufacturers before freelancing for other businesses and doing some journalism, including for the Guardian. Baker encountered difficulties getting a press card, so was unable to pursue photojournalism seriously, and believed she was only given the assignments deemed unsuitable for men. From the 60s, Baker taught photography at Salford College of Art.

    Baker kept photographing in later life and completed an MA in critical history and the theory of photography at the University of Derby in 1995. She joined the Mary Evans Picture Library in 2008, and in 2012 had solo shows in Oldham and Salford, with another planned for 2015 at the Photoraphers’ Gallery in London. She was always pleased when people who featured in her work came along to exhibitions. At the opening of the Lowry Gallery in 2000, the Queen not only viewed Baker’s photographs but met some of Baker’s subjects, too.