Documentation

Daguerreotype of the Moon
by John William Draper in 1845

You thought it may be difficult to define landscape? But is it harder to define documentary photography? I have been thinking about it all afternoon. What is the earliest documentary photograph? Wouldn't it be the first photograph? Possibly Niepce's "View from His Window at Le Gras?" or may be Daguerre's "Boulevard du Temple?" Not sure.

The simplest meaning  "to document" is evidence, proof, or to record. Isn't any photograph this? And if any photographic image is documentary by its very nature why do we need a special class at COC to learn Documentary and Landscape? I am still not sure.

When I think about documentary photography I spilt it into two groups. The straight and the manipulative. Straight...portrait, natural wonders, motion studies, cities being built, etc. But after the Social Reform movement of the early 20th century, a new form of documentary was born... Social Documentary. As Beaumont Newhall (George Eastman's Curator of Kodak) described Social Documentary as "fact imbued with feeling." Photographers with a dedication to social change.

EJ Bellocq -- A man, as small as a child, with little photographic skills who took a personal interest in documenting prostitutes in New Orleans and when he died his brother (who happened to be a Catholic priest) scratched out the subjects faces to protect the women's identity and hid the negatives in his attic. Eventually the images were saved from certain destruction and oblivion by 1960's Social Landscape photographer Lee Friedlander. Each subject poses aware of the camera, proud, humble, and confident. The relationship between the subject and the photographer familiar, comfortable, friendly, but not sexual.

Gordon Parks -- born with a natural talent for composition and photography with little to no education turned his lens to expose inequality in FDR's own Farm Security Administration - an agency created with tax payers' dollars to combat the Great Depression. Before the New Deal American's didn't pay personal income tax. Park's documented the struggle of a young black mother working for the American government on the cusp of the civil rights movement. Parks poses his subject, Ella Watson, holding a mop and broom, standing stoically in front of the American flag. The pose as well as the title of the image playing directly off of Grant Wood's masterpiece of farmer and wife "American Gothic."

Dorothea Lange - a portrait artist, a woman, a "cripple". Hired to document migrant farm workers lost and wandering west to stay alive in the greatest nation on earth. Lange documented a mother with three small children living on the side of the road with no amenities - no food, no water, or no shelter. Lange created several images of the children playing around camp that afternoon, but it is the shot of the youngest child at her mother's breast and two older children hiding their faces in shame on her shoulders that became the iconic image symbolizing the Great Depression.

The OTHER both in subject and photographer... that is what draws me to the movement of Social Documentary photography. The outsider...for the first time in photographic history it was not merely the privileged photographer making important images. Women and minorities' photographic work dominated the early Social Documentary movement highlighting what people couldn't see without their help... those that needed help.