Consider early documentary photography in Britain and the United States in relation to the uses to
Photographs are often seen as a mechanical reproduction of reality, they are regarded as a form of documentary of past events showing how the world was. Essentially photography is a source of information, a very important one to historians and scholars studying mankind’s past. Susan Sontag summed up the faith people have in photography in her book, On Photography, she says, “Photographic images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it.” This essay will deal with this belief and the effects documentary photography in particular has had on our world. Photography was often treated during it’s early golden age of invention, possibly in a naďve way, as the truth, as is it is the product of a machine, but in reality it’s more complicated than that. ... Documentary photography is mainly used to show the public what is wrong in the world. ... At the other end of the scale are the subjects documentary photography deals with, suffering, misfortune, war, crime, poverty, generally controversial subjects that shock the viewer. Documentary photography has been described as ‘the camera with a conscience’ as it seeks out issues that need to be dealt with. ... " Across the ocean in Britain poverty was becoming a very big concern. In the 1860’s major cities all across Britain had become clearly divided by class. ... Reformists started to investigate the problems in the cities and documentary photography became a very important medium to do this. ... Mayhew realised the benefits of photography and hired Richard Baird to take photographs for him which he had made into engravings so he could include them in his reports. ... Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant working in America, was probably the first ‘photo-journalist’ in America and along with Lewis Hine, an American, helped to establish documentary photography as a tool for social reform in America in the late 19th century. ... He was the first documentary photographer to explore the use of a ‘photo-story’ which combined image and text. ... Riis and Hine together set good examples of what documentary photographers should be doing. ... This made it a lot easier for documentary photographers with a purpose to reach a much wider audience and their photographs to have a much greater effect. Regarded as the most famous of America’s documentary projects was the Farm Security Administration Photographic Project (FSA). ... This project, as photography historian Alan Trachtenberg has noted, “was perhaps the greatest collective effort . ... in the history of photography to mobilize resources to create a cumulative picture of a place and time.” Without the work of the FSA the New Deal possibly wouldn’t have received the support of the nation it needed to make a change In today’s world of photography it is often difficult to determine what in a photo is real and what isn’t, with the advances in photographic manipulation technology almost anything can be achieved.