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History of Photography
Introduction
History of Photography
A World History of Photography
The Story Behind the Pictures 1827-1991
Photographers' Dictionary


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Chapter 8
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WILLIAM CARRICK
EUGENIO MAUNOURY
MARIE LYDIE CABANNIS BONFILS
BENITO PANUNZI
WILLOUGHBY WALLACE HOOPER
CHARLES L'HERMITTE
JAMES JOSEPH FORRESTER
RAJA LALA DEEN DAYAL
HORACE W. NICHOLLS
TIMOTHY O'SULLIVAN
(collection)
GEORGE BRETZ
GUSTAV MARRISSIAUX
CHARLES
NEGRE
(collection)
JOHN THOMSON
THOMAS ANNAN
WALDEMAR FRANZ HERMAN TITZENTHALER
JACOB RIIS
(collection)
KENYON COX
FRANCES BENJAMIN JOHNSTON
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DOCUMENTATION:
THE SOCIAL SCENE
to 1946
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The true use
for the imaginative faculty of modern times is to give ultimate
vivification to facts, to science and to common lives.
Walt Whitman,
1860
Documentary:
That's a sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear.
. . . The term should be documentary style. . . . You see, a
document has use, whereas art is really useless.
Walker Evans,
1971
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AS AN INEXPENSIVE AND REPLICATIBLE
MEANS of presenting (supposedly) truthful verifications of visual fact,
camera images were bound to become important adjuncts of the campaigns
waged by reformers in industrialized nations during the 19th century to
improve inequitable social conditions. Nevertheless, while photography's
potential for this purpose was recognized soon after the medium's
inception, a characteristic form for social documentation did not emerge
until the end of the century. Then, shaped by both the emergence of
organized social reform movements and the invention of an inexpensive
means of mechanically reproducing the photograph's halftones, social
photography began to flower in the aspect that we know today.
A tandem phrase, social
documentary, is sometimes used to describe works in which social themes
and social goals are paramount, because the word documentary could refer
to any photograph whose primary purpose is the truthful depiction of
reality. Indeed before 1880, nearly all un posed and unmanipulated images
were considered documentation; since then, millions of such records of
people, places, and events have been made. The word social also presents
problems when used to describe the intent of a photograph because many
camera images have as their subject some aspect of social behavior. For
instance, commercial cartes (pi. no. 409), snapshots, postcards, artistic
and photojournalistic images often depict social situations; that is. they
deal with people, their relationships to one another and the way they live
and work even though the motives of their makers have nothing to do with
social commitment or programs. This said, however, it also must be
emphasized that one cannot be too categorical about such distinctions,
since all photographs defy attempts to define their essential nature too
narrowly, and in the case of works that have social change as their prime
goal the passage of time has been especially effectual in altering
purpose, meaning, and resonance.
Documentary, as Evans observed,
refers also to a particular style or approach. Although it began to emerge
in the tate 19th century, the documentary mode was not clearly defined as
such until the 1930s, when American photography historian Beaumont Newhall
noted that while the social documentary photographer is neither a mere
recorder nor an "artist for arts sake, his reports are often brilliant
technically and highly artistic"—that is, documentary images involve
imagination and art in that they imbue fact with feeling. With their focus
mainly on people and social conditions, images in the documentary style
combine lucid pictorial organization with an often passionate commitment
to humanistic values—to ideals of dignity, the right to decent conditions
of living and work, to truthfulness. Lewis Hine, one of the early
partisans of social documentation (see Profile), explained its goals when
he declared that light was required to illuminate the dark areas of social
existence, but where to shine the light and how to frame the subject in
the camera are the creative decisions that have become the measure of the
effective-ness of this style to both inform and move the viewer.
A crucial aspect of social
documentation involves the context in which the work is seen. Almost from
the start, photographs meant as part of campaigns to improve social
conditions were presented as groups of images rather than individually.
Although they were included at times in displays at international
expositions held in Europe and the United States in the late-19th and
early-20th centuries, such works were not ordinarily shown in the salons
and exhibitions devoted either to artistic images or snapshots. They were
not sold individually in the manner of genre, landscape, and architectural
scenes. Instead, socially purposive images reached viewers as lantern
slides or as illustrations in pamphlets and periodicals, usually
accompanied by explanatory lectures and texts. Indeed, the development of
social documentary photography is so closely tied to advances in printing
technology and the growth of the popular press that the flowering of the
movement would be unthinkable without the capability of the halftone
process printing plate to transmute silver image into inked print (see A
Short Technical History, Part II). In this regard, social documentation
has much in common with photo-reportage or photojournalism, but while this
kind of camra documentation often involved social themes, the images
usually were not aimed at social change.
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409. CRUCES AND CO. Fruit Vendors, 1870s.
Albumen print. Bancroft
Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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Early Social Documentation
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Few images of a socially
provocative nature were made in the period directly following the 1839
announcements of the twin births of photography. The small size,
reflective surfaces, and uniqueness of the daguerreotype did not suit it
for this role despite attempts by some to document such events as the
workers' rallies sponsored by the Chartist Movement in England in 1848
(pi. no. 331). The slow exposure time and broad definition of the calotype
also made it an inefficient tool for social documentation. Of greater
importance, however, is the fact that the need for accurate visual
documentation in support of programs for social change was a matter of
ideology rather than just technology; it was not until reformers grasped
the connections between poverty, living conditions, and the social
behavior of the work force (and its economic consequences) that the
photograph was called upon to act as a "witness" and sway public opinion.
Nevertheless, although social
betterment was not initially involved, images of working people were made
soon after portraiture became possible. Usually commissioned by the
sitters themselves, some images straddle the line between individual
portrait and genre scene, as in a daguerreotype by an unknown American
depicting blacksmiths at work (pi. no. 330). Its particularity of
detail—it includes surroundings, tools, work garments, and individual
facial characteristics—coupled with the revelation of a sense of the
upright dignity of the two men pictured, reflects attitudes toward rural
and artisan labor similar to those embodied in the work of the American
genre painters such as William Sidney Mount.
Calotypists who favored the
picturesque genre tradition generally regarded working people as types
rather than individuals, and portrayed them in tableauxlike scenes such as
one of hunters by the French photographer Louis Adolphe Humbert de Molard
(pi. no. 257). Others found more natural poses and more evocative lighting
in order to place greater emphasis on individual expression and stance
rather than on tools and emblems of a particular occupation or station in
life. This approach, visible in images of farm laborers made by William
Henry Fox Talbot on his estate at Lacock and of fisherfolk in Newhaven by
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, may be seen as indications of the
growing interest among artists and intellectuals not only in the theme of
work but in working people as individuals.
A consciously conceived effort
involving the depiction of working people was undertaken in 1845 by Hill
and Adamson. Probably the first photographic project to embrace a socially
beneficial purpose, it apparently was suggested that calotypes might serve
as a means of raising funds to provide properly decked boats and better
fishing tackle that would improve the safety of the fishermen of the
village of Ncwhaven, Scotland. Intending to present their subject in as
favorable light as possible for cosmopolitan viewers. Hill and Adamson
made beautifully composed and lighted calotypcs of individuals (pi. no.
51) and groups that may be seen as especially picturesque forerunners of
the documentary style.
After the invention of the
collodion negative, which made possible the inexpensive Ambrotype, and the
still cheaper and easily replicated albumen print on paper, working people
began to be photographed more frequently, appearing on cartes-de-visite
and other formats. With the subjects posed in studios in front of plain
backdrops, often with the tools of their trade, these works, meant either
as mementos for the sitter or souvenir images for travelers, ordinarily
pay little attention to actual conditions of work or to the expressive use
of light and form to reveal character. The incongruity between studio
decor and occupation, for example, is obvious in an 1867 English carte of
a female mine worker (pi. no. 410) who, appropriately clothed for work in
clogs, trousers, and headscarf, stands squarely before a classy paneled
wall with a studio prop of a shovel by her side. One exception to the
generally undistinguished character of such cartes is the work of Danish
photographer Heinrich Tonnies, who maintained a studio in the provincial
town of Aalborg between 1856 and 1903. In common with many such
portraitists, Tonnies photographed all classes of people—carpenters,
housemaids, chimney sweeps, waiters—as well as the town's more pros-perous
folk, but despite the anomaly of the decorated studio carpet and
occasional painted backdrop, his images reveal a feeling for character
that endows these working-class sitters with unusual individual presence
(pi. no. 69).
Similar images of working people
in cultures outside of western Europe and the United States served mainly
as souvenirs. To cite but two examples, William Carrick, a Scottish
photographer who opened a studio in St. Peters-burg, Russia, in 1859, and
Eugenio Maunoury, a French national working in Peru at about the same
time, each produced cartes of peddlers, street traders, and peasants. The
distinctive quality of Carrick's Russian Types (pi. nos. 411 and 412), a
series of over 40 images made in Simbirsk that fall partway between
portraiture and picturesque genre, probably is owed to the photographer's
expressed sympathy for humble clients to whom he devoted special
attention.6 Maunoury, said to have been associated with Nadar's studio in
Paris before appearing in Lima in 1861, may have been the first to
introduce the genre carte to this part of South America, but his static
studio scenes depict working-class types as glum and inert (pi. no. 413).
Commercial photographers working
in the Near and Far East in the latter part of the 19th century produced
larger-format views in which working people, social life, native customs,
and seemingly exotic dress were featured. Felix Bonfils, whose scenic
views of the Near East were mentioned earlier, was a prolific producer of
such socially informative views, many of which show the women of the
Ottoman Empire in characteristic dress and activity but with
uncharacteristic ease of pose and expression (pi. no. 414). This
naturalness, and the fact that in a number of instances native women posed
without veils, is attributable to the pictures being taken not by Bonfils
himself but by his wife, Marie Lydie Cabannis Bonfils, who worked in the
family studios in Beirut, Baalbeck, and Jerusalem between 1867 and 1916.
In South America, a similar engagement with the life of the lower classes
can be seen in the images of field peasants by Argentinian photographer
Benito Panunzi (pi. no. 415).
Unquestionably, the most graceful
studio portrayals of artisans, laborers, and geisha are the large-format
albumen prints turned out in the Japanese commercial establish-ments of
Felice Beato, Reteniz von Stillfried, and Kusakabe Kimbei. The subtle
handling of light and the artful arrangements of props and figures create
a rare tension between information—what work is done, what garments are
worn—and idealization. Enhanced further at times by delicate hand-coloring
or by vignetting (pi. no. 333), these highly decorative images may be seen
as camera equiva-lents of the Ukivo-e woodblock prints that also often
featured depictions of working people.
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410. T. G. DUGDALE. Pit Brow Girl, Shevington, 1867.
Albumen carte-de-visite.
A. J. Munby Collection, Trinity College Library, Cambridge, England.
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411. WILLIAM CARRICK. Russian Types (Milkgirl), c. 1859.
Albumen
carte-de-insite.
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412. WILLIAM CARRICK. Russian Types (Balalaika Player), c. 1859.
Albumen carte-de-visite.
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413. EUGENIO MAUNOURY. Three Portraits, c. 1863.
Albumen cartes-de-visite. Collection H. L. Hoffenberg, New York.
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414. MARIE LYDIE CABANNIS BONFILS. Group of Syrian Bedouin Women, c.
1870.
Albumen print. Semitic Museum, Harvard University. Cambridge, Mass.
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415. BENITO PANUNZI. Settlers in the Countryside, c. 1905.
Albumen
print. Collection H. L. Hoftenberg, New York.
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Social life and ways of work
engrossed amateur as well as commercial photographers working or traveling
in these parts of the world. During 1857, compositions by British amateur
William Johnson appeared each month in the periodical Indian Amateurs
Photographic Album under the title "Costumes and Characters of Western
India" (pi no. 191). Photographs of lower-caste Hindus taken by British
Army Captain Willoughby Wallace Hooper arc further indications of the
growing interest among Westerners in the social problems of the lower
classes around the world (pi. no. 416). Perhaps the most completely
realized result of a kind of curiosity about the way people live is a
four-volume work entitled Illustrations of China and Its People, published
by photographer John Thomson in England in 1873/74. With a lively text and
200 photographs taken during the photographer's four-year stay in China,
the work attempted to make an arcane and exotic way of life understandable
and acceptable to the British public by showing industrious and
well-disposed natives (pi. no. 192) interspersed with unusual
architectural and natural monuments (pi. no. 138). In so doing, Thomson
helped create a style and format for documentation that carried over to
projects concerned with social inequities.
A somewhat different view of the
non-Westerner emerged in the photographs of Native American tribesmen by
cameramen attached to the geographical and geological surveys of the
American West. Early images by the Canadian Humphrey Lloyd Hime, and later
works by the Americans Jack Hiliers, William Henry Jackson, and Timothy
O'Sullivan, for example, depict "native races" with a sober directness
unleavened by the least sense of the picturesque. Hillers's views of the
Southern Paiute and Ute tribes, made on the Powell Expedition of 1872,
were especially influential in establishing a style of ethnic and social
documentation that had as its goal the presentation of information in a
clear fashion without either idealization or undue artistry. This approach
was taken over by the Bureau of American Ethnology after 1879, and it
became a cornerstone of the social documentary style that began to emerge
in the late 19th century. This style also informed such sociologically
oriented documents as Report on the Men of Marwar State, mentioned in
Chapter 2 (pi. no. 417). Although the works discussed so far were
sometimes published in books and albums, or were sold commercially, their
impact on Western viewers is difficult to gauge. On the other hand, there
is no question about the impact of the hundreds of thousands of
stereograph views of similar social material published by commercial
stereograph firms. From i860 on, as capitalist nations opened up large
areas of Africa, Asia, and South America for trade, exploitation, and
colonization, companies such as Negretti and Zambra, the London
Stereoscopic Company, and Under-wood and Underwood sent photographers—some
known. some still anonymous-—to record people at work and their housing,
dress, and social customs. These three-dimensional views, accepted by the
public as truth that "cannot deceive or extenuate," were in fact taken
from the point of view of die industrialized Westerner; but while the
scenes frequently were chosen to emphasize the cultural gap between the
civilized European or American and the backward non-white, it is possible
that glimpses of social life, such as two stereographic views of
conditions in Cuba at the turn of the century (pi. nos. 418 and 419),
inadvertently awakened viewers to inequities in colonized areas. Toward
the close of the 19th century, interest in social customs led some
photographers to capture on glass plate and film indigenous peoples and
folk customs that were in danger of extinction. In Europe, this role was
assumed in the 1880s by Sir Benjamin Stone, a comfortably situated English
manufacturer who hoped that a "record of ancient customs, which still
linger in remote villages," would provide future generations with an
understanding of British cultural and social history. Somewhat later, Jose
Ortiz Echagiie, a well-to-do Spanish industrialist, and Charles L'Hermitte,
the son of a renowned French Salon painter, undertook similar projects,
seeking out customs, costumes, and folkways in provincial byways that they
believed would soon vanish with the spread of urbanization. Exemplified by
L'Hermitte's photograph of lace-makers in Brittany made in 1912 (pi. no.
420), such images tend toward nostalgia in that they romanticize handwork
and folk mannerisms while seldom suggesting the difficulties and boredom
of provincial life.
Similar attempts to use the camera
both to arrest time and to make a comparative statement about past and
present can also be seen in the work of several photographers in the
United States who turned their attention to native tribal life just before
the turn of the century. In contrast to the earlier unnuanced records by
Hillers and others of Indian dress and living arrangements, these
projects— undertaken between 1895 and about 1910 by Edward S. Curtis, Karl
E. Moon, Robert and Frances Flaherty, and Adam Clark Vroman—were designed
to play up the pos-itive aspects of tribal life, in particular the sense
of community and the oneness of the individual Native American with
nature. This attitude is especially visible in the 20-volume survey
published by Curtis, which owing to its strongly Pictorialist
interpretation was discussed in Chapter 7. The handsome portraits and
artfully arranged group scenes made by Moon in the Southwest, and the
close-ups of cheerful and determined Inuit tribespeople of the far north
(pi. no. 197) photographed by Robert Flaherty, embody a similar desire to
make their subjects palatable to white Americans with strong ethnocentric
biases. As pioneers in documentary film in the United States in thee early
1920s, the Flahertys became known for their ability to give dramatic form
to mundane events, and among the 1,500 or so still photographs that Robert
made of the Inuit are works that seem arranged and posed to accord with a
concept of these subjects as heroic and energetic.
A project of more limited
proportions than the one envisioned by Curtis occupied Adam Clark Vroman,
a successful California book merchant who also saw in photography a means
to emphasize the virtues of American tribal life. His images, of which
Hopi Maiden is an example (pi. no. 195), were carefully framed to suggest
the grace, dignity, and industriousness of the natives of the American
Southwest, but Vroman did not entirely romanticize his theme or obscure
the hardships shaping Indian society in his time. In true documentary
fashion, he used the photographs in slide lectures and publications in
order to awaken white Americans to the plight of the Native American.
The interest in making images of a
social nature relates to the collections of photographs of people at work,
at home, and at play that were initiated toward the end of the century by
individuals who believed such reservoirs of images would facilitate the
study of history. Benjamin Stone, for example, not only photographed
vanishdanger of extinction. In Europe, this role was assumed in the 1880s
by Sir Benjamin Stone, a comfortably situated English manufacturer who
hoped that a "record of ancient customs, which still linger in remote
villages,'" would provide future generations with an understanding of
British cultural and social history. Somewhat later, Jose Ortiz Echague, a
well-to-do Spanish industrialist, and Charles L'Hermitte, the son of a
renowned French Salon painter, undertook similar projects, seeking out
customs, costumes, and folkways in provincial byways that they believed
would soon vanish with the spread of urbanization. Exemplified by
L'Hermitte's photograph of lace-makers in Brittany made in 1912 (pi. no.
420), such images tend toward nostalgia in that they romanticize handwork
and folk mannerisms while seldom suggesting the difficulties and boredom
of provincial life.
Similar attempts to use the camera
both to arrest time and to make a comparative statement about past and
present can also be seen in the work of several photographers in the
United States who turned their attention to native tribal life just before
the turn of the century. In contrast to the earlier unnuanced records by
Hillers and otuers of Indian dress and living arrangements, these
projects— undertaken between 1895 and about 1910 by Edward S. Curtis, Karl
E. Moon, Robert and Frances Flaherty, and Adam Clark Vroman—were designed
to play up the positive aspects of tribal life, in particular the sense
of community and the oneness of the individual Native American with
nature. This attitude is especially visible in the 20-volume survey
published by Curtis, which owing to its strongly Pictorialist
interpretation was discussed in Chapter 7. The handsome portraits and
artfully arranged group scenes made by Moon in the Southwest, and the
close-ups of cheerful and determined Inuit tribespeople of the far north
(pi. no. 197) photographed by Robert Flaherty, embody a similar desire to
make their subjects palatable to white Americans with strong ethnocentric
biases. As pioneers in documentary film in die United States in the early
1920s, die Flahertys became known for their ability to give dramatic form
to mundane events, and among the 1,500 or so still photographs that Robert
made of the limit are works chat seem arranged and posed to accord with a
concept of these subjects as heroic and energetic.
A project of more limited
propordons than die one envisioned by Curtis occupied Adam Clark Vroman, a
successful California book merchant who also saw in photography a means to
emphasize the virtues of American tribal life. His images, of wluch Hopi
Maiden is an example (pi. no. 195), were carefully framed to suggest the
grace, dignity, and industriousness of the natives of the American
Southwest, but Vroman did not entirely romanticize his theme or obscure
the hardships shaping Indian society in his time. In true documentary
fashion, he used the photographs in slide lectures and publications in
order to awaken white Americans to the plight of the Native American.
The interest in making images of a
social nature relates to the collections of photographs of people at work,
at home, and at play that were initiated toward the end of the century by
individuals who believed such reservoirs of images would facilitate the
study of history. Benjamin Stone, for example, not only photographed
vanishcustoms but, an inveterate traveler, he collected camera images of
social experiences around the world, typified by a photograph of blind
beggars in St. Petersburg by an unknown photographer (pi, no. 421). He
advocated the establishment of photographic surveys to be housed in local
museums and libraries throughout Britain, a concept that actually was
realized around the turn of the century with the establishment by Francis
Greenwood Peabody, professor of social ethics at Harvard University, of a
"Social Museum" that eventually comprised over documents, including
photographs, of social experience around the world.
It should be emphasized again that
it is difficult to categorize many images that at first glance seem
concerned with social themes such as work and living conditions, in that
the goals of the makers were varied and complex. For example, should one
regard views of workers on Talbot's estate at Lacock or of peasants in
Portuguese vineyards owned by the family of photographer James Joseph
Forrester (pi. no. 422) as more than a new type of picturesque genre
imagery because they show us tools, dress, and relationships? Children on
a Fish Weir (pi. no. 274) by the Venetian photographer-publisher Carlo
Naya transforms the reality of working youngsters into an idyllic episode;
should such commercial views be considered social documentation also? Can
one really decide whether Curtis's views of tribal life in the United
States are authentic documents or Pictorialist fictions?
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416. WILLOUGHBY WALLACE HOOPER. The Last of the Herd, Madras Famine,
1876-78.
Albumen print. Royal Geographic Society, London.
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417. UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER. I of 1565 Aabirs;
He Sells Cow Dung (from
Report on the Men of Marwar State, c. 1891.
Albumen print. American
Institute of Indian Studies, Chicago.
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418. UNDERWOOD and UNDERWOOD (Publishers). Wretched Poverty of a Cuban
Peasant Home,
Province of Santiago, 1899.
One-half of an albumen
stereograph. Keystone-Mast Collection,
California Museum of Photography,
University of California. Riverside.
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419. UNDERWOOD and UNDERWOOD (Publishers). The Courtyard of a Typical
Cuban Home, Remedios, 1899.
One-half of an albumen stereograph.
Keystone-Mast Collection,
California Museum of Photography, University of
California. Riverside.
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420. CHARLES L'HERMITTE. On the Coast of Plomarc'h, Douarnenez, 1912.
Gelatin silver print. Explorer, Paris.
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421. UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER. Blind Russian Beggars, 1870.
Albumen print
Stone Collection, Birmingham Central Library. Birmingham, England.
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422. JAMES JOSEPH FORRESTER. Peasants of the Alto Doura, 1856.
From The
Photographic Album, 1857. Albumen print.
Gernsheim Collection, Humanities
Research Center, University of Texas, Austin.
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Perhaps all of these images, no
matter what their purpose, might be seen as aspects of the growing
interest in problems of work and social existence on the part of Western
artists and intellectuals. From the 1850s on, alongside the serious but
idealized treatment of the European peasantry by Barbizon painters,
realistic portrayals of less bucolic kinds of work associated with
advancing industrialization had begun to appear in graphic art and
literature. Exemplified by The Stonebveakers (pi. no. 423) of 1851/52 by
French realist Gustave Courbet and by Work (pi. no. 424), a grandiose
composition begun in 1852 by the English Pre-Raphaelite Ford Maddox Brown,
such themes signaled the mounting concern among elements of thie middle
class for the social and ethical consequences of rampant
industrialization—a concern that helped prepare for the role of the
documentary photograph in campaigns for social change. Obviously, the
complexity of ideas explored in the painting Work, which deals with the
roles and kinds of labor necessary to the functioning of industrialized
society, is difficult if not impossible to encompass in photography.
Nevertheless, an effort was made by Oscar Gustav Rejlander. His composite
picture Two Ways of Life (pi. no. 253— discussed in Chapter 5) can be seen
as an attempt to deal with the moral and ethical implications of labor in
a society in which the working class faces a choice between virtuous hard
work or sinful ease. While Rejlander's image is derivative in style and
moralistic in concept, other of his photographs embody less complex social
themes and are more successful. For instance, the anxiety of unemployment
is imaginatively handled in the composite image Hard Times (pi. no. 266)
while portraits of chimney sweeps reveal an individualized grace that docs
not depend on social class.
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423. GUSTAVE COURBET. The
Stonebreakers, 1852
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424. FORD MADDOX BROWN.
Work, 1852.
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The Social Uses of Photographic Documentation
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The concept of using camera
documentation to improve social conditions could not evolve so long as
poverty was regarded as a punishment for sinful behavior. Nevertheless,
even before such Calvinistic attitudes were replaced by an understanding
that improved housing and working conditions might produce better behavior
and a more efficient labor force, the photograph began to find a place in
campaigns for social betterment. Carte portraits were turned into a
quasi-sociological tool by Dr. Thomas John Barnardo, a self-appointed
evangelical missionary who opened his first home for destitute boys in
London in 1871 and went on to organize a network of so-called charitable
institutions. To illustrate the effectiveness of his programs, Barnardo
installed a photographic department to document the "before" and "after"
transformations of street waifs into obedient slaveys (pi. nos. 425 and
426); the prints were kept as records and sold to raise funds.
Such works have litde value as
expression, but they raised issues that have continued to be perceived as
significant problems in social documentation. Because the transformations
seen in the photographs were at best little more than cosmetic, the result
of a wash and a new ward-robe, and at worst entirely fictitious, Barnardo
was accused of falsifying truth for the camera; he responded that he was
seeking generic rather than individual truths about poverty. This attitude
was considered flawed by subsequent social documentary photographers, who
endeavored to make absolutely authentic records while also expressing what
they saw as the larger truth of a situation. Nevertheless, the "before"
and "after" image became a staple of social documentation, appearing in
American tracts of the 1890s and on the other side of the world in the
photographs made by the firm of Raja Lala Deen Dayal, for the nizam of
Hyderabad to show the efficacy of relief programs for die starving (pi.
nos. 427 and 428).
As photographs came to be accepted
as evidence in campaigns to improve social conditions, it became apparent
that in themselves images could not necessarily be counted on to convey
specific meanings—that how they were perceived often depended on the
outlook and social bias of the viewer. The carte images of women
mineworkers mentioned earlier are a case in point; introduced before a
British industrial commission, as evidence that women were deprived of
their feminine charms because mine work forced them to wear trousers, the
same images suggested to others that hard work induced independence and
good health in women. Naturally, not all photographic images can be as
broadly construed as these bland cartes obviously were, but one of the
basic tenets of the developing documentary style was that images should
not only provide visual facts, they should be as unambiguous as possible
in tone. For instance, in an interesting contrast to the cartes under
discussion, an image of a young woman delivering coal (pi. no. 429), taken
some 50 years later by Horace Nicholls as part of a project to investigate
the role of women doing "men's work" during World War I, leaves little
question as to the subject's feelings.
As a social theme, mining became a
subject of special appeal to artists, writers, and photographers in the
late-19th and early-20th centuries owing to its difficulties and dangers
and to the perception of the mineworker as one who mixed individualism and
fearlessness. One of the earliest American mine images, an 1850
daguerreotype of California goldminers (pi. no. 431), presents this
occupation as an open-air enterprise that seems not to entail hours of
back-breaking "panning." The first underground mining pictures were made
in England in 1864; some three years later, while on the Clarence King
expedition, Timothy O'Sullivan documented silver miners at work in images
that suggest the constriction of space and the physical difficulty of the
work (pi. no. 430). In the final several decades of the 19th century,
mining companies themselves commissioned photographs of their operations
and often displayed them at international expositions. Between 1884 and
1895, George Bretz, who pioneered subterranean photography with electric
light in the United States, focused almost exclusively on mining in
Pennsylvania hard-coal collieries. Breaker Boys, Eagle Hill Colliery (pi.
no. 432) was one of a number of works acclaimed for unusual subject,
technical expertise, and directness of treatment. Not long afterward,
Gustav Marrissiaux, a Belgian photographer commissioned by mining
interests in Liege, depicted (among other operations) young boys similarly
occupied in separating coal from slag (pi. no. 433). Perhaps the most
compelling images of this subject are those taken by Lewis Hine around
1910 as part of the campaign against the unconstrained use of children in
heavy industry being waged by the National Child Labor Committee (pi. no.
474).
The directness of style associated
with social documentation emerged around 1850, the consequence of expanded
camera documentations on paper and glass of historic and modern
structures—buildings, railroads, bridges, and, on occasion, social
facilities (see Chapter 4). Commissioned mainly by government bodies,
railroad lines, and publishers, the photographers involved with this work
demonstrated an earnest respect for actuality and an attentive regard for
the expressive properties of light. While they did not seek to obscure or
mystify their subjects, they realized that the judicious management of
light added an aesthetic dimension to the description of objects and
events. One such documentation eloquently confirms that while actuality
may be depicted without artifice, it can be made suggestive; The Linen
Room (pi. no. 436) by Charles Negre avoids the picturcsqucness this
photographer brought to his images of street types and draws one into the
scene by an alternating cadence of dark and light notes that seem to imbue
the scene with a mysterious silence. The series of which this is part was
commissioned in 1859 by Napoleon III to demonstrate the government's
benevolent concern for industrial workers injured on the job.
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425-26. UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER. Before and After Photographs of a Young
Boy, c. 1875.
Albumen prints. Barnardo Photographic Archive, Ilford,
England.
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427-28. RAJA LALA DEEN DAYAL. Before and After (from Types of
Emaciation, Aurangabad), 1899-1900.
Gelatin silver prints. Private
collection.
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429. HORACE W. NICHOLLS. Delivering Coal, c. 1916.
Gelatin silver
print. Royal Photographic Society, Bath, England.
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430. TIMOTHY O'SULLIVAN. Miner at Work, Comstock Lode, 1867.
Albumen
print. National Archives, Washington, D.C.
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TIMOTHY O'SULLIVAN
(see collection)
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431. UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER. Goldminers, California, 1850.
Daguerreotype.
International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester,
N.Y.
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432. GEORGE BRETZ. Breaker Bays, Eagle Hill Colliery, c. 1884.
Gelatin
silver print. Edward L. Baftord Photography Collection, Albin O. Kuhn
Library and Gallery, University of Man-land, Baltimore.
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433. GUSTAV MARRISSIAUX. Breaker Boys, 1904.
Gelatin silver print. Musee de la Vie Wallone, Liege, Belgium.
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436. CHARLES NEGRE. Vincennes Imperial Asylum: The Linen Room, 1859.
Albumen print. Collection Andre Jammes, Paris; Courtesy National Gallery
of Canada, Ottawa.
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CHARLES NEGRE
(see collection)
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Social Photography in Publication
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434. W. ROBERTS. Street-Seller of Birds' Nests, c. 1850.
Wood engraving
after a daguerreotype by Richard Beard or assistant;
an illustration from
London Labour and London Poor by Henry Mayhew.
New York Public Library,
Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
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Despite the realization that
photographs might be useful in campaigns for social improvement, it took a
while for the medium of photography and the message of social activism to
be effectively harnessed together. One early sociological venture
involving camera images was Henry Mayhew's pioneering work, London Labour
and London Poor, which first appeared toward the end of 1850. Combining
illustrations based on daguerreotypes taken under the supervision of
Richard Beard with "unvarnished" language in the text portions, the author
sought to enliven his account of lower-class urban life, but in the
translation from camera image to wood engraving the London "poor" became
little more than stiffly positioned genre types (pi. no. 434).
Furthermore, with the backgrounds only sketchily indicated, the figures of
street vendors and workers seem extracted from their environment, a visual
anomaly in view of Mayhew's desire to bring the reality of working-class
existence home to his readers. Curiously, the same lack of veracity
characterizes his later work on English prison conditions even though by
this time the engraver had access to albumen prints from collodion
negatives supplied by the photographer Herbert Watkins. Even so, the
format that was established—authentic language supposedly from firsthand
interviews and accurate visual illustration from photographs—became the
bedrock of sociological documentation—one that is still used today.
A later work, Street Life in
London, a serial that began publication in 1877, repeated this scheme, but
instead of line engravings it was illustrated with Woodburytypes made from
photographs taken expressly for this project by Thomson, after his return
from China. The 36 images that illustrate written vignettes supplied by
author Adolphe Smith seemed to accord with the canons of the documentary
style even though the text was a mixture of sensationalist reporting and
moralistic opinions. The work was not a condemnation of the class system
or of poverty' as such, but an attempt to make the middle class more
sympathetic to the plight of the poor and thus more eager to ameliorate
conditions. In keeping with the tone of the writing, Thomson photographed
vendors and other working-class Londoners in an agreeable light, on the
whole choosing pleasant-looking individuals and consciously arranging them
in tableaux like genre scenes. Nevertheless, at least one image—The
Crawlers (pi. no. 435) —must have left readers with a disturbing feeling
in that it depicts with considerable force and no self-consciousness an
enfeebled woman seated in a scabrous doorway holding an infant. While
Street Life may seem ambiguous in terms of purpose, one of its goals that
met with eventual success was the building of an embankment to prevent the
Thames River from periodically flooding the homes of the London poor. A
project that originated in the desire to make a record of slum buildings
slated for demolition in central Glasgow also helped establish the
documentary style even though its purpose was nostalgic rather than
reformist.
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In 1868 and again in 1877, during
a period of unsettling urban growth, the Glasgow Improvement Trust
commissioned Thomas Annan, a
Scottish photographer of architecture, portraits, and works of art to
"record many old and interesting landmarks." The results, originally
printed in albumen in 1868, were reissued with later images added as
carbon prints in 1878 and in two editions of gravure prints in 1900 with
the title Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow. Because this project was not
conceived in a reformist spirit, no statistical information about living
conditions or comments by the inhabitants—who appear only incidentally in
the images—were included. Nevertheless, Annan's images might be seen as
the earliest visual record of what has come to be called the inner city
slum—in this case one that excelled in "filth . . . drunkenness . . . evil
smell and all that makes city poverty disgusting." The vantage points
selected by the photographer and the use of light to reveal the slimy and
fetid dampness of the place transform scenes that might have been merely
picturesque into a document that suggests the reality of life in such an
environment (pi. no. 437).
Whatever the initial purpose of
the commission and despite their equivocal status as social documentation,
many of Annan's images are surprisingly close in viewpoint to those of
Jacob Riis, one of the first in America conceive of camera images as an
instrument for social change. Sensitivity to the manner in which light
gives form and dimension to inert objects also links Annan's work with
that of the French photographers Charles Marville and Eugene Atget and
supplies further evidence that the documentary style in itself is not
specific to images commissioned for activist programs. This becomes even
more apparent in the work of the photographer Waldemar Franz Herman
Titzenthaler, one of the first in his native Germany to understand that
the dry plate gave the urban photographer unprecedented access to the
social scene. Whether documenting urban slums, industrial enterprises,
workers (pi. no. 438), army cadets, or street life, Titzenthaler's images
all display the same careful attention to pictorial structure and the
disposition of light. Indeed, the stylistic similarities between such
images and those made to realize specific social goals suggests that in
addition to a particular approach on the part of the photographer, social
documentation requires text and context to make its message understood.
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435. JOHN THOMSON. The Crawlers from Street Life in London (an album of
36 original photographs), 1877.
Woodburytype. Museum of Modern Art, New
York; gift of Edward Steichen.
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437. THOMAS ANNAN. Close No. 75 High Street from Old Closes and Streets
of Glasgow, 1868.
Albumen print. Edward L. Bafford Photography Collection,
Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery,
University of Maryland, Baltimore.
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438. WALDEMAR FRANZ HERMAN TITZENTHALER. Boiler Maker (Types of German
Workers), c. 1900.
Gold-toned printing-out paper. Carpenter Center for the
Visual Arts. Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
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Social Documentation in the United States
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Riis was the link in the United
States between older Victorian concepts and emerging Reform attitudes
toward social problems. His subject was the tenement world— where the
poverty-stricken half of New York's population lived. In the late 1880s,
on the eve of the Reform era, mil-lions of immigrants from Europe, largely
from the eastern and southern sections, were induced by the promise of
jobs to come to the United States. Needed as cheap labor for seemingly
insatiable industrial appetites, those uprooted workers became the first
victims of the economic collapse that lasted from 1882 until 1887 (one of
the many in the post-Civil War era). Disgracefully ill-housed in tenements
or actually living in the streets of major American cities, with New York
by far the most overcrowded and disease-ridden, impoverished immigrants
were thought by most middle-class people to be responsible for their own
poverty. Before 1890, the problems of the urban poor were completely
ignored by public officials, while private charitable organizations
contented themselves with pro-viding soup kitchens and moral uplift.
As a police reporter for the New
York Herald, Riis, who was thrust squarely into a densely populated and
malignant slum called Mulberry Bend, started to use camera images, taken
by himself or under his supervision, to prove the truth of his words and
to make the relationship between poverty and social behavior clear to
influential people. The photographs were seen as a way to produce
incontrovertible evidence of the existence of vagrant children, squalid
housing, and the disgraceful lodgings provided by the police for the
homeless. As lantern slides for Riis's popular lectures and as
illustrations for articles and books, diese pictures were significant
elements of the successful campaigns to eliminate the most pestilential
shanties in Mulberry Bend and to close down the police lodging houses. The
first and most influential publication by Riis, How the Other Half Lives:
Studies Among the Tenements of New York, which appeared in book form in
1890, consisted of reportage based on his personal investigation and was
illustrated by 40 plates, 17 of which were direct halftone reproductions
of photographs. Despite the poor quality of these early halftones, images
such as Five Carts Lodging, Bayard Street (pi. no. 439) clearly are more
persuasive as photographs than as line drawings (pi. no. 440).
Neither their social intent nor
the fact that Riis thought himself an inept photographer, uninterested in
the techniques or aesthetics of printing, should blind one to the
discernment with which these images were made. Fully aware of the purpose
to be served, the photographer selected appropriate vantage points and
ways to frame the subject, at times transcending the limitation implied in
the title—that of an outsider looking at slum life from across the deep
chasm separating middle- from lower-class life. While he may not have
entered very deeply into the space occupied by the "other, his was not a
casual view. Com-pare for example, the Jersey Street sheds (pi. no. 441)
in which the figures are placed in a rigidly circumscribed patch of
sunlight, hemmed in by areas of brick and shadow and so disposed that the
eye must focus on them while also taking in the surrounding details, with
a contemporaneous image by an unknown photographer of a London slum
courtyard pi. no. 442). This scene, with its random arrangement of
figures, may actually seem more authentically real to modem viewers than
Riis's image, but the slice-of-life naturalism it represents did not
interest social documentarians. Because social images were meant to
persuade, photographers felt it necessary to communicate a belief that
slum dwellers were capable of human emotions and that they were being kept
from fully realizing their human qualities by their surroundings. As a
result, photographs used in campaigns for social reform not only provided
truthful evidence but embodied a commitment to humanistic ideals. By
selecting sympathetic types and contrasting the individual's expression
and gesture with the shabbiness of the physical surroundings, the
photographer frequently was able to transform a mundane record of what
exists into a fervent plea for what might be. This idealism became a basic
tenet of the social documentary concept.
Before 1890, tracts on social
problems in the United States had been largely religious in nature,
stressing "redemption of the erring and sinful." Such works usually were
illustrated with engravings that at times acknowledged a photographic
source and at others gave the artistic imagination free reign. After the
appearance of How The Other Half Lives, however, photographic "evidence"
be-came the rule for publications dealing with social problems even though
the texts might still consider poverty to be the result of moral
inadequacy rather than economic laws. In one example, Darkness and
Daylight, an 1897 compendium of interviews, sensationalist reporting, and
sermonizing, readers were assured that all the illustrations were "scenes
presented to the camera's merciless and unfailing eye," notwithstanding
the fact that they actually were engraved by artists using photographs.
As halftone printing techniques
advanced and reformist ideas took the place of religiously motivated
charity, social photography became the "embodiment of progressive values,"
largely through the work of Hine. His career spanned 40 years, during
which he enlarged on Riis's objectives and formulated new concepts and
techniques. Involvement in The Pittsburgh Survey, a pioneering study of
working and living conditions in the nation's foremost industrial city,
aided Hine in developing a forceful and distinctive personal style,
exemplified by the previously mentioned Breaker Boys (pi. no. 474). This
complex organization of informative detail and affecting expression bathed
in somber light creates a miniature netherworld of intersecting triangles,
a visual counterpart to Hine's characterization of child labor as
"deadening in its monotony, exhausting physically, irregular," and of
child workers as "condemned."
The confident atmosphere
engendered by the Progressive Era sustained other projects in which camera
images were used to document social conditions, but few photographers were
as committed to lobbying for social change as Riis and Hine. Many worked
for the expanding periodical press that by 1886 had increased its use of
photographs to the point where Frances Benjamin Johnston could describe
herself as "making a business of photographic illustration and the writing
of descriptive articles for magazines, illustrated weeklies and
newspapers" (at the time an unusual career for women). Her early
assignments are indicative of the growing popular interest in work and
workers; they include a story on coal mines, a spread on the employees in
the United States Mint, one on iron workers on the Mesabi Range and on
women in the mills of New England, besides news stories on the illustrious
doings of celebrities. Her most fully realized commissioned documentation
(as contrasted with her magazine stories) was undertaken in 1899 to
publicize the educational program offered by the Hampton Institute—a
school in Virginia that incorporated the Reform ideal of industrial
training in a program designed to eliminate poverty among rural blacks and
Indians. Johnston's highly styled arrangements, classical poses, and
overall clarity of illumination—seen in Students at Work on the Stairway
(pi. no. 443) and now so unexpected in documentary images-—seem designed
to suggest the temperate and disciplined approach that the school
emphasized. Others who supplied imagery on social themes to the press were
Arthur Hewitt, a member of the Camera Club of New York whose Pictorialist
style colored his photographs of bridge-builders and longshoremen for
Everybody's Magazine, and Jesse Tarbox Beals, whose prosaic record shots
of tenement life were commissioned by the charity organizations that
eventually merged into the Community Services Society.
After 1915, Reformist ideals and
programs withered as American energies were redirected to the crisis
occasioned by the first World War. With social issues receding in
importance, there was less demand for photographs that give dimension to
these concerns, and at the same time fresh aesthetic winds, generated by
the Armory Show of 1913, quickened interest in the European avant-garde
movements in the arts. Abstraction, Expressionism, and Dadaism were some
of the new styles and concepts that made Realism and the expression of
human emotion and sentiment in visual art seem old-fashioned and
contributed to a brief eclipse of the social documentary sensibility
during the 1920s.
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439. JACOB A. Riis. Five Cents Lodging, Bayard Street, c. 1889.
Gelatin
silver print. Jacob A. Riis Collection,
Museum of the City of New York.
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440. KENYON COX.
Lodgers in a Crowded Bayard Street Tenement, 1890.
Wood engraving from How the Other Half Lives.
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Jacob Riis
(see
collection)
(b Ribe, Denmark, 3 May 1849; d Barre, MA,
26 May 1914).
American photographer of Danish birth. The son
of a school-teacher and editor, he was well-educated when he
came to the USA in 1870. He was a self-taught photographer
and worked at a variety of jobs before becoming a
journalist, and he understood the power of the written and
illustrated word. Riis’s work in journalism began in 1873
when he was employed by the New York News Association. By
1874 he was editor and then owner of the South Brooklyn
News. In 1878 he won a coveted job as a police-reporter
at the Tribune and found the basis of his life’s work
in his assigned territory, Mulberry Bend, where the worst
slums and tenements were (e.g. Mulberry Bend as It Was).
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441. JACOB RIIS. Yard, Jersey Street Tenement, c. 1888.
Gelatin silver
print. Jacob A. Riis Collection, Museum of the City of New York.
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442. UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER. London Slum, c. 1889.
Gelatin silver print.
BBC HuJton Picture Library/Bettman Archive.
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443. FRANCES BENJAMIN JOHNSTON. Hampton Institute: Students at Work on
the Stairway, 1899-1900.
Gelatin silver print. Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.
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