Photography as document and evidence

From its first years, photography was praised as a perfect witness. Talbot titled his book of 1844 to 1846 The Pencil of Nature, suggesting that nature drew itself without human interference. Governments, scientists, explorers, armies and police quickly adopted the camera as a tool for recording, measuring and proving. Yet every documentary photograph involves choices about what to include, how to frame it, when to press the shutter and how to caption and circulate the result. This lesson examines photography's documentary uses in the nineteenth century, from expeditions and surveys to war and colonial photography, and the critical questions historians now ask about the archives those uses produced.

The idea of photographic truth

Early commentators believed photographs were objective because they were made by light and chemistry rather than by the hand. A painter might flatter or invent, but the camera, they argued, could not lie. Photographs were soon accepted as evidence in courts, used to record architecture and archaeological sites, and attached to scientific reports. The belief in photographic truth was powerful, and it shaped how photographs were used for more than a century.

Historians now see this belief as only partly justified. A photograph does record light reflected from real objects at a real moment, which gives it a special relationship to reality that later lessons will call indexical. But a photograph also depends on the photographer's choices, the limits of the process, the purpose of the commission and the words attached to it. The documentary photograph is best understood as a trace shaped by human decisions.

Exploration and survey photography

Nineteenth-century governments sponsored expeditions to map territory, assess resources, plan railways and assert control. Photographers joined these expeditions, carrying heavy cameras, glass plates and portable darkrooms through difficult terrain. Their photographs served as scientific records, as evidence for investors and politicians, and as images that shaped how people far away imagined distant lands.

In 1858 Humphrey Lloyd Hime accompanied the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Exploring Expedition, led by Henry Youle Hind, which assessed the prairie region for agriculture and settlement. Hime's photographs, published in London in 1860 as a portfolio, are among the earliest photographs made on the Canadian prairies. They include landscapes and portraits of Cree, Ojibwe and Métis people. Later, government geological surveys and railway companies employed photographers to document the West. The Canadian Pacific Railway commissioned photographs to attract settlers and tourists, presenting the Rockies as spectacular scenery while largely omitting the Indigenous nations whose lands the railway crossed.

Survey photographs combined scientific purpose and aesthetic ambition. Photographers chose dramatic viewpoints, waited for good light and printed carefully. Later critics have pointed out that many survey images present the land as empty and available, a vision that served settlement and resource extraction, and that they rarely show the Indigenous peoples who lived there or the effects of mining and railways.

War photography

Photography's limitations shaped early war photography. Long exposures made it impossible to record battles in action, so photographers recorded camps, fortifications, officers, landscapes and, later, the aftermath of combat.

In 1855 the British photographer Roger Fenton travelled to the Crimean War with a darkroom van. His photographs, partly intended to reassure the British public, showed orderly camps and posed officers rather than suffering soldiers. His image of a road strewn with cannonballs, The Valley of the Shadow of Death, exists in two versions, one with cannonballs on the road and one without. Historians have argued for years about whether he moved the cannonballs onto the road for effect, an early example of debates about staging.

The American Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, was the first conflict photographed extensively. Alexander Gardner, Timothy O'Sullivan and others photographed battlefields after fighting, including the dead at Antietam in 1862 and Gettysburg in 1863. When images of the Antietam dead were exhibited in New York, a newspaper wrote that they brought the terrible reality of war to the public's doorstep. Later research showed that at Gettysburg Gardner's team moved at least one body and a rifle to create the photograph known as Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter. The case shows that documentary photographs were sometimes arranged to tell a more compelling story.

Photography and colonialism

As European empires expanded in the nineteenth century, photography became one of the tools of colonial administration and science. Photographers recorded colonized peoples, landscapes and monuments for governments, scientific societies and commercial markets. Anthropologists used photographs to classify people into racial "types", sometimes photographing them in front of measuring grids. Commercial studios sold images of colonized peoples as curiosities. These photographs often presented their subjects as specimens rather than individuals, removed names and context, and reinforced ideas of racial hierarchy used to justify colonial rule.

In North America, photographs of Indigenous peoples were shaped by the belief, widespread among settlers, that Indigenous cultures were disappearing. Photographers set out to record what they called a "vanishing race", often ignoring the policies of dispossession, residential schools and forced assimilation that were in fact causing harm.

Edward S. Curtis and the critique of the vanishing race

Edward S. Curtis, an American photographer, spent three decades producing The North American Indian, a twenty-volume work published between 1907 and 1930 with support from the financier J. P. Morgan. It contained more than 2,000 photogravures and extensive text. Curtis's images are technically accomplished and often beautiful, and some Indigenous communities today value them as records of ancestors.

Critics have also shown that Curtis often staged his photographs to fit a romantic idea of a pre-contact past. He sometimes supplied costumes and props, asked people to remove signs of modern life such as clocks or manufactured clothing, and retouched negatives to erase them. His images helped fix a stereotype of Indigenous peoples as noble but doomed, frozen in the past, which obscured the realities of contemporary Indigenous life and resistance. Contemporary Indigenous artists and scholars have responded by reclaiming, recaptioning and reinterpreting such images, and by making their own photographs of their communities.

The archive and its critics

Nineteenth-century institutions created vast photographic archives of criminals, patients, colonial subjects and workers. In the 1880s the French police official Alphonse Bertillon developed a system of standardized mug shots, front and profile, combined with body measurements, to identify repeat offenders. The British scientist Francis Galton made composite portraits by superimposing photographs of different people, hoping to reveal criminal or racial "types", a project linked to his advocacy of eugenics.

Later critics, including Allan Sekula in his 1986 essay "The Body and the Archive" and John Tagg in The Burden of Representation (1988), argued that such archives show photography's role in systems of surveillance and control. For Tagg, a photograph's status as evidence is not natural but is produced by institutions such as police forces and courts that give certain photographs authority. Lesson 10 returns to these ideas.

Ethics of working with documentary archives today

Researchers, curators and photographers who work with historical documentary photographs now follow ethical practices that reflect these critiques.

• Recover names and context where possible, working with the communities and descendants of the people shown.
• Replace or annotate harmful historical captions rather than repeating them uncritically.
• Respect cultural protocols, including restrictions on images of ceremonies, sacred objects or the deceased.
• Consider whether reproducing an image of suffering or humiliation serves the people shown or only the viewer.
• Credit the photographer and also acknowledge the subject as a person, not just a specimen.

In Canada, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to action and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act of 2021 have encouraged archives such as Library and Archives Canada to work with First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities. Projects such as LAC's Project Naming have invited community members to identify people in historical photographs of Inuit and other Indigenous communities, replacing anonymous captions with names.

Practice: making a survey-style photograph today

You can understand survey photography better by trying it. Choose a landscape that has been changed by people, such as a highway interchange, a new subdivision, a mine site seen from a public road or a shoreline with a pipeline terminal. Photograph it twice. In the first version, adopt the heroic conventions of nineteenth-century survey work: a high vantage point, dramatic light, a wide view that makes the land look vast and empty. In the second version, adopt a critical approach: include signs of human presence and change, such as fences, survey stakes, signs or traces of earlier inhabitants, and write a caption that names whose land it is and how it came to look this way.

Compare the two versions with classmates. Which seems more objective? Which tells more of the truth? Most people find that both are constructed and that the difference lies in what each includes and how each is captioned. That is the central lesson of documentary history: evidence and argument are always intertwined, and the photographer's responsibility is to be honest about the choices made.