Documentary and social reform

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, photographers began to use the camera deliberately to expose social problems and persuade the public to demand change. Tenement housing, child labour, rural poverty and the treatment of immigrants and minorities became subjects for photographs designed to move viewers to action. In the 1930s the word "documentary" was adopted to describe this kind of work, and government agencies in the United States and Canada sponsored large documentary programs. This lesson follows social documentary photography from Jacob Riis to the Farm Security Administration and the National Film Board of Canada, and examines both its achievements and the ethical questions it raises. PHOT-320 covers photojournalism ethics in contemporary practice; here the focus is on history and interpretation.

Jacob Riis and the tenements

Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant who worked as a police reporter in New York, set out in the late 1880s to show middle-class readers how the poor lived in the city's overcrowded tenements. Magnesium flash powder, introduced in Germany in 1887, made it possible to photograph in dark rooms and alleys. Riis and his collaborators burst into cramped apartments and lodging houses at night, igniting flash powder that startled the occupants and, at least once, set a fire.

His book How the Other Half Lives (1890) combined text with illustrations based on his photographs; only a few were reproduced directly as halftones because the technology was still new. Riis's lectures with lantern slides drew large audiences and contributed to housing reforms in New York. Historians also note that his text relied on ethnic stereotypes, that he often treated his subjects as specimens rather than individuals, and that his flash photography violated their privacy. His legacy shows both the power and the problems of reform photography.

Lewis Hine and child labour

Lewis Hine, a sociologist and teacher, used photography more deliberately and respectfully. He began by photographing immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in 1904, aiming to show them as dignified individuals. From 1908 to 1924 he worked for the National Child Labor Committee, travelling across the United States to photograph children working in textile mills, coal mines, canneries, glass factories and fields. He often used ruses to get into workplaces, posing as a fire inspector, insurance agent or machinery photographer, and he recorded children's names, ages and heights by measuring them against his coat buttons.

Hine's photographs were published in pamphlets, posters and the NCLC's journal, often with captions and layouts he designed himself to make the case for reform. He called his approach "photo-interpretation" and insisted that photographs must be accompanied by accurate facts. His work contributed to state and federal child labour laws. Hine also wrote, in a phrase often quoted, that he wanted to show things that had to be corrected and things that had to be appreciated. Late in life he photographed construction workers on the Empire State Building in 1930 and 1931, celebrating labour.

The idea of documentary

The term "documentary" became common in the 1920s and 1930s. The Scottish filmmaker John Grierson, who later founded the National Film Board of Canada, used the word in 1926 to describe films that dramatized real life, and defined documentary as the "creative treatment of actuality". The phrase captures the tension at the heart of documentary photography: it claims to record reality, yet it is shaped by the photographer's creative choices and persuasive purposes.

The Farm Security Administration

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the United States government created programs to help farmers and rural workers. In 1935 the Resettlement Administration, which became the Farm Security Administration in 1937, set up a Historical Section headed by the economist Roy Stryker. Stryker hired photographers including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon and Jack Delano, and later Gordon Parks. Their task was to document rural poverty and the government's relief programs and to supply photographs to newspapers and magazines to build public support.

Between 1935 and 1944, when the project had moved to the Office of War Information, the photographers produced about 175,000 film negatives as well as many prints and transparencies. Stryker sent them detailed "shooting scripts" listing subjects to cover, and he edited the results, sometimes punching holes in negatives he rejected. The collection, held by the Library of Congress and in the public domain, is one of the most important visual records of American life in the period.

Iconic images and their afterlives

Dorothea Lange's photograph of a migrant mother with her children in a pea pickers' camp in Nipomo, California, in 1936 became one of the most reproduced photographs in history. Lange made a short series of exposures, moving closer each time, and the final close portrait was published widely. Decades later, the woman, Florence Owens Thompson, said she had never received anything from the photograph and felt her image had been used without her benefit; she had been told the pictures would help the camp, and some food relief did reach the workers. Her case is now a standard example in discussions of consent and the rights of documentary subjects.

In 1936 Arthur Rothstein photographed a bleached steer skull on cracked earth in South Dakota. Critics discovered that he had moved the skull to make a better composition, and opponents of the government used the case to accuse the FSA of faking evidence about the drought. The controversy raised a question still debated: does arranging a detail falsify a documentary photograph if the situation it represents is real?

Walker Evans and the writer James Agee spent the summer of 1936 with three white tenant farming families in Alabama for a magazine assignment. The magazine rejected the work, and it became the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), in which Agee's anguished text questions the ethics of the project itself. Gordon Parks, the first Black photographer hired by the FSA, made a 1942 portrait of Ella Watson, a government cleaner, standing with a mop and broom before an American flag, which he called American Gothic, a direct and bitter commentary on racism in the nation's capital.

Documentary in Canada and the NFB

In Canada, the National Film Board, founded in 1939 under John Grierson, became a major producer of still photographs as well as films. During the Second World War, the NFB's photographers documented the war effort, from factory workers and women in industry to soldiers in training. After the war, its Still Photography Division, formally organized in the early 1940s, continued to photograph Canadian life, industry, Indigenous communities and the North for government publications, exhibitions and press distribution. Photographers such as Chris Lund, Gar Lunney and Ronny Jaques produced thousands of images. Under the direction of Lorraine Monk from 1960, the division also produced celebrated photographic books, such as Canada: A Year of the Land (1967) for the centennial. In 1985 the division's collection became the basis of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, whose collection moved to the National Gallery of Canada in 2009. Critics have noted that NFB photography often presented an optimistic, unified image of the nation that could overlook inequality, and that some images of Indigenous and northern communities reflected government assimilation policies.

Ethics and critique

Documentary photography has always faced ethical questions. Did subjects consent, and did they understand how their images would be used? Did they benefit? Were they named or reduced to types? Did the photographer stage or arrange details? Who controlled the captions and the final publication?

In the 1970s and 1980s critics such as Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula questioned documentary more fundamentally. In her 1981 essay "In, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography)", Rosler argued that traditional documentary often aestheticized poverty for middle-class viewers, offering them pity rather than political understanding, and turned victims into objects of a sympathetic gaze while leaving the causes of injustice untouched. Her photo-text work The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (1974–75) paired photographs of empty storefronts with lists of slang words for drunkenness, refusing to show the people themselves. Lesson 10 returns to these critiques.

Contemporary documentary photographers respond with collaborative and participatory methods: working with communities over long periods, sharing editorial control, giving cameras to participants, paying or otherwise benefiting subjects, and publishing names and voices alongside images.

Practice: a collaborative documentary exercise

Choose a small community you have access to, such as a club, a workplace, a neighbourhood market or a family group, and plan a short documentary project of eight to twelve images. Before photographing, explain your project, ask for consent and agree on how the photographs will be used. Invite participants to suggest what should be photographed and to choose one or two images themselves. Record their names, their words and their preferences about how they are described.

After editing, show the selection to the participants before sharing it more widely and ask whether the images and captions represent them fairly. Write a reflection comparing your process with the methods of Riis, Hine and the FSA. Many students find that collaboration changes not only the ethics of the project but also its look: participants often choose different moments, settings and expressions than an outside photographer would, and their captions add information that no photograph could show on its own.