This document provides an overview of documentary photography, including its definition and various subgenres. Documentary photography aims to provide a factual record or report of real events through photographs and sometimes accompanying text. Some key subgenres discussed include portrait, social documentary, documentary landscape, photojournalism, street photography, sports photography, and identification photography. The document also profiles several influential documentary photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Dorothea Lange, Don McCullin, and Richard Billingham.
2. Documentary Photography
• What is it?
• What sub genre‟s fit into documentary photography?
Documentary Photography is a narrative or story being told
through photographs that involves real events to provide a
factual record or report (and sometimes this is
complimented with text).
• Portraiture, social documentary, documentary landscape,
photojournalism, live events, street photography, self portraiture,
sports photography, forms of identification, editorial and many
more …
3. Key Points
• ‘Document’ means evidence = official, to be
trusted, not to be questioned…
• Documentary as signifier of truth but what of
re-presentation??
• Documentary is intimate – it assumes a bond
between viewer and image and it is charged
with showing the world as it really is
4. Documentary photography has always had the power to shock,
to inform, to change opinion and to persuade yet the very term
can be ambiguous and the photographer always chooses a
particular frame and moment in time
7. Henri Cartier-Bresson like Doisneau is created as
father of photojournalism and also street
photography. His style is often decisive and always
candid
8. Martin Parr: Part of the British new wave
whose focus was on the everyday from a
critical perspective
9. Simon Norfolk’s work crosses the line between fine
art and photo journalism, often shooting locations
that are war torn or where atrocities were commited
20. Tom Merilion
“I wanted the buildings to look like models, and to photograph them from above
on sunny days so there was a sense of a singular light source” – Tom Merilion
23. Stuart Whipps
• Aladdin Houses, commission for an exhibition alongside Bill Brandt‟s work.
.
• http://www.stuartwhipps.com/index.php?/project/the-aladdin-houses/
24. Tom Merilion
Aerial photographs of Birmingham. Merilion achieved this by photographing from
a small aircraft flying low over the city centre. He used an architectural lens the
wrong way round, with a selective focus and a polarizing filter to emphasize the
colours of sky and foliage.
28. Henri Cartier-Bresson like Doisneau is created as
father of photojournalism and also street
photography. His style is often decisive and always
candid
29. George Rodger’s approach is strictly that of the
obersvor. Images may be shocking but are not
sensationalist like FSA. He declared himself as
‘interested in the minorities’
33. • Robert Haeberle
People about to be
shot 1969
• War photography
makes for a fascination
via the horror but the
technology of smaller,
faster cameras also
brought these horrors
into our homes
• Do these types of
images now create a
moral exhaustion and
cycnisism?
38. Alfred Eisenstaedt
a sailor kissing a nurse in
Times Square on Aug.
14, 1945, during the
celebration to mark V-J
Day, the end of World
War II.
39. Rich Lam
I was covering last night's Stanley Cup Playoffs for Getty Images when Vancouver erupted in riots after the Canucks' Game 7 loss to the Boston
Bruins. It was complete chaos. Rioters set two cars on fire and then I saw looters break the window at a neighboring department store. At
that point, the riot police charged right towards us. After I stopped running, I noticed in the space behind the line of police that two people
were laying in the street with the riot police and a raging fire just beyond them. I knew I had captured a "moment" when I snapped the still
forms against the backdrop of such chaos but it wasn't until later when I returned to the rink to file my photos that my editor pointed out that
the two people were not hurt, but kissing."
40. Sebastiao Salgado
A photojournalist in the best sense of the word, Sebasiao Salgado is fascinated with people who work hard in
all parts of the world. From landless workers trying to claim property for themselves in Brazil to Oil workers
putting out fires in Kuwait, Salgado's lens captures the beauty in his subjects' gritty reality.
Look at his work: Workers and Genesis (below)
56. Fazal Sheikh
• The portrait is central to Fazal Sheikh‟s work. For more than two decades, as he has worked in
different communities around the world, the invitation to sit for a portrait has been the principal
means by which he has established a link with his subjects and been allowed to enter and
document their lives. Often these have been people in crisis: displaced from their homes and their
countries, at risk from violence, poverty and prejudice.
59. Sally Mann – Immediate Family
"Immediate Family, which was published in 1990, must be counted as one of the great photograph books of our time. It is a
singularly powerful evocation of childhood from within and without..."
60. Dorothea Lange
Best known for her famous photos of the Depression, including Migrant Mother, Nipomo,
California, Lange was active from the 1920s to the early 1960s and was one of the most
influential photographers in American history.
71. Nadav Kander - www.nadavkander.com
His best shot, read the
article:
http://www.guar
dian.co.uk/artand
design/2008/nov/
27/photography
“More people live
along the
Yangtze river
than live in the
US. So, on my
first trip to
China, I wanted
to get a sense of
this by visiting
Shanghai and
Chongqing, a
massive city of
27 million
people, where
this image was
taken."
84. Taryn Simon - 'A Living Man Declared
Dead and Other Chapters'.
She has been photographing the descendents of 18 different bloodlines, each based around a
particular situation, exploring predetermination and notions of perpetual return. There are many
blank photographs for those who couldn‟t be photographed.
85. Edward Curtis
Curtis built an illustrious career documenting Native Americans in the
1900s. The images resonate 100 years later.
Photojournalism is the gathering of images to tell a story, a sub-genre of docu...
Concentration camp following liberation, German guards burying the deadKorango tribesman wrestling match
Death of a Loyalist soldier questioned as a fake!
Quote from Robert Haeberle ‘ guys were about to shoot these people, I yelled “hold it” and I shot my picture. M16s opened up and from the corner of my eye I saw bodies falling’
Joel Meyerwitz
Nick Turpin
She photographed three women, one hour (Julie), one day (Tecla) and one week (Saskia) after giving birth. During a visit to Portugal in 1994, she made portraits of four bullfighters immediately after the fight.
Nadars work hovers between portraiture as identification and revealing the true personality – this is a point we keep coming back to!