Documentary Photography: The Camera as Witness to Real Life

In March 1936, a photographer named Dorothea Lange drove through Nipomo, California, photographing migrant farm workers for the federal government. She had been on the road for a month, working for the Farm Security Administration, documenting the human cost of the Great Depression. She passed a sign that said "Pea-Pickers Camp" and kept driving. Twenty miles later, she turned around and went back. She said later that she did not know why. She found a woman named Florence Owens Thompson, 32 years old, sitting in a tent with three of her seven children. She was hungry. The family had been living on frozen vegetables and birds the children killed. Lange took six photographs. The last one, Migrant Mother (1936), became the most famous documentary photograph ever made. It did not just record suffering. It created a national emotional consensus that policy was needed. That is an extraordinary thing for a photograph to do.

Documentary photography is photography that chronicles real events, people, places, and conditions with the intention of providing factual visual evidence. The documentary photographer aims to show what is there, not to construct what is not. The genre encompasses social documentary, war photography, conservation photography, ethnographic photography, and the photo essay. What unites these sub-genres is the principle that the camera is a machine for recording reality, and the photographer's job is to bring to light something that would otherwise remain hidden, ignored, or misunderstood.

This entry covers what documentary photography is, how it emerged, which photographers defined it, and how the genre evolved from objective witness to subjective art.

What Is Documentary Photography?

Documentary photography is photography that attempts to capture real-life situations and settings. The term was first applied to visual media by John Grierson, a Scottish filmmaker, in a 1926 review of Robert Flaherty's film Moana in the New York Sun. Grierson wrote that the film "has documentary value." The word "documentary" has two meanings that shift about. It can mean acting as a document, which is close to a "photographic document." Or it can mean acting as if it were a document, a quality that suggests an appearance rather than an actuality. This ambiguity is built into the genre.

Walker Evans, one of the most important documentary photographers of the 20th century, rejected the term "documentary" in an interview with Leslie Katz in Art in America: "Documentary? That's a very sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear. The term should be documentary style. An example of a literal document would be a police photograph of a murder scene. You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never a document, though it certainly can adopt that style." Evans's distinction is important. Documentary photography is not the same as a photographic document. It is photography that adopts the style and authority of a document while making choices about framing, timing, composition, and subject that transform the record into something more than a mere transcription.

Origins: Surveys and Reform (1850s-1900s)

The earliest documentary photographers thought of themselves as recorders. Photographs meant to accurately describe otherwise unknown, hidden, or difficult-to-access places date to the earliest daguerreotype and calotype surveys of the ruins of the Near East, Egypt, and the American wilderness. John Beasly Greene traveled to Nubia in the early 1850s to photograph the major ruins of the region. The French Missions Heliographiques, organized by the Commission des Monuments Historiques, sent photographers including Henri Le Secq, Edouard Denis Baldus, and Gustave Le Gray to create an archive of France's rapidly disappearing architectural heritage.

The development of photogravure methods and the introduction of halftone reproduction around 1890 made low-cost mass reproduction in newspapers, magazines, and books possible. This shifted documentary from antiquarian and landscape subjects to the city and its crises. The figure most directly associated with the birth of this new form is Jacob Riis, a New York police-beat reporter who used photography to document tenement life. His books, most notably How the Other Half Lives (1890), used photographs to prove that the living conditions of the urban poor were a crisis that required action. Riis was not making art. He was making evidence. But the photographs he produced had a visual power that went beyond their documentary function.

Lewis Hine (1874-1940)

Hine was the next major figure. Beginning in 1908, he photographed child laborers in American mills, mines, and factories for the National Child Labor Committee. His photographs of small children working in textile mills, coal breakers, and canneries were used as evidence in the campaign for child labor laws. Hine called his work "photographic interpretation" and believed that the camera could be a tool for social reform. His images of children standing at looms, their faces visible above the machinery, are both documents and arguments. They show what is happening and they say it should stop.

The FSA and the Golden Age (1930s-1940s)

The Great Depression brought a new wave of documentary photography. The Farm Security Administration (FSA), a federal agency created in 1935 as part of Roosevelt's New Deal, sent photographers across rural America to document the human cost of the economic collapse. Under the direction of Roy Stryker, the FAP hired Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein, and others. They produced over 250,000 photographs, creating the largest documentary archive ever assembled by the US government.

Lange's Migrant Mother (1936) is the most famous FSA photograph, but Evans's work is arguably more influential. Evans photographed sharecroppers, storefronts, churches, and houses in the rural South with a large-format camera and a deadpan, frontal style that gave his subjects dignity without sentimentality. His photographs, published with James Agee's text in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), are the model for what Evans called "documentary style": photography that looks like a document but functions as art. Read more about the FSA photographers at The Art Story.

The Subjective Turn: New Documents (1950s-1970s)

The classic documentary tradition assumed a kind of moral neutrality. The photographer was a transparent witness, and the photograph was evidence. A new generation in the 1950s and 1960s pushed back against this idea. They argued that there was no such thing as a neutral image. Every frame was a choice, and pretending otherwise was its own kind of distortion.

Robert Frank's The Americans (1958), photographed during a Guggenheim-funded road trip across the United States, changed what a documentary photograph was allowed to be: personal, subjective, atmospheric, even mournful. Frank's images are tilted, grainy, and compositionally unconventional. They do not document America so much as they document Frank's experience of looking at America. The book was savaged on release and is now considered one of the most influential photography books ever made.

In 1967, John Szarkowski curated New Documents at MoMA, featuring Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand. Szarkowski wrote that these photographers' "aim has been not to reform life but to know it." Arbus photographed people on the margins of American society with a directness that made the viewer aware of their own gaze. Friedlander photographed the fragmented visual experience of American streets, full of reflections, shadows, and overlapping signs. Winogrand shot rapidly and obsessively, capturing the chaotic energy of public life. All three rejected the reformist agenda of social documentary in favor of something more personal and more ambiguous.

Key Artists in Documentary Photography

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965)

Lange's work for the FSA defined the social documentary tradition. Migrant Mother (1936) is the most reproduced documentary photograph in history. Lange's gift was finding the specific image that could stand for a general condition: one woman's face standing for the suffering of millions. She continued to document American life through World War II, photographing the internment of Japanese Americans for the War Relocation Authority.

Walker Evans (1903-1975)

Evans's large-format photographs of the rural South, taken for the FSA between 1935 and 1937, are the model for documentary style. His subjects, sharecroppers, storefronts, churches, roadside signs, are photographed with a frontal, symmetrical precision that gives them the authority of architectural records. Evans also photographed subway riders in New York with a hidden camera between 1938 and 1941, producing candid portraits of strangers who did not know they were being photographed. The work was not published until 1966, in the book Many Are Called.

Sebastiao Salgado (b. 1944)

Salgado's long-term projects, including Workers (1993), Migrations (2000), and Genesis (2013), document labor, displacement, and the natural world on a global scale. He works in black and white with medium-format cameras, spending years on each project. Salgado's work has been criticized for aestheticizing suffering, but his defenders argue that beauty is a way of commanding attention, and that without it, the images would be ignored.

Gordon Parks (1912-2006)

Parks was the first Black photographer hired by the FSA. His photographs of Ella Watson, a Black government cleaner in Washington, D.C., including American Gothic, Washington D.C. (1942), which shows Watson standing with a broom and mop in front of an American flag, directly reference Grant Wood's American Gothic to make a point about racial inequality. Parks later became a staff photographer for Life magazine, covering the Civil Rights movement, poverty, and urban life.

Documentary Photography and Art

The relationship between documentary photography and fine art has been contentious from the beginning. Walker Evans insisted that art is "never a document." John Szarkowski argued that the New Documents photographers were artists who adopted the documentary style, not documentarians who happened to make art. By the 1970s and 1980s, the documentary impulse had entered the gallery. Photographers like Nicholas Nixon, Sally Mann, Joel Sternfeld, and Richard Avedon used large-format cameras to produce documentary-style work that was exhibited in museums and sold as fine art.

David Green argued in 2009 that the "art concept" of documentary photography has become the principal vehicle in which the documentary mode now exists. It is no longer a case of documentary photography migrating from the street to the gallery, but the emergence of new kinds of documentary practice specific to the gallery and museum. Documentary photography is no longer just a tool for reform or reportage. It is also an art form, with its own conventions, its own market, and its own relationship to truth.

See Documentary Photography in Person

Major collections of documentary photography are held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., which houses the FSA archive; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Getty Museum in Los Angeles; and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. For contemporary documentary work, look for exhibitions at the Photographers' Gallery in London, the Rencontres d'Arles festival in France, and Aperture's exhibition program in New York.

Next, read our entries on fine art photography and street photography, or explore our post on street photography and the decisive moment to see how documentary and street traditions overlap.