DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY
IN THE 2OTH CENTURY


The city photographs of the French photographer Eugène Atget stand halfway between social documentary and art photography; their superb composition and expression of personal vision transcend a purely documentary function. Atget, perhaps one of the most prolific of the documentarians at the turn of the century, made an enormous number of often poetic scenes of ordinary life in and around his beloved Paris between 1898 and 1927. The preservation and publication of his work is due to the efforts of another gifted documenter of the urban scene, Berenice Abbott, many of whose photographs record New York City of the 1930s.

During the Great Depression, a group of photographers was hired by the U.S. Farm Security Administration to document those areas of the country hardest hit by the catastrophe. The photographers, including Walker Evans, Russell Lee (1903-86), Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and Arthur Rothstein (1915-85), were given complete freedom to record as they saw fit. The result-pictures of migratory workers and sharecroppers, and their homes, schools, churches, and belongings-was extremely persuasive both as evidence and as art. Evans's contributions, with a text by the American writer James Agee, were separately published under the title Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941); the book is considered a classic in its field.