- 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.