In a sense, of
course, all photography is reportage, recording an image of what the eye
and camera lens behold. The earliest experimenters with the medium looked
on it as no more than this; by the 1860s, however, a split in theory divided
those photographers who continued to use the camera to record straightforwardly
from those who claimed photography to be a substitute for the other visual
arts. - Documentary
photography combines the use of pictures as record and as evidence; a subgenre
may be distinguished as social documentary. Photojournalism uses pictures
specifically to record events.
Among the earliest
documentary photographs are those taken by the English photographer Roger
Fenton (1819-69), which vividly brought the Crimean War home to English
viewers. The grim realities of the American Civil War were documented by
Mathew B. Brady, Alexander Gardner (1821-82), and Timothy H. O'Sullivan
(c. 1840-82). After the war, Gardner and O'Sullivan extensively photographed
the western U.S., along with Carleton E. Watkins (1829-1916); Eadweard
Muybridge, better known for his studies of figures in motion; William Henry
Jackson (1843-1942), whose images of the Yellowstone area were instrumental
in making it the first national park; and Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952),
who did a series of studies of North American Indians. The clear, detailed
prints of both these men provide a permanent record of the unspoiled wilderness.
Instead of recording
life in other parts of the world, a number of 19th-century photographers
devoted themselves, with more subjective concern, to documenting life and
conditions immediately about them. Thus, the English photographer John
Thomson (1837-1921) documented the ordinary life of London's working class
during the 1870s in his volume of photographs, with accompanying text,
Street Life in London (1877); and the Danish-born American police
reporter Jacob August Riis did a series of photographs of the slums of
New York City from 1887 to 1892. With the intent of forcing a change in
slum conditions, Riis brought them to the attention of the public in two
photographic volumes, How the Other Half Lives (1890) and Children
of the Poor (1892). These pictures with Riis's written commentary were
directly responsible for positive social changes.
Between 1905
and 1910, Lewis Wickes Hine, an American sociologist and champion of child
labor laws, also recorded the oppressed of America in his pictures of ironworkers
and steelworkers, miners, impoverished European immigrants, and especially
child laborers.
