Documentary photography

Documentary photography uses photographs to record people, places, and events as evidence or interpretation of social and historical reality.

Photographic realism: The belief or style that photographs can present visible reality with little distortion. Documentary photographs draw authority from their appearance of direct, unmediated evidence.
Jacob Riis: A Danish-American journalist and photographer whose images documented poverty in New York City tenements. His 1890 book used photographs to support arguments for housing reform.
Dorothea Lange: An American documentary photographer known for images of displacement and poverty during the Great Depression. Her work for the Farm Security Administration became a defining record of the era.
Social documentary photography: Photography that documents social conditions, often to inform public debate or encourage reform. This branch makes social problems and their causes its explicit subject.
Direct photography: A photographic approach that presents subjects clearly, with minimal apparent manipulation or intervention. Its ideal of unembellished depiction differs from documentary work that openly interprets reality.
Photo essay: A sequence of photographs organized to develop a subject or argument. Sequencing turns individual documentary images into a sustained account.
How the Other Half Lives: Jacob Riis’s 1890 book combining photographs and text about poverty in New York City. It established a prominent model for photography serving social investigation.
Walker Evans: An American photographer whose restrained images documented vernacular architecture and life during the Great Depression. His photographs shaped documentary style through formal precision and observational distance.
War photography: Photographs made during or about armed conflict and its effects. It records conflict while raising urgent questions about danger, evidence, and representation.
Pictorialism: An early photographic movement that emphasized painterly effects and artistic interpretation. Its crafted, expressive appearance contrasts with documentary photography’s evidentiary conventions.

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