Research Point. History of Documentary Photography in the USA up to 1916.
When were the first documentary images recorded?
The term “documentary" as applied to film was coined by the writer, director and producer John Grierson in 1926 but this relates to the use of the word and not the use of photographs as documents. The use of a photograph as a document, or proof of an event, has a much longer history. The increase in light sensitivity, with the arrival of wet and then dry plates, released the camera and the photographer from the confines of the studio. The later development of flash photography allowed the camera to be taken into the darkest of places, freezing action and capturing the previously unrecordable. As cameras developed they reduced in size and became ever more transportable.
In both Europe and America the camera was in use to record life in the mid 19th century. In France photographers were employed by the Commission des Monuments Historic to record the changes taking place in France. The British were traveling their Empire recording the strange people they controlled, and the wealth and power that came with it. The Americans, as they have since, looked inwards and concentrated on the occupation of their newly united country.
The drive to have Americans living on the East Coast to move West led to photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan, Mathew Brady and Carleton Watkins to be employed by both the Government and the railroad companies to show how empty and inviting this new land was. This ignored the fact that the land was already occupied by up to half a million native Americans. Some photographers, like Alfred A. Hart were employed by the railroad companies full time to document their progress. It was Alfred A. Hart who recorded the striking of the final spike when the Union and the Central Pacific railways met at Promontory Ridge in 1869.
These early photographers came into their own during the American Civil War. The constraints of their equipment precluded live action but this was the first war to be documented photographically. O’Sullivan, Brady and Alexander Gardner were among the number that recorded the events. Although either staged or showing the aftermath of war they still convey the horror of conflict, the division of people, the destruction of property, and death.
The United States Geological and Geographic Surveys, which ran from 1868 to 1878, employed many photographers, including Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson to supply pictures for their Annual Reports, thus encouraging further funding.
American born photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand not only highlighted the privations of the inner city poor but also, through the magazine Camera Work, made photographs art objects in their own right. Stieglitz’s images, The Terminal of 1892 and Steerage of 1907, look horribly familiar to the plight of people who are today fleeing north from Africa to Europe. Strand’s stark New York faces still challenge the viewer.
Steerage was in fact a picture of people leaving America and returning to Europe, having either failed the entry standards or having completed their work contract. The Terminal, was a winter scene of a New York street car terminal and taken using a 5x4 camera. This gave Stieglitz the opportunity to work without the encumbrance of a tripod.
A number of European photographers moved to American in this period and worked in the social arena. Jacob Riis emigrated from his native Denmark and recorded some harrowing pictures that he published in How the Other Half Live in 1890. The development of flash photography allowed him to record images inside buildings that would have been impossible previously.
Another European who was attracted to work in America was the German Arnold Genthe whose book, Pictures of Old China Town, of 1908, featured the plight of the Chinese immigrants who, having been brought over to America as labourers on the railroad, were left to their own devices and formed a thriving community in San Francisco. Their community was demolished in 1906.
American documentary photographers continued to look inwards rather than outwards right up to 1916. When the USA joined the European conflict, that became World War 1, their focus of attention moved.
