This document provides an overview of documentary photography, including its definition and various subgenres. Documentary photography aims to provide a factual record or report of real events through photographs and sometimes accompanying text. Some key subgenres discussed include portrait, social documentary, documentary landscape, photojournalism, street photography, sports photography, and identification photography. The document also profiles several influential documentary photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Dorothea Lange, Don McCullin, and Richard Billingham.

1. Documentary Photography
Meanings and sub genre’s

2. Documentary Photography
• What is it?
• What sub genre‟s fit into documentary photography?
Documentary Photography is a narrative or story being told
through photographs that involves real events to provide a
factual record or report (and sometimes this is
complimented with text).
• Portraiture, social documentary, documentary landscape,
photojournalism, live events, street photography, self portraiture,
sports photography, forms of identification, editorial and many
more …

3. Key Points
• ‘Document’ means evidence = official, to be
trusted, not to be questioned…
• Documentary as signifier of truth but what of
re-presentation??
• Documentary is intimate – it assumes a bond
between viewer and image and it is charged
with showing the world as it really is

4. Documentary photography has always had the power to shock,
to inform, to change opinion and to persuade yet the very term
can be ambiguous and the photographer always chooses a
particular frame and moment in time

5. Early documentary was often for identification –
documenting criminals

6. Or racial types

7. Henri Cartier-Bresson like Doisneau is created as
father of photojournalism and also street
photography. His style is often decisive and always
candid

8. Martin Parr: Part of the British new wave
whose focus was on the everyday from a
critical perspective

9. Simon Norfolk’s work crosses the line between fine
art and photo journalism, often shooting locations
that are war torn or where atrocities were commited

10. Documentary Landscape

11. Bernd and Hilla Becher

12. Simon Norfolk
„The Perisher‟ – submarine commander exercise area .2006

13. Fay Godwin

14. Bill Brandt
• A Night in London
encompassed
social events and
strata, with staged
scenes where
necessary.

15. Charles Johnstone
• Thirty-four
Basketball
Courts.

16. Stephen Shore – uncommon places

17. Danilo Murru – What Remains

18. Exit Strategies by Jules Spinatsch

19. Rinko Kawauchi

20. Tom Merilion
“I wanted the buildings to look like models, and to photograph them from above
on sunny days so there was a sense of a singular light source” – Tom Merilion

21. Robert Walker

22. Annie Leibovitz - Pilgrimage
• http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/sunday/annie-leibovitzs-pilgrimage.html?pagewanted=all

23. Stuart Whipps
• Aladdin Houses, commission for an exhibition alongside Bill Brandt‟s work.
.
• http://www.stuartwhipps.com/index.php?/project/the-aladdin-houses/

24. Tom Merilion
Aerial photographs of Birmingham. Merilion achieved this by photographing from
a small aircraft flying low over the city centre. He used an architectural lens the
wrong way round, with a selective focus and a polarizing filter to emphasize the
colours of sky and foliage.

25. Richard Billingham - Zoo

26. Photojournalism

27. Robert Doisneau is often seen as one of
the pioneers of photojournalism

28. Henri Cartier-Bresson like Doisneau is created as
father of photojournalism and also street
photography. His style is often decisive and always
candid

29. George Rodger’s approach is strictly that of the
obersvor. Images may be shocking but are not
sensationalist like FSA. He declared himself as
‘interested in the minorities’

30. Robert Capa

31. Eve Arnold

32. Robert Capa: Hungarian combat photographer:
Part of the European documentary tradition

33. • Robert Haeberle
People about to be
shot 1969
• War photography
makes for a fascination
via the horror but the
technology of smaller,
faster cameras also
brought these horrors
into our homes
• Do these types of
images now create a
moral exhaustion and
cycnisism?

34. Anastasia Taylor-Lind
English/Swedish photographer

35. Dennis Stock

36. Don McCullin

37. Jerome Delay

38. Alfred Eisenstaedt
a sailor kissing a nurse in
Times Square on Aug.
14, 1945, during the
celebration to mark V-J
Day, the end of World
War II.

39. Rich Lam
I was covering last night's Stanley Cup Playoffs for Getty Images when Vancouver erupted in riots after the Canucks' Game 7 loss to the Boston
Bruins. It was complete chaos. Rioters set two cars on fire and then I saw looters break the window at a neighboring department store. At
that point, the riot police charged right towards us. After I stopped running, I noticed in the space behind the line of police that two people
were laying in the street with the riot police and a raging fire just beyond them. I knew I had captured a "moment" when I snapped the still
forms against the backdrop of such chaos but it wasn't until later when I returned to the rink to file my photos that my editor pointed out that
the two people were not hurt, but kissing."

40. Sebastiao Salgado
A photojournalist in the best sense of the word, Sebasiao Salgado is fascinated with people who work hard in
all parts of the world. From landless workers trying to claim property for themselves in Brazil to Oil workers
putting out fires in Kuwait, Salgado's lens captures the beauty in his subjects' gritty reality.
Look at his work: Workers and Genesis (below)

41. Don McCullin

42. Street Photography

43. Zhang Xiao - They I
Chinese photographer

44. Bruce Gilden – Head On
'I'm known for taking pictures very close,
and the older I get, the closer I get.'

45. Martin Parr
Playas – various beaches in Latin America.
http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/essay/playas

46. Peter Dench

47. Joel Meyerwitz

48. Nick Turpin

49. Antonio Bolfo
• http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-
photography/project/1730771/visa-pour-limage-new-yorks-finest

50. Henri Cartier Bresson

51. Helen Levitt

52. Beat Strueli - Bangkok 02

53. Kate Hooper – night

54. Jun Abe – Citizens
Japanese photographer

55. Social Documentary

56. Fazal Sheikh
• The portrait is central to Fazal Sheikh‟s work. For more than two decades, as he has worked in
different communities around the world, the invitation to sit for a portrait has been the principal
means by which he has established a link with his subjects and been allowed to enter and
document their lives. Often these have been people in crisis: displaced from their homes and their
countries, at risk from violence, poverty and prejudice.

57. Tomasz Gudzowaty - Free Running
Polish photographer

58. Elinor carucci

59. Sally Mann – Immediate Family
"Immediate Family, which was published in 1990, must be counted as one of the great photograph books of our time. It is a
singularly powerful evocation of childhood from within and without..."

60. Dorothea Lange
Best known for her famous photos of the Depression, including Migrant Mother, Nipomo,
California, Lange was active from the 1920s to the early 1960s and was one of the most
influential photographers in American history.

61. James Russell Cant - Family
Brother Alone

62. Laura Cooper - Disaffected

63. Lewis Hine

64. Fistful of Dreams by Nishant Ratnakar
• Watch the multimedia project: http://nishantratnakar.com/portfolio/multi-media/fistful-of-dreams/

65. Sarah Fishlock - Middlemen
• http://www.foto8.com/new/online/photo-stories/1508-middlemen

66. Richard Billingham
• Series of work: Rays a laugh

67. Diane Arbus – Untitled series

68. Julie, Netherlands, 1994. One hour
after giving birth. Bullfighter, Portugal. 1994
Rineke Djikstra‟s work
Video: http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/cruelandtender/interviews.htm

69. Jo Spence

70. Nan Goldin
Photographs her friends and family. A lot of her work is
about gender politics.

71. Nadav Kander - www.nadavkander.com
His best shot, read the
article:
http://www.guar
dian.co.uk/artand
design/2008/nov/
27/photography
“More people live
along the
Yangtze river
than live in the
US. So, on my
first trip to
China, I wanted
to get a sense of
this by visiting
Shanghai and
Chongqing, a
massive city of
27 million
people, where
this image was
taken."

72. Tina Barney

73. David Goldblatt – On the Mines
South African photographer

74. Rineke Djikstra

75. Richard Avedon – In the American West

76. David Stewart – Teenage Pre-
occupation (2012)

77. Identification

78. Jeff Harris
• http://www.jeffharris.org/ - takes a portrait of himself every
day.

79. Robert Gumbert

80. Handswoth Self Portraits by Derek Bishton,
Brian Homer and John Reardon

81. Julia Margaret Cameron

82. Felix Nadar

83. Cindy Sherman

84. Taryn Simon - 'A Living Man Declared
Dead and Other Chapters'.
She has been photographing the descendents of 18 different bloodlines, each based around a
particular situation, exploring predetermination and notions of perpetual return. There are many
blank photographs for those who couldn‟t be photographed.

85. Edward Curtis
Curtis built an illustrious career documenting Native Americans in the
1900s. The images resonate 100 years later.

86. Marc Garanger – Femmes Algeriennes
1960

87. Alice Springs