Truth in Images

Documentary Photography:The Creation of Images to Tell a News

Story

Documentary Photography

• Separated from photojournalism, street, or celebrity photography by the quality that the photographer attempts to produce truthful, objective, and usually candid photography of a particular subject, most often pictures of people.

• Historically, these photographs meant to accurately describe otherwise unknown, hidden, forbidden, or difficult-to-access places or circumstances and date to the earliest daguerreotype and colotype "surveys" of the ruins of the Near East, Egypt, and the American wilderness areas.

• The genre quickly adapted itself to war situations and exposés on the need for social reform.

Civil War: “Harvest of Death”

Timothy H. O’Sullivan’s “The Harvest of Death," depicting dead soldiers from the Battle of Gettysburg.

“View in a Wheat Field”

“Slaughter Pen”

Urban Poverty How the Other Half Lives

Jacob Riis: “A Plank for a Bed” 1890

Lewis Hine: “Glassworks, Midnight” 1908

Children in Poverty, 1890

Dorothea Lange

Iconic Image Remastered

Original snapshot

World War II: Robert Capa “D Day”

Vietnam: 1972

Images of Contemporary Family: Sally Mann

Diane Arbus