documentary photography artist research, meanings and sub genres

Documentary PhotographyMeanings and sub genre’s

• 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 …

Documentary Photography

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

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

Early documentary was often for identification – documenting criminals

Or racial types

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

decisive and always candid

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

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

Documentary Landscape

Bernd and Hilla Becher

Simon Norfolk

‘The Perisher’ – submarine commander exercise area .2006

Fay Godwin

Bill Brandt

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

Charles Johnstone

• Thirty-four Basketball Courts.

Stephen Shore – uncommon places

Danilo Murru – What Remains

Exit Strategies by Jules Spinatsch

Rinko Kawauchi

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

Robert Walker

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

Stuart Whipps• Aladdin Houses, commission for an exhibition alongside Bill Brandt’s work.

. • http://www.stuartwhipps.com/index.php?/project/the-aladdin-houses/

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.

Richard Billingham - Zoo

Photojournalism

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

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

decisive and always candid

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’

Robert Capa

Eve Arnold

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

• 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?

Anastasia Taylor-Lind English/Swedish photographer

Dennis Stock

Don McCullin

Jerome Delay

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.

Rich LamI 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."

Sebastiao SalgadoA 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)

Don McCullin

Street Photography

Zhang Xiao - They IChinese photographer

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

Martin Parr Playas – various beaches in Latin America.

http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/essay/playas

Peter Dench

Joel Meyerwitz

Nick Turpin

Antonio Bolfo

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

Henri Cartier Bresson

Helen Levitt

Beat Strueli - Bangkok 02

Kate Hooper – night

Jun Abe – Citizens Japanese photographer

Social Documentary

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.

Tomasz Gudzowaty - Free RunningPolish photographer

Elinor carucci

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..."

Dorothea LangeBest 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.

James Russell Cant - Family

Brother Alone

Laura Cooper - Disaffected

Lewis Hine

Fistful of Dreams by Nishant Ratnakar

• Watch the multimedia project: http://nishantratnakar.com/portfolio/multi-media/fistful-of-dreams/

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

Richard Billingham

• Series of work: Rays a laugh

Diane Arbus – Untitled series

Bullfighter, Portugal. 1994Julie, Netherlands, 1994. One hour

after giving birth.

Video: http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/cruelandtender/interviews.htm

Rineke Djikstra’s work

Jo Spence

Nan Goldin Photographs her friends and family. A lot of her work is

about gender politics.

Nadav Kander - www.nadavkander.com

His best shot, read the article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/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."

Tina Barney

David Goldblatt – On the Mines South African photographer

Rineke Djikstra

Richard Avedon – In the American West

David Stewart – Teenage Pre-occupation (2012)

Identification

Jeff Harris

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

Robert Gumbert

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

Julia Margaret Cameron

Felix Nadar

Cindy Sherman

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.

Edward CurtisCurtis built an illustrious career documenting Native Americans in

the 1900s. The images resonate 100 years later.

Marc Garanger – Femmes Algeriennes 1960

Alice Springs