Photography as Documentary

Photography is documentary, because photography captures real life events. For instance the firs ever photograph taken for social purposes was the Great Chartist Meeting 1848. However the photographer is never invisible, because his point of view is subjective and cannot be ignored.
In many contexts the notion of a literal and objective record of ‘history’ is a limited illusion.  It ignores the entire cultural and social background against which the image was taken, just as it renders the photographer neutral, passive and invisible recorder of the scene. (Clarke:1997:145)

Written and visual account /Study of the tenements of New York. Revealing cultural ideologies of ethnicity, poverty and ‘the other’. Riis used this superficially as a tool for social reform, but made a lot of money lecturing to middle classes

Less about propaganda more about the human condition:

In Lewis Hines photography Russian immigrants are portrayed as poor etc. but with a steely dignity and honour - good cases for american citizenship.

He portrays togetherness and humanity and describes himself as a sociological photographer- child labour etc and his work does bring about real changes in the law.

The one photograph tha was discussed during the lecture stuck into my mind- it was the Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange (1936)

"I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made 5 exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her her name or her history…" Lange talked about the photographs. "She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. "

This really moved me and the photograph stuck in my mind.

Another Documentary Photograph that stood out to me was the  Shell Shocked Soldier by Don McCullin 1968.

Another really schoking photograph was People About to Be Shot By Robert Haebrle (1969). 

Forty years ago, black-and-white photographs of slaughtered women, children and old men in a Vietnamese village shocked the world -- or that portion of the world willing to believe American soldiers could gun down unarmed peasants and leave them to die in streets and ditches.

The Plain Dealer, in an international exclusive, was the first news outlet to publish the images of what infamously became known as the My Lai massacre, which had taken place on March 16, 1968.

"A clump of bodies," read the description on the front page of The Plain Dealer's Nov. 20, 1969, edition. At first some people were in denial about how these South Vietnamese civilians were killed, even after seeing the pictures. 

It was a very interesting lecture and I learned a lot about photography as documentary and about the concept of decisive moment.