Zemni Images

Photography, moving image, design and illustration of Linda Mayoux

Surveys

Category: Documentary

  • Surveys

    Alongside pictorial landscape photography during the later part of the 19th Century ‘topographic’ or ‘proto-documentary’ approaches arose making use of the ability of the camera to record external phenomena.  This coincided with a rapid rise in industry, imperialism and means of communication, notably the print media and telegraphy. The photographic process was believed to eliminate any subjectivity on the part of the photographer. Photographs provided a means to communicate, with unparalleled realism, the far-flung corners of the country and the world.

    BRITISH SURVEY MOVEMENT

    Anxiety and nostalgia for the countryside as industrialisation progressed led to attempts to record the disappearing countryside and communities:

    National Photographic Records Association established by Sir Benjamin Stone in 1897. Now held in the VandA

    John Thomson (1837-1921)

    Francis Frith (1822-98)

     UNITED STATES

    Photographers were commissioned by companies and entrepreneurs to document their industrial work as it encroached into the country, particularly more remote areas. 1868-1869 Andrew Joseph Russell was commissioned to document part of the Union Pacific Railroad. Carleton Watson produced technically accomplished and classically composed images for mining and lumber companies as well as the railroad company.

    This representative scheme…presents the possibility of a double salvation – a return to unspoiled innocence and an opportunity to profit from the violation of innocence (Snyder discussing Watkins’ images  in Mitchell ed 2002 p189 q Alexander 2013 p54)

    Timothy O’Sullivan’s (1840–82) images on the other hand ignores pictorial conventions and is bleaker and more challenging, representing the land as alien, inhospitable and unwelcoming.

    Ian Jeffrey (1981, p.60 q Alexander 2013 p 54) makes an interesting comparison to European traditions:

    “The surveyors chose high vantage points and uninterrupted lines of vision, and what they show appears at a distance, accessible to lines of sight alone. If their pictures have foregrounds they are marginal, or they begin at some distance away as though the camera registered its views at a remove from the earth. European landscapists, such as George Washington Wilson, Francis Bedford and William England, who were all active in these years, tended, by contrast, to mediate distant views by means of foreground detailing, seated figures and the like. American landscapes allow no such ease of access; they remain unapproachable, things seen across a gap, or even across a ravine as O’Sullivan’s picture of the Cañon de Chelle suggests… Perhaps in the face of such vast and unfamiliar places there was no alternative, no well-worn track or resting place which might make a viewer feel at home.”

    2.1 : ‘Territorial Photography’

  • Documentary photographers today

    Task

    Do your own research into the work and techniques of the Magnum agency photographers and include your findings in your learning log or blog.

    The list below represents a range of styles and approaches and has been selected to support your development and give  a feeling of the industry today.
    Look briefly at the website of each of the photographers to get an overall feel for the range of work that’s out there. Pick out five or six photographers whose work appeals to you (more if you have time) and analyse their approach:

    • What is the main strength of their practice?
    • What makes them different to other photographers working in a similar genre?
    • Where do your chosen photographers fall in the social documentary–photojournalism spectrum? Does this matter?

    Richard Billingham
    Briony Campbell
    Luc Delahaye
    Melanie Dornier
    David Gillanders
    Nadav Kandar
    Steve McCurry
    Mimi Mollica
    Zanele Muholi
    Nicholas Nixon
    Ingrid Pollard
    Brent Stirton
    Medford Taylor
    Ed Thomson
    Albrecht Tübke
    Donovan Wylie

  • The Decisive Moment

    The idea of the decisive moment is underpinned by the notion that this is something that emerges from the scene, i.e. it happens independently of the viewer. Magnum stressed the ‘moment’ as being crucial to the interpretation and communication of the image.

    Henri Cartier Bresson

    It could be argued, though, that the decisive moment is effectively created by the observer who decides that it is in some way ‘decisive’. Moments only become ‘decisive’ through the act of observing and analysing.

    What is ‘decisive’ depends on interpretation and meaning. Different moments of coincidence and contrast have different meanings.

    There are also generally a continuum of decisive moments, corresponding to a multitude of observers. Different observers will produce different decisive moments.

    The concept of the ‘moment’ raises questions about the photographer’s motivation and integrity.

    • Is it acceptable to engineer this moment or should a photographer wait to capture it in its honesty and purity?

    Sources:

    Simon Bainbridge 2011 Hereford Photography Festival

    Graham Clarke, The Photograph (pp.145–87). Discussion of how Cartier-Bresson, Werner Bischof, Robert Capa and others put their personal style into an image, for example in Capa’s war photography. ’the moment’ and social class as a motivating issue for the documentary photographer.

    Importance of technology

    Getting the moment is still a challenge for modern photographers but current practice is based on portability, with a return to the smaller but very high-quality digital camera. Much of Magnum’s style and the numerous ‘moments’ they captured were delivered through a technology breakthrough – the Leica 35mm rangefinder camera. The Leica gave flexibility and the ability to be inconspicuous, unlike the full- and half-plate cameras that had been used before and which involved setting up a tripod and a wood or metal 5×4 camera. Quick and instant, the Leica was made to capture the moment. The camera itself changed the photographers’ practice and delivered an ability to move quickly and get in close. (Capa later used Contax and Rollei cameras, but not until after the Spanish Civil War.)

  • Dorothea Lange

    Lange was finishing a month’s trip photographing migrant farmhands for what was then the Resettlement Administration. In 1960, Lange gave this account of the experience:

    “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 five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. 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.”
    (From Popular Photography, Feb. 1960, quoted in Wells, p.42)

    The six images in the series were made using a Graflex camera. The original negatives are 4×5” film. This type of camera needs and demands careful composition and is one sheet of film for one exposure. There were other children and a husband in the family but Lange moved these out of the image
    in an effort to construct the connotations she wanted. For example, the image may have recalled the traditional iconography of the Madonna and child in the mind of some

    pp.39–49 of your course reader. This is an in-depth look at the cultural impact of Lange’s Migrant Mother and the FSA project, examining the image in context from the original through to the Black Panther version of the sixties. This is essential reading and expands on what has been introduced here.

    Getty Museum film about Dorothea Lange’s documentary work:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQPS3KI5-yM

  • Early Social Documentary

    To Do

    What moved or motivated the photographer to get hold of his or her camera and get involved?
    Where did it start? What was its purpose?

    Many of the early practitioners of documentary photography remain quite famous today within visual culture for the way that they contributed to the development of film and cinema.

    Early Social Documentary

    Note was not ‘objective’ – long shutter speeds meant was empty. Often moved objects for better effects.

    United States

    Alfred Steiglitz

    Roger Fenton

    Matthew Brady

    Jacob Riis

    Lewis Hine

    The FSA project

    In 1935 the Farm Security Administration (FSA) project was set up to document the experiences of peasant farmers and sharecroppers and rural poverty in the Mid West of America. Led by Roy Stryker and funded by the US government, the project’s team of 17 photographers produced some 80,000 images from 1935–44. Some of these images were made available via newspapers and magazines to a target audience of middle-class city dwellers to help justify the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal, an economic programme designed to transform America’s economy in the wake of the Great Depression.

    The FSA project saw the social documentary genre, with its enquiring insight, recording for posterity and mission to elicit change, begin to cross over into photojournalism or editorial photography. The paid commissioned photographer began to emerge, as opposed to the independent and individually motivated social documentarist. The emerging genre photographer may have had an altruistic motivation but needed the pay to make it happen.

    Prominent amongst the FSA project’s image-makers were Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks, the first black American photographer to work for Life magazine.

    UK

    Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79)

    Frank Meadow Sutcliffe (1853–1941)

     Henry Peach Robinson (1830–1901)

    Modernism

    Henri Cartier Bresson

    Magnum Photos

  • Lewis Hine

    Source: Wikipedia

    Lewis Wickes Hine (1874–1940)  was an American sociologist and photographer. After his father died in an accident, he began working and saved his money for a college education. Hine studied sociology at the University of Chicago, Columbia University and New York University.

    Hine used his camera as a tool for social reform.Both Riis and Hine made their social reforming images more widely available through magic lantern shows, arguably the YouTube of the time, with the aim of reaching a middle-class audience with some political influence. Whereas Riis presented the urban poor as helpless victims, Hine was committed to social change. Hine was more than sympathetic to the cause and used the setting of the people in his images in a way that endorsed the points he and the committee were making. He wanted to see labour law reform and felt that he could help achieve this by shedding some light on the plight and daily struggle of previously ‘invisible’ people like immigrants and child workers.

    He became a full-time photographer when he was hired by the National Child Labor Committee in 1908 to travel around America for four years documenting and providing evidence of the working and social conditions of children. His photographs were instrumental in changing the child labour laws in the United States.

    Hine was also aware of the dangerous nature of the high rise race – the pace that buildings were going up in New York and the number of fatalities that were involved. The industry guideline at the time was that there should be no more than one death per floor – the Empire State Building has 102 floors. Whilst his images have an almost relaxed feel, the stark background and the drop below reveal the danger that these workers were exposed to.

    During the Great Depression, he again worked for the Red Cross, photographing drought relief in the American South, and for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), documenting life in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. He also served as chief photographer for the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) National Research Project, which studied changes in industry and their effect on employment. Hine was also a member of the faculty of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School.

    The Library of Congress holds more than five thousand Hine photographs, including examples of his child labor and Red Cross photographs, his work portraits, and his WPA and TVA images. Other large institutional collections include nearly ten thousand of Hine’s photographs and negatives held at the George Eastman House and almost five thousand NCLC photographs at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

    In 1936, Hine was selected as the photographer for the National Research Project of the Works Projects Administration, but his work there was never completed. The last years of his life were filled with professional struggles due to loss of government and corporate patronage. Few people were interested in his work, past or present, and Hine lost his house and applied for welfare. He died at age 66 on November 3, 1940 at Dobbs Ferry Hospital in Dobbs Ferry, New York, after an operation.

    After Lewis Hine’s death his son Corydon donated his prints and negatives to the Photo League, which was dismantled in 1951. The Museum of Modern Art was offered his pictures but did not accept them; but the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York did.

     Notable photographs

    •  Child Labor: Girls in Factory (1908)
    • Breaker Boys (1910)
    • Young Doffers in the Elk Cotton Mills (1910)
    • Steam Fitter (1920)
    • Workers, Empire State Building (1931)
    • Two Boys Working on a
    • Loom in Massachusetts
    • The Spinning Room at Carver Mill.

    Documentary film about Lewis Hine’s involvement with the child labour reform movement

    Lewis Hine pdf

    Google Images

  • Jacob Riis

    Danish-born Jacob Riis (1849–1914) was a pioneer in social documentary photography which included identifiable people and was one of the first photographers to use the new technology of magnesium flash. Riis photographed the flop houses where people were stacked at night
    on every available horizontal space. Again these were usually immigrants and Riis showed the squalor they inhabited in his book How the Other Half Lives (1890) which featured the infamous Mulberry tenements in New York.

    For a New York Times (2008) article on Riis visit:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/opinion/12tue4.html?th&emc=th

    Watch a 10-minute film clip about Riis and his use of the new magnesium flash:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EACoIbokOcc

  • Shirley Baker

    Images on Mary  Evans Picture Library

    Google Images

    Shirley Baker, (1932-2014), was one of the rare female photographers who chronicled life in the north of England from the 1950s onwards. Her street photography was in the ‘flaneuse’ tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, whom she named as influences. Unposed snapshots of people going about their business were juxtaposed with telling graffiti. She had a great eye for composition that has been under-appreciated next to her compassionate documentation and concern for social injustice, with a particular focus on women and children.

    From the 60s, Baker taught photography at Salford College of Art and would always carry her camera modestly stowed in her handbag. In free periods, she began a body of work, spanning 15 years, of the social housing in the area that was being demolished as people lived in semi-derelict slums. Shirley’s work in Salford and Manchester (shot mainly between 1960 and 1973) captured a time of rapid social and economic change in the lives of working class people in Manchester and Salford.”It was a time of much change: people were turfed out of their homes and some squatted in old buildings, trying to hang on to the traditional life they knew.”

    Slum clearances, started in the 1930s, resumed in earnest in the 1950s, and in the twenty years between 1955 and 1975, around 1.3 million homes were demolished nationwide. When Shirley Baker began photographing the streets of her native Salford, it seemed that no-one was interested in recording the human story of these soon-to-be demolished communities. Old ladies sitting on doorsteps in a row of condemned houses, men with handcarts searching for refuse to be recycled, children playing inventively among rubble and abandoned cars. That she chose to preserve these moments on film, now seems like the only perceptive response to a vanishing environment. It was not until 1989 that her first book, Street Photographs: Manchester and Salford, was published and Baker began to be more widely appreciated.

    In addition to her work in Manchester and Salford, she spent a considerable amount of time capturing Camden Market at the height of punk. Her work was often humorous and she added over the years to collections such as owners who look like their dogs and people falling asleep in public.

    Remembering the work of Shirley Baker Phil Coomes  BBC

    Life

    (from Guardian Obituary)

    Born in Salford, to Alec, a furniture maker, and Josephine, a housewife, Shirley had an identical twin, Barbara, who would also become an artist. They both went as boarders to Penrhos College, in Colwyn Bay, from where during the second world war they were evacuated to Chatsworth House, in Derbyshire. Their parents were unfazed by their daughters pursuing the arts professionally after they left school.

    Baker married Tony Levy, a GP, in 1957, and the couple eventually settled in Wilmslow, Cheshire, where their daughter, Nan, was born in 1963. Baker never displayed any of her photographs around their home, although she did like to take pictures of the family. This perhaps summed up the private, almost secretive, nature of her work.

    When Baker studied  photography at Manchester College of Technology, there was only one other woman on the course. On finishing, Baker’s plan was to work in-house at a company, recording processes and producing promotional images. She started at Courtaulds fabric manufacturers before freelancing for other businesses and doing some journalism, including for the Guardian. Baker encountered difficulties getting a press card, so was unable to pursue photojournalism seriously, and believed she was only given the assignments deemed unsuitable for men. From the 60s, Baker taught photography at Salford College of Art.

    Baker kept photographing in later life and completed an MA in critical history and the theory of photography at the University of Derby in 1995. She joined the Mary Evans Picture Library in 2008, and in 2012 had solo shows in Oldham and Salford, with another planned for 2015 at the Photoraphers’ Gallery in London. She was always pleased when people who featured in her work came along to exhibitions. At the opening of the Lowry Gallery in 2000, the Queen not only viewed Baker’s photographs but met some of Baker’s subjects, too.

     

     

  • Documentary typologies for Eugenics

    Documentary typologies for Eugenics

    There was widespread interest in eugenics in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Eugenics is based on the idea that some characteristics are ‘better’ than others and that you can improve the human gene pool by encouraging reproduction between people with desirable genetic traits and discouraging reproduction amongst those with less desirable traits. Clearly the belief that some groups were inherently genetically inferior could be used as a justification for all kinds of behaviour, from colonial rule to modern day racism.

    Scientific Racism: The Eugenics of Social Darwinism.  one-hour BBC4 documentary

    Implicit in eugenics was the idea of classification or objective measuring – pigeon-holing people into particular groups according to their genetic characteristics and treating them accordingly. The Victorians, for example, believed that you could identify criminal ‘types’ through their facial characteristics.

    Photography was adopted as a useful tool to facilitate classification.It was manipulated and used by racists and propagandists  to endorse a ‘science’ to the public.  Such photography effectively dehumanised its subjects and turned them into research objects although its creators might have argued that it was simply documentary – showing what was there. It also served a journalistic function, publicising and legitimising racist organisations and ‘celebrities’ like Margaret Sanger.

    In America the eugenics movement was well funded and they produced plenty of indicative material.

    Francis Galton photographed immigrants as they arrived in America, often at Ellis Island. He identified 46 different races through measurement and through facial characteristics on photographs.  Charts were compiled to show what to expect visually of the Negroid Insane Criminal and the Negroid Criminal.  Margaret Sanger’s ‘Negro Project’ sought to restrict the black population, and thus improve the American population, through ‘planned parenthood’ masquerading as health care and family planning.

    For more on Malthusian eugenics and the Harlem Project,
    visit:

    The Nazis took this to the extreme by exterminating groups who failed to match the Aryan ideal – Jews, black people, homosexuals, Roma, people with learning disability – and eugenics fell into disfavour after World War II as a result.

    The Baldwin lecture and a perspective on post genome race:

    http://www.princeton.edu/president/speeches/20100309/

  • Cindy Sherman

    Photographer Cindy Sherman (born 1954) initially used herself as model in many of her works.

    She has taken a stance against sexism and stereotyping since her early photo-series Centerfolds or Horizontals (1981). This examined the poses in men’s or pornographic magazines of the time.
    The images were rejected by the commissioning publication  ArtForum as reinforcing stereotypes.

    Sherman continued to challenge the ways in which women are seen and valued. In the 1992 Sex Pictures she used latex medical body parts to re-create poses seen in pornography. These images mimicked pornography whilst at the same time de-eroticising it, forcing the viewer to confront their attitudes to the female body and pornography and raising issues of voyeurism.
    interview on Sex Pictures with Cindy Sherman

    Sherman discusses the characters she has assumed in her work:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiszC33puc0&feature=related

    Sherman’s History Portraits (1989–90) parodied some of the portraits of women made by the Old Masters and others,
    highlighting the ways in which women have been objectified.

    Untitled (Balenciaga) (2008) explores the world of fashion and its victims. See:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?=MtATCPCC8b8&feature=relmfu

    Vimeo offerings that show Sherman’s early untitled film stills and a later set of Sherman characters – the rich and famous:
    http://vimeo.com/2176377
    http://vimeo.com/35780957

    Clowns (2003-04) was Sherman’s first major piece to
    be created digitally, hence the garish colour palette.
    The imagery examines how make-up transforms the
    individual and questions the complex emotional
    state that lies beneath the painted smile. It is also an
    investigation into what a clown is, why people choose
    to do it.

    For Sherman talking about Clowns and her work, visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCkSQOaCf7s&feature=BFa&list=PL2DBA1E2449F0FDF2&lf=results_video