The History of Photography

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The History of Photography

The content of the work

Introduction

1. The Invention of Photography

2. The Impact of Modern Technologies

3. Photography as a Documentary form

4. Photography as a Fine Art form

Conclusion

List of Literature

Annex 1

Annex 2

Annex 3

Introduction

For centuries images have been projected onto surfaces. Artists used the camera obscura and camera lucida to trace scenes as early as the 16th century. These early cameras did not fix an image, but only projected images from an opening in the wall of a darkened room onto a surface, turning the room into a large pinhole camera. The phrase camera obscura literally means darkened room.

Photography started with a camera and the basic idea has been around since about the 5th Century B.C. For centuries these were just ideas until an Iraqi scientist developed something called the camera obscura sometime in the 11th Century. Even then, the camera did not actually record images, they simply projected them onto another surface. The images were also upside down. The first camera obscuras used a pinhole in a tent to project an image from outside the tent into the darkened area. It took until the 17th Century for camera obscuras to be made small enough to be portable and basic lenses to be added.

The first photograph was an image produced in 1826 by the French inventor Nicephore Niepce on a polished pewter plate covered with a petroleum derivative called bitumen of Judea. Produced with a camera, the image required an eight-hour exposure in bright sunshine. Niepce then began experimenting with silver compounds based on a Johann Heinrich Schultz discovery in 1724 that a silver and chalk mixture darkens when exposed to light Photographic media - traditional and digital photography, film, television, video, and the internet - dominate global art and communication today. And painting no longer enjoys anything like the preeminent position it held in mid-nineteenth century Europe. Ever since painter Paul Delaroche's purported exclamation at the birth of photography - “From today, painting is dead!” - art critics have been predicting the end of painting. Indeed, the invention of photography coincides historically with the onset of the never-ending end and "crisis” of painting - the crisis that spurred the radical formal innovations of modern painting from Manet to Jackson Pollock. Although it is a mistake to believe that photography single-handedly caused the transformation from classical to modernist painting, from mimetic illusion to experimental modes of realism and abstraction, the historical coincidence of the birth of photography and the crisis of painting is far from innocent. From Daguerre and Talbot's public reports of their discoveries in 1839, the histories of painting and photography have been inextricably tangled. Our job is to grasp the creative historical dynamics of the relationship along with the significance and scale of the nineteenth-century revolution in art technology. In the broadest sense, all photography not intended purely as a means of artistic expression might be considered `documentary', the photograph a visual document of an event, place, object, or person, providing evidence of a moment in time. Social or other information can be extracted from vast numbers of early photographs:

- for example, those assembled by Queen Victoria and Tsar Nicholas II to record aspects of their reigns;

- industrial collections like the Krupp archive;

- Thomas Annan's Glasgow series;

- country house photography;

- many views (especially of towns);

- early crime scene photographs;

- the snapshots of amateurs like J.H. Lartigue and Alice Austen.

Even some photographs conceived by their creators as primarily expressive have been used later as documents:

- for example, the work of pictorialists such as Alfred Stieglitz (notably The Steerage (1907));

- the Photo-Secessionists' realistic images;

- or the work of Paul Strand and others in straight photography.

The development of new reproduction methods for photography provided impetus for the next era of documentary photography, in the late 1880s and 1890s, and reaching into the early decades of the 20th century. This period decisively shifted documentary from antiquarian and landscape subjects to that of the city and its crises. The refining of photogravure methods, and then the introduction of halftone reproduction around 1890 made low cost mass-reproduction in newspapers, magazines and books possible. The figure most directly associated with the birth of this new form of documentary is the journalist and urban social reformer Jacob Riis. Riis was a New York police-beat reporter who had been converted to urban social reform ideas by his contact with medical and public-health officials, some of whom were amateur photographers. Riis used these acquaintances at first to gather photographs, but eventually took up the camera himself. His books, most notably How the Other Half Lives of 1890 and The Children of the Slums of 1892, used those photographs, but increasingly he also employed visual materials from a wide variety of sources, including police "mug shots" and photojournalistic images.

Historians often regard photographs as a critical form of documentary evidence that hold up a mirror to past events. Public and scholarly faith in the realism of the photographic image is grounded in a belief that a photograph is a mechanical reproduction of reality. Susan Sontag captured the essence of that faith in her monumental reverie On Photography when she wrote “Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it”. And in arranging these pieces to form historical mosaics, teachers and scholars have rarely paused to submit photographs to the usual tests applied to other forms of documentary evidence. For example, we have been trained to factor in the subjectivity of the author when we read autobiographical writing. But when we encounter an historical photograph, “shot for the record”, we often treat the image as the product of a machine and therefore an objective artifact.

Since they are regarded as inherently truthful, photographs are frequently used to illustrate history textbooks. Publishers, not authors, usually select images to accompany history texts, and the images are used merely as illustrations and not as historical documents in their own right. As a consequence, today's history students miss out on the opportunity to explore the fascinating visual dimensions of the past, to play detective with a mountain of photographic images that far outnumber traditional written documents. This essay seeks to lay out strategies for subjecting photographs to the same tests we apply to written documents when we use them as historical evidence. Exercising such scrutiny, students can bring to light the narratives hidden within images that are not always examined, despite our traditional belief that “a picture is worth a thousand words”.

Photography, as compared to other mediums such as painting and drawing, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Its discovery was derived from what scientists already knew about the ability of light to change certain substances. It was during the 16th century that it became known that when exposed to light salts of silver would darken. Even modern day photographs possess a silver halide base. Louis-Jacques-Mande-Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot were:

- the first to introduce two successful methods of generating photographic images;

- the daguerreotype and photogenic drawing.

"Daguerreotypes were direct positive images on copper plates coated with a thin layer of silver". Both processes took a while to be perfected. It was in 1840 that the daguerreotype process was improved so that it was now possible to photograph human beings due to a reduced exposure time. This process is known as calotype. In 1851 the waxed paper negative process was introduced which was an expansion of the calotype process. This allowed for the photographing of landscapes and architecture. Then came the emergence of wet collodion photography which was the ability to produce a negative on glass, this ended the production of daguerreotypes and photogenic drawing.

It is not merely a mechanically reproducible medium with many functional purposes and objectives, but it is also an art form created by a more modern and methodical type of artist (the photographer) who wants to depict the world in a different way than the painter or the sculptor. The artist gives us in a sense a kind of coated reality of his construction that can only be transmitted through a photograph.

1. The Invention of Photography

Before the invention of photography, images were painted by artists or were duplicated by using printing plates. An image made by a painter was unique of its kind and copies of it could not be produced. Similarly, printing was done by hand and it required a lot of time and skill. The need remained for a process to be invented that could produce images of fine quality as well as to duplicate them. This was achieved in the 19th century with the invention of photography.

A photographic image requires 3 elements. A light source, a light tight box to capture an image, and a photosensitive material to preserve the image. A light source and a light tight box called the camera obscura was used for centuries as an artists aid to make drawings. Camera obscura was able to produce an image but the need remained of a process to preserve this image. Many scientists and camera obscura users underwent a number of experiments in this regard but failed to do so.

In 19th century a Frenchmen Joseph Niepce was able to capture and preserve the first photograph of history. His process involved exposing the image to a plate covered by bitumen of Judea, which hardens by light. The plate was then washed in lavender thus removing the soft unexposed parts. Niepce called his invention heliographs meaning sun drawings, which required eight hours of exposure.

Later in Paris Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre invented a similar process called daguerreotype. It involved the use of a silver plate sensitized by iodide and then exposing it in the camera obscura, and then the plate was kept on mercury solution and finally fixed by salt solution. The daguerreotype produced a much clearer picture than the previous heliograph and the exposure time was also reduced. Although both these methods were similar but they had there negative points as well. First of all the image made was one of its kind and copies of it could not be made since the plate was exposed once. Secondly the photography is the art of recording images by means of light on a sensitive photographic film or an image sensor. It can be pursued as a hobby or as a profession. The term photography was used for the first time by John Herschel in 1839. Photography is derived from the Greek words, photos meaning light, and graphien meaning to draw. Hence, the collective meaning of photography is drawing with light. Though the actual photography originated in the 19th century, the idea has been in existence since the ancient times. The credit for inventing modern photography goes to many scientists and other personalities who contributed a lot in the field of photography. Let's discuss in brief about the invention of photography.

NIEPCE Joseph Nicephore (March, 7, 1765, Chalon-sur-Saone, France - July, 5, 1833) was a French inventor, and one of the creators of photography. He was the first to find a way to fix an image produced by a camera obscura (around 1820) using bitumen cutback as the photosensitive substance (heliography). He cooperated with L. Daguerre since 1829.

Nicephore Niepce was born to a rich family. His father was the king's councilor and his mother - a daughter of a well-known lawyer. In his childhood Niepce showed a great interest in the invention process but was preparing for an ecclesiastical career he quit it in 1792 to become an army officer. Niepce left the army in the first period of the French revolution because of his royalist sympathies. When Napoleon came into power Niepce returned into the army and took part in Sardinian and Italian military operations. He retired due to health problems and was a statesman in Nizza for a few years. In 1801 he returned home to Chalon and together with his brother Claude devoted the rest of his life to scientific investigations.

Before 1813 Niepce had for many years been occupied with increasing the quality of planographic printing, lithography, invented by A. Zenefelder in 1796. The heavy Bavarian limestone used by Zenefelder as a printing form was replaced by Niepce with a sheet of tin. His son made color drawings with a bold pencil on it. Niepce himself could not draw and after his son had been drafted he started experiments with silver salts. He aimed at making the light "to draw". The target was achieved with the help of bitumen cutback attenuated in animal oil. He deposited this solution onto a plate made of glass, copper and tin-lead alloy and exposed it in a camera obscura for several hours. Consequently, the first "photo paper" was made of asphalt. When the image on the coating hardened and became visible with the naked eye Niepce processed the plate with an acid in the dark room. The acid dissolved the coating over the lines of the image covered from light during the exposure process and left soft and soluble (other sources say the asphalt was washed out with lavender oil and kerosene). After that an engraver engraved clear lines, covered the plate with ink and printed the needed quantity of copies as it had been done before from any etched or engraved plates. The result of this was an engraving created not by an artist but by light - heliography (after the Greek "of the sun"). Niepce obtained his first stable image from a camera obscura in 1822. But the only surviving heliographic image is one from 1826, from the time when Niepce begun to use the alloy of tin and lead instead of copper and zinc plates. The exposure took 8 hours.

In such a way Niepce, for the first time in the history, managed to fix an exact image of an object "drawn" by light. In order to do it he used one of the photo sensitive materials - bitumen cutback. But he also had to use the work of an engraver. This kind of heliogravire was only the initial stage in the invention of photography. Heliogravires were not very clear. Niepce invented an aperture for correction of the image defects arising from the camera obscura open lens.

In 1827 Niepce met Louis Daguerre - the rich and prosperous owner of the Paris Diorama who offered him cooperation. The 64 year old Niepce, in delining health and in need for funds for his investigations, signed a 10-year contract with Daguerre in 1829 to develop the opened by Niepce method of "fixing nature images without an artist". There was a term clause in the contract according to which Niepce' son Isidore would become an heir in case of Niepce death before the end of the contract. Niepce sent to Daguerre a detailed description of his heliographic process and showed the technology. Daguerre had to come to Chalon to see it. They never met after that: each of them worked over his own invention independently. It is obvious that the art of photography began with the invention of camera. The invention of pinhole camera can be traced back to the 4th and 5th century BCE, and can be attributed to well-known philosophers, Mo Ti, Aristotle and Euclid. The ideas were put into practice in the 11th century by an Iraqi scientist, who invented the first camera obscura. The working of the camera obscura was such that, a tent with a pinhole was used to project inverted images on another surface in a darkened room (placed outside the tent). Hence, the room acted as a pinhole camera and there was only projection of images without actually recording them.

The portable camera obscura along with additional lenses was developed in the 17th century. Permanent image or photograph, as we call, was invented by Joseph Nicephore Niepce, a French physicist, in 1825. Prior to this, he made the first paper negative in 1816. Niepce used camera obscura for recording image on a polished pewter plate, coated with bitumen (a petroleum derivative). This was the first image that retained for a longer period. Later on, the experiment of Niepce, in partnership with Louis Daguerre, a French painter, led to the development of daguerreotype plates for creating permanent images.

The basic principle used in daguerreotype was that, an image taken on a silver-coated copper plate was exposed twice - first in iodine vapor, then followed by light exposure. Daguerre also discovered the phenomena of creating latent image by further exposing the image to mercury fumes. By 1839, he announced the invention of daguerreotypes to public. Daguerreotypes were popular till the late 1850, before the invention of emulsion plates.

In late 1839, William Henry Fox Talbot, an English scientist, who developed the process of generating positive images from paper negatives, invented the glass negative. While doing so, he adopted the idea of fixing pictures from John Herschel, an astronomer, who in 1819, mentioned the use of hyposulphite of soda (now sodium thiosulfate) as a suitable dissolving substance for silver salts. By 1841, Fox Talbot introduced the calotype or talbotype by using silver iodide as a coating substance for paper. After refining Fox Talbot's process, George Eastman developed the technology for chemical films, which is used till today. He founded the Eastman Kodak Company, and is honored as the inventor of roll film.

Well! This is, in brief, a highlight with respect to the invention of photography. While speaking about the inventors, we can mention the names of four pioneers, namely, John Herschel, Niepce, Daguerre and Talbot, who with their path breaking contributions, led to the development of modern-day photography.

2. The Impact of Modern Technologies

Photography is the process of making pictures by means of the action of light. Light patterns reflected or emitted from objects are recorded onto a sensitive medium or storage chip through a timed exposure. The process is done through mechanical, chemical or digital devices known as cameras.

The word comes from the Greek words цщт phos (”light”), and гсбцйт graphis (”stylus”, “paintbrush”), together meaning “drawing with light” or “representation by means of lines” or “drawing”. Traditionally the product of photography has been called a photograph. The term photo is an abbreviation many people also call them pictures. In digital photography, the term image has begun to replace photograph. The term image is traditional in geometric optics.

The earliest cameras were simple devices that did not capture an image but merely projected an image onto a surface. It was basically a large pinhole camera in the form of a darkened room or booth. These were used by artists as early as the 16th century. These were known as Camera Obscuras. They then improved this method by replacing the pinhole with a telescope lens. By the 17th century they even made this system portable in the form of sedan chairs. In 1727 the first photo-sensitive compound was discovered completely by accident by Professor J. Schulze. The mixture consisted chalk, nitric acid, and silver in a flask and the professor noticed that the side of the flask exposed to sunlight, darkened (Tom Ang.: 2001).

After that many significant events happened that resulted in the cameras we have today. These include Nicephore Niepce merging the Camera Obscura with photosensitive paper in 1816 and then creating a permanent image in 1826. This image was exposed for eight hours and the lens was facing the window of his estate in central France. In 1829 Niepce paired up with Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre to improve on the current techniques used. Daguerre's most important discovery came two years after the death of his partner in 1835. He discovered silver iodine was more sensitive to the light and needed much less exposure time to create a fixed image. And then in 1837 he figured out a way stop the image darkening over time.

The development of the 35-mm or "candid" camera by Oskar Barnack of the Ernst Leitz company, first marketed in 1925, made documentarians infinitely more mobile and less conspicuous, while the manufacture of faster black-and-white film enabled them to work without a flash in situations with a minimum of light. Color film for transparencies (slides) was introduced in 1935 and color negative film in 1942. Portable lighting equipment was perfected, and in 1947 the Polaroid Land camera, which could produce a positive print in seconds, was placed on the market. All of these technological advances granted the photojournalist enormous and unprecedented versatility. The advent of large-circulation picture magazines, such as Life (begun 1936) and Look (begun 1937), provided an outlet and a vast audience for documentary work. At the same time a steady stream of convulsive national and international events provided a wealth of material for the extended photo-essay, the documentarian's natural mode. One of these was the Great Depression of the 1930, which proved to be the source of an important body of documentary work. Under the leadership of Roy Stryker, the photographic division of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) began to make an archive of images of America during this epoch of crisis. Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, and Dorothea Lange of the FSA group photographed the cultural disintegration generated by the Depression and the concomitant disappearance of rural lifestyles. With the coming of World War II photographers, including Margaret Bourke-White, Edward Steichen, W. Eugene Smith, Lee Miller, and Robert Capa, documented the global conflict. The war was a stimulus to photography in other ways as well. From the stress analysis of metals to aerial surveillance, the medium was a crucial tool in many areas of the war effort, and, in the urgency of war, numerous technological discoveries and advances were made that ultimately benefited all photographers.

Two recent releases of the latest and greatest compact cameras have introduced some interesting new technology. In addition to the usual advances in auto focus speed, number of megapixels and ISO performance, we have some new and groundbreaking features to consider. The stand out feature here is the `smart' technology that works with us during the photo-taking process to record our photograph as well as a few of its own for us to consider. By recording 20 photographs before and after you actually fully depress the shutter button and then recommending your best five to you (how does it know?), you are offered a variety of photographs of `the moment' to choose from. Purists will worry that we are not actually photographing `the moment' ourselves anymore: the shot that correlates to the moment we pushed the shutter button is not necessarily the photograph we will use and claim as `ours' as this was, quite possibly, taken before or after our best effort by the camera. Of course the idea is harmless enough, it's designed so that you are less likely to miss a good moment, such as the changing expression on someone's face, by recording this expression over a series of images which affords us a choice of the best. This technology will also mean that the auto focus must be much faster than previous cameras where waiting for it to lock focus was sometimes like waiting for paint dry. A welcome improvement, indeed.

Through immense advancement of technology, photography equipment have evolved at such blindingly quick pace that a camera that rolled out in production a month ago would smoke any cameras produced three years ago. Much thanks and praises to pixel-peepers and measure-bators, we have cleaner and cleaner high ISO performance, faster frames per second continuous shooting, and higher megapixel resolution being squeezed out from the black little box we are so fond of calling, the camera. So is technology necessarily improving photography? I am not referring to the gear and tools only, because cameras and lenses alone do not fully define the whole equation of photography. Yes, we have better and more powerful camera release after release, but the core of photography, the essence of what it used to be has been eroded. Lets not do the comparison too much between the film and digital age (gosh when will this debate end) but I am looking closer to the occurrences more relevant within the past 5-6 years of DSLR photography development. The camera these days are so intelligent, you can hardly get anything wrong with a wide variety of automatic controlled settings at your disposal. There are the ever so convenient scene modes, if you are shooting portraits, just select portrait-mode, if you are shooting landscape, there is even a pre-set for that. If you really feel so lazy, just set the camera to full auto. I noticed a trend of many new-comers to photography merrily snapping their cameras away without even the slightest thought of lighting considerations, the composition and the subject content in the photograph itself.

They don't really care if their photographs carry any significant messages, or how would different parameters such as narrower aperture or different white balance setting would affect the outcome of their photographs. They just want to snap. They pay little attention to what is happening before clicking the shutter button. DSLR these days are so “perfect” that it is really difficult to screw things up. I-Auto, with Auto ISO control, with the 1000000 points continuous tracking AF system.

Gone were the days when new photographers learned meticulously everything from the basics, starting with manual controls of the exposure (setting aperture, shutter speed and ISO combination manually) and also doing manual focus to understand how the focusing of the camera actually works. These days, the finger does more work in clicking the shutter button in trigger happy mode than the brain. So the question arises, who are smarter photographer or his camera? Are you the photographer, or the camera? Perhaps in the future, the word photographer will be replaced with “camera-man” instead, more fitting because it is the man that just clicks the camera, not a man doing photography with a camera.

3. Photography as a Documentary form

Photography has gained the interest of scientists and artists from its inception. Scientists have used photography record and study movements, such as Edward Muybridge's study of human and animal locomotion (1887). Artists are equally interested by these aspects but also try to explore avenues other than the photo-mechanical representation of reality, such as the pictorialist movement. Military, police and security forces use photography for surveillance, recognition and data storage. Photography is used to preserve memories of favourites and as a source of entertainment.

The use of photography to document the need for reform began, modestly, in the mid-19th century. When Henry Mayhew began an investigation into the lives of the English labouring poor, originally published in the Morning Chronicle and subsequently as London Labour and the London Poor (1851), he engaged the daguerreotypist Richard Beard (1801-85) to do a series of `character studies' of the various `types' of the working poor, images which became the basis of the engraved illustrations in the book. Beard, a businessman rather than a photographer, had immediately grasped the potential of Daguerre's invention, and purchased the exclusive right to use the process in England, establishing `daguerrean galleries' in London in 1841. However, the images of London labourers were only a minor part of the work of one of those galleries, and were not widely circulated or seen. And photography played only a minor role in the investigative and reforming process. The term documentary applied to photography antedates the mode or genre itself. Photographs meant to accurately describe otherwise unknown, hidden, forbidden, or difficult-to-access places or circumstances date to the earliest daguerreotype and calotype "surveys" of the ruins of the Near East, Egypt, and the American wilderness areas. Nineteenth century archaeologist John Beasly Greene, for example, traveled to Nubia in the early 1850 to photograph the major ruins of the region. One early documentation project was the French Missions Heliographiques organized by the official Commission des Monuments historiques to develop an archive of France's rapidly disappearing architectural and human heritage the project included such photographic luminaries as Henri Le Secq, Edouard Denis Baldus, and Gustave Le Gray.

By contrast, when a later journalist-reformer, Adolphe Smith, undertook another study of the London poor in the 1870, he collaborated directly with John Thomson in Street Life in London (1877-8), in which 37 case histories of various occupational `types' were illustrated by Woodburytype reproductions of Thomson's photographs. Compelled by his use of the wet-plate process to pose his subjects rather than capturing them informally, Thomson, who also photographed London high society, has been criticized for sentimentalizing and misrepresenting the nature of their poverty. Nevertheless, Thomson was certainly one of the originators of social documentary photography. (In Russia, his contemporary-and fellow Scotsman-William Carrick was not only photographing social types in the studio, but also capturing Volga boatmen at work and peasants in the fields). Another photographer who recorded lower-class Londoners, Paul Martin, did so in a much more informal and, to our eyes, `modern' way, by using a hand-held camera disguised as a parcel.

In revolt against the entrenched imitation of genre painting known as "salon" photography, Stieglitz founded a movement which he called the Photo-Secession, related to the radical secession movements in painting. He initiated publication of a magazine, Camera Work (1903-17), which was a forum for the Photo-Secession and for enlightened opinion and critical thought in all the arts. It remains the most sumptuously and meticulously produced photographic quarterly in the history of the medium. In New York City, Stieglitz opened three galleries, the first (1908-17) called "291" (from its address at 291 Fifth Ave.), then the Intimate Gallery (1925-30), and An American Place (1930-46), where photographic work was hung beside contemporary, often controversial, work in other media. Stieglitz's own photographs and those of several other Photo-Secessionists-Edward Steichen, one of his early proteges, Frederick Evans, the British architectural photographer, and the portraitist Alvin L. Coburn-adhered with relative strictness to a "straight" aesthetic. The quality of their works, despite a pervasive self-consciousness, was consistently of the highest craftsmanship. Stieglitz's overriding concern with the concept "art for art's sake" kept him, and the audience he built for the medium, from an appreciation of an equally important branch of photography: the documentary. Taking as their precedents the work of such men as Jackson and reporter Jacob Riis (whose photographs of New York City slums resulted in much-needed legislation), documentarians like Lewis Hine and James Van DerZee began to build a photographic tradition whose central concerns had little to do with the concept of art. The photojournalist sought to build, strengthen, or change public opinion by means of novel, often shocking images. The finished form of the documentary image was the inexpensive multiple, the magazine or newspaper reproduction. For a time the two traditions, art photography and documentary photography, appeared to be merged within the work of one man, Paul Strand. Strand's works combined a documentary concern with a lean, modernist vision related to the avant-garde art of Europe. The power of the photograph as record was demonstrated in the 19th cent., as when William H. Jackson's photographs of the Yellowstone area persuaded the U.S. Congress to set that territory aside as a national park. In the early 20th century photographers and journalists were beginning to use the medium to inform the public on crucial issues in order to generate social change.

Finally, although his entire career as a photographer was as an employee of the US government, Jack Hillers, chief photographer on John Wesley Powell's second survey expedition down the Colorado River in 1871-2, is also regarded as a precursor of social reform documentary photography. Subsequently employed by the US Geological Survey and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Hillers became essentially an ethnographic photographer, winning the trust of the south-western tribes he photographed, and sympathetically recording their daily lives.

American Progressivism (1890-1920) was marked by an optimistic belief that informed citizens could reform social evils through the democratic process. Middle-class reformers mounted multiple crusades: against disease and poverty in inner cities crowded with immigrants, exploitation of women and children in the workforce, official corruption, and alcoholism and in favour of universal education, proper sanitation, pure food and safe drugs, and women's suffrage. In the hands of the reform pioneers Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, the camera played a major consciousness-raising role in the passage of progressive legislation that altered cities and regulated children's employment, and transformed the understanding of photography's social and educational potential.

Riis, a Danish immigrant, worked as a labourer before becoming a police reporter in 1873 for the New York Tribune. Unlike Spencerian Social Darwinists, he believed that the poor were not inferior beings whose poverty resulted from inborn laziness or ineptitude, but were forced into it by their destructive surroundings. His answer to slums was model housing. He turned to photography because of his passionate commitment to reform, and his conviction that if `there was some way of putting before the people' the terrible conditions he saw in his midnight trips with the sanitary police, people of good will would demand change. He read about German experiments with flash photography and eventually learned to use a dry-plate camera outfit. First in lantern-slide lectures, then in articles for the Evening Sun, and finally in the book How the Other Half Lives (1890), he forced the public to confront every detail of the squalor that his flash-lit images exposed in the nocturnal city. Of the book's 43 illustrations, fifteen were half-tone reproductions rather than line drawings based on photographs, and they helped change the patterns of journalism. Riis showed images not only of sweatshops and overcrowded lodging houses, but of the good that education could accomplish. Although later scholars have read a degree of racism into the main text of his books, his photography and captions reveal not only a superb eye for detail and composition, but a sympathetic understanding of the destructiveness of the urban environment.

Hine came to the reform crusade against child labor already trained in photography and sociology. Though he had worked in a factory, his middle-class, educated background was more typical of Progressivism. His photographic career lasted nearly four decades, and moved social documentary photography in significant new directions. He pioneered the approach of making photographs broadly available through posters and publications. As with Riis, the impact of his efforts was vastly increased by the spread of half-tone reproduction technology.

His earliest reform photographs, of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, were in the tradition of Riis. Although there is no evidence that the two knew each other, both worked for the reform journal Charities and Commons. Using initially a 12.7 ? 17.8 cm (5 ? 7 in) view camera, Hine during his career witnessed significant technical and artistic changes. He was associated with the Photo League and, although rejected by Roy Stryker at the FSA, worked in the Depression for the Works Progress Administration. Hales, P.B., Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839-1915 (1984). Trachtenberg, A., Reading American Photographs: Images as History. Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (1989).

Between 1936 and 1951, the Photo League emerged as the leading US organization championing the development of documentary photography.

Defending photography both as an expressive medium and an agent for social change, it originated in the earlier Film and Photo League after the film-makers moved out of the group's shared headquarters in New York. A membership organization of amateurs and professionals, the league also functioned as a cooperative, giving independent professionals a base from which to run their businesses. It provided members' darkroom space, mounted photographic exhibitions, offered elementary and advanced classes in photography, and gave photographers an outlet for news and ideas through its newsletter, Photo Notes. The league, through its founders Sol Libsohn and Sid Grossman, was instrumental in preserving the photographic oeuvre of Lewis Hine. Members of the `Documentary Production Group' completed important projects on New York street life in the Lower East Side and Harlem 1936-42. Documentary photography by league members Walter Rosenblum, Paul Strand, and Harold Corsini appeared regularly in Fortune, Look, US Camera, and Good Photography. After the Second World War the league began a fund-raising effort to make its headquarters a `Center of American Photography'. However, in December 1947 the FBI and the US Attorney-General blacklisted the league as a communist front organization, basing charges in part on Grossman's 1940 documentation of labour union activities. Though the charges were unsubstantiated, Cold War fears led to a drop in membership, loss of tuition income, and inability to get its exhibitions reviewed in the mainstream press. Unable to pay its rent, the league disbanded in the summer of 1951.

The league's most important contribution to documentary photography was probably its dual roles of teaching new photographers and then providing a centre where those committed to documentary photography could connect with each other, to meet, exchange ideas, and view each other's work. In the late 1930, when few photographic exhibition galleries existed and museum collecting of photographs was in its infancy, the league held regular exhibitions featuring the work of both established photographers and newcomers. Students in its classes could see the work of Eugene Atget, Lewis Hine, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston. The league was the first to exhibit Weegee's work. At its monthly meetings, speakers included Henri Cartier-Bresson, Strand, Stryker, Margaret Bourke-White, and Berenice Abbott. The photographic historians Beaumont and Nancy Newhall were members, as were Elizabeth McCausland and W. Eugene Smith. In Walter Rosenblum's words, at the league `interesting people, deeply involved with photography, were happy to help young photographers understand in greater depth the meaning of photography as a fine art'.

Constance B. SchulzLight, K., Witness in our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers (2000). Tucker, A., This Was the Photo League (2001).

The Mass-Observation (M-O) research organization in Britain was, like the FSA, much larger than the documentary photographic work for which it is also known. It was founded in January 1937 by three young left-wing intellectuals, Charles Madge, Tom Harrison, and the Surrealist photographer and film-maker Humphrey Jennings (1907-50), who had been dismayed, during the crisis of Edward VIII's abdication, by the population's continuing affection for the monarchy. Madge declared that to understand ordinary working-class people, intellectuals needed to study them by `mass observation' and the three determined to create an organization that would change society by using anthropological observation techniques to probe the character of the British, and especially of the northern working class. Active until the early 1950, M-O undertook an almost quixotic range of projects, resulting in the publication of 25 books between 1937 and 1950. In addition to paid investigators who observed people in public settings (pubs, meetings, leisure and sport activities) thousands of volunteers were recruited to keep diaries and respond to monthly thematic questionnaires. Though central direction lagged during the war years, many of these diarists continued faithfully, creating a rich legacy of wartime observations. Best known, perhaps, was the study of industrial `Worktown' (Bolton, Lancashire) and its inhabitants' annual seaside holiday at Blackpool, an intensive project between 1937 and 1940 that continued sporadically through the war years. The voluminous Mass-Observation Archive was donated to Sussex University in 1970.

Photography was from the beginning an important observation technique for M-O, and the best known of its photographers, Jennings and Humphrey Spender, were strongly influenced by the example of the FSA. Spender took more than 800 candid photographs as part of the `Work town' study, using a hidden 35mm camera in the belief that `truth would be revealed only when people were not aware of being photographed'. Jennings, too, photographed the grimy environment of Bolton before abandoning M-O to concentrate on documentary film-making. Later, photography continued to be an important part of Mass-Observation work;in the village of Luccombe in Somerset, for example, John Hinde used colour photography as part of a 1944 M-O study coordinated with the Ministry of Information to export the image of an idealized English rural community. Constance B. Schulz Cross, G., Work town at Blackpool: Mass Observation and Popular Leisure in the 1930 (1990).

Sarsby, J., ?“Exmoor Village” Revisited;Mass Observation's “Anthropology of Ourselves” and Wartime Colour Photography', Rural History (1998).

French `humanism' lies at the heart of 20th-century photojournalism. It was a dominant form of documentary and editorial photography from the late 1920s until the 1970, though its impact is still felt in the 21st century. It influenced the style and content of all the great illustrated magazines of the 1930, 1940, and 1950, in Europe and America. Many of the leading names of 20th century photography were associated at various points in the life of the movement (although that is perhaps a tendentious term for such a loose grouping of like-minded individuals): Kertesz and Brassai, Marcel Bovis (1904-97), Boubat, Pierre Boucher (b. 1908), Robert Capa, Jean-Philippe Charbonnier (b. 1921), Dieuzaide, Doisneau, Francois Kollar (1904-79), Janine Niepce (b. 1920), Riboud, Ronis, Roger Schall (1904-95), Seymour, Sabine Weiss (b. 1924), and many others (including younger photographers like Martine Franck). The leading photo agencies Rapho and Magnum were formed to distribute the work of such photographers, and played a key role in the development of humanism as a global photographic paradigm. Steichen's Family of Man exhibition (1955) used many images drawn from the corpus, or heavily influenced by it.

Its subject matter was concisely defined by perhaps its best-known exponent, Henri Cartier-Bresson, when he told a journalist in 1951 that the most important subject for him and his colleagues was `mankind. Man and his life, so brief, so frail, so threatened'. In this sense, humanism has an ethically combative edge, aiming to celebrate and defend a humanity everywhere challenged by totalitarian power-particularly in the period 1936-68, with the Second World War and the subsequent period of reconstruction of special importance. A French magazine article of 1955 refers to a type of photography that takes as its subject `the human being and the mark that he leaves on nature and on things'. French humanism is deeply rooted in social themes, particularly those which came to prominence in 1939-45, and the occupation and liberation of France. After 1944, humanist photography helped to reconstruct what it was to be French. In this, the role of the photographer providing illustrative images to the press may not seem of critical importance, but it played a part in the evolution of new representations of Frenchness which can be seen as having a primarily solidaristic role. They cluster around certain themes, the majority of which contain a central core of social and cultural referents having to do with community and solidarity, and with the sense of happiness or contentment which derives from human association.

Beginning in the 1950, but increasingly after 1970, documentary photography became many things to many audiences. Charlotte Cotton, curator of the exhibition Stepping in and Stepping out: Contemporary Documentary Photography at London's Victoria & Albert Museum (2002), pointed to the `range of emotional forces-political, humanist and aesthetic-which drive (contemporary) documentary photography'. An even larger London show the following year, Tate Modern's Cruel and Tender, illustrated both its contemporary and historical diversity. Simply counting relatively conventional social documentary work in Europe and the USA since the 1970s yields a huge range of subjects, from teenage sex and drug abuse (Larry Clark), old age (Martine Franck), and domestic violence (Donna Ferrato) to post-industrial desolation (Chris Killip, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen), female sex-workers (Susan Meiselas), the British seaside (Martin Parr, Tony Ray-Jones), and the French fishing industry (Jean Gaumy (b. 1948)).

The tradition of reporting unsettling social realities founded by Riis and Hine, and continued by the FSA/OWI, was already central to the growing (and to some commentators separate) field of photojournalism. In Europe, the Magnum agency became a major international distributor of documentary photography of political events. Outside Europe and North America, independent documentary photographers like Sebastiao Salgado continued to use their cameras to protest against inhumane conditions.

Documentary practice is now worldwide, its images disseminated through disparate outlets and media: galleries, books, magazines, newspapers and the Internet. Like Paul Strand before 1939, many documentary photographers since 1945, such as Rene Burri and Larry Clark, have also made films.

Although the earliest social documentary reform photographers had explicitly rejected the designation of their work as `art', much late 20th century documentary photography attracted this label. Building on the `straight' approach of the Photo League, but in some cases moving towards the exploration of personal rather than societal problems and shortcomings, psychological rather than social reality, the makers of this kind of work captured the alienation and isolation of modern life, often more as distanced observers than as passionate advocates. Beginning with Robert Frank's The Americans (1958), carried further by the gritty realism of Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Mary Ellen Mark, or the detachment of Diane Arbus, this strand of documentary practice offered ironic commentaries on American complacency.

Though it also appeared in magazines, such work was more likely to be viewed in photographic galleries and book-length monographs than in photo-essays. This important shift was illustrated by W. Eugene Smith, whose pictures appeared periodically in Life until the 1960s, but who published his outsize essay on Pittsburgh in Photography Annual (1959), and the final version of Minamata as a book (1975). The change was driven partly by the decline or disappearance of the great illustrated magazines, but partly also (and encouraged by the rise of an art photography market from the 1960s) by the perception of the photographer-as-artist. Organizations like the Guggenheim and Hasselblad foundations often supplied sponsorship. The appearance of new exhibition venues in cities like San Francisco, New York, London, and Paris, and the creation of dedicated publishing houses such as Ralph Gibson's Lustrum Press, Aperture, and Picture Project provided important outlets.

At the same time as documentary photography turned inward, and some of its practitioners defined themselves, or were defined, primarily as artists, there was a democratization of documentary photography, an adaptation of its potential to the documenting of local communities, `empowered' through being given a means to create and capture their identity through their own or a professional's photographs. Modelled on the FSA/OWI concept of a `file' of photographs that document the reality of a specific time and place, but relying on local funding, this kind of documentary photography often has a celebratory character rather than one of irony or critical outrage. Enterprises such as the California Council for the Humanities Documentary Project, or the `Milleni-Brum' project of the Birmingham Central Library, England, to document under-represented ethnic groups, re-emphasize its earliest meaning of simply making a record. In the USA on a national scale, the FSA model survived in the 1970s Project DOCUMERICA funded by the Environmental Protection Agency to document the condition of the environment. The later decades of the 20th century saw the appearance of numerous show-filling and book-length documentary projects, though mainly in North America, western Europe and Japan. Notable figures elsewhere included David Goldblatt in South Africa, Boris Mikhailov in the Ukraine, and, above all, Sebastiao Salgado in Brazil and internationally.

Photography has affected our lives greatly. It recorded the scenes in history that have touched us all. Priceless memories were saved thanks to photography, this art of light. Photography is the science of capturing light onto a piece, which we find captivating, amusing, or thought provoking. It has helped us capture memories for over a century now. It can also get to be a very complex subject because before you understand photography you must understand light.