8/10/2019 photonotes.pdf

1/2

[Editor's Note]

Elizabeth McCausland, art critic of theSpringfield Sunday Union andRepublican, is a well-known writer onart. She has contributed to theAmerican Magazine of Art, Parnassusand other publications. Longinterested in social photography, shewas instrumental in organizing theshow of photographs by Lewis Hine,now at the Riverside Museum. Inaddition to writing the preface to theexhibition catalog, Miss McCauslandcontributed a long article on Hine'swork to the Springfield Sunday Unionand Republican of September 11th.The current issue of U.S. CameraMagazine contains a splendid articleon Lewis W. Hine by MissMcCausland.

This is the first of a series of longarticles that Photo Notes intends, fromtime to time, to publish. Extra copiesof this article may be obtained for fivecents each.

Home Photo Gallery Classroom DocumentsPHOTO NOTESPHOTO NOTES

Publishing Information

Documentary Photography

Elizabeth McCausland

January 1939

1. The rise of documentary photographydoes not spring from fashion. Rather itsrapid growth represents strong organicforces at work, strong creative impulsesseeking an outlet suitable to the seriousand tense spirit of our age. The proof thatdocumentary photography is not a fad ora vogue lies in the history of othermovements in photography. Before thedocumentary, the technical "capriccci" of Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray; before the"photogram" and the "rayograph," thePhoto-Secession; before that, thepictorialists. What came of these? Fromthe abstract and surrealist tendencies,Cecil Beaton. From the Photo-Secessiona few fine workers like Paul Strand,Edward Weston and Charles Sheeler, thebest of their mature energies being bestemployed when they turn to newer andmore objective purposes. From thepictorial school, the Oval Table.

2. Against this pattern of sterility, of ideaswhich could not reproduce themselves,we have the new function (and evolvingfrom it the new esthetic) of documentaryphotography, an application of photography direct and realistic,

dedicated to the profound and soberchronicling of the external world. To Lewis Hine, who thirty-five years ago wasmaking photographs of child labor in sweat shops and textile mills, the vague tenentsof pictorialism or the even less useful purposes of the "photogram" or "rayograph"must be incomprehensible. To the hard-working photographers of the Farm SecurityAdministration, the somewhat remote and abstruse manner of the spiritual heirs of thePhoto-Secession may seem too refined. To such a photographer as Berenice Abbott,setting down the tangible visage of New York in precise detain and lineament, thesentimental fantasies of a Fassbinder must be well nigh incredible.

3. The above is not intended as an ad hominem argument. The instances are noted merelyto indicate different directions and purposes in photography. The reason that the

difference may so clearly be illustrated is that the difference in ideas of the newphotography and all the old styles is like the difference between two continents: it is a"passage to India" to travel from the old to the new. We have all had a surfeit of "pretty" pictures, of romantic views of hilltop, seaside, rolling fields, skyscrapers seenaskew, picturesque bits of life torn out of their sordid context. It is life that is excitingand important, and life whole and unretouched .

4. By virtue of this new spirit of realism, photography looks now at the external worldwith new eyes, the eyes of scientific, uncompromising honesty. The camera eye cannotlie, is lightly said. On the contrary, the camera eye usually does nothing but lie,rationalizing the wrinkles of an aging face, obligingly overlooking peeling paint androtting wood. But the external workd is those facts of decay and change, of socialretrogression and injustice--as well as the wide miles of America and its vast mountainranges. The external world, we may add, is the world of human beings; and, whetherwe see their faces or the works of their hands and the consequences, tragic orotherwise, of their social institutions, we look at the world with a new orientation,more concerned with what is outside than with the inner ebb and flow of consciousness.

5. For this reason, a Farm Security Administration photograph of an old woman's knottedand gnarled hands is a human and social document of great moment and movingquality. In the erosion of these deformed fingers is to be seen the symbol of socialdistortion and deformation: waste is to be read here, as it is read in lands washed downto the sea by floods, in dust storms and in drouth bowls. The fact is a thousand timesmore important than the photographer; his personality can be intruded only by theworst taste of exhibitionism; this at last is reality. Yet, also, by the imagination andintelligence he possesses and uses, the photographer controls the new esthetic, finds

the significant truth and gives it significant form.6. This is indeed the vanguard of photography today. For the channels of distribution for

truth are no more numerous for the photograph than for the printed or spoken word, thetheatre, the moving picture, the arts generally. The censorship that in Hollywood hasshifted from leg and kiss sequences to social themes operates also with the publicationsthat use photographs--and by their use support the photographer. The opportunities forpublishing honest photographs of present-day life in magazines or newspapers are notmany; a Hearst press is not the only censor of truth.

7. For this reason, we find the strongest precedent for documentary photography in thework of the Farm Security Administration photographers and in the Federal Art Project"Changing New York" series by Berenice Abbott. As in soil erosion and flood control,highway engineering, agricultural experiment stations and numerous other importanttechnical activities, the best sponsor of knowledge (even if on too limited a scale) hasbeen the government. By combinations of circumstances that we shall not call lucky

accidents, these pioneer ventures have been gotten under way and have broken groundfor younger workers to till. Already the influence of the new spirit may be observed, asa more straight-forward quality pervades much of the work published, even inmagazines not vowed to the documentary ideal.

8. What is this ideal, you have the right to say. A hundred years ago when photographywas born, an enthusiast cried, "From this day painting is dead." Nevertheless paintinghas survived till the present. Thus in the course of the past century certain confusionsgrew up around photography. In the case of D. O. Hill, there was no question as to whyhe took portraits; they were notes to be incorporated in a canvas with over two hundredfigures. Julia Cameron was an elderly woman who perused a hobby, incidentally

8/10/2019 photonotes.pdf

2/2

turning out masterpieces of portraiture. Atget had no nonsense about him when hemade "documents pour artistes;" and certainly there was no false estheticism involvedwhen Brady went to the Civil War.

9. But at the turn of the century art got mixed with photography. Some inner insecurity of photographers (seduces, perhaps, by commercial appeals and selling talks) led them toprecipitate the battle: "Is photograph ART?" Today progressive photographers are notespecially interested in the point; it seems an empty issue. There is the whole wideworld before the lens, and reality uniting to be set down imperishably.

10. Without prejudicing the case, we may say at once that photography is not art in the oldsense. It is not a romantic, impressionistic medium, dependent on subjective factorsand ignoring the objective. It is bound to realism in as complex a way as buildings arebound to the earth by the pull of gravitation, unless we build aerial cities, cantileveringor suspending them in mid-air.

11. But this is certain from history--that forms and values change under the impact of newenergies. The arts alter their modes of expression and their emphasis on subject matter,their ideology and their iconography, as society changes. Today we do not wantemotion from art; we want a solid and substantial food on which to bite, somethingstrong and hearty to get our teeth into, sustenance for the arduous struggle thatexistence is in eras of crisis. We want the truth, not rationalization, not idealizations,not romanticizations. That truth we get from reading a financial page, a foreign cable,an unemployment survey report. That truth we receive, visually, from photographsrecording the undeniable facts of life today, old wooden slums canting on theirfoundations, an isolated farmer's shack, poor cotton fields, dirty city streets, thechronicles written in the faces of men and women and children.

12. Yet this truth is not an abstract statement, made in a desert with none to hear. The newspirit in art (if, after all the talk, we agree that photography is an art) represents adrastic reversal position from the attitudes of the twenties. One cannot imagine a Joyceor a Proust producing documentary photographs, if photography were their medium.On the contrary, one can think of a Thomas Mann finding documentary photographymuch to his liking, congenial as it is to the careful factual implementation of "TheMagic Mountain."

13. Instead for prototypes, we turn back to the ages of realism, to Balzac, to Fielding, toDickens, to a painter like Gericault who painted humble scenes of farm life as well asgrandiose mythological scenes. A work of art, on this basis, must have meaning, itmust have content, it must communicate, it must speak to an audience. The cult of non-intelligibility and non-communication is no longer fashionable; only a fringe of survivors makes a virtue of a phrase which is a dead issue.

14. For communication, the photograph has qualities equaled by no other pictorialmedium. If one wishes to present the interior of a slum dwelling where eight peoplelive in one room, the camera will reveal the riddled floors, the dirty bedding, the dishesstacked unwashed on a table, the thousand and one details that total up to squalor andhuman degradation. To paint each item completely would take a dozen Hoochs andChardins many months. Here with the instantaneous blink of the camera eye, we havereality captured, set down for as long as negative and print will endure.

15. Actually there is no limit to the world of external reality the photographer may record.Every subject is significant, considered in its context and viewed in the light of historical forces. It is the spirit of his approach which determines the value of thephotographer's endeavor, that plus his technical ability to say what he wants to say.

First of all, there is no room for exhibitionism or opportunism or exploitation in theequipment of the documentary photographer. His purpose must be clear and unified,and his mood simple and modest. Montage of his personality over his subject will onlydefeat the serious aims of documentary photography. For the greatest objective of suchwork is to widen the world we live in, to acquaint us with the range and variety of human existence, to inform us (as it were forcibly) of unnecessary social horrors suchas war, to make us aware of the civilization in which we live and hope to function ascreative workers. This is a useful work, and as such beyond claims of mere personalityor clique.