Documentary Photography

On successful completion of this module students should be able to:

1. Identify the key individuals, institutions, practices, contexts, and ideas associated with documentary photography.
2. Locate and assess primary and secondary sources.
3. Analyze, evaluate, and compare relevant critical theories of documentary photography.
4. Interpret photographs based on knowledge of their historical and interpretative contexts, and in light of relevant theoretical understandings.
5. Construct and justify a written argument about documentary photography, using the appropriate scholarly apparatus.

Can a photograph lie? Can it even tell the truth? If so, whose truth?

Since its inception, photography has been understood as a process for faithfully recording the actual. On this basis, it became an instrument of both power and resistance. While photography’s capacity to tell the truth has, for decades, been the subject of sustained critical and deconstructive pressure, it seems we still have difficulty in letting go of a belief that the camera never lies.

Centered on the 1930s to 1960s—a period in which the documentary possibilities of photography came into sharp relief—and focusing on the USA in a global context—drawing connections with, for example, the UK, USSR, South Africa, Europe, and Latin America—this module intersects the history of documentary photography with the most important critical and theoretical responses to the problems it continues to raise.

Lectures offer a chronological survey of the development of documentary photography as a genre, from the nineteenth-century photobooks of Anna Atkins and William Henry Fox Talbot, through the so-called Golden Age of the 1930s, the subjective turn of the 1960s, to our own contemporary moment. Students will have the opportunity to examine prints in the collections of the School of Art. In seminars, key texts in the critical literature on photography are discussed in relation to iconic documentary photographs.

This module is at CQFW Level 6