's photo of the
Abu Simbel temples, 1854 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 1850s 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. In the United States, photographs tracing the progress of the
American Civil War (1861-1865) resulted in a major archive of photographs ranging from dry records of battle sites to harrowing images of the dead by
Timothy O'Sullivan and evocative images by
George N. Barnard. These photographs were published by at least three groups of photographic publisher-distributors, most notably
Mathew Brady and
Alexander Gardner. A huge body of photography of the vast regions of the Great West was produced by official government photographers for the
Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories (a predecessor of the
USGS), during the period 1868–1878, including most notably the photographers
Timothy O'Sullivan and
William Henry Jackson. Both the Civil War and USGS photographic works point up an important feature of documentary photography: the production of an archive of historical significance, and the distribution to a wide audience through publication. The US Government published Survey photographs in the annual
Reports, as well as portfolios designed to encourage continued funding of scientific surveys. 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. Riis devoted his documentary photography to changing the inhumane conditions under which the poor lived in the rapidly expanding urban-industrial centers. His work succeeded in embedding photography in urban reform movements, notably the
Social Gospel and
Progressive movements. His most famous successor was the photographer
Lewis Wickes Hine, whose systematic surveys of conditions of child-labor in particular, made for the
National Child Labor Commission and published in sociological journals like
The Survey, are generally credited with strongly influencing the development of child-labor laws in New York and the United States more generally. In Canada during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, local governments adopted photography as a means to record events and evidence of local problems. Urban centres like Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg used photography as a tool for urban reform, documenting living conditions in downtown areas and capturing mugshots of local criminals. Canadian photojournalism took off in the early twentieth century, as newspapers and magazines adopted photographs to illustrate their publications. During the wartime and postwar eras, documentary photography increasingly became subsumed under the rubric of
photojournalism. Swiss-American photographer
Robert Frank is generally credited with developing a counterstrain of more personal, evocative, and complex documentary, exemplified by his work in the 1950s, published in the United States in his 1959 book,
The Americans. In the early 1960s, his influence on photographers like
Garry Winogrand and
Lee Friedlander resulted in an important exhibition at the
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which brought those two photographers together with their colleague
Diane Arbus under the title,
New Documents. MoMA curator
John Szarkowski proposed in that exhibition that a new generation, committed not to social change but to formal and iconographical investigation of the social experience of modernity, had replaced the older forms of
social documentary photography. In the 1970s and 1980s, a spirited attack on traditional documentary was mounted by historians, critics, and photographers. One of the most notable was the photographer-critic
Allan Sekula, whose ideas and the accompanying bodies of pictures he produced, influenced a generation of "new new documentary" photographers, whose work was philosophically more rigorous, often more stridently leftist in its politics. Sekula emerged as a champion of these photographers, in critical writing and editorial work. Notable among this generation are the photographers
Fred Lonidier, whose 'Health and Safety Game" of 1976 became a model of post-documentary, and
Martha Rosler, whose "The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems" of 1974-75 served as a milestone in the critique of classical humanistic documentary as the work of privileged elites imposing their visions and values on the dis-empowered. Since the late 1990s, an increased interest in documentary photography and its longer term perspective can be observed.
Nicholas Nixon extensively documented issues surrounded by American life.
South African documentary photographer
Pieter Hugo engaged in documenting art traditions with a focus on African communities.
Antonin Kratochvil photographed a wide variety of subjects, including Mongolia's street children for the Museum of Natural History.
Fazal Sheikh sought to reflect the realities of the most underprivileged peoples of different third world countries. ==Documentary photography vs. photojournalism==