As early as in the 19th century the living conditions for the lower classes were the subject of photography.
Henry Mayhew photographed the book
London Labour and the London Poor, a representation of the depiction of London's working class. The book was illustrated by
woodcuts, from photographs by Beard.
Thomas Annan published "Photographs of the Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, 1868-77", a documentation of the slum areas in Glasgow. Yet another example is the book published by Smith and Thompson in 1877 "Street Life in London", which also documented social life. England was the birthplace of social documentary photography, given the advanced stage of industrialization, and its impact on society. , USA, 1908).In the United States two photographers got involved at the end of the 19th century in favor of people on the margins of society, Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. For them the camera was an instrument of accusation against social injustice. In 1890 Riis documented the living conditions of the unemployed and homeless in New York ("
How the Other Half Lives"). He was also interested in the fate of immigrants, many of whom lived in extreme poverty in the New York slums. Riis clearly takes sides for the people he photographed and appeals to the social conscience of society. In 1908 the
National Child Labor Committee hired Hine, a
sociology professor who advocated photography as an educational medium, to document child labor in American industry. In the early 20th century Hine would publish thousands of photographs designed to pull at the nation's heartstrings. Child Labor was widespread in the U.S. in the early 20th century. Hine equally drew attention to the situation of immigrants. The work of Riis and Hine had political influence. Riis' commitment to the people in the Mulberry Bend neighborhood led to its demolition. The building of schools and educational programs can also be attributed to Riis. Hine's work culminated in a law against child labor, the
Keating-Owen Act of 1916, which was repealed shortly after the entry of the U.S. into the First World War. An English pioneer of socially committed photography is
Bill Brandt. Brandt is particularly renowned for his experimental studies of the nude. He moved to England in 1931 and worked for several magazines, for which he published coverages on people affected by the Great Depression. In 1936 he published the illustrated book "The English at Home", in which he portrayed the
English class system. He traveled to the Midlands and to northern England where he photographed the effects of the Great Depression. After 1945 the dedicated, collectively organized social documentary photography no longer was able to gain ground, except in England, where the tradition lingered on a bit longer. The vigorous anti-communism of the McCarthy era had anathematized the engaged, liberal social documentary photography with the verdict of evil. Great documentary photographers of the postwar era, such as
W. Eugene Smith,
Diane Arbus,
Robert Frank,
William Klein or
Mary Ellen Mark were either lone fighters or were forced to work as story-suppliers for the large illustrated magazines (especially
Life). Squeezed into the economic restraints of circulation increases, political outsider positions found little room. Nevertheless, photographers devoted themselves to social issues in the second half of the 20th century. Thus Eugene Smith documented in the late 1960s the fate of the inhabitants of the Japanese fishing village of
Minamata who had fallen ill as a result of
mercury poisoning. In the 1960s and 70s,
Lee Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban social landscape, with many of his photographs including fragments of store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, posters and street signs, and seeking to understand his era by examining society's cultural furniture, while
Garry Winogrand made photographs in order "to see what the world looks like in photographs." British photojournalist
Don McCullin specialised in examining the underside of society, and his photographs have depicted the unemployed, downtrodden and the impoverished. He is also recognised for his war photography and images of urban strife.
John Ranard (1952–2008) began his social documentary photography in his depictions of the brutal and ironic world of boxing. Portions of his boxing portfolio,
The Brutal Aesthetic, were published in the book
On Boxing (Doubleday, 1987) with the text written by Joyce Carol Oates. Ranard went on to photograph squatters and the homeless in
New York City, and spent lengthy periods in
Russia photographing
perestroika and the poignant problem of
HIV/AIDS in Russia. He gained access to Russian prisons and photographed the grim life of Russian prisoners. A good many of his Russian photographs appeared in
Forty Pounds of Salt (Fly by Night Press, 1995),
Full Life and
The Fire Within (the last two published by
Medecins Sans Frontieres (Holland) & AIDS Foundation East-West, 2001). Ranard was closely connected with
Louisville, Kentucky throughout his career. In his portfolio
On Every Corner he photographed the inside world of the black communities' store-front churches. The churches were faced with the problem of violence by black teenagers. A social documentary photographer of the present is Brazilian photographer
Sebastião Salgado, who has documented the industrial age (
Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age, 1993). Another central theme of his work is the global phenomenon of migration (
The Children: Refugees and Migrant (2000) and
Migrations (2000)). In both documentaries he demonstrated the plight of refugees in many countries around the world. The documentary photography of
Martin Parr contrasts starkly with that of Salgado, at times being humorous. : Tobacco Harvesting, Valle de Viñales, Cuba 2002 The aims of social documentation continue today in Puerto Rican photographer
Manuel Rivera-Ortiz's photographs of lives in poverty. Affected by his own experience of growing up poor in rural
Puerto Rico, Rivera-Ortiz refers to his work as a celebration of life, in poverty. ==Acceptance by the art world==