Social Documentary Photography

Thomas Annan was commissioned by the Glasgow City Improvement Trust to photograph old closes and streets marked for clearance under nineteenth-century urban reform.

Jacob Riis emigrated from Denmark to the United States in 1870 and knew poverty first-hand before becoming a reporter.

Paul Geniaux was a French photographer associated with late Pictorialism and with the broader effort to secure photography's standing as an art at the turn of the twentieth century.

Lewis Hine was an American photographer and trained sociologist who used the camera as an instrument of social reform.

August Sander's vast portrait project People of the Twentieth Century grew in part from the prestige that physiognomy still held in early twentieth-century Germany.

Dorothea Lange ran a commercial portrait studio in San Francisco, but during the depths of the Depression in 1932 she looked out her studio window, saw unemployed men standing in line in the street, and walked out toward documentary work.

Ken Domon's postwar call for "realist photography" grew out of two dissatisfactions: the salon photography of the prewar years, with its emphasis on technical prettiness, and his own experience participating in wartime propaganda imagery.

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Diane Arbus grew up in a prosperous Jewish family on Manhattan's Central Park West, insulated from the Depression and from any direct encounter with hardship or difference.

Shomei Tomatsu made postwar Japan itself into his subject.

Ernest Cole (1940-1990) was a South African photographer who exposed apartheid from within the system that shaped his own daily life.