Photographies

Once admired for its seemingly magical properties, photography grew into an expected and sometimes even mundane aspect of twentieth-century visual culture. With the introduction of the halftone process, photographs could be reproduced quickly and could circulate widely in the press, allowing the practice of photojournalism to flourish. Leica cameras, which became popular in the 1920s, had faster shutter speeds, making it possible to capture what Henri Cartier-Bresson called “a decisive moment.” Cameras also began to feature viewfinders that encouraged photographers to bring the camera up to their eyes; when looking at the resulting photographs, viewers take on the embodied perspective of the photographer. Previously, photographers typically steadied their cameras against their navels while looking down into a viewfinder located at the top of the camera. 

Though increasingly commonplace and engaging with changing aesthetics, the photographs that circulated knowledge in the twentieth century functioned much like earlier examples that sought to collect, catalogue, rationalize, and control the world that was pictured through photography. The tradition of documentary photography that emerged in the late-nineteenth century and flourished in the twentieth century built on these earlier practices while seeking to use the camera as a tool for social change. Steven Bull describes this documentary tradition, seen here in examples such as Life and The Fight against Apartheid!, as “the idea of objectively recording people living very different lives to those of the [photographer’s] viewers, and especially lives that are difficult and which might raise the moral concern of the audience” (108). Ultimately, the aim of such photographs was to prompt social change.

Some critics of documentary photography, such as Martha Rosler and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, have noted that documentary photographs may do more to testify to the bravery and skill of the photographer than to tell us about the situation documented by the photograph. Such limitations become especially evident when they circulate in galleries or art books (Bull 111-14). In contrast, photography theorist Ariella Azoulay suggests that documentary photographs establish a “civil contract” between the people photographed and the viewer, and this contract has the potential to prompt action. 

Aside from these developments in documentary photography and photojournalism, books of all kinds were illustrated photographically, and even ordinary reports and commercial pamphlets featured photographs. In all of these examples—whether the photographs are printed as halftones or pasted onto the page—text frames and anchors the intended meaning of the photographs.

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