— Overview
The notes stay with a distinction between documentary and press photography, and with Riis’s pictures of New York housing and water.
— Contents and key concepts
A record that is not the same as the press picture
Because a documentary photograph puts the record first, the notes write, it is vulnerable to a photographer’s viewpoint, or to the ideology of an age. It also has to argue with the view that treats documentary and press photography as the same, on the strength of a shared base in what is real.
Press photographs, they say, are heavily shaped by an editorial staff’s judgment and choices. Documentary work is centered on reflection and understanding of the subject. Under many efforts to link documentary with enlightenment, progress, and science, its definition has never been agreed, pulled as it is among education, propaganda, scientific discourse, and art. What remains at the base of the term, they write, is fact — and a stronger emphasis on fact than other forms of art usually carry.
Atget’s door, Flaherty’s Moana, and a congress in 1910
Document, they write, means a simple proof or piece of evidence, and is also traced to the Latin docere, “to teach.” In photography the word was first used, they say, in the early twentieth century by the French photographer Eugène Atget. He pasted a paper over his studio door that read “documents for artists.” In the rapid change of the late-nineteenth-century metropolis he recorded, calmly and almost encyclopedically, the fine grain of the streets of Paris and of the Île-de-France around it, and sold the work to Surrealist painters.
The term documentary, they add, was used in 1926 to describe the filmmaker Robert Flaherty’s Moana, in a phrase they record as “documentary value film.” In film, documentary named work grounded in fact, against the false situations built on Hollywood studio sets. Officially, they write, the term began to be used for still photography at the 5th International Photographic Congress, held in Belgium in 1910. The first sense they start to give is that a photographic document should be usable for studies of various kinds.
Riis, New York’s slums, and a flash of magnesium
They take Jacob Riis as a representative documentary photographer, and as someone who opened an early humanism in the field. He made pictures of housing and of water problems in New York’s slums, and those pictures, they write, led on to social reform.
He is also recorded as the first to use magnesium flash powder. The notes stay with that work and that technical attempt. They do not add later photographers the telling does not name.
The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.
Sources
- The notes, a student account of documentary photography and Jacob Riis: a distinction from press photography, Eugène Atget’s “documents for artists” in Paris and the Île-de-France, Robert Flaherty’s Moana (1926) and the phrase “documentary value film,” the 5th International Photographic Congress in Belgium in 1910, New York slums and water, social reform, and magnesium flash powder.
Last updated: 15 November 2026
Frequently asked questions
How do the notes set documentary photography against press photography?
Because a documentary photograph puts the record first, they write, it is vulnerable to a photographer’s viewpoint, or to the ideology of an age. It also has to argue with the view that treats documentary and press photography as the same, on the strength of a shared base in what is real. Press photographs, they say, are heavily shaped by an editorial staff’s judgment and choices; documentary work is centered on reflection and understanding of the subject. Under many efforts to link documentary with enlightenment, progress, and science, its definition has never been agreed, pulled as it is among education, propaganda, scientific discourse, and art. What remains at the base of the term, they write, is fact.
Where do they find the word, and what do they say of Atget and of Flaherty’s Moana?
Document, they write, means a simple proof or piece of evidence, and is also traced to the Latin docere, “to teach.” In photography the word was first used, they say, in the early twentieth century by the French photographer Eugène Atget — the notes spell the name in a form read here as Atget. He pasted a paper over his studio door that read “documents for artists.” In the rapid change of the late-nineteenth-century metropolis he recorded, calmly and almost encyclopedically, the fine grain of the streets of Paris and of the Île-de-France around it, and sold the work to Surrealist painters. The term documentary, they add, was used in 1926 to describe the filmmaker Robert Flaherty’s Moana, in a phrase they record as “documentary value film.” In film, documentary named work grounded in fact, against the false situations built on Hollywood studio sets. Officially, they write, the term began to be used for still photography at the 5th International Photographic Congress, held in Belgium in 1910. The first sense they start to give is that a photographic document should be usable for studies of various kinds.
What do they record of Jacob Riis?
They take Jacob Riis as a representative documentary photographer, and as someone who opened an early humanism in the field. He made pictures of housing and of water problems in New York’s slums, and those pictures, they write, led on to social reform. He is also recorded as the first to use magnesium flash powder. The notes stop with that work and that technical attempt; they do not add later photographers the telling does not name.
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