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DOCUMENTARY APPROACH TO PHOTOGRAPHY
by BEAUMONT NEWHALL

JOURNALISM has discovered that the camera is one of its most powerful tools. A picture can often tell more than thousands of words, and a picture made by photography implies by its method of production a basis of fact. All know that such an implication is untrue, but everyone accepts the photograph as the pictorial evidence of an eye-witness - the cameraman.

There is, of course, nothing new in the appreciation of the photograph as a document. At its very birth in 1839 photography's importance in providing, with a minimum of effort, accurate visual records was advanced as one of its chief values. On this one point all were agreed, while the place of the photograph as a work of art was immediately questioned. But even those who have denied most vehemently that photography is an art do not hesitate to study the history of more accepted forms of art by means of photographic documents. Henri Delaborde, in a review of a photographic exhibition in 1856 had no good to say for the photographs produced in the name of Art, but he was enthusiastic over the photographic documents of Chartres cathedral produced by Le Secq.

I mention this particular criticism, because it is a qualitative one. Delaborde singled out the work of one man. We agree in his choice; Le Secq's series has seldom been surpassed by all the hundreds of cameramen who have visited Chartres since 1852. Yet they were not unique. They were not unique in factual content. Their technique - that of the calotype - did not permit a high resolution of detail; what is told about the physical structure of Chartres was not revealed for the first time, because lithographed documents, by the most meticulous draftsmen, had appeared previously. Le Secq's photographs are a sympathetic interpretation of Chartres. They are a direct record, not only of the carved stones, but of the photographer's emotion in viewing them. And they represented only what actually stood in front of his camera on the day in 1852 when he exposed his negatives.

In making this series of photographs, Le Secq had in mind nothing more than a record of Chartres cathedral.

Yet in producing them he himself created words of art, of a far more genuine character than such an elaborately self-conscious photograph as Rejlander's Two Paths of Life, reproduced in Parnassus in October, 1934, which was practically contemporary. Through the program of documenting medieval architecture and sculpture, Le Secq achieved an artistic result. This, I believe, is the chief esthetic function of documentary photography, and possibly even a basis for the most genuinely creative aspect of photography.

The use of the word "documentary" in connection with photography is comparatively new. Paul Gruyer in his Victor Hugo Photographe (Paris, Mendel, 1905) calls the camera record of Hugo's exile in Jersey which he reproduces "le premier document photographique que nous possedons sur une epoque" In the N.Y. Sun for February 8, 1926, John Grierson spoke of Flaherty's film Moana as documentary. It has since been generally accepted among movie makers as defining a particular type of film which is based upon natural factual material (as opposed to artificial studio sets) presented in an imaginative and dramatic form. The greatest and most organized activity has been in Great Britain, under the leadership of John Grierson and Paul Rotha. The latter's Documentary Film, published by Faber & Faber in 1936 is a brilliant statement of the history and aims of the movement. The definition of documentary which Rotha offers differs markedly from the dictionary meaning; it includes qualitative and technical implications - a dramatic presentation of fact. It is thus more closely allied to the French documentaire as developed by Zola. Like the French writer's document novels, these films are produced for definite sociological purposes. The doctrine is conscious. There exist, of course, films quite independent of the movement which, probably unconsciously, follow the same theories: for example many newsreels and travelogues. But by no means all, for while they are based on fact, they are not necessarily presented either in a dramatic fashion or with regard to the sociological significance of their material.

The same is true of still photography. I have discussed the meaning of documentary as used in film-making,   

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