Documentary: New Cultures, New Spaces

The change in documentary photography during the mid 20th century could have been one of the most positive changes to photography in that time. Robert Frank and his book The Americans almost single-handedly transformed how documentary photography was viewed. The Americans took what most people thought was mundane and pulled an enormous amount of meaning out of it. Frank took pictures of things that many people would have never noticed when walking down the street and used it as a commentary on American life in ways that were incredibly funny, but also eye opening and depressing. Something that this article points out that I think is very successful in The Americans is that, in the early 20th century most documentary photographs were taken with the knowledge that a caption or article was going to accompany it so the photograph itself did not have to be exceptionally strong because the article would be doing most of the talking. What changed with the advent of photographers like Robert Frank was the stress on making photographs that could speak for themselves and did not need a caption because everything you needed to know was right there in the frame and adding a caption would almost be a disservice to the photograph. Frank was able to not only able to push documentary photograph as a genre to new heights but also the art of photography itself by making image so strong that they needed no extra explanation.