Photojournalism
Dorothea Lange - Migrant Mother, 1936
In 1936 Dorothea Lange photographed a mother of seven who was a migrant worker. She was following the pea harvest but the ground was frozen, leaving nothing to pick. The mother was housing her family in a lean-to, having just sold the family tent and the tires off the family car. While she was 32 when the image was taken, she appears to be a much older woman. These images were used to document the work of the Resettlement Administration, later called the Farm Security Administration. This image, called “Migrant Mother”, was immediately published in a San Francisco paper and the federal government sent 20,000 pounds of food to the camp where she was photographed. It is said that it inspired John Steinbeck to write “Grapes of Wrath”. Lange later said she was drawn to the site after completing her work, and mailing her film back to Washington, DC. She only shot five images, and did not approach anyone but Florence Owens Thompson at the camp.
Source: The Fateful Roadside Stop That Led to Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” - Dorothea Lange Moma Exhibition
What is Photography's Relationship with the Truth?
The purpose of any type of documentary is to record and demonstrate what is important about any sort of event, people or place. The finished project should contain selected excerpts from the entire observational experience--the excerpts are (in the mind of the author) the most crucial aspects of his/her research or observations that best represent the whole. Example: You sit in class and take notes; you do not write down every word the lecturer says: you are writing your own documentary of the lecture. Think of any work (fiction or not) you have ever read; the contents of the work are used to demonstrate a concise purpose--a means to an end--without leading the reader astray with other "means" that may lead to an alternative "end".
The inherent problem with any type of documentary that you read is that it is transmitted to you via the author. Thus, how can one judge the "realness" of what you are observing, as compared to what the researcher observed. At some point, you must sacrifice your desire to know all the facts, and make a judgement on the truthfulness in the facts which you are given. Enter photography (still photography that is) as a research method, and it seems that your problems are solved; people believe that the camera does not lie. Have you not ever said the words: "I'll believe it when I see it," or "seeing is believing." However, as Susan Sontag, in "On Photography" explains:
The photographer was thought to be an acute but non interfering observer--a scribe, not a poet. But as people quickly discovered that nobody takes the same picture of the same thing, the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal, objective image yielded to the fact that photographs are evidence not only of what's there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world.
As Alan Trachtenberg explains in "Reading American Photographs":
Photographs transcribe, not "reality", but the world as it was seen and recorded...in the picture we see the world from the angle of the camera's partial vision, from the position it had at the moment of the release of the shutter.
Although we recognize that the photographer is not a mere objective recorder, but a subjective evaluator, we still believe that the camera does not lie. So, the camera is capable of two capacities at the same time: it can objectify reality and subjectify it. In this dual function lies the value of using photography as a research method. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug97/fsa/tool.html
The inherent problem with any type of documentary that you read is that it is transmitted to you via the author. Thus, how can one judge the "realness" of what you are observing, as compared to what the researcher observed. At some point, you must sacrifice your desire to know all the facts, and make a judgement on the truthfulness in the facts which you are given. Enter photography (still photography that is) as a research method, and it seems that your problems are solved; people believe that the camera does not lie. Have you not ever said the words: "I'll believe it when I see it," or "seeing is believing." However, as Susan Sontag, in "On Photography" explains:
The photographer was thought to be an acute but non interfering observer--a scribe, not a poet. But as people quickly discovered that nobody takes the same picture of the same thing, the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal, objective image yielded to the fact that photographs are evidence not only of what's there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world.
As Alan Trachtenberg explains in "Reading American Photographs":
Photographs transcribe, not "reality", but the world as it was seen and recorded...in the picture we see the world from the angle of the camera's partial vision, from the position it had at the moment of the release of the shutter.
Although we recognize that the photographer is not a mere objective recorder, but a subjective evaluator, we still believe that the camera does not lie. So, the camera is capable of two capacities at the same time: it can objectify reality and subjectify it. In this dual function lies the value of using photography as a research method. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug97/fsa/tool.html
