CategoriesStyles and Movements
New American Documentary Photography
American photographers of the 1950s to the 1970s who kept documentary's unposed realism but set aside its reforming mission for personal vision.
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About
Documentary photography in the 1930s had served a cause: Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange worked for a federal agency publicising rural poverty. After the war a younger generation kept the unstaged camera but dropped the mission. Robert Frank's The Americans (1958), made on long road trips, set the tone with tilted frames, jukeboxes, flags and lonely faces.
The curator John Szarkowski's exhibition New Documents (1967) at the Museum of Modern Art presented Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand as photographers who wanted to understand the world rather than improve it. Arbus photographed twins, nudists and circus performers head-on; Friedlander layered shop windows, signs and his own shadow; Winogrand's crowded, off-kilter frames filled The Animals (1969). Bruce Davidson spent two years on one Harlem block for East 100th Street (1970), and in the 1970s Robert Adams and Frank Gohlke brought the same cool attention to a changing American land.
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