Photography Collection

Sebastiao Salgado, Dispute between workers of a gold mine in Serra Palada, Brasil, and the military police, 1986

By Dr. Anton Holzer
The postmodern arbitrariness that went hand-in-hand with globalisation appears to have come to an end. It has been succeeded by a new trend in photography: a return to the documentary. People have recently started to reflect on the long-forgotten socio-critical photography of the 1930s. But does it really serve as a model? Social criticism in documental images? Elucidation, accusation and political change effected by means of the camera? No, during the last three decades this form of social criticism has not really been in demand. If we look at the exhibition policies of the large art museums, it is obvious that in the last three decades more and more photography as photo art has been shown, yet at the same time the documentary element of photography has gradually disappeared.

Larger formats
This tendency can be seen even in the superficialities: the format of pictures has moved further and further from the conventional dimensions of the ordinary, everyday snapshot and closer to those of the panel painting. In the 1970s and 1980s photos, if they did happen to find their way into an art museum, were exhibited in small or only slightly enlarged formats: 13 by 18 cm, 18 by 24 cm, or, at the very most, 24 by 30cm. Now photography demands more space on the museum wall than the venerable old large-format oil paintings that were once considered the flagships of 'high art'.

3.3 million dollars for '99 cent'
When the photographic series '99 cent' by the star German photographer Andreas Gursky was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2001, the pictures measured well over 2 by 3 m. The prices at the photographic art market kept admirable pace with these expansions. At an auction in 2007, a buyer paid 3.3 million dollars for a single print from the '99 cent' series, which Gursky had photographed in a New York discount supermarket where every product cost 99 cents. It was the most expensive photographic image ever sold.

The dizzying heights that photographic art reached in recent years did not happen by chance. They fit well within the economic climate of an unrestrained globalisation, in which stock exchange profits seemed inexhaustible and the business of speculative transactions just kept booming. The large-format photographic work of postmodernists such as Gursky, Struth, Ruff and Hütte would seem to be a fitting illustration of the years of economic euphoria. They composed a world not of hard social facts, but of a kaleidoscope of sparkling impressions.

Concrete social and political concerns are difficult to discern in this form of photography. The viewer stands filled with awe before the monumental tableaux – nothing more. In the twinkling of an eye these large-format panels make facts into fiction; the postmodern carousel of perception turns again and again. The pictures refrain from absolute, definitive assertions about the state of society and of things.

But then came the crisis. The profits tumbled, confidence in the monetary economy dwindled, banks and other businesses got into difficulty. The shock to the economy left its mark – even in the cultural domain, even in photography. Now a new trend in the photography of the early 21st century is tentatively starting to show itself: a renewed interest in socio-critical documentary photography. And it is not by chance that this return leads us back to the 1930s, when engagé documentary photography was at its zenith.

Taking sides
The heyday of the (mostly) left-wing, socio-critical photography of the interwar period admittedly lasted just a short time both in the USA and in Europe, from the late 1920s to the middle or end of the 1930s. Almost all the socio-documentary photo-projects from this period of violent political conflict commented on the pressing social problems of the time. Unemployment, poverty, housing shortages, homelessness. These were the issues at this time of great political conflict between left and right. The socio-documentary photographers took sides. They involved themselves in the conflicts on the street. As Tucholsky so aptly put it in the 'Weltbühne' in 1925, the camera was their weapon. And photographs, he said, were 'dynamite and blasting cartridges in the battle for souls'.

Undertones
While Tucholsky was fascinated by the left-wing, militant 'biased photography' that aimed to ignite social and political sparks through radical juxtaposition such as that practised by the photo-montage artist John Heartfield in the 'Arbeiter-Illustrierten-Zeitung' (Workers Pictorial Newspaper), the language of other documentary photographers was to some extent gentler and subtler. One need only recall the work of the Soviet, Czech, Slovak and Hungarian socio-photography movements, for example, whose exponents combined political engagement with modern, objective imagery.

An astonishing number of women in central Europe took part in this political project for a political sociography in pictures. The Slovakian Irena Blühová, for example, photographed a fascinating series about social outcasts for her 1930 work 'Cretins'. The Hungarian Klára Langer took photographs of the dismal living conditions of gypsy girls in the 1930s. Around 1932 Judit Kárász, a Hungarian Bauhaus student, photographed the unemployed. Kata Sugár took photos of the faces of the working class. And Kata Kálmán, with her husband Iván Hevesy, devoted almost a decade to the social documentation of the lives of workers and peasants.

The offshoots originating from the workers' photography movement of the mid-1920s in Germany spread far across the German-speaking world. In Germany, well-known figures included Eugen Heilig, Erich Rinka, Ernst Thormann, Helmar Lerski and Walter Ballhause, in Austria Ferdinand Hodek, Nikolaus Schwarz, Alexander Stern and Edith Suschitzky, and in the Netherlands Mark Kolthoff, Eva Besnyö, Wally Elenbaas, John Fernhout, Hans Wolf, Cas Oorthuys and Carel Blazer. In Hungary, other than those mentioned, Sándor Gönci, Ferenc Haár, Lajos Lengyel and Lajos Kassák were of note. In Czechoslovakia, alongside Irena Blühová were also Karol Aufricht, Barbora Zsigmondiová and, most importantly, Lubomir Linhart, who published the programmatic volume 'Soziale Fotografie' (Social Photography)in 1934. Even in Switzerland this interest in the underclasses of society made itself felt: in the 1930s Theo Frey, for example, photographed the everyday lives of workers, the unemployed and highland peasants.

Walker Evans, Starving cuban family, 1933. Silver gelatin vintage print, 13.8 x 22.7 cm. Private collection, © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

'Not a single shot of Wall Street'
Although they used the camera in very different ways, there is one thing that the images of all these documentarists have in common: the poor, the outcasts and the lower classes are not represented as exotic objects, but rather portrayed in a way that points to participatory observation. The photographs do not present poverty as a human stain; they show the dignity of the poor. To the lowliest members of society, those who appear in all the statistics only as the anonymous collective, these photographs give back their individual – often proudly upturned – face. Socio-documentary photography from the interwar period is, as Tucholsky diagnosed, no austere and sober non-fiction record of things, but rather 'biased photography'. The documentary power of the images is related to the desire for political and social change. This desire could be conveyed in a variety of ways. The tradition of the socially reforming (largely civil) documentary photography of the turn of the century (such as that of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, who coined the term 'social photography' in 1909) appeared again in an altered and expanded form in the interwar period: such as in the large-scale propaganda project of the US Farm Security Administration (FSA), which in the 1930s wished to use government funding to eradicate rural poverty in the American South. Starting in 1935, a photo-documentary project was run alongside this economic campaign, and from it emerged such icons of American photography as Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein and Dorothea Lange. Roy E. Stryker, head of the photographic division of the FSA, did not pursue inflammatory social documentation, but rather used images to show wholehearted support for Franklin D. Roosevelt's national New Deal policy. He intervened wherever possible to bring into the public eye his idea of a positive documentary image in terms of the belief in progress expressed in the patriotic policy: he chose 'appropriate' photographers, gave them strict itineraries and guidelines regarding content, wrote detailed scripts, and chose pictures for the press and specified the captions. Stryker claimed: 'You'll find no records of big people or big events. There are pictures that say Depression, but there are no pictures of sit-down strikes, no apple salesmen on street corners, not a single shot of Wall Street and absolutely no celebrities.' Accordingly, Stryker made no great strides in any new political direction when in 1941 he became head of photo-propaganda in the American Office of War Information.

Academic analysis
Alongside the left-wing workers’ photography and the nationally supported photo-propaganda, there was a third strand to socio-documentary photography in the 1930s: the academic analysis, using ethnological approaches, of the everyday proletarian life. We encounter this variety of photography in the ‘Mass Observation’ movement in England, which was founded in 1937 by writer Charles Madge and anthropologist Tom Harrison, along with the filmmaker and photographer Humphrey Jennings. Between 1937 and 1950, when the project ended, 25 books and countless field studies about the daily lives, living conditions and leisure activities of the English working class had been produced with the aid of thousands of volunteers who participated in the collection of the data. The end of the 1930s heralded the temporary end of socio-documentary photography. National Socialism in Germany and the looming war drove left-wing photographers into inner emigration - the term used to describe the withdrawal of intellectuals and artists into private life during the Nazi occupation- exile, sometimes prison – or even into the arms of the national propaganda machine. In the USA and almost all the countries of Europe, from the middle of the 1930s social criticism entered into the service of patriotic rearmament. Even left-wing photographic movements, which until then had given national ideological exploitation an appropriately wide berth, fell into line within the phalanx of nationally stipulated and sponsored propaganda in World War II. An example of this was the ‘Photo League’ founded in New York in 1936, the largest non-commercial photography school in the USA.

The return to the documentary
After 1945 – except in England, where the tradition continued a little longer – engagé and collectively organised socio-documentary photography could no longer really gain a foothold. The ruthless anti-communism of the McCarthy era imposed the verdict of evil on the left-wing, committed socio-critical photography of the interwar period. The great documentary photographers of the post-war period, such as W. Eugene Smith, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, William Klein and Mary Ellen Mark, were either lone fighters or forced to work supplying stories for the big illustrated magazines (particularly 'Life'). Constrained by the economic logistics of increasing circulation, political outsiders had little scope for expressing their views. In the shadow cast by the global economic crisis, is there now any trace of a reversal of the trend? The first signs of a new direction in photography can be identified: some European museums and academic institutions are looking back – it’s no coincidence that they were nudged by the shock of the economic crisis – to the documentary power of the photograph. In the summer of 2009, the renowned Budapest Ludwig Museum showed an outstanding exhibition of socio-documentary photography from the late 1920s and 1930s, entitled 'Things are drawing to a crisis'. In the centre of the display were the works of the American and European photographers and photography groups (such as those from the Dutch and Hungarian workers’ photography movements) who, starting from the great economic crisis of 1929, documented the daily lives of the economic losers. In 2009, the photographer, critic and curator Jorge Ribalta organised 'Universal Archive' at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), a highly regarded exhibition on the history of documentary photography in the 20th century. Finally, in 2010 the Museum Reina Sofia in Madrid will be hosting a large international conference on the history of the socio-documentary workers' photography movement. This does not in any way mean that the socio-documentary photography of the interwar period has made its comeback. But the public, which is now reflecting even more keenly on the socio-documentary images of the 1930s, also seems to be interested in the currently visible downside of unrestricted capitalism. Perhaps the economic losers of this latest crisis will now also gain a new photographic face.