BBC4 have just started a series on the history of photography, entitled The Genius of Photography. This review outlines how sometimes photography has served social causes.
Critics of early documentary photography employed the same arguments that had been directed against the founding father of documentary film, John Grierson — that working-class people were represented simply as passive victims of industrial capitalism.
At best, the photograph aimed to pressurise governments into a charitable response to poverty, slum housing or bad working conditions. At worst, the goal was simply to display the skill and humanity of the photographer.
Nevertheless, documentary photographs have led to progressive social change that might otherwise have been delayed or not occurred at all.
Lewis Hines’ photographs in the opening years of the twentieth century were used to help end child labour in US factories, sweatshops and mines. Tina Modotti made an empathetic representation of the Mexican Revolution in the twenties and thirties.
And here in the UK Edith Tudoe-Hardt worked with the National Unemployed Workers’ Association to highlight the consequences of mass unemployment in depression Britain.
The iniquities of apartheid South Africa were wonderfully represented in Ernest Coles’ famous “House of Bondage”, while Sebastian Salgado’s photos of “Workers” has undoubtedly contributed to a worldwide struggle for social justice.
But the medium has not escaped the retreat from class politics which has been underway from the Thatcher period onwards, and it is not obvious who, if anybody, has replaced documentary photographers like McCullin, Bresson, Capa, and Salgado.
Whatever the aims of the photographer, it is undeniable that the documentary photograph has been seen, and continues to be seen, as a threat not just by dictatorial regimes but also increasingly by late-capitalist Western liberal-democracy.
The first big example of censorship was the banning of photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Americans during their seven-year occupation of Japan at the end of World War Two. The photos of Yamhata, Domon and Tomatsu brought the horrors of the atomic age to the world’s attention only after the occupation ended.
Don McCullin, Philipp Jones Griffiths , David Douglas Duncan, Tim Page and Larry Burroughs’ negative representation of Vietnam were significant in turning public opinion against the war .
Crucially, the impact of Eddie Adams’ photo of the cold blooded execution of a North Vietnamese by the Saigon Chief of Police dramatically increased the numbers of Americans on anti-war demo. The numbers increased again as the smuggled photos of the My Lai massacre emerged.
Government reaction has seen much tighter control, with Don McCullin infamously being denied a press pass during the South Atlantic War over the Falklands. Photographers in Ireland during “The Troubles” were “embedded” with army units — a practice repeated in the ongoing conflict in Iraq.
But further technological advances have made absolute control impossible, as the images of the Abu Ghraib tortures ably demonstrated.
It remains to be seen if there is a downside to the greater availability of high quality images.
Will the fantastic quantity of photographs undermine the medium’s power both to shock and also to provoke much needed protest and dissent? Or will the widespread availability of easily usable digital technology at ever falling prices make oppression and cover-up increasingly difficult ?