Social documentary photography

It may also refer to a socially critical genre of photography dedicated to showing the life of underprivileged or disadvantaged people.

Social documentary photography has its roots in the 19th-century work of Henry Mayhew, Jacob Riis, and Lewis Hine, but began to take further form through the photographic practice of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the USA.

Many noted Depression-era photographers were fostered by the FSA project, including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks.

In the United States two photographers got involved at the end of the 19th century in favor of people on the margins of society, Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine.

Hine's work culminated in a law against child labor, the Keating-Owen Act of 1916, which was repealed shortly after the entry of the U.S. into the First World War.

The vigorous anti-communism of the McCarthy era had anathematized the engaged, liberal social documentary photography with the verdict of evil.

Great documentary photographers of the postwar era, such as W. Eugene Smith, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, William Klein or Mary Ellen Mark were either lone fighters or were forced to work as story-suppliers for the large illustrated magazines (especially Life).

Thus Eugene Smith documented in the late 1960s the fate of the inhabitants of the Japanese fishing village of Minamata who had fallen ill as a result of mercury poisoning.

British photojournalist Don McCullin specialised in examining the underside of society, and his photographs have depicted the unemployed, downtrodden and the impoverished.

A good many of his Russian photographs appeared in Forty Pounds of Salt (Fly by Night Press, 1995), Full Life and The Fire Within (the last two published by Medecins Sans Frontieres (Holland) & AIDS Foundation East-West, 2001).

[5] Affected by his own experience of growing up poor in rural Puerto Rico, Rivera-Ortiz refers to his work as a celebration of life, in poverty.

Luc Delahaye, Manuel Rivera-Ortiz, John Ranard, and the members of VII Photo Agency are among many who have regularly exhibited in galleries and museums.

Roman Vishniac may be mentioned as a characteristic representative, who documented Jewish life in Eastern Europe prior to the Holocaust (Verschwundene Welt, A Vanished World)|.

Social Realism is an artistic movement, expressed in the visual and other realist arts, which depicts working class activities as heroic.