Exercise - 'Documentary Photography' by Elizabeth McCausland

'Write a short bullet list of McCausland's main points in your learning log. Explain in your own words, in a single paragraph, why this article is relevant to this part of the course.'

• McCausland underlines the different genres of photography - the new world: the documentary photography; and everything before that, the traditional, expressionist photography: surrealism, photo secession and pictorialism. The latter group unfortunately in her opinion utterly useless in the assistance towards any social or economic improvements. 
• The old photography is compared to a pretty, subtle country side whilst the new wave of documentary photography is described as a medium that pictures life and excitement, in its pure state, without the need of retouching it.
• The main purpose of the document is to create the awareness, a concern, whilst the photographer task is to use his skills and imagination to 'find the significant truth and give the significant form'.
• The always present question of photography if the medium can be called art is also raised in the article. The writer argues that photography's main task is to be a recording tool, again criticising the turn of the century creative photographers, who were aiming at achieving impressionistic results. 
• Should the photography be seen as art, it has the responsibility of having a meaning, it must be able to communicate and speak to the viewer. The lack of communication and understanding seems it is long gone out of fashion.
• The photograph is no longer meant to beautify, it's not meant to improve on reality, it is in fact its responsibility to show the most horror of all truths.
• Lastly, the photographers themselves must have a clear purpose, they must be able to produce work that informs of social issues and makes us aware of the 'civilisation we live in'. Such work presents an actual reason, unlike the work based purely on personal expression.

McCausland in her 1939 article clearly emphases on the importance of a social document. The so called new wave of photographers working with realism covers the decades of a very difficult financial and social climate: 1st World War, Great Depression, the approach of the Second World War. With such photographers as Lewis Hine covering the subject of child labour and programs as Farm Security Administration tackling the issue of poverty during the great depression (with photographers like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange), camera quickly became the tool of change. The b&w photography became the symbol of an ability to demand an improvement, to open the eyes and request a change to the difficult circumstances. The relevance of this article to this part of the course is therefore based on the emphasis of the importance of documentary photography, which in 1939 was only practiced in b&w (although the experimentation with colour film started years before).