One of the major problems to consider before proceeding on a project that uses photography as a means to document is the medium’s nature and its relation to human intention. The following section will compare and contrast the approaches of several documentary style photographers as a way to discuss the problems photography faces as a means for conveying information and giving representation to people and community.

Susan Sontag argued that the industrialization of the camera democratizes all experiences by translating them into images (1977, p. 7). Even if photographers attempt to “mirror” reality, their approach is informed by an inescapable subjectivity. Simply by virtue of preference or taste, “photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects” (1977, p. 6). This is the nature of its democratic function. Sontag expounds on the breadth of photography through various examples of its uses.

For the insecure or anxious, for example, the act or practice of taking pictures becomes a factor for its use and by implication, the meaning of the photograph. Sontag notes that many travelers overcome by a foreign land, use the camera as a way to soothe those emotions. She calls these people tourists. “[They] help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure” (1977, p. 9). Space becomes manageable by reducing it to photographic means, “by converting experience into an image, a souvenir”, and by implication, the photograph one makes, negates what is not photographed (1977, p. 9).

A representation is created by virtue of a space or other world that resides between the photographer and the photographed. Sontag describes photography as an event in itself. The sense of meaning of a subject photographed takes on a plurality through its being photographed, tacitly stating that an event is worth capturing (1977, p. 11).

If an event is worth capturing, implying a choice by the photographer to capture that event, it is also considered worth preserving. Sontag makes the charge that to photograph is not only an act of participation, as if stating, in lieu of my direct participation in that event, I will photograph it, the act also tacitly implies a preference for the status quo (1977, p. 12). Sontag provides the example of Alfred Hitchcock’s protagonist, James Stewart, from the film Rear Window. An immobilized man, unable to directly participate in an event he feels a strong affinity for, photographs it instead. To Sontag it was his way of “participating” in the event, and by implication preserving it, status quo.

In direct conflict to her own statements, Sontag also argues that to photograph is to kill. How can a photograph both kill and preserve? Sontag saw the photographed subject as a violated subject, “by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have” (1977, p. 14). She compares the camera to the gun and states that it is a sublimated weapon, each click of the shutter, a “soft murder”, by virtue of the gun safaris in East Africa being replaced by cameras. To photograph is a symbolic “murder”, a re-representation premised on the event of photography itself. In this particular instance it is also democratic by virtue of a plurality of interpretations. We may preserve an image of things as they are within a temporal space, and we may re-signify its nature by our aesthetic choices and the circumstances in our photographing it.

These are three examples Sontag provides that demonstrate the various intentions photographers have brought to the craft. For the anxious photographer who finds him or herself in a foreign land, photography can serve to ease emotions and take control of an unfamiliar environment. Photography can act as a way to participate indirectly in an event, and finally, photography can serve as a weapon. In the context provided by Sontag, the camera acts in lieu of the prize kills a hunter may collect.

However, Sekula complicates these intentions by describing the camera’s usage in the context of a photographic discourse. Put simply, photographic discourse is in reference to the question, what does a picture provide in the context of a discussion? What is the discussion? He provides several assumptions about the camera’s ability to relay information. For one, he says that a picture is a form of communication. The picture implies a message, which he describes as a “metalinguistic proposition”. For example, “This snapshot represents your son”. The snap of the shutter, he describes as an “utterance” (Sekula, 1975, p. 454). If the snap of a shutter is an utterance of a message, and the discourse represents a discussion, which that message contributes to, then there is an implication of meaning to each photograph if we assume this about all types of photographs.

The way intention becomes complicated by the entry of a discourse is in what he calls “a floating meaning”, an image that has a trivial relation to the subject that was photographed (Sekula, 1975, p. 457). One example he provides is a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz called Steerage. Stieglitz shot an image of two levels of a ship. At the top level, men in blazers and hats look down at a lower level of who Stieglitz refers to as the “common people”, women and children, their clothing hanging from a makeshift clothesline. The image has polemic value as both a statement about class division as well as male patriarchy. However, Sekula argues that incidental polemic value is not enough to secure the message as part of a discourse. Sekula instead looks to statements made by Stieglitz himself about his intention for the photograph: “I longed to escape from my surroundings and join these people… I saw shapes related to each other. I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that of the feeing I had about life… Here would be a picture based on related shapes and on the deepest human feeling, a step in my own evolution, a spontaneous discovery” (Sekula, 1975, p. 464).

At an analytical level, the polemic meaning becomes stripped away by the formalistic qualities of the photograph based on the words Stieglitz provided to describe the image. The abstraction is the meaning of the photo as the catalyst for his “feeling” about the scene. This is reduced to a logical equation: “Common people equal my alienation. We have the reduced metaphorical equation: shapes equal my alienation. Finally by a process of semantic diffusion, we are left with the trivial and absurd assertion: shapes equal feelings” (Sekula, 1975, p. 466). In this example, the meaning of the photo is “floating” between the image’s polemic value and its formalistic qualities. Sekula gives final and conclusive weight to abstraction as the meaning of the photograph, so whatever social outcome the image would have provided becomes incidental. As a staunch absolutist, Sekula adds, “The photographer of genius is possible only through a disassociation of the image maker from the social embeddedness of the image” (1975, p. 469).

Complete dissociation seems like an impossibility and echoes many of the same contentions audiences have about the work of anthropologists who attempt to represent indigenous communities from a “neutral lens”. There is an inescapability the researcher faces with his own cultural lens. However, Sekula’s point was about form taking precedents over content. I would argue that both polemics and form were represented in the image, as well as in Stieglitz’s statement, if even as a tertiary consideration. Many critics particularly of the post-modern school of thought believed the social work of Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Live ought to have been discounted by virtue of Riis’ sometimes blatant racism and classism exhibited in his texts, calling him a faux progressive (O’Donnell, 2004). Those who argued in his defense asked the audience to look at the social outcomes he produced during his time and the social context he was speaking from, which was much looser about derogatory racial stereotypes. However, what is truly in question is the purity of the photographer’s intention to use the image as a reliable means to a socially beneficial end as opposed to an image acting as an end in itself.

The work of Stieglitz is distinct from the work of Jacob Riis or Lewis Hine. Riis didn’t even describe himself as a photographer. The use of their cameras was strictly a means to an end. Similar but different, Hine had identified as a photographer and even considered photography as an art but not an art for its aesthetic outcomes but rather the photographer’s ability to interpret the everyday world. “He did not mean ‘beauty’ or ‘personal expression’. He meant how people live. He wanted his pictures to make a difference in that world, to make living in it more bearable” (Trachtenberg, 1977, p. 240). These intentions were prefaced by a clear statement of his purpose. In Hine’s project, Men at Work, he sought to show his audience images of workers, a response to the assumption that cities “build themselves”. He wanted to put a face on the people who work behind the scenes of great American infrastructures. His intention is stated clearly, creating an implied contract of expectation between himself and his audience. The project would provide “a very important offset to some misconceptions about industry. One is that many of our national assets, fabrics, photographs, motors, airplanes and what-not – just happen” (Trachtenberg, 1977, p. 241). Hine makes no reference to aesthetic appeals in his statement, and thus, the purity of his intentions, a polemic statement with strictly social outcomes, are emphasized and can be expected by an audience beyond the level of a “floating meaning” that shares half of its efforts to the creative projections of an “artist”.

Creative projection is not a sin in itself, but the work of Hine demonstrates that it shouldn’t be the end in itself but rather, an implicit means to an end. The approach Riis and Hine took made an ethical statement that aesthetics ought to be strictly in service to polemics, that the image was simply a tool, and the true nobility of “art” was its contributions to the human condition. Eugène Atget was another social documentary style photographer who demonstrates this point. His work has been described as possessing a particularly arresting visual quality, a moodiness and tone that could be described as “art”, but Atget like Riis and Hine worked with clear intentions in mind. Atget’s photo documents of pre-modern Paris arrived from the perspective of preservation. Atget began working decades after the rebuilding process during the beginning of the 20^th century. By this time, preservationist groups banded to form conservation establishments for the historical districts of Paris to which Atget was associated (Westerbeck and Meyerowitz, 1994, p. 108).

Atget was said to have approached his subject matter with an “attitude”, revealed in his pictures. (Westerbeck and Meyerowitz, 1994, p. 109). Many of the old Parisian districts were emptied describing them as a “necropolis, a city from the past inhabited by ghosts” (Westerbeck and Meyerowitz, 1994, p. 110). Atget’s viewfinder camera worked with a long shutter speed that blurred the motion of subjects crossing its plane contextualized in literary terms as a “disparity between the slow times of the city” (Westerbeck and Meyerowitz, 1994, p. 110). They were considered technical flaws in the photographs that reflected his feeling of wandering old Paris, places where he once lived, with a sentimentalism and attitude that defined his work as “romantic”.

Although his work could be described extensively for its formalistic qualities, its sense of “attitude”, and “sentimentalism”, the latter going against the typical aims of social documentary style photography, his intentions were not for self-serving posterity in itself. However, as Paris was disappearing, he sought to document what would be gone forever. His own feelings of sentimentalism seep into his documents as a statement for the inescapability of the subject from the creation. This is how we can talk about formalism without straying from polemics, but Atget never considered what he was doing was for art as an end in itself. For example, he would sell an image of a lion with two serpents in its mouth to metalworkers who used the references to produce bronze replicas (Hamburg, n.d.) His approach and feeling was sentimental but his intent was to serve the collective memory of those who lived in old Paris. He described his work as documents – an artifact with the specific purpose for providing evidence for something within a discourse. The bulk of his photographs went to visual use for painters and libraries. His stated aim was to catalogue (Hamburg, n.d.).

Sontag argued that despite the parallel movements between photography and art, the two disciplines oppose each other: the painter constructs, the photographer discloses. Her view is informed by a key assumption about photography. It is a document that discloses a fragment of the world selected by a person’s subjectivity. Thus, artistic considerations are of secondary importance. What piece of the world the photo represents is of primary concern (1977, p. 93). She complicates the point by posing a key question: what piece of the world is it? She believed that until this question was answered, there was no expectation of knowing how to react to a photograph.

Jacob Riis aimed to produce a document to which photography was relegated to a secondary visual aid. He worked as a police reporter for 22 years and possessed sensitivity to the exploitation and congestion in the living situations of the Irish, Italian, and Jewish people living in New York’s Lower East Side (Westerbeck and Meyerowitz, 1994, p. 241). Riis did not identify as a photographer and had no qualms about making bad images. He wanted his pictures to equal the ugliness he saw in poverty. One image for example is of a cramped crawl space described by its technical flaws.

The focus has been put in the wrong place. Refuse is clear in the foreground, while the band of petty criminals who are supposed to be the subject squat hazily beyond. Yet the photographic mistake puts the social emphasis where it belongs, on the vermin-breeding conditions in which these men live. (Westerbeck and Meyerowitz, 1994, p. 242).

Riis did not have these thoughts in mind when he photographed. He took a run and gun approach, setting his gear and flash in the shadows of the tenement he would be visiting usually without people realizing his presence, snapping off one photo and leaving before anyone got the wiser. The result was satisfying for him. “It is a bad picture but not nearly as bad as the place,” he said (Westerbeck and Meyerowitz, 1994, p. 242). The irony of his non-aesthetic is the emergence of an aesthetic that represents the polemic meaning Riis was after, giving way for his written accounts. The approach for Riis was in service to his statement, and thus the purity of his social work remains as the end in itself.

The impact of James Agee and Walker Evans’ classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was through the establishment of a clear contextual discourse to which photographs would be of service to, featuring images of portraits, both individual and group, landscapes, and detail shots as a visual archive of how Alabama sharecroppers lived in the 1930s. The images are followed by a detailed account describing the experience, from the point of view of James Agee infiltrating Jim Crow era Alabama farmlands to document how the tenants there lived.

Evans opens the book with his reflection on the attitude of James Agee. “The writing they induced is, among other things, the reflection of one resolute, private rebellion. Agee’s rebellion was unquenchable, self-damaging, deeply principled, infinitely costly, and ultimately priceless” (Agee and Evans, 1988, p. vii). Agee never made a call to find “the truth” about Alabama tenant farmers, instead embracing his own subjectivity to be of service to his social documents. He wanted to represent the truth of his own experience as purely and concisely as possible because his implicit style was the truth that would establish his interpretations. “Those works which I most deeply respect have about them a firm quality of the superhuman… that plane and manner are not within reach, and could only falsify what by this manner of effort may at least less hopelessly approach clarity, and truth” (Agee and Evans, 1988, p. 9). Agee was familiar with the conventions of creative projection, stating that most art transforms reality into “aesthetic reality” in a forward he wrote for Helen Levitt’s book A Way of Seeing, but the kind of images he said photographers should make ought to reflect and record, not transform. He placed the emphasis on developing perception as a way to make an “undisturbed and faithful record” (Agee, 1965).

Evans shared the same sentiments. “Photography should have the courage to present itself as what it is, which is a graphic composition produced by a machine and an eye and then some chemicals and paper. Technically, it has nothing to do with painting” (Katz, 1971, p. 364). Evans made the distinction that documentary has a use. In its most literal usage, for example, a police photo of a murder scene may serve as evidence for a crime. He said art in itself is useless. However, he’s also reticent in saying that what he makes is strictly “documentary” preferring to say that he makes art in “documentary style” (Katz, 1971, p. 364).

Agee recognized that even words and documents have a limitation. He would have rather pulled from the roots of the Alabama farmlands a piece of the earth so his readers may come to feel what it was like. “If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement” (Agee and Evans, 1988, p. 10). This was truth for Agee. He wanted his readers to experience the roots of Southern farmland, so people could feel what it was like. Ultimately, the intent of the duo was to inspire a self-reflection in his readers to the things they may take for granted and the people who had no access to the same liberties. “In the hope that the reader will be edified, and may feel kindly disposed toward any well-thought-out liberal efforts to rectify the unpleasant situation down South, and will somewhat better and more guiltily appreciate the next good meal he eats” (Agee and Evans, 1988, p. 12).

Susan Sontag acknowledged that photographers had often enlisted the help of writers to “spell out the truth to which photographs testify – as James Agee did in the texts he wrote to accompany Walker Evans’s photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” (1977, p. 108). It was the hope of the moralist’s written word that Sontag felt may save photography from the slipperiness of context. She said, “Photography can only say, ‘how beautiful.’ … It has succeeded in turning abject poverty itself, by handling it in a modish, technically perfect way, into an object of enjoyment” (1977, p. 107). The moralists demand that a picture speaks, and it is the caption that tries to provide the missing voice. Sontag acknowledged a commonality between the photograph and the poem. She said, “Poetry’s commitment to concreteness and to the autonomy of the poem’s language parallels photography’s commitment to pure seeing. Both imply discontinuity, disarticulated forms and compensatory unity: wrenching things from their context (to see them in a fresh way), bringing things together elliptically, according to the imperious but often arbitrary demands of subjectivity” (1977, p. 96).

The structure of the book and the way the reader must interact with it serves an important polemic function described in the sonata form – a musical convention juxtaposing two musical themes where the second theme is in a different key from the first. The meaning of the song structure is enriched and modified by the second theme thus broadening the range and understanding of the message (Lucaites, 1997). Lucaites argued that the juxtaposition of captionless images that begin the book to a section on Agee’s politics creates a tension that requires an active participation and engagement by the reader. The reader is invited to engage and evaluate the three tenant families who are introduced in book I. Afterwards, the assumptions the reader makes are enriched by Agee’s discourse. Agee’s aim was to decontextualize the experience of poverty as an object of enjoyment. Instead, the images and text work in tandem, fulfilling the shortcomings of the other and addressing the assumptions of the viewer. “The implication here is that Evan’s photographs will serve as a visual, restraining corrective to Agee’s prose, and thus provide a clear balance to the ambiguities of verbal representation” (Lucaites, 1997).

Additionally, Lucaites argued that even the title, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, implores the viewer to actively engage with the subject matter. The ethical statement of the approach implies that political consciousness necessarily requires the interaction between the speaker and the audience (Lucaites, 1997). What’s more, the title of “famous men” is a recontexualization of the underclass, the “wretches” of society as they were earlier described. Each of these considerations reveal carefully thought out considerations towards the purity of their aims for photography as an informative device.

Robert Frank’s The Americans is hailed as a brilliant social document on American culture partly by virtue of its enormous backlash when it was published in the states in 1959. Beat poet, Jack Kerouac, provided the opening remarks to the book, regarding Frank in kinship to the commitments of the poet. “Anybody doesn’t like these pitchers don’t like potry, see? Anybody don’t like potry go home see television shots of big hatted cowboys being tolerated by kind horses… Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world” (Frank, 1959, p. 3).

It was his image of America that people in his time rejected, even his way of shooting, often described as lacking a central focus. Frank could not initially publish the book in the States when he’d finished the project following a Guggenheim Fellowship grant he received, partly by the help of Walker Evans. “Life wouldn’t touch the work, and the New York Times used only one image, a Houston bank interior that Frank considers the most innocuous photograph in the book” (Westerbeck and Meyerowitz, 1994, p. 354). In ’58, he found a publisher in Paris who agreed to print the book, but he wanted the work to be released in the States, a striking clue towards his polemic intentions. A year later, Frank found Grove Press who agreed to print The Americans, which many regarded as an attack on the United States (Westerbeck and Meyerowitz, 1994, p. 354).

Frank shot the common symbols of American life. Two of his leitmotifs were the automobile and the American flag. “The automobile, in whose backseat the Americans of the fifties often had their first sexual experience, becomes a vehicle for Frank’s reflections on love American-style” (Westerbeck and Meyerowitz, 1994, p. 356). The automobile was an outsider’s response to American symbols that responded to a sentimentalism that pervaded popular thinking about photography.

Frank captured America’s prized symbols, albeit with an eye for “quiet people” and “black events” (Westerbeck and Meyerowitz, 1994, p. 354). Many of his images contrasted those most widely accepted notions in American society.

All but one of the seven pictures that end The Americans are of cars (or, in one instance, a motorcycle). Passing from teenagers petting amid parked cars to newlyweds in Reno, a dejected black couple astride a Harley Davidson, and finally Frank’s wife and kids in the Ford, this closing run of pictures has traced a kind of American romance from courtship through marriage to disillusionment and, in the end, the numbness of family life. (Westerbeck and Meyerowitz, 1994, p. 356)

Frank takes the theme of the American automobile to its narrative conclusion as he saw through a type of poetic anthology that contrasted the common image. “Editorially, the shots… disclose a warped objectivity that gives this book its major limitation,” writes one critic (Westerbeck and Meyerowitz, 1994, p. 354).

Essayist, James May, provided a biting criticism of Frank’s portrayal of America and ultimately, its utility as a document of truth. In his central thesis he states, “I don’t for one second see it as being anything other than a reflection of Frank himself and so in a certain sense having nothing to do with Americans or America… they are only showing what they wish to believe or think to portray and not the truth of the matter” (2010).  Frank’s cover image shows a man and a woman standing in front of adjacent windows in an apartment building. A large American flag spreads out across the frame, covering the man’s face. All the viewer sees is a hand raised to the face similar to the motions a person would make when taking a drag from a cigarette. The woman peers out with a look of concern, to which May states, “Frank could just as easily have had the people behind the flag in the window waving and smiling but then lost the art of it… Frank had no desire to show happy people nor do the generations of street photographers who followed nor does the audience who admire showing the flip side of the American dream who you can bet do not see themselves in Frank’s photographs” (2010).

May’s critique refers back, once again, to the plurality of context, and he may not be far off in saying that the people Frank portrayed may not have attributed the same meaning to their own lives that Frank’s symbolism gave to the American image. This is precisely the point. Frank was not talking about these individual people’s lives as an end in themselves. They are, as Westerbeck and Meyerowitz described in their comparison to poetry, re-contextualized. Frank’s angle was to show that sadness and isolation also exists.

May’s appeal was to “the right way” to view American society. “In Frank’s America, there is no room for the brightness of the music, literature, art and film that would captivate an entire world, or the sophistication and audacity that would place men in the Sea of Tranquility with less computer power than a cell phone” (2010). May defends his position through a calling of traditional notions of American industriousness and achievement, recalling his own family life. “I don’t recall any of my extended family in the mid-1960s being rendered numb in such a fashion…Americans overcame not gave into such feelings by traveling huge distances in search of careers, education and opportunities” (2010).

Most of May’s criticisms responded to interpretations provided by art curators and his own interpretations of the photographs, projecting his own conceptions of what an “American” image ought to look like, appealing to the convention of the “happy moments” image. This is an ethical and polemic statement in itself. It should be noted that May had not once referred to any direct quotations from Frank himself about his intentions. Sontag states, “Even an entirely accurate caption is only one interpretation, necessarily a limiting one, of the photograph to which it is attached… It cannot prevent any argument or moral plea which a photograph (or set of photographs) is intended to support from being undermined by the plurality of meanings that every photograph carries” (1977, p. 109). May believed the photographs Frank produced erased history, thus his need to reiterate it in his argument. The discussion about aesthetics and photography becomes political itself thus revealing Frank’s polemic statement.

Howard Becker argued that what makes a photograph “documentary” (or social science or photojournalism) is full context, yet he regards the work of Frank as part of this vein, despite its lack of captions or any statements he makes from The Americans because “the images themselves, sequenced, repetitive, variations on a set of themes, provide their own context, teach viewers what they need to know in order to arrive, by their own reasoning, at some conclusions about what they are looking at” (Becker, 1995). Context in some form of presentation is necessary for an image to be documentary otherwise, he said, viewers will provide their own meaning from their own resources. Frank had not included any of his own words to his book The Americans, but he had spoken before of his intentions.

What I have in mind, then, is observation and record of what one naturalized American finds to see in the United States that signifies the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere… I speak of the things that are there, anywhere and everywhere – easily found, not easily selected and interpreted… It is important to see what is invisible to others. Perhaps the look of hope or the look of sadness. Also, it is always the instantaneous reactions to oneself that produces a photograph. (Becker, 1995)

Westerbeck and Meyerowitz acknowledged that Frank was not the type of photographer to make the single image that tells the full story. The polemic statement was implicit and imbedded in his presentation, the types of photographs he chose, sticking closely to thematic motifs like cars, politicians, jukeboxes, and various presentations of the American flag. Frank’s message, the conclusions his photographs made, worked in the form of sequences building from one another.

We learn that a big man is a powerful man (as in Frank’s ‘Bar – Gallup, New Mexico,’ in which a large man in jeans and a cowboy hat dominates a crowded bar), and that a well-dressed big man is a rich and powerful man (‘Hotel Lobby – Miami Beach,’ in which a large middle aged man is accompanied by a woman wearing what seems to be an expensive fur)… We learn that politicians are big, thus powerful, men… We are looking at how the powerful work in some unspecified way. (Becker, 1995).

Becker concludes that had Frank gone farther to expand on his analysis, the images would have functioned more along the lines of visual sociology, leading to a statement about the nature of American politics, among other leitmotifs (1995). However, he admits that even the social sciences cannot escape the plurality of truth. Many social scientists would have felt weary about the work Frank produced even if he had captioned in detail each of his photos with accompanied analysis by virtue of the photograph’s ease to manipulation both technically and in its framing and presentation. “They would not, however, take the next step, which would be to see that every form of social science data has exactly these problems, and that none of the commonly accepted and widely used sociological methods solves them very well either” (Becker, 1995).

What emerges is an important discussion about interpretive projection. How does the view from the audience sync up with the vision of the photographer? Nesterenko and Smith describe a term called “protection” that informs how a viewer will experience a photograph. “What a photograph means to a person is the result of a complex interaction between the photograph and the person’s prior experiences and perceptions” (1984). This may explain the way May and the critics of Robert Frank addressed his project. May refers to his own family experiences and to say, “Frank’s vision of America does not sync up with the way I or my extended family view America” thus it must not be true.  Nesterenko and Smith attribute part of the interpretation to the ambiguity of the social situations stating, similarly to Becker, “he is apt to expose his own personality… traces of past experiences” (1984). Therefore, they argue that The Americans was rejected not because it misrepresented America, but because it evoked negative experiences to American viewers set in the context of the Korean War, McCarthyism, the cold war, and racial unrest. It was a defensive response to a reminder of those events (Nesterenko and Smith, 1984).

In the context of social science, this may be the crux of Frank’s work. Wagner argued that images of social life and culture are more credible when they are based on observation that is backed by other data and presented in a way to invite analysis, including commentary from the people they depicted (2004). The error in Frank’s part could be the effectiveness of his photographs. They were polarizing and challenging to a society where even the verbal representation of these subjects may have fallen on deaf ears. Perhaps he felt that way in preparation for this project. These considerations are speculative. Frank didn’t explain why he chose to omit verbal context, instead letting Jack Kerouac provide a few opening remarks to which he states if any one doesn’t like these pictures, they don’t like poetry. If they don’t like poetry go home and watch television. Poetry was the medium for his polemics, which by Kerouac’s statements, implies a lack of a mainstream following and thus, a narrower audience and consequent misinterpretation.

Wagner suggests two tools for those who do documentary style photography to enhance the credibility of images: (i) A research design that provides an explicit description of how a study is organized and how the right kind of evidence can answer predetermined questions (ii) personal accounts similar to those provided by James Agee that provide a personal context for the project (2004). Wagner argued that the addition of these tools to documentary style photo projects can bridge the “empirical divide”, meaning the documentary photographer and social researcher stand on the same side of empirical inquiry (2004).

His concern is in reference to invention by the photographer, stating that it’s important to make clear between photographs that mirror the subject and those that reveal the photographer. In the case of Frank, he had done both. Through his personal statements, he said his intentions were to observe and record what was invisible to others from the point of view of a naturalized citizen. From the point of view of his critics, this was a fiction, but both Becker and Wagner point out that the work of both artists and social scientists face an inescapable subjectivity. Wagner adds, “Our choice, in so far as we have one, is not between fact and fiction, but between good and bad fiction” (2004). This is not to say that ethnographic work or the work of documentary style photographers like Frank is untrue. In fact, Wagner said invention is part of the tool kit of empirical inquiry and that investigators and reports exercise some form of inventiveness. The concern is about inventions that bring the viewer closer or farther away from the truth, inventions, he said, that “get it right” (Wagner, 2004).

The photographers discussed in this section reveal the different issues that can arise in the attempt at representing culture and the human experience. Alfred Stieglitz showed that meaning of an image can float between polemic statements and formalistic concerns, remaining to some, ambiguously represented as either an observation or a creative projection. Photographic meaning emerges with Lewis Hine through statements he provides about his photographic intentions, for example, an expression for a desire that his audience see the human effort behind a city’s infrastructures in Men at Work. Atget sought to create a catalogue of the artifacts of old Paris that served as a reference for painters and sculptors seeking to create replicas for posterity. Although, he approached the work with a sense of sentimentality that informed his framing, those considerations were in service to his primary aim of creating records of a disappearing culture. Jacob Riis too used aesthetics to represent his polemic statement. He was sated by an anti-aesthetic and poor composition that served as an after the fact metaphor for the conditions of the slums he photographed. For Agee and Evans, the use of the sonata form, the presentation and juxtaposition of opening images to political discourse represented a creative approach and a polemic statement about how political consciousness ought to be considered: as an active interaction between the speaker and the audience. Similarly, the work of Robert Frank revealed that a polemic statement could be made by the presentation of photographs in a thematic series. However, his work also showed that lacking in a verbal contextualization, meaning to a less sophisticated viewer may be misinterpreted as a creative projection.

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Agee, J., & Evans, W. (1988). Let us now praise famous men. Boston: Houghton Mifflin

Agee, James. Essay (1989). A Way of Seeing. By Helen Levitt. Durham: Duke University Press, 1989

Becker, H. (2010). Visual sociology, documentary photography, and photojournalism: it’s (almost) all a matter of context. Visual Studies, 10, 5 – 14

Frank, R. (1959). The Americans. New York: Grove Press

Hamburg, M. (n.d.) Atget: the art document photography national gallery of art, Washington.

Katz, L. (1971). An interview with Walker Evans. V. Goldberg (Ed.). New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981. 358 – 369

Lucaites, J. (1997). Visualizing “the people” individualism vs. collectivism in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 83, 269 – 288

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