Documentary photography usually refers to a popular form of photography used to chronicle significant and historical events. It is typically covered in professional photojournalism or real-life reportage, but it may also be an amateur, artistic, or academic pursuit. The photographer attempts to produce truthful, objective, and usually candid photography of a particular subject, most often pictures of people.

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Documentary photography was first innovated to document or archive work for historical events or valuable art-works. But as a field of art, documentary photography began to be recognized in the works of the USA. In the United States, photographs tracing the progress of the American Civil War by photographers for at least three consortia of photographic publisher-distributors, most notably Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, resulted in a major archive of photographs ranging from dry records of battle sites to harrowing images of the dead by Timothy O'Sullivan and evocative images by George N. Barnard. The Civil War works point up an important feature of documentary photography: the production of an archive of historical significance, and the distribution to a broad audience through publication. The U.S. Government published Survey photographs in the annual Reports and portfolios designed to encourage scientific surveys' continued funding. The development of new reproduction methods for photography provided an impetus for the next era of documentary photography, in the late 1880s and 1890s, and reaching into the early decades of the 20th century.

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Photojournalism
This period decisively shifted documentary from antiquarian and landscape subjects to that of the city and its crises. The low-cost mass reproduction made documentary photography to be used in newspapers. Therefore, the new branch, photojournalism, has started to occur. The inhumane conditions under which the poor lived in the rapidly expanding urban-industrial centres, urban reform movements, and child-labour conditions became the subject matter of this field. In the 1930s, the Great Depression brought a new documentary wave, both of rural and urban situations. This generation of documentary photographers is generally credited for codifying the documentary code of accuracy mixed with passionate advocacy to raise public commitment to social change. During the wartime and post-war eras, documentary photography increasingly became subsumed under the rubric of photojournalism. It is not surprising that most photojournalist agencies were founded in those eras such as Magnum Photos.

In the 1960s, Robert Frank became an established international artist affecting the new emerging artists such as Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus, which resulted in an important exhibition at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) under the title New Documents. MoMA curator John Szarkowski proposed in that exhibition that a new generation, committed not to social change but to a formal and iconographical investigation of the social experience of modernity, had replaced the older forms of social documentary photography.

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Post-documentary
In the 1970s, we see another movement in documentary photography as post-documentary. In post-documentary, we know the critique of privileged elites imposing their visions and values on the dis-empowered so we can say that there were more leftists’ assumptions behind producing art. Since the late 1970s, the decline of magazine published photography meant traditional forums for such work were vanishing. Many documentary photographers have now focused on the art world and galleries of a way of presenting their work and making a living. Traditional documentary photography has found a place in dedicated photography galleries alongside other artists working in painting, sculpture and modern media.

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Art and reality
The relationship of art with reality needs to be discussed deeply in relation to documentary photography since it was the most prominent issue in the progress of art. At least, I can say that this year, not only in Art and Beauty but also in Aesthetics in Modern Times courses, we always discussed this relationship and when we take the photography into account; we did read Walter Benjamin and Osip Brik’s thoughts. Here, in the discussion about documentary photography, we see the representation of life conditions in third world countries. Still, we have to focus on these works' emotions, so we need to look at photography from a Freudian perspective.

As a famous documentary photograph, we can take Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother during the Great Depression. Associated Press photographers like Eddie Adams with the South Vietnamese Gen and Nick Ut with the nine-year-old Kim Phuc or National Geographic’s photographers like Steve McCurry with the Afghan Girl became world-wide known photo artists. Most of the documentary photos in the contemporary era aim to reveal the unseen ordinary things in life, but we see different goals by looking at the examples mentioned above. Straight photography was the first approach in the history of photographic art movements. In this movement, the photographer was more technician than an artist. After that, Romanticism had influenced the photographer, so that bible themes are reproduced with montage images. Impressionism also influenced the art of photography in terms of the rise of experimental photography.

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Pictorialism
In Pictorialism, we see that the Pictorialists strove to go beyond the clinical, focused detail of the photograph, beyond the "snapshot" to invoke a feeling, a mood or an atmosphere in print. They copied the compositions of modern paintings and manipulated the image. In Futurist type of photography, Giulio Bragaglia used multiple exposures and time-lapse techniques to show movement and dynamism in still photographs, as illustrations of the machine-age Futurist doctrine. In a Dadaist approach to photography, photo collage was used to create intellectually challenging absurd nonimages. Photograms were also created by placing objects directly on photographic paper and exposing them directly. In Surrealism, we only see Man Ray’s photographic art pieces.
Photojournalism is the most widespread movement in photography, with more portable cameras came more "street photography" with Henri Cartier-Bresson ("the decisive moment") advocating a snapshot style, Berenice Abbot and Helen Levitt documented New York City. Of course, photojournalism had been carried on since the 1840s, but the style's widespread use had to wait for more portable cameras. If we talk about the movements, we need to add Social Documentary as another art movement, not a subject matter. With the great depression came the documentation of the FSA with Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. Of course, these themes had been explored before and continue. In the Minimalist photography, we see that the relevance of this movement to the modern "thumbnail" gallery display of photographs is striking, with spare, uncomplicated and highly compositional images being more likely to attract the viewer's attention during the half-second or so the tiny image is in sight. After the conceptual art, we see Photorealism or Super-realism, which aims to produce photograph-like paintings and sculpture. The influence of photography on painting and the more apparent historical influence of painting on photography becomes obvious.

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Street photography
Documentary Photography was an essential retrospective photography. The subject is bound to the camera’s desire to see. The camera bestows on the subject his/her credentials as a witness. Technological choice implies the choice an archiving approach. What is that documentary photography and street photography might be said to share? First, a long-time devotion to black-and-white as the guarantor of authenticity. Black and white photography organizes the world, gives it coherence through the careful gradations of tone, ensures a certain austerity, a denial of self-indulgence, and a non-glamorizing steadiness of vision.

Moreover, it allows for greater technical control. Colour instead adds to the problems, the risk of wrong notes. We also depend a great deal on the conditions of reproduction. Still more one must beware of the pretty, the spectacular. For the street photographer, it is the adventures that lie dormant in the street, at a crossroads, in a market, adventures generated by the secret forces at work just below the surface of things. We see, in time, the tendency to seek for unusual, extraordinary things.

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The unattached flaneur
The invisibility that the documentary photograph brings to light, on the other hand, is not the invisibility of what we cannot see but, precisely, the invisibility of what we usually refuse to isolate, to treat as a particular case. If the documentary photography justifies its transmission of the subject through implicit affirmations of destiny, street photography maintains its transformative capacity through a lively relationship with chance. If documentary photography looks to turn the relative into the absolute, street photography does the reverse. If documentary photography suggests a world that is ever funnelling down to a restricted range of predicaments, street photography makes its home in variety and proliferation. If the documentary photographer presents himself as the public servant, the street photographer gets by as the unattached flaneur. The documentary is always looking for the right classification, the founding type, a grammatical syntax of relationships. The parole of the street, on the other hand, is generated by and generates chance. While the documentary photographer seeks to transfer subjectivity into the image, subjectivity is all in the choice of the moment of taking for the street photographer. In taking photographs, the photographer is peculiarly free from reality, while the image is subject to reality. The street photographer operates with reality as a customer, while the documentarist acts as a vendor. We discover the shift in the history of photography from documentary to Atget’s shop windows.

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Language
Since its invention, photography has been exploring different symbiotic relations with language, that language is not merely a constant companion of photographic images but indelibly implicated in the very process of looking. Photographs are not just moments snatched out of time; they are moments of contact with reality, even though that reality is past and may be geographically distant. The relationship of photography with time is also another vital aspect. The punctuality it has reflects the reasonable time and moment in life. When we move into the linguistic interpretation of the photographic image, two ways lie open to us. Either the significance of the image lies in the significance of the photographer’s relation to his subject, or it lies in what the image, regardless of the photographer, says to us. But there is also the viewer to consider as the one for whom the image is a pretext for speculation about human motives and behaviour. The photograph offers us a point of view on the world produced by a disembodied eye; the camera offers us acts of extreme attention which we cannot make our own.

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‍Art of Photography
‍It is usual to assign the demise of French humanist street photography to the late 1950s and early 1960s and to locate the reasons for that demise in the emergence of other street-photographic traditions, the contestation of French identity in a newly multi-ethnic capital, the dispersal of the working class, the increase in the volume of traffic and the consequent diminution of habitable public spaces, the rise of television and the consequent demise of a certain kind of illustrated magazine, the Cold War and disillusionment with Communism, the increase in rents and property speculation, and the increase in consumerism and consequent social homogenization.

In dealing with the art of photography, we can also discuss the photographic memory and time. Our position relies on making sense of experiences of the present, our memories of the past, and our awareness of the oncoming future. Photography’s subordination of time down to the instantaneous moment is evidence of its final destiny in cinema. Photography works as a perception mechanism. It makes references to our memory. The photograph’s perceived power is balanced on the ability or inability to freeze time. This gives photography its extraordinary position in cinema’s history. In terms of the effects of photographs, you might make a reference to the Medieval Times’ still lifes. The interpretation of photographs comes easy to us. They are, after all, images of the real world that, at first glance, require little or no extraneous information.

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Eugene Atget
Documentary photographs have a function as story-telling about the human condition. The main characteristics of documentary photography or photojournalism are truthful, objective, candid and usually about people. Street photographs have an imaginative life their own, entire one that sometimes seems entirely independent of whatever intentions the photographer might have had. Dorothea Lange is known for her Depression-era photojournalism for the FSA. As another, the charm of Atget lies not in the mastery of the plates and papers of his time, nor in the quaintness of costume, architecture and humanity as revealed in his pictures, but in his equitable and intimate point of view. His work is a simple revelation of the most straightforward aspects of his environment. There is no superimposed symbolic motive, no tortured design application, and no intellectual axe to grind. The Atget prints are direct and emotionally clean records of a rare and subtle perception and represent perhaps the earliest expression of true photographic art.
We can say about post-war American street photography that in many ways, these works are social satires of American life. They dramatize American society's broad canvas, with its diverse classes, creeds and races jostling on the street. The formal turbulence of these images with their dynamic tilted viewpoints, their grainy immediacy, their frenetic crowds and their temporarily isolated strangers, matches the political turmoil of the Vietnam years and provides a defining portrait of a society caught unawares. Another documentary photographer, Arthur Rothstein, worked for the FSA and photographed Gee’s Bend, AL. Sally Mann documented her children growing up. Henri Cartier-Bresson has been considered to be the father of modern photojournalism. He helped develop the "street photography" or "real life reportage" style. Sebastião Salgado is a Brazilian social documentary photographer and photojournalist noted for photographing workers in less developed countries. Alexandre Rodchenko, as the founding father of constructivism, was also influenced by photography and had an interest in experimental photography. To understand the documentary, archival importance of this type of photography, we need to look at an example from Othmar Pferschy, who is known for his photographs about the modern Turkish Republic. Today, governmental institutions also find his works important and prepare a lot of exhibitions to shed light on the old times of Turkey. And here, I also take a photo from Nar Photos agency. Kerem Uzel, as a photojournalist in Nar Photos, documents a narrative about Turkish history with his photo as a ceremony at the Fener Greek Orthodox Patriarchate; many guests come from Greece for weddings and religious ceremonies. And, lastly, Ara Güler, as an Armenian origin photojournalist, documented most of the world-wide issues with his photographs.

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References

Sutton, Damian. 2009. Photography, Cinema and Memory: The Crystal Image of Time. University of Minnesota Press. UK, London.
Scott, Clive. 2007. Street Photography: From Atget to Cartier-Bresson. I.B. Tauris. UK, London.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_photography http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/explainers/documentary-photography-open-society http://180degreeimaging.com/workshops/article-movements.html

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