Documentary Photography and Preservation, or The Problem of Truth and Beauty

Author(s): Jesús Vassallo

Source: Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and
Criticism , Vol. 11, No. 1 (Summer 2014), pp. 15-33
Published by: University of Minnesota Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/futuante.11.1.0015

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1. Walker Evans, Bedroom Window of Bud Fields’s Home, Hale County, Alabama, 1936. Photograph courtesy of the Library of
Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection [LC-­DIG-­fsa-­8a44623].

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Jesús Vassallo
Documentary Photography and
Preservation, or The Problem of
Truth and Beauty

Born in the first third of the nineteenth century, photography

was a daughter of invention, much like the combustion engine
or electromagnetism, all made possible by the increasingly
rapid progress of technology. In the beginning, its miraculous
capacity to fix reality into an image was unquestioned as a
scientific fact, and it was only through its popularization and
consumption by society as a cultural product that photography
was realized as a medium and began to gradually acquire its
own status within different disciplines.
In the decades following its invention, as photography
slowly gravitated from the realm of science and into the worlds
of media and art, its difficult position within this triangle be-
came apparent. In this process an innate conflict was revealed:
that photography simultaneously expanded and complicated
previous notions of truth and beauty as well as the relation-
ship between the two. While this specific problem pervades
all genres and instances of photographic production, it is
especially present in a certain lineage within the medium that
has come to be labeled as documentary photography.1
More precisely, it is in the overlaps between the worlds of
utilitarian photography and the documentary formats in fine
art photography that we find the most challenging conflicts and
the most promising opportunities for reflection on its specific-
ity as a discipline. It is also in this gray area, where photogra-
phy is evaluated simultaneously by its capacity to become an
account of the facts and its qualities as a visual construct, that
architects and preservationists forged their relationship with
photography. This text thus provides a brief overview of how
architecture in general and preservation in particular acted as
forces in the emergence of a photographic documentary style
in the century following the invention of photography as it tries
to shed some light on the relationship between the two disci-
plines (Figure 1).

The Architect as a Client: Architectural Conventions and

Photographic Vision, 1830–1870
Architects were among the first professionals to include photog-
raphy as one of their representational tools, focusing initially on
the documentation of monuments, both in exotic locations and
Future Anterior
Volume XI, Number 1 in their own countries.2 The use of photography in restoration
Summer 2014 was consistently advocated by Viollet-­le-­Duc in his Dictionnaire

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2. Édouard Baldus, Imperial Library of
the Louvre, Paris, 1856–57. Photograph
courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum
of Art.
raisonné de l’architecture française and used extensively in
his own work related to preservation. Other French architects
who pioneered the use of the daguerrotype in their restoration
projects were Félix Duban and Jean Baptiste Lassus.
Unlike in England, where photography was a matter of
upper-­middle-­class aficionados, in France, state patronage
played a major role in the development of architectural photog-
raphy by sponsoring large projects aimed at recording its his-
toric heritage. In 1851 the French Commission des Monuments
Historiques, formed by historians and architects including Félix

16
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 Duban, undertook an ambitious documentation of the architec-
ture of ancient France.
To carry out the project, known as Mission Héliographique,
five photographers —­Hippolite Bayard, Henri LeSecq, Auguste
Mestral, Gustave Le Grey, and Édouard Baldus (Figure 2) —­
were sent to the different regions of the country to document
its monuments with the intent to compile a body of precise
information for their preservation. Upon the return of the photog-
raphers to Paris, the commissioners of the Mission were taken
aback when they realized that each photographer had a com-
pletely different technique and approach to the subject matter,
therefore rendering the effort to create a homogeneous body of
work utterly useless.
Despite the fact that the Mission Héliographique was
considered a failure and subsequently discontinued, it made a
decisive contribution as it revealed the need for a photographic
language suited to the views of architects and architecture
historians, while in the process shattering the previously held
belief that photography was a merely scientific process devoid
of human agency. It becomes especially significant, then, to
note the different responses to the work of the photographers
involved in the project, mainly in the cases of Le Secq and
Baldus, who came to be identified with two opposing posi-
tions. While Le Secq’s images (Figure 3) were questioned for
their strong contrasts, atmospheric effects, and excessive inte-
gration of the monuments into the building fabric around them,
Baldus’s photographs (Figure 4) were appreciated as crisp and
bare renditions of discrete buildings.3
This split is especially relevant since the more pictorial
bias of Le Secq was rejected in favor of what was considered
the more architectural vision of Baldus, establishing an iden-
tification between architectural ways of seeing and represent-
ing and an idea of realism. The importance of this moment
cannot be overstated: It situates the realization of the inherent
subjectivity of photography with the start of a sustained effort
to construct a visual language of impersonality, and thus purge
photography of its original sin of subjectivity and restore an
illusion of scientific truth. The history of this process, which we
identify with the gradual formation of documentary photogra-
phy, was influenced all along by architects, not the least in the
paradigmatic case of Édouard Baldus.
In Baldus’s surviving plates from the Mission, the monu-
ments appear as discrete structures emancipated from their
surroundings. This effect was achieved by intentional framing
and, when necessary, by extensive manipulation involving the
painting, cutting, and pasting of the negatives. In Baldus’s
photographs, the monuments dominate the frame from the
center. His choice of vantage point and light conditions were

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3. Henri Le Secq, Troyes Cathedral, North Rose Window, 1851. Photograph courtesy of George Eastman House, International
Museum of Photography and Film.

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4. Édouard Baldus, Roman Arch at driven by a search for minimum distortion of perspective lines
Orange, 1851. Photograph courtesy of
and maximum legibility of both profile and detail. He favored
The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
elevated vantage points that allowed him to minimize optical
deformation and frontal views similar to architectural eleva-
tions. His search for even light distribution and maximum de-
tail was complemented by the customary removal of the skies
in order to preserve the legibility of the profile of the buildings.
His success in devising a photographic language for
depicting architecture became apparent when, in 1855, he

19
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 was awarded the commission to document the construction of
the New Louvre, the most important project undertaken in Paris
during the Second Empire. Over the course of nearly a decade,
Baldus worked closely with the architect Hector Lefuel in a long
and intensive commission that allowed the photographer to
distill and perfect his photographic language based on frontal-
ity and luminosity.
It was precisely during this period of the mid-­1850s that a
polemic emerged in the field of photography between the advo-
cates of precision, detail, and orthogonal views—­mainly aimed
for professional clients such as architects or historians— ­and
those that favored a picturesque approach based on chiaroscuro
and an expressive use of perspective—­which were aimed for
the general public.4 The first trend was dominant in France, with
Édouard Baldus leading the way and firms like Bisson Frères
quickly following in his steps, while the second was advocated
mainly in England with figures like Francis Bedford.5
During the following decades, the consumption of archi-
tectural photography by professionals of architecture, art, and
art history as well as their demands for a specific expertise in
the photographing of monuments and modern buildings led to
the definitive success and popularization of the style and tech-
niques perfected, among others, by Baldus. Once photography
adopted the visual conventions preferred by architects, it was
quickly incorporated into the work routine of most architecture
schools and offices, which during the late nineteenth century
started to collect albums of architectural photographs for use
by their students and draftsmen.6 This custom reached its maxi­
mum popularity in America, with eclectic architects like Henry
Hobson Richardson or McKim Mead & White, who quickly real-
ized the power of the photographic frame to isolate fragments
of larger wholes with great detail, enabling a direct utilization
of photography as a repository of constructive, stylistic, and
ornamental solutions.

The Urban Planner as a Patron: Seriality and Nostalgia

in Urban Photography, 1870–1900
Another way architecture influenced the new medium of photog-
raphy was through large commissions by municipal agencies. In
the late nineteenth century, the tremendous rate of renewal and
construction taking place in the industrial cities of Europe led
to the photographic recording of the buildings and areas being
demolished. The unprecedented transfer of population from
the countryside to the cities, where industries had settled,
resulted in overpopulation and unsanitary living conditions
in the working-­class quarters, and in many cases city officials
viewed demolition as the only solution to this problem.

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5. Charles Marville, Rue d’Ecosse, The quintessential example of such use of photography is
1865–69. Photograph courtesy of Yale
the documentation of prefect Baron von Haussmann’s radical
University Art Gallery.
program for modernizing Paris undertaken by photographer
Charles Marville.7 Haussman, working on behalf of Napoleon III
since 1853, sought to modernize the city by inserting a set of
networks of infrastructure, ranging from rail lines and stations
to ample boulevards suited for a new traffic intensity, as well as
new sewer and water systems. This muscular effort necessarily
entailed the destruction of wide areas of the old city, as well
as the forced relocation of their inhabitants, who belonged in
most cases to the less favored classes.

21
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 As the response to this social injustice and historic era-
sure began to be articulated, Baron Haussman — ­soon labeled
by his opposition as the artiste démolisseur — ­realized that
a parallel campaign was necessary to counter this criticism.
Under his rule, several bureaucratic agencies began to com-
mission photographers to record the positive effects of the
transformations undertaken. The most remarkable of those was
the Service des Travaux Historiques, which was entrusted with
the documentation and publication of everything related to
Parisian history and its monuments, and was meant to act as
a foil to Haussman’s critics.
Marville started to work for several of these agencies in the
late 1850s, receiving his most extensive commission around
1860. His urban survey for the Service des Travaux Historiques
was a series of more than four hundred photographs systemati-
cally depicting the streets to be demolished by Haussmann,
each photograph carefully captioned to indicate the exact posi-
tion and direction in which it had been taken. He became the
official photographer of the city of Paris in 1962, and continued
his study by systematically photographing each street in the
old quarters twice, from opposing perspectives, before and
after their demolition and reconstruction (Figure 5).
The photographs taken by Marville are not just propa-
ganda but also tools for the planners and architects. Not only
are they captioned topographically in order to be consulted in
association with maps — ­almost a proto–Google Street View —­
but the images themselves are taken in a way that speaks to
their utilitarian character. They are framed in a neutral and easy
way, trying to maximize the amount of information in the frame,
renouncing formal or geometric compositions. Additionally, the
fact that the exact same system was used to photograph both
the old streets and the new avenues is telling of how Marville
saw his photographs as mere records to be used by others: as
vehicles for information.
Much like for Baldus, Marville’s years of experience
working for urban planners were fundamental in creating a
photographic language of clarity and objectivity. While Baldus
defined the ultimate way to portray the architectural object as a
discrete entity according to the French concept of dégagement,8
Marville, with his urban landscapes, created a systematic way
to replicate the all-­encompassing quality and atmosphere of an
urban environment.
Even though Marville’s work is probably the best-known
and most emblematic urban survey of the late nineteenth
century, similar photographic efforts were undertaken in many
European cities during that period. In particular, Thomas
Annan’s depiction of the old wynds, closes, and tenements of
Glasgow is especially relevant, because it became symptom-

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 atic of a certain nostalgic turn that soon pervaded this type of
photographic work.9 By the time Annan received the commis-
sion to record this area designated for demolition in 1868, he
was already trained in the photography of architecture and
was concerned as a citizen about the rapid transformations
taking place in Glasgow and its old city. As he worked on his
urban survey, he was also producing two volumes dealing with
preservation issues, namely The Old Country Houses of the Old
Glasgow Gentry (1870) and Memorials of the Old College of
Glasgow (1871). In fact, Annan’s knowledge of and sensibility
toward the architecture of the slums resulted in calm images of
great dignity, turning them into sought-­after images by those
citizens opposing the demolition of the area.10
One step further in the feeling of nostalgia that pervades
these photographic projects of the late nineteenth century
is the series of photographs taken by the Society for Photo-
graphing Relics of Old London (SPROL) founded in 1875.11 The
society, active until 1886, was formed by a group of friends to
record one of London’s oldest inns (the Oxford Arms) before
it was torn down and then continued to photograph other
endangered anonymous architectures within the urban fabric
of London. The aim of the society was to put forward the sig-
nificance of these built structures from different periods of the
past, regardless of their architectural quality, as a testament to
a disappearing way of life. Several similar associations emerged
in the following years throughout the United Kingdom and other
countries in Europe, displaying not just a certain cultural pes-
simism but also the first symptoms of distrust toward modern-
ization’s capacity to provide a brand new world that would be
unarguably better than the old.

The First Documentalist: Eugène Atget’s Unique Archival

Project, 1900–1930
The slow process through which the scientific documentation
of urban renewal turned into a nostalgic portrayal of a disap-
pearing way of life found a turning point in the work of Parisian
photographer Eugène Atget (Figure 6).12 During his early years
as a photographer, Atget made a living exclusively by selling
his photographs door to door to a clientele of painters, archi-
tects, set designers, decorators, and amateurs of Old Paris.
His images consisted primarily of architecture — ­monuments
and emblematic views of the historic city —­but also included
myriad other themes including street scenes, shop windows,
architectural details, trees, and people. Each of these hetero-
geneous categories was dealt with consistently as a series,
which was in turn organized into an annotated volume. Atget
patiently carried a collection of such volumes across Paris
when selling his pictures.

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6. Eugène Atget, Rue St. Rustique,
March 1922. Photograph courtesy
of The Library of Congress,
Prints & Photographs Division
[LC-­USZ62-­105725].
This formative experience marked Atget’s approach to
photography, as it determined that his images were conceived
as documents depicting fragments of reality that were found
and isolated by the keen eye of the photographer but destined
to be elaborated and elevated to the category of art by others.
While his reputation as a photographer soon grew, and his
pictures began to be purchased by several cultural institu-
tions, including museums, he continued to deny his status as
an artist, keeping until his last days a sign on the door of his
apartment-­studio that read “documents pour artistes.”

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 During the years leading up to 1920, Atget managed to
secure substantial acquisitions of his estate from several
institutions, including the Musée Carnavalet and the Biblio-
thèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, the inheritors of the
Service des Travaux Historiques for which Marville had worked.
As he gradually secured economic independence, his work as a
photographer became more driven by the systematic employ-
ment of the series, which in turn became increasingly tuned to
his personal interests and obsessions. Some of the most dar-
ing and shocking examples were his series of interior views of
Parisian apartments (1910), portraits of prostitutes (circa 1924),
and tree trunks (1910–1926).
Although Atget’s photography can in many ways be con-
sidered a continuation of Marville’s urban work —­especially
in those series devoted to the depiction of streetscapes — ­it
is also necessary to point out that Atget greatly expanded
Marville’s range of motifs and techniques, getting closer on
some occasions to the clarity and isolation of the subject
achieved by Baldus— ­such as in his depiction of architectural
and ornamental elements in public parks —­and even inventing
new subgenres altogether, as in his haunting images of empty
apartment interiors, which have influenced generations of
photographers to our day.
In addition to Atget’s capacity to diversify and differentiate
his work in each of his series, there is an even more substan-
tial divergence between Atget and the tradition embodied by
Marville. While Marville can be regarded as an agent of bu-
reaucratic power enforcing urban transformations from above,
Atget was just a citizen who decided on his own to record his
surroundings. In fact, the disappearing world documented by
Atget was his own environment, the one he shared with sailors,
actors, painters, and prostitutes. Additionally, while Atget’s
highly constructed system of samples and series reconstituted
the objective impression of a world now gone, the subjectivity
and lack of authorial explanation in his choice of motifs— ­trees
instead of flowers, or prostitutes instead of couturiers —­speaks
to us about the transition between an utilitarian conception of
photography and its emancipation as new category within the
realm of art.

The Canonic Documentary Form: Berenice Abbott and

Walker Evans, 1930–1940
As much as we can say today that Atget was pivotal in trans-
forming a bureaucratic process for the acquisition and organi-
zation of information into a personal artistic project, it is also
true that we owe this reading of his oeuvre to a later generation
of photographers who saw in his work a powerful conceptual

25
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7. Berenice Abbott, Charles Lane, 1938. apparatus by which to confront the world with a camera.
Photograph courtesy of the Museum of
While Atget systematically refused to call himself an artist, his
the City of New York.
reputation as such was established by a group of young foreign
admirers that included Man Ray and Berenice Abbott, who not
only purchased his photographs but also organized exhibi-
tions and published books about his work.13 This is especially
true in the case of the American photographer Berenice Abbott
(1898–1991) who, in the long process of studying, curating,

26
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 and interpreting the work of the French photographer, ended
up creating an alter ego for her own career.14
Abbott had come into contact with Atget in 1925 while
working as an assistant in Man Ray’s portrait studio in Paris.
Impressed by the stern Atget and the power of his photo-
graphic vision, Abbott purchased some of his prints and
convinced him to sit for a portrait in July 1927, just a few days
before his death. Abbott then bought as much original material
from the Atget archive as she could and began to promote his
work in the United States, subsequently publishing the first
book on his work: Atget, Photographe de Paris, in 1930.
It was precisely while selecting and developing the images
for this book in the context of the rapidly changing city of New
York that Abbott realized that she could translate Atget’s Pari-
sian archival project to New York City, designing an ambitious
analogue project by the name of Changing New York (Figure 7).15
During the following years Abbott unsuccessfully tried to get
funding for her project from institutions like the Museum of the
City of New York and the Guggenheim Foundation.16 During this
period she sustained herself by teaching at the New School of
Social Research and through a series of commissions involving
architectural photography. In the summer of 1934 she traveled
with historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock to take the photographs
for an exhibition he was curating for Wesleyan University with
the title American Cities before the Civil War: The Urban Ver-
nacular of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties.17
This formative experience in the photography of an archi-
tectural heritage would prove to be decisive when Abbott was
finally hired by the Federal Art Project in 1935 to implement
Changing New York. By this time, she had managed to define
her own archival project and to articulate her choice of motifs
according to three themes: the diversity of the inhabitants of
the city, the physical presence of the places in which they live
and work, and the energy embodied in the activities they per-
form.18 The heavily political ambition behind Abbott’s work was
to help citizens realize their capacity to change their surround-
ings and take control of the formation of cities, as opposed
to the industrial forces that had shaped American cities until
then.19 Interestingly enough, it was precisely this shift toward
the political and away from the disinterested and spare photo-
graphic language of Atget that explains why, despite Abbott’s
best efforts to present herself as the counterpart of the French
master, it was Walker Evans who, with time, would be regarded
as the American heir to Atget and his European tradition of
photographic objectivity.20
Walker Evans (1903–1975) had indeed a trajectory that was
in many ways parallel to that of Abbott.21 As a young man in-
terested in the arts, he traveled to Paris in 1926, subsequently

27
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 meeting Abbott upon his return to New York, when the two
of them became close friends for a brief period of time.22 It
was precisely during this period and through his friendship
with Abbott that Evans became aware of the work of Atget, an
encounter that he recounted as having a transformative power
on his photography.23
Additionally, Evans’s first photographic commissions were
also in the field of preservation photography. In 1931, he was
commissioned by his friend and protector Lincoln Kirstein to
photograph the then-­despised Victorian houses in and around
Boston, a minor architecture that at that moment threatened
to disappear.24 For the documentation of this heritage, Evans
favored static compositions and frontal views, featuring great
detail and luminosity. As a result of this approach, the photo-
graphs adopted a relaxed and almost impersonal character. In
1933, Evans showcased thirty-­nine of those images under the
title Photographs of Nineteenth-­Century American Houses by
Walker Evans in what became the first solo show devoted to a
photographer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Again in a parallel with Abbott, Evans also saw his photo-
graphic vision — ­formed in the field of preservation —­elevated
to the category of a collective archival project in the mid-­thirties.
In 1935 — ­the same year Abbott received her grant from the Fed-
eral Art Project —­Evans became involved with a photographic
survey funded by the Farm Security Administration, a public
entity devoted to subsidizing agriculture through small grants
to farmers and the fostering of cooperatives. In 1935, a new
information unit was created and a group of photographers was
brought in to define the activities of the group.25 Among them
was Walker Evans, whose style quickly became adopted as a
guideline for the other photographers of the unit (Figure 8). In
exchange, Walker Evans used the commission by the FSA as a
means to obtain a stable salary and take the pictures that he
would later use for his famous exhibition and book American
Photographs held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
in 1938. The photographs in this exhibition and catalog,
two-­thirds of which are portraits of anonymous architectures,
continue to this day to be regarded as the canon of documen-
tary photography.26
Evans’s photographs of this period represent the crystal-
lization of a visual language that had been in the making for
almost exactly a century, and that had evolved not the least as
a result of the demands of preservation and architectural prac-
tices. We could briefly define such a style as revolving around
three main concepts: the concept of high-­fidelity, governing
the decisions regarding light, focus, and detail; the concept
of neutrality, governing the decisions regarding framing and
perspective; and the concept of posterity, which explains the

28
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8. Walker Evans, Store with False Front.
Vicinity of Selma, Alabama, 1936.
Photograph courtesy of The Library
of Congress, Prints & Photographs
Division, FSA/OWI Collection
[LC-­USF342-­T01-­001139-­A].
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systematic use of the series and the archive as means to pre­
sent a future spectator with a section of a disappeared reality.27
With his two early shows at MoMA, Evans marked not only
the coming of age of documentary photography as a differen-
tiated genre but also the acceptance of photography as a larger
medium in the context of the world of art and its institutions.
It is then telling, if perhaps not fully intuitive, to note that
photography came to be accepted as an art in precisely the
instance in which it was more intensely trying to regain an aura
of impersonality and lack of authorial voice. In fact, Evans’s
greatest contribution was not to grant documentary photogra-
phy access to the world of art museums but, most important,
to do so conscious of the emancipation that this passage
implied from the initial utilitarian drive that had contributed to
the definition and formalization of the genre. In other words,
Evans acknowledged for the first time photographic realism as
a visual construct independent from the use-­value of the im-
ages themselves.28
So, What Is It That Architects See in Documentary Photography?
While it is not the purpose of this short text to put forward a
radically new definition of documentary photography or to chal-
lenge its independence by implying that it is a by-­product of
architectural practices, it seems proven here that the two disci-
plines are not entirely unrelated. This fact is relevant because
it means that when architects approach documentary photog-
raphy they are not resorting to a completely alien or imported
29
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9. Walker Evans, Church, Southeastern
U.S., 1936. Photograph courtesy
of The Library of Congress, Prints
& Photographs Division, FSA/OWI
Collection [LC-­USF342-­T01-­008262-­A].
mechanism but rather to a particular way to look at the world
that is, to a great extent, architectural. This realization informs
our understanding of what it is that architects see when they
look at documentary photography and why it has come to be
an important and even obsessive reference for some of them.
First of all, documentary photography is a deeply con-
structed mode of vision. This is true to the extent that it can lend
its inner structure to subject matters that otherwise would be
too formless or problematic for the architect. To put it simply,
when Walker Evans isolates a roadside shack or a rural church
with his camera —­inserting himself in a lineage that goes back

30
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 to Baldus —­he is allowing the architect to suddenly consider
these popular objects as Architecture, simultaneously enabling
a broadening of the contents of the discipline while legitimiz-
ing pathos as a source of beauty in contemporary architecture
(Figure 9).
Second, despite its premeditated nature, documentary
photography presents reality in a highly unmediated state.
Through its reliance on the concepts of high fidelity, neutrality,
and posterity, documentary photography approaches difficult
subjects with an open and clinical eye, shamelessly ignor-
ing what our feelings are for the people living in the shack or
praying in the church. This emotional detachment, which we
have characterized as a scientific approach to the problem of
truth, allows the architect to consider material reality on its
own terms, gaining in the process a crucial time to develop his
own take on it.
Finally, documentary photography brings formal qualities
to the foreground in a way that is respectful of the original but
nonetheless mediated. Being deeply reliant on visual con-
siderations, its hyperconstructed language acts as a filter, a
first degree of abstraction that allows the architect to start to
see a world of possibilities in the internal relationships and
forms present in the photographic frame. This light-­handed but
powerful component of formal interpretation implies that each
image holds the potential for many possible formal outcomes,
rendering this particular way of looking at the built environ-
ment projective.
Nonetheless, the value of documentary photography for
architects and preservationists is not limited to its role as an
apparatus to confront the built environment. We will argue on
the other hand, that documentary photography as a discipline,
in its trajectory of increasing autonomy leading to Evans and
through our day with figures like Ed Ruscha, the New Topo-
graphics, or the Dusseldorf School of Photography, offers
itself as a useful model for the fields of architecture and, more
poignantly, preservation. In a world that is saturated with both
photographs and buildings, where each new image is a link in
a culturally loaded chain and every new project steps in one
way or another into the realm of preservation, documentary
photography offers us an intelligent mode for deriving new
meaning from an intense engagement with reality.

Biography
Jesús Vassallo is an architect and an assistant professor at Rice University School of
Architecture.

Notes
1
The term documentary appears in the second decade of the twentieth century. It
was allegedly coined by Scottish film director John Grierson in a review of Robert
Flaherty’s film Moana published at New York’s The Sun. For a detailed discussion of
the origin and signification of the term, see Olivier Lugon, El Estilo Documental: de

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 August Sander a Walker Evans, 1920–1945 (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de
Salamanca, 2010), 21–26.
2
For a comprehensive account of the early use of photography by architects,
see Robert Ellwall, Building with Light: The International History of Architectural
Photography (New York: Merrell, in association with the Royal Institute of British
Architects, 2004), 54–55.
3
Barry Bergdoll, “A Matter of Time,” 106.
4
Ellwall, Building with Light, 18.
5
Baldus’s photographs of the New Louvre were used for institutional purposes.
The firm of Bissons Frères was quick to emulate Baldus’s technique and assemble
an album with its own photographs of the building for sale to the general public.
See Malcolm Daniel, “Édouard Baldus, Artiste Photographe,” in The Photographs
of Édouard Baldus, ed. Malcolm Daniel (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art;
Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1994), 64.
6
Ellwall, Building with Light, 55.
7
Peter Barberie, “Charles Marville’s Seriality,” Record of the Art Museum, Princeton
University (2008): 30–45.
8
This was enunciated by Voltaire in the mid-­eighteenth century when he suggested
that Paris should demolish the fabric of ordinary structures surrounding its monu-
ments in order to enhance its public image. Bergdoll, “A Matter of Time,” 108.
9
For a full account of this commission, see Thomas Annan, Photographs of the Old
Closes and Streets of Glasgow, 1868/1877: With a Supplement of fifteen Related
Views (New York: Dover Publications, 1977).
10
Anita Ventura Mozley, “Introduction to the Dover Edition,” in Thomas Annan,
Photographs of the Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, vi.
11
The photographs were at first taken by A & J Bool and from 1877 by Henry and
T. J. Dixon. Both couples of photographers were actually considered amateurs in
the photographic circles of the time. For a full account of their careers, see “The
Photographic Careers of A. & J. Bool and Henry Dixon and Son.” Library Chronicle 15
(March 1981): 41–47.
12
Unless otherwise noted, biographical data regarding Atget are taken from Clark
Worswick, Berenice Abbott, Eugene Atget (Santa Fe, N.M.: Arena Editions, 2002).
13
For many years Berenice Abbott’s book on Atget was the only published reference
on the French photographer. Berenice Abbott, Atget: Photographe de Paris (Paris:
Jonquières, 1930).
14
For an extensive account of Abbott’s lifelong involvement with the work of Atget,
see Clark Worswick, “Abbott and Atget,” in Berenice Abbott, Eugene Atget, 13–47.
15
For a detailed account of Abbott’s New York Project, see Lugon, El Estilo Documen-
tal, 93–97, and Terri Weissman, The Realisms of Berenice Abbott: Documentary Pho-
tography and Political Action (Berkeley: University of California Press; Washington,
D.C.: Phillips Collection, 2011), 121–171.
16
See Lugon, El Estilo Documental, 89–90.
17
The result of this collaboration can be seen in a re-­creation of the original exhibi-
tion and catalog. See Janine A. Mileaf and Carla Yanni, Constructing Modernism:
Berenice Abbott and Henry-­Russell Hitchcock: A Recreation of the 1934 Exhibition
and The Urban Vernacular of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties: American Cities before
the Civil War, Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut,
October 28–December 10, 1993 (Middletown: The Center, 1993).
18
For a full account of the scope of the Changing New York project, see Lugon, El
Estilo Documental, 89.
19
For a discussion on the social and political agenda of Abbott, see Weissman, The
Realisms of Berenice Abbott, 121–71
20
Abbott’s growing political involvement and the influence of her partner, the
writer Elizabeth McCausland, whom she met in 1935, eventually gave way to a more
humanistic and moralistic approach in her work, with an increasing importance of
captions. These distanced her work in the years after her Changing New York proj-
ect from the dispassionate visual purity of her initial experiments with Hitchcock.
For more on this “humanist” phase of American documentary photography, see
Lugon, El Estilo Documental, 102–15.
21
All biographic data on Evans, unless otherwise noted, is taken from Belinda
Rathbone, Walker Evans: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995).
22
Between 1929 and 1930, Evans used Abbott’s photo lab, before their strong
personalities and colliding ambitions caused them to suddenly break apart. See
Worswick, “Abbott and Atget,” 14.
23
Ibid.
24
Lugon, El Estilo Documental, 86.
25
Ibid., 102.
26
Walker Evans and Lincoln Kirstein, American Photographs (New York: The Museum
of Modern Art, 1938).

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 27
This summary of the characteristics of documentary photography is a free
re-elaboration of the work of Lugon. See Lugon, El Estilo Documental, 123–24.
28
“Documentary? That’s a very sophisticated and misleading word. And not really
clear. . . . The term should be documentary style. An example of a literal docu-
ment would be a police photograph of a murder scene. You see, a document has
a use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never a document, though it
certainly can adopt that style.” Walker Evans on his own work in Leslie Katz, “An
Interview with Walker Evans (1971),” in Photography in Print, ed. Vicki Goldberg
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 364.

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