“Documentary photography usually refers to a popular form of photography used to chronicle both significant and relevant to history and historical events and everyday life.”
Documentary photography is a form of storytelling, usually with one powerful photograph and deeper meaning which often moves people. This form of photography is used to ‘document’ events and people in everyday real life situations which in the past has been used to bring the attention of an audience to a particular subject, change their perspective and create a social change for example: a photograph taken by Nick Ut in Vietnam in 1972 of children running from a bomb explosion caused outraged protests in America and changed the outcome of the war. Views on documentary photography are controversial as some people believe that certain situations should not be documented which also brings in social and political associations such as whether or not it is deemed ethical or moral to take these pictures and publish them.
Today many people are pushing the boundaries of what can be defined as documentary photography, and if photographer should still abide by the rules and ethic codes of documentary photography. Below is an example of an article about the World Press panel discussing the rules of documentary.
Photojournalism
Documentary photography are generally related to longer term projects with a more complex story line, whilst photojournalism concerns are more about breaking news stories.
Photojournalism is a particular form of journalism which involves collecting and editing news material for a news publication or a broad cast. Photojournalism uses photographs in order to tell a story, it’s different to other types of photography such as documentary and street photography because of it’s rigid ethics which demands that the photos are honest and impartial and are only telling the story in journalistic terms. The objective of photojournalism is to have images which are a fair representation of events of situations. Illustrating news story’s with photographs began in the mid 19th century in The Times newspaper of Lord Horatio Nelson’s funeral. The first newspaper with weekly illustrations was the Illustrated London News.
