Straight photography understood today captures an image of a scene as we see it in reality, often using sharp focus, wide depth of field and refraining from image manipulation. . This movement was first publicised in the early 1900’s through a note by The New York Times on an exhibition in New York with photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Kasebier, Clarence H. White and many others. In the 1904 article ‘A Plea for Straight Photography,’ A critic Sadakichi Hartmann, expressed his regrets about the excessive handwork and painterly flourishes that characterised much of what he saw in Pictorialist photography, arguing, “We expect an etching to look like an etching, and a lithograph to look like a lithograph, why then should not a photographic print look like a photographic print?”   Straight photography was a result of Pictorialism. Pictorialism was in the time period of the 1880’s, which was around the time of the second industrial revolution. Romanticism was extremely popular at this time and this linked well with pictorialism photographs as they were like paintings, engravings or a drawings. It was a way of projecting an emotional intent into a viewer’s imagination. The characteristics pictorialism displayed were the blurred, fuzzy and textured images that almost look like paintings, this was through manipulating images, which is a key feature in pictorialism. This then provoked the idea of straight photography, which is completely different to Pictoralism as people felt images were being manipulated too much and therefore preferred photographs having more realistic features. They then focused on documenting events and every day life as they saw it. The key characteristic was really just true and real images, which represent elements of social, economical, political and culture and this was later named documentary photography. Similarly, realism claims to have a special relationship with reality and shows the cameras ability to record real events and real life without manipulation. Its a way in which the photographer sees the world and the way they choose to photograph it, portraying the truth. This style of photography relates to my own project that I am working on, as well as the artists’ work I am exploring. In my own photographic study of my Granddad I wanted to capture a realistic insight into his life, struggles and illness, by taking photographs in a documentary style creating a story close to the truth of his experiences showing that manipulation of images is not needed to express this.  I have adopted a snapshot approach as I wanted the photographs to be raw and genuine, with hints of the vernacular present throughout. This reflects a closeness, a familiarity, intimacy and every-day connection. It is not staged.

However, some images in my book have been converted to black and white or even cropped, but these are very simple and is not manipulated enough for the image to be untrue. Realism is about giving “the observer a feeling of intrusion on privacy when looking at it.” – The guardian. This is another aim of my own project as well as the artists.

Phillip Toledano’s work for example gives outsiders a personal view of his father’s last days as he has photographed him experiencing everyday life inside his home. This notion is what inspired me to follow a similar aim in my own photographs. For example, accessing archival imagery of my granddad is something which can be seen as something very personal and as a photographer, putting these images into to my own project gives outsiders an insight of his personal life behind closed doors previously as well as showing more recent photographs of his life now, letting the viewers make a comparison and detect change between then and now. On the other hand, the photographs produced by Phillip and myself can also be seen as narrative photography as the sequence of images are made to tell a story to the viewers through the pages and images produced. Narrative photography can be both documentary style photography or tableaux photography, both myself and Toledano use narrative photography in a documentary style. This means it’s more of a story of true events and situations compared to tableaux, which are staged and made up photographs, however, they can be based on a real event. Another example of a artist who uses both documentary and narrative photography is Laia Abril, she investigated and documented how a family coped with the aftermath of losing their daughter to bulimia. Separating the work into sections allowed her to approach different aspects through different platforms, not only in the multiplicity of perspectives but also in a constantly evolving visual stimulation. All three projects ‘Days with my father’, ‘The Epilogues’ and my personal study entitled ‘The Aftermath’ all tackle emotion subjects, specifically change, absence and fate.