Is the purpose of documentary

photography to persuade or record?

Dan Foy

BA Hons Photography

Module: PHOT10058
Seminar tutor: Malcolm Brice
Word Count: 1099
 Is the purpose of documentary
photography to persuade or record?

The term ʻdocumentary photographyʼ infers that photographs created in this

style exist to document record of real-world events. It would appear that the
subgenres of this broad classification can be split into one of two credos:
either its purpose is to objectively record, else it is just another form of
expression, and thereby a vehicle to persuade a viewer into interpreting an
event or idea as expressed by the photographer. I suggest that neither
approach is attainable in a practical fashion.

To illustrate my point I will refer to two photographs: ʻChildren Fleeing an

American Napalm Strikeʼ by Nick Ut, and ʻValley of the Shadow of Deathʼ by
Roger Fenton.

Utʼs photograph, taken during the Vietnam War in 1972, depicts a number of
Vietnamese children, all of whom appear to fleeing the plume of arid smoke
behind them, and who are clearly in distress. Two of them are screaming,
and one of them – a pre-adolescent girl – is naked. A number of soldiers walk
behind the children, and look notably calmer. The photograph is a press
photograph and intended to be accompanied by a story, which will inform that
the childrenʼs village has been napalm-bombed by friendly forces; the girl, Kim
Phuc, has suffered terrible burns that will leave her hospitalized for over a
year. Utʼs photograph is indisputably evocative, and whilst it could be argued
that the photograph was taken with intent to indiscriminately record, the image
became a symbol of large-scale public opposition to the unpopular Vietnam
War. This makes Utʼs intentions as a photographer somewhat irrelevant in a
real-world context.

The second photograph, taken in 1855 during the Crimean War, is comprised
of what would by a comparatively featureless landscape, if it were not for the
cannonballs littering the valley road that snakes through the photograph.

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Despite initially appearing much more of an objective record than Utʼs
photograph, it is arguably more constructed to be persuasive. The
photograph is one of a pair, with the other photograph showing the road clear
of cannonballs. Although it is a matter of some dispute, it would appear that
Fenton artificially altered the scene for dramatic effect, in an attempt to
persuade viewers that the situations that he photographed were more
dangerous than they were in reality, perhaps due to 1850s technology
prohibiting photographs of actual wartime action. This sort of direct
manipulation became scandalous with instances such as Rothsteinʼs famous
FSA image of a skull on cracked earth creating political uproar, suggesting
that the general public expect ʻofficialʼ documentary photographs to be as
neutral a record as possible.

However, it is also significant to consider what the photographers in question

did not choose to photograph. It is unusual to discover photographs
documenting the poor living conditions of soldiers at war dating from
photographyʼs infancy. Fenton is recognised for his documentation of soldiers
and the wartime landscape, but in balance, the lack of photos of
documentation of the killed or maimed in action, or those wasted to incidental
causes such as the cholera outbreak, is almost as significant and revealing of
his intentions. In the words of George Baldwin, a curator more familiar with
Fentonʼs work:

“The soldiers, in that first winter, before Fenton arrived, had inadequate
food, inadequate shelter, inadequate clothing. The images that are
propagandistic are the ones that show that the soldiers are adequately
housed, adequately clothed.” (Baldwin, 2007)

Created more than a century later, Utʼs photograph appears to be a world

apart from Fentonʼs photograph, depicting the clear stress of an innocent child
as she becomes the victim of an attack by friendly forces that is likely to leave
her alive, yet deformed for life. If the failures of Fentonʼs work as
documentary photography lay within his apparent reluctance to make

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photographs depicting the appalling realities of war, the inference is that Utʼs
frank and unashamed photograph is a more accurate record of the realities of
organized conflict. However, the more complex reality is that no photograph
can be truly objective, and thus no photograph can claim to be an objective
and unbiased record.

People expect to see photographs compatible with their beliefs. When a

layman purchases a ticket for a photo-safari in Africa, he is likely to expect to
return with photographs of wild lions, elephants, and traditional African
villagers, rather than black people in jeans and vast featureless landscapes.
Similarly, the majority of 1970s American public would have been uninterested
in photographs glorifying war, just as the 1850s British would have been
uninterested in viewing the hundreds of their military wiped out
unceremoniously by disease behind the lines.

Being a subtractive medium, a photographer must actively decide what to

include and omit in each exposure, and this is influenced – even if only in the
subconscious – by the context in which the photograph is made. In many
cases, a photographerʼs aim is to persuade a party to adopt his or her
depiction of a scene as accurate. However, the full story is not as simple, and
for the press documentary photographer there is an additional party to
persuade: the picture editor. Utʼs photograph is dramatic and evocative and is
an award-winning piece of documentary and rightly so, but this would not be
the case if the photograph depicted a more mundane aspect of life in wartime
Vietnam. The reality of press photography - the field in which Nick Ut and
other Associated Press photographers operate in – is that if a photograph isnʼt
interesting, then it isnʼt going to be published, and this naturally influences the
types of photographs that are taken.

The persuasive forces behind Fentonʼs photograph are more subtle. Fenton
founded what was to become the Royal Photographic Society, under the
patronage of Prince Albert, and according to Susan Sontagʼs book ʻRegarding
the pain of othersʼ, it was under Albertʼs insistence that Fenton travelled to the

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Crimean Peninsula to become the first European war documentary
photographer. Considering that Fentonʼs personal security and access to the
war was due to royal appointment, it seems unlikely that the lack of
photographs depicting poor conditions at camp or the demoralizing sight of
dead allied soldiers is a coincidence.

Photographs that are created purely to persuade tend to fail because viewers
tend to be attracted to photographs illustrating values and ideas that to a
degree they already emphasise with, or are at least aware of, whilst photos
taken purely to record fail because they can never be objective – both
photographer and viewer interpret the scene based on past experiences. The
true purpose of documentary photography lies not at these extremes, but in a
skilful fusion meeting somewhere in the middle.

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 Bibliography
ANON., 2010. Roger Fenton. Wikipedia [online]. Available at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Fenton [accessed 8/3/10].

FAAS, Horst, 2000. The Survivor - The Story of Kim Phuc and photographer
Nick Ut. Digital Journalist, 0008, pp.8

JEFFREY, Ian, ed., 1997. The Photo Book. London: Phaidon Press.

MORRIS, Errol, and BALDWIN, Gordon, 2007. Which came first, the chicken
or the egg? New York Times Opinionator [online blog]. 25 September.
Available at: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/which-came-
first-the-chicken-or-the-egg-part-one/ [Accessed 9 March 2010]

ROBERTS, Simon, 2010. Talk with Simon Roberts (re. Motherland, Homeland
exhibition). [Lecture to students and public, Photography, Nottingham Trent]. 4
March 2010.

ZEHR, Howard, 2010. Photographic truth and documentary photography.

Visual Peacemakers [online blog], 30 January. Available at
http://visualpeacemakers.org/2010/01/30/photographic-truth-and-
documentary-photography/ [accessed 8 March 2010].