Social Documentary - Class

This morning we had a contextual lecture on class/social documentary within art. We looked at a range of photographers from the past 100 years.

The first photograph which really took my eye was this piece below by Dorothea Lange. It was taken in 1936 in America of a migrant mother. This is a very emotional/moving piece as it says a lot about the way some people live. Social documentary photography was always done in the same manor as this piece - black and white with raw emotion. The thing about this photograph is the way the children are all positioned around the mother. They're all leaning against her for aid and help. I really admire the way photographers like Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Alfred Stieglitz capture the reality within lower and upper classes.

Unlike Dorothea Lange, Martin Parr brought a completely different spin on social documentary photography. He looked at it from a different light and instead of always focusing on the deep, moving reality, he captured it within the main area. His work tends to be colourful and full of motion but also points out how people live and what sort of state their environment is in. The piece below is a good example of his work. It is completely different to normal documentary work and when looked at next to the piece above of Dorothea Lange', it looks like something compeltely different. The piece of Martin Parr's was taken in the 1980's and shows a much different technique of documentary photography. The work in this genre used to follow the previous trend of black and white and gritty.

Moving away from photographers who have documented, to the left is a piece by Georges-Pierre Seurat called A Sunday on La Grande Jatte from 1884. The piece seems like a portrait in a park in the summer. It shows the higher classed citizens spending an enjoyable day in the park by the wter but it also shows their riches. The fact that they're in the sun with umbrellas makes them seem snobby and it outlines them as people who don't want to get hot in the sun.