Down on the Farm - Art Gallery of Alberta

The Alberta Foundation for the Arts Travelling Exhibition ProgramPhotography and the Documentary EyeThere is a terrible truthfulness about photography.George Bernard ShawWhlle some photographers believed that photography should emulate painting, on theother side of the debate were those who believed that photography was primarliy apopular means of reproducing the material world. For all their ambitions, the artistphotographersremained a tiny group within the body photographic whereas it wasphotography’s capacity for recording fact, giving evidence, and presenting a documentthat practitioners and their public valued most. This aim of photographers to create a‘real’ document, which derived from the genre of realism in painting, resulted in the genreof DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY and is most fully expressed in the exhibition <strong>Down</strong>on the Farm in the work of Dawn Saunders Dahl.Documentary photography has been defined as ‘...adepiction of the real world by a photographer whose intentis to communicate something of importance - to make acomment - that will be understood by the viewer.’ (Time LifeLibrary of Photography, pg. 12) In such photography thephotographer attempts to produce truthful, objective, andusually candid photography of a particular subject, mostoften pictures of people.Dawn Saunders DahlLynn, 2008Digital photographCollection of the artistAs a genre of photography, documentary photographydeveloped in three general stages. While the actual term‘documentary photography’ was coined in the 1930s todescribe a category of photography which comments onreality, photographs meant to accurately describe otherwiseunknown, hidden, forbidden, or difficult-to-access places orcircumstance date to the earliest daguerreotypes andcalotype surveys of the ruins of the Near East, Egypt, thehistoric architecture of Europe, and the Americanwilderness. This desire to create a permanent record offamiliar and exotic scenes and the appearance offriends and family marked the first stage ofdocumentary photography.As expressed by photographer John Thomson in the 1860s...the photograph affords the nearest approach that can be made toward placing (the reader)actually before the scene which is represented’Documentary Photography, Time Life Library of Photography, pg. 16At this early stage in photography’s development, photographs were seen as miraculous,enabling the human eye to see things it did not always notice or would never see. Photographytook over the concerns with realism that had been developing in painting and the camerawas used mainly as a copier of nature. This faith in the camera as a literal recorder gave rise tothe belief that the camera does not lie.AFA Travelling Exhibition Program, Edmonton, AB. Ph: 780.428.3830 Fax: 780.421.0479youraga.ca