Photographers Who Created Important Historical Records

The National Child Labor Committee sent Hine to photograph working children. Start with the captions in its collection, which can give the industry, the place, and details he learned about the child. Hine’s pictures were made for a reform campaign. The record includes both what a camera showed and the information the investigator thought would persuade a reader.

Atget’s Paris includes shop fronts, courtyards, and old streets as well as familiar buildings. He did much of the work with a view camera and glass plates. Look across the series to see the commercial and residential details that become legible when someone documents a city one frontage at a time.

Abbott’s Changing New York grew into a Federal Art Project survey of the city during the 1930s. Compare views of older streets with her pictures of new buildings. The shifts in scale and viewpoint are part of the historical record, because they show how an older street could sit beside a city that was being rebuilt.

Van Der Zee’s Harlem studio work records people as participants in their own portraits. Dress, props, and poses show how people wanted to mark a moment or present themselves. For a view of Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, compare that studio record with photographs made outside by news photographers.

Harris photographed Pittsburgh for the Pittsburgh Courier. The museum’s archive follows Black Pittsburgh through public events and ordinary assignments, including businesses, celebrations, and sports. Look across a run of pictures to see what a local newspaper treated as everyday history.

Rogovin returned to Buffalo’s Lower West Side several times over about three decades. The doorway portrait shown here is one photograph from that longer record. Compare pictures across visits to see how repeat access can document people and households in a way a single visit cannot.

Thomson’s Street Life in London, made with writer Adolphe Smith, looks at how people made a living on the streets of the Victorian city. Start with the photographs and their accompanying sketches of workers such as cab drivers. The writing helps identify the trade, and the staging shows what the photographer chose to include.

Start with Chambi’s 1928 self-portrait in his Cusco studio. The glass plate in his hand makes the process part of the picture. The studio portraits and photographs made beyond it document the region from the perspective of a photographer from a Quechua-speaking family in southern Peru.

Look at Singh’s portrait of a Calcutta taxi driver, then follow his wider record of Indian streets. Singh worked in color, packing streets, people, and objects into frames with several points of attention. Where a simpler picture might isolate one subject, his photographs make the surrounding place part of what you can study.

Iturbide began photographing life in Juchitán after artist Francisco Toledo invited her there in 1979. The portrait of a woman wearing iguanas is a starting point. Consider it alongside the broader Juchitán body of work to see what the collaboration and sustained access made visible about Zapotec community life.

Tōmatsu photographed Nagasaki years after the atomic bombing. One picture records a glass bottle distorted by heat, an object that can keep a historical aftermath in view without an image of the attack itself. Start with the city’s object and portrait photographs together to see the different forms a record of aftermath can take.

Goldblatt photographed South African life through its working spaces and everyday arrangements. Start with the barber’s chair made out of mining timbers in his early work and compare it with his photograph of a worker-management meeting. A piece of furniture and a meeting room offer two ways of seeing how labor is organized.

Faces and Phases is an ongoing record of lives in Black LGBTQ communities. It makes individual portraits and personal histories visible together. Look at the sequence as well as single images, because the repetition gives the project the force of an archive while keeping the people distinct.

Mark photographed unhoused young people in Seattle on assignment for Life in 1983. Tiny became a central subject in the photographs and in the film Streetwise the following year. Start by comparing a portrait with the film material to see what continued access gives a project beyond a magazine assignment.