• This project was contemplated as the twelfth Funarte Marc Ferrez Photography Prize 2012

    Documentary Photography


    Documentary photography allows understanding of the future milestones. Documentary photography covering different aspects of human nature and its environment and is fundamental to the historical and cultural revival of our past.

    True time capsule, the images once signed on different types of paper and digitally today moving in dizzying number – something like a trillion – the World Wide Web demonstrate that photography is one of the most used tools of representation of human genius. Incidentally, never produced so visual memory. We live in a wonderful age of human existence, we can confirm the imaging power of the photograph on our civilization.

    Documentary has been defined in the stylistic sense of photographic work. His pleas were deeply absorbed by photojournalism by factual style of journalism and television journalism, and more recently, visual anthropology. Some names have been suggested substitutes for documentary photography, such as: historical, factual, realistic, but neither brings so implicitly in his direction, the desire to create a subjective interpretation of the world in which we live.

    If on one side the picture was and still is used as a window into the past, allowing the visualization of details that textual documents do not record for another understanding of photography as a form of representation opened up countless possibilities to analyze historical facts associated with the image building.

    The contemporary documentary photography preserves some features of the classical structure of documentaries, consolidated in the 1930s, which we call the paradigmatic model of the 1930s. This model began to take shape in the nineteenth century, with the first documentary, as the Scotsman John Thomson (1837-1921), Danish Jacob Riis (1849-1914), American Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) and the German Heinrich Zille (1858 – 1929), who were dedicated, intensely, the picture of a social nature. In the 1930s, the height of the model, fotodocumentaristas sought to establish under the tripod truth, objectivity and credibility, although we know that such an intention could never be achieved. According to the English Derrick Price (1997), “the archetypal documentary project was concerned to draw the attention of an audience for individual subjects, often with a vision of changing the social or political situation.” (PRICE, 1997)

    When structured, photographic documentation allows rescue, interpret and consolidate the collective memory, for documentary photography is an educational tool to raise awareness about the reality in which we live.

    Roberto Castello and staff – 2014