Documentary photography began to be used as social reform evidence in the 19th century, with early practitioners using the camera to record social conditions and urban poverty. This was truly solidified in the 1930s, when the Great Depression in the USA saw figures like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans turn the lens on human dignity within the economic crisis, whilst later war photography from Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson brought global conflicts to home audiences. Since the dawn of the medium, the camera has gone hand-in-hand with social activism and consciousness. These five exhibitions foreground the masters of the craft, from those like Brassaï and Helen Levitt, who pioneered the field during the late 20th century, to those carrying it forward today, capturing life in today’s photography-saturated world.
Helen Levitt is one of the most formative voices in 20th century American photography. Born in Brooklyn in 1913, she found her muse in the streets of New York. The project began after a chance meeting with legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who inspired Levitt to take up the camera and begin documenting her neighbourhood with a 35mm Leica. She observed urban life in all its spontaneity, poetry and contradictions, including her early series on children’s chalk drawings, left on walls and pavements. These sharp and incisive images give a visual expression to the reality of the American Dream, characterised by migration and poverty. Fifty works from her revered series A Way of Seeing will be on display at Fotomuseum Winterthur this year, offering viewers the chance to dive into archival material.
Photographer, activist and politican Letizia Battaglia captured the harsh reality of life in Sicily in the shadow of the Mafia. From the early 1970s, she recorded the impact of Mafia rule on the Sicilian population and the suffering it caused. In her fight against organised crime, Battaglia wielded her camera as a weapon: as a photojournalist, she documented the daily terror and put it on the front pages of the newspapers. In total, she took more than 600,000 photographs, including images that are considered the most famous visual testimonies of the Mafia. Later, Battaglia continued her fight against these criminals as a politician. Life, Love and Death in Sicily is the first major retrospective since her death in 2022, produced by the The Photographers’ Gallery and now on tour to audiences around the world.
Julia Kochetova makes work from the frontlines of Ukraine. The photographer and documentary filmmaker draws from her own experiences, bringing audiences closer to the conflict, where she explores the fragile boundary between documenting, mourning and surviving. War is Personal, on display at Foam, Amsterdam, emerged from a “desire to bridge the gap between statistics and lived experience.” International media can often reduce war to numbers, cropping the human presence out of images, but Kochetova insists of showing that war is, above all, personal. Her images reveal how conflict permeates the home, body and language of those who remain. The show, part of a research project with Foam, functions as a visual diary, offering an intimate portrait of everyday life in a country at war.
Brassaï was born in Hungary in 1899, but France, and especially Paris, became his home. In the early 1930s, the artist set out with one of his cameras on long nocturnal walks through the city. The depictions of people and environments that emerge when darkness descends became the focal point of his practice. He, in the words of All About Photo, “illuminated the city’s shadowed streets, smoky cafés, solitary lovers and nighttime wanderers, creating images that were simultaneously intimate and cinematic.” The shots mark a new era of photography, with penetrating images of Paris and his now infamous work documenting street graffiti. Moderna Museet present around 100 photographs from the artist as part of the first exhibition of his work in Sweden, bringing his infamous work to a whole new audience.
Since 2016, Sebastian Wells has travelled to all Olympic Games as an accredited photographer. His work deliberately opposes heroic, nationally-charged visual tradition of sports and instead draws attention to the structures that give rise to perception, attention and meaning in the first place. ARENA I shows the Games as a product legitimised by images, in which athletes, fans and officials become part of a predetermined order. Instead of reproducing medal moments, Wells directs his camera at peripheral areas, architectural spaces and seemingly incidental situations. Meanwhile, ARENA II extends this critique beyond the duration of the games. Between march and September 2024, Wells documented the Place de la Concorde in Paris before, during and after its transformation into an “Olympic Park.”
Words: Emma Jacob
Image Credits:
1. Recruit of the 68th Jaeger Brigade during training in the Donetsk region near the front line 2023 © Julia Kochetova.
2. Helen Levitt, New York , 1976, Dye transfer © Helen Levitt © Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne.
3. Rosaria Schifani, widow of escort agent Vito, killed together with Judge Giovanni Falcone, Francesca Morvillo and his colleagues Antonio Montinaro and Rocco Di Cillo. (Rosaria Schifani, vedova dell’agente di scorta Vito, ucciso insieme al giudice Giovanni Falcone, Francesca Morvillo ed i suoi colleghi Antonio Montinaro e Rocco Di Cillo.) Palermo, 1992 © Courtesy Archivio Letizia Battaglia.
4. A teenager is setting “a checkpoint” in the village of Zelene in the Kharkiv region, 29 July 2022 © Julia Kochetova.
5. Brassaï, Couple d´amoureux dans un petit café parisien, Place d’Italie, Paris/Lovers in a Small French Café, Place d’Italie, Paris, ca 1932/ca 1970 © Estate Brassaï Succession/Philippe Ribeyrolles. Reprophoto: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet.
6. Sebastian Wells, ARENA1, #006, 2016.
