Essential Characteristics and Social Value of Documentary Photography

Documentary photography refers to the type and way of photography that truly records the reality, truthfully reflects what is seen from life and has certain social value of recording and preserving history. Documentary photography generally includes photo stories, photo series, photo short comments and other categories. Its value lies not in the intuitive feeling given by photos, but in the information value of photos themselves. Speak with facts, photos tell a thousand words, reveal various problems and contradictions that affect social change, convey the author's tendency to evaluate life, and embody profound ideological connotation.

First, the nature and characteristics of documentary photography

The essence of documentary photography is that its subject matter and content have certain social significance, which has attracted the attention of people at that time or later generations and has certain practical significance and historical value. Secondly, the main purpose of documentary photography is to arouse people's attention, arouse social conscience, or criticize the shortcomings of the times, reveal the truth, preserve culture and record history. Some photographic works will cause strong social reactions and social effects. Finally, documentary photography requires going deep into reality, understanding and respecting the subject, not interfering, not directing, not wearing makeup, not whitewashing or retouching, and taking pictures on the spot. This is a means to accurately fix accurate and fleeting moments. In a word, the core and essence of documentary photography is to pay attention to people, their fate, the social life they live and contact, and advocate the direct expression of human nature and the people-oriented spirit.

Photography has the characteristics of documentary since its birth, and its technical feature is to reproduce the images of real things realistically with the help of optical characteristics. Therefore, documentary can be said to be the natural attribute of photography. The creation of documentary photography must start with a true portrayal of life. As a medium to spread information, photography has its own characteristics since then: sociality, historicity, culture and systematicness.

1. Authenticity

Photography has the characteristics of documentary since its birth, and documentary is the natural essential attribute of photography. The so-called authenticity of documentary photography is generally that photographers use cameras as a tool to record an objective existence at that time. Documentary photography is to tell people that at a certain time or a certain period of time, in a certain place, someone or some people did something, and finally what kind of influence it had. Its function is not only to convey information, but also to guide readers to prove the true state of a society.

2. Sociality

Sociality means that documentary photography reflects the social reality and expresses the characteristics of social evaluation by recording the social relations represented by the subject, and shows the characteristics of people and the times from the historical cross-section. Documentary photography can often attract people's attention, arouse social conscience, reveal the truth and record history, which has certain social effects.

3. Contemporary Nature

The era marks the characters and characteristics of the era from the vertical axis of historical development, and it is a social feature that conforms to the law of historical development and is formed by contemporary people constantly sublating national traditions in the process of social reform. Documentary photography is an objective historical record. It was shot at that time or recently, which has a strong realistic timeliness. It embodies the inheritance of national culture and reflects the essence of contemporary life.

Second, the social value of documentary photography

1. Documentary photography is the product of today's society and the need of modern social civilization.

Looking back on photography in 170 years, in fact, documentary photography should really be the mainstream of photography. Since 1930s, the so-called photo photography and salon photography in the world began to give way to documentary photography. As a pioneer of industrial culture, photography has greatly expanded the space of image thinking, making images replace words as the most important cultural carrier. In other words, documentary photography has created a way to obtain political, economic, military, educational, social, scientific and artistic information directly through images, and made important contributions to modern society.

2. Documentary photography pays attention to cultural relics and traditional folk customs.

In daily life, people's vision is vague, fluid, scattered and incoherent to observe everything that exists. Most of people's visual centers are just facing those common and moving time and space, and people will not choose and combine some disappearing cultural elements and some classic traditional folk customs. Of course, not all the meanings contained in it can be found at a glance. I am amazed at the diversity of life. People will see what they can't see through their own images, realize the original meaning of another life that is different from what they usually experience personally, and inadvertently capture the historical value around them.

Documentary photography is the reflection of social life and the essence of the times.

Recording reality and reflecting the times is the natural function of documentary photography. This requires it to pay attention to people, especially those who embody the characteristics of the times. Taking people who reflect the characteristics of the times as the theme, documentary portrait photography is endowed with the characteristics of the times and has irreplaceable historical characteristics. For example, salgado's Laborer and many other documentary photography works reflecting social problems have revealed the people in the tragic corner to the world and become the focus of the world's attention, which has also brought broad development prospects and vitality to documentary photography.

4. Documentary photography expresses social evaluation and promotes social progress.

Documentary photography works pay attention to social phenomena and the social value of material selection. It often aims at promoting social progress and permeates photographers' understanding and thinking of reality. From this perspective, documentary photography can be regarded as a social activity. We live in an era of great change, using cameras to keep today's glory and gloom and expose the true feelings and ugliness of society. Interpreting all levels of society from different angles will help people understand the society in front of them and make a correct evaluation, thus ultimately promoting the further improvement of society.

5. Documentary photography conveys social information and witnesses social changes.

Different from artistic photography and commercial photography, documentary photography will convey some social information to people. Objective documentary photography has the function of providing detailed image display for social development and change.