Humanist photography


Humanist Photography, also known as the School of Humanist Photography, manifests the Enlightenment philosophical system in social documentary practice based on a perception of social change. It emerged in the mid-twentieth-century and is associated most strongly with Europe, particularly France, where the upheavals of the two world wars originated, though it was a worldwide movement. It can be distinguished from photojournalism, with which it forms a sub-class of reportage, as it is concerned more broadly with everyday human experience, to witness mannerisms and customs, than with newsworthy events, though practitioners are conscious of conveying particular conditions and social trends, often, but not exclusively, concentrating on the underclasses or those disadvantaged by conflict, economic hardship or prejudice. Humanist photography "affirms the idea of a universal underlying human nature". Jean Claude Gautrand describes humanist photography as:
Photographing on the street or in the bistro primarily in black‐and‐white in available light with the popular small cameras of the day, these image-makers discovered what the writer Pierre Mac Orlan called the 'fantastique social de la rue' and their style of image making rendered romantic and poetic the way of life of ordinary European people, particularly in Paris.

Philosophical foundation

The preoccupation with everyday life emerged after World War I. As a reaction to the atrocities of the trenches, Paris became a haven for intellectual, cultural and artistic life, attracting artists from the whole of Europe and the United States. With the release of the first Leica and Contax range-finder cameras, photographers took to the street and documented life by day and night. Such photographers as André Kertész, Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson emerged during the period between the two world wars thanks to the Illustrated Press. Having been brought to notice by the Surrealists and Berenice Abbott, the life work of Eugène Atget in the empty streets of Paris also became a reference.
At the end of World War II, in 1946, French intellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux embraced humanism; Sartre argued that existentialism was a humanism entailing freedom of choice and a responsibility for defining oneself, while at the Sorbonne in an address sponsored by UNESCO, Malraux depicted human culture as 'humanisme tragique', a battle against biological decay and historical disaster.
Emerging from brutal global conflict, survivors desired material and cultural reconstruction and the appeal of humanism was a return to the values of dignity, equality and tolerance symbolised in an international proclamation and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the General Assembly of the United Nations in Paris on 10 December 1948. That the photographic image could become a universal language in accord with these principles was a notion circulated at a UNESCO conference in 1958

Emergence

As France in particular, but also Belgium and the Netherlands, emerged from the dark period of the Occupation, the liberation of Paris in August 1944 released photographers to respond to reconstruction and the Fourth Republic’s drive to redefine a French identity after war, defeat, occupation, and collaboration, and to modernise the country. For photographers the experience had been one in which the Nazi authorities censored all visual expression and the Vichy carefully controlled those who remained; and who eked out a living with portraiture and commercial, officially endorsed editorial photography, though individuals joined the Resistance from 1941, including Robert Capa, Cartier-Bresson, and Jean Dieuzaide, with several forging passes and documents.
Paris was a crossroad of modernist culture and so cosmopolitan influences abound in humanist photography, recruiting emigrés who impressed their stamp on French photography, the earliest being Hungarian Andre Kertesz who arrived on the scene in the mid-1920s; followed by his compatriots Ergy Landau, Brassai, and Robert Capa, and by the Pole "Chim" Seymour, among others, in the 1930s. The late 1940s and 50s saw a further influx of foreign photographers sympathetic to this movement, including Ed van der Elsken from the Netherlands who recorded the interactions at the bistrot Chez Moineau, the dirt-cheap refuge of bohemian youths and of Guy Debord, Michele Bernstein, Gil J. Wolman, Ivan Chtcheglov and the other members of the Letterist International and the emerging Situationists whose theory of the dérive accords with the working method of the humanist street photographer.

Picture magazines, reportage and the photoessay

Humanist photography emerged and spread after the rise of the mass circulation picture magazines in the 1920s and as photographers formed fraternities such as Le Groupe des XV, or joined agencies which promoted their work and fed the demand of the newspaper and magazine audiences, publishers and editors before the advent of television broadcasting which rapidly displaced these audiences at the close of the 1960s. These publications include the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, Vu, Point de Vue, Regards, Paris Match, Picture Post, Life, Look, Le Monde illustré, Plaisir de France and Réalités which competed to give ever larger space to photo-stories; extended articles and editorials that were profusely illustrated, or that consisted solely of photographs with captions, often by a single photographer, who would be credited alongside the journalist, or who provided written copy as well as images.

Photobooks and literary connections

Iconic books appeared including Doisneau's Banlieue de Paris, Izis's Paris des rêves, Willy Ronis' Belleville‐Ménilmontant , and Cartier‐Bresson's Images à la sauvette.

Exhibitions

National and international exposure of humanist photography was accelerated through exhibitions and of particular importance in this regard is The Family of Man, a vast travelling exhibition curated by Edward Steichen for MoMA, which presented a unifying humanist manifesto in the form of images selected from amongst, literally, a million. Thirty-one French photographs appeared in The Family of Man, a contribution representing almost one-third of the European photography in the show.
Steichen said that based on his experience of meeting photographers in Europe as he sought images of ‘everydayness' which he defined as 'the beauty of the things that fill our lives', for the exhibition, that the French were the only photographers who had thoroughly photographed scenes of daily life. These were practitioners he admired for their conveying 'tender simplicity, a sly humor, a warm enthusiasm... and convincing aliveness'. In turn, this exposure in The Family of Man inspired a new generation of humanist photographers.
The British, exposed to much the same threats and conflict as the rest of Europe during the first half of the century, in their popular magazine Picture Post did much to promote the humanist imagery of Bert Hardy, Kurt Hutton, Felix H. Man, Francis Reiss, Thurston Hopkins, John Chillingworth, Grace Robertson, and Leonard McCombe, who eventually joined Life Magazine's staff. Its founder Stefan Lorant explained his motivation;
The movement is in marked contrast to the contemporaneous ‘art’ photography of the USA, and it was a country less directly exposed to the trauma that inspired the humanist philosophy. Nevertheless, there too ran a current of humanism in photography, first begun in the early 20th century by Jacob Riis, then Lewis Hine, followed by the FSA and the New York Photo League photographers exhibited at Limelight gallery.
Books were published such as those by Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, Walker Evans and James Agee, Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell, Arthur Rothstein and William Saroyan. The seminal work by Robert Frank, The Americans published in France in 1958 and the USA the following year, the result of his two Guggenheim grants, can also be considered an extension of the humanist photography current in the USA which had a demonstrable impact on American photography.
In spite of the Red Scare and McCarthyism in the 1950s a humanist ethos and vision was promoted by The Family of Man exhibition world tour, and is strongly apparent in W. Eugene Smith's 1950s development of the photo essay, street photography by Helen Levitt, Vivian Meier et al., and later the work by Bruce Davidson '', Eugene Richards, and Mary-Ellen Mark from the 50s into the 90s. The W. Eugene Smith Award continues to award humanitarian and humanist photography.

Characteristics

Typically humanist photographers harness the photograph's combination of description and emotional affect to both inform and move the viewer, who may identify with the subject; their images are appreciated as continuing the pre-war tradition of photo reportage as social or documentary records of human experience. It is praised for expressing humanist values such as empathy, solidarity, sometimes humor, and mutual respect of cameraperson and subject in recognition of the photographer, usually an editorial freelancer, as auteur on a par with other artists.
Developments in technology supported these characteristics. The Ermanox with its fast and lenses camera, miniaturized and portable, had become available by the end of the 1920s, followed by the medium-format Rolleiflex, and the 35mm Contax. They revolutionized the practice of documentary photography and reportage by enabling the photographer to shoot quickly and unobtrusively in all conditions, to seize the "decisive moment" which Cartier-Bresson defined as "the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes" and thus support Cornell Capa's notion of "concerned photography", described as "work committed to contributing to or understanding humanity's well-being".

Decline

The humanist current continued into the late 1960s and early 70s, also in the United States when America came to dominate the medium, with photography in academic artistic and art history programs becoming institutionalised in such programs as the Visual Studies Workshop, after which attention turned to photography as a fine art and documentary image-making was interrogated and transformed in Postmodernism.

Humanist photographers

The list below is not exhaustive, but presents photographers that can be partially or totally attached to this movement: