Independent Research - USA photographers Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine styles

USA photographers Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine styles

When I input the name of Jacob Riis into Google images I immediately drew up hundreds of pictures of people living in the tenements of cities in the USA in exceedingly poor surroundings.  The pictures themselves featured one person or child to families to large numbers of badly dressed people in tenements where it was obvious there was no running water or sanitary conditions.  Riis was able, after the invention of the flash photograph, to go into dark tenement buildings with his flash machine and take pictures where a camera on its own would record nothing, as it was so dark.

On the other hand, when researched Lewis Hine I saw, again, a large number of pictures of people, either on their own or groups, but what seemed like in the workplace.  Lewis Hine spent most of his time photographing working conditions for children when employment laws were in place to stop young children working in factories and sweatshops.  In the guise of an interest in photographing working machinery, Hine was able to encourage young children to stand in the pictures giving a real sense of scale to the machines.  He had concocted a way of gauging the height of children, through the use of judiciously sewn buttons on his clothing, to enable him to know their height.

Research UK Photographers - Julia Margaret Cameron, Frank Meadow Sutcliffe and Henry Peach Robinson

Julia Margaret Cameron

Cameron did not take up photography until she was 48 when she was given her first camera.  Cameron’s techniques (sometimes consciously leaving prints with smudges, printing from cracked negatives and scratching away the emulsion of negatives) and her 'out of focus' effects were often criticized in her lifetime.  Mrs Cameron strived always to achieve high art and idealism, she produced many images portraying religious figures and illustrating sacred legends. Julia spent a fair bit of her time taking socialite photographs of wealthy London-based people.

Frank Meadow Sutcliffe

Sutcliffe, an English pioneering photographic artist, presented an enduring record of life in the seaside town of Whitby, England, and surrounding areas, in the late Victorian era and early 20th century.  By photographing the ordinary people in Whitby that he knew well, he built up a most complete and revealing picture of a late Victorian town, and the people who lived and worked there.

Henry Peach Robinson

Robinson was an English pictorialist photographer best known for his pioneering combination printing - joining multiple negatives or prints to form a single image; an early example of photomontage.  Robinson was one of the most prominent art photographers of his day and kept up his involvement with the theoretical side of photography, writing the influential essay Pictorial Effect in Photography, and various other works regarding the theoretical side of photography.  His most famous photograph montages included ‘Fading Away’ (1858) and ‘When the Day's Work is Done’ (1877).  

Of the three British social documentary photographers, Cameron tended to stay with her own environment where she took pictures of people in her own social class.  Sutcliffe, on the other hand, was a true documentarian who recorded the situation over many years of his own area, whilst Robinson concocted pictures, using his own images, to create photo montages of life around him.