What is documentary style photography

Form of photography used to chronicle significant and historical events

Documentary photography usually refers to a popular form of photography used to chronicle events or environments both significant and relevant to history and historical events as well as everyday life.

It is typically undertaken as professionalphotojournalism, or real life reportage, but it may also be an amateur, artistic, or academic pursuit.

What is Documentary Photography? (Examples & Tips)

History

The term document applied to photography antedates the mode or genre itself. Photographs meant to accurately describe otherwise unknown, hidden, forbidden, or difficult-to-access places or circumstances date to the earliest daguerreotype and calotype "surveys" of the ruins of the Near East, Egypt, and the American wilderness areas.

Nineteenth-century archaeologist John Beasly Greene, for example, traveled to Nubia in the early s to photograph the major ruins of the region.^[1] One early documentation project was th