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The development of the 35-mm or “candid” camera by Oskar
Barnack of the Ernst Leitz company, first marketed in 1925, made
documentarians infinitely more mobile and less conspicuous, while
the manufacture of faster black-and-white film enabled them to work
without a flash in situations with a minimum of light. Color film
for transparencies (slides) was introduced in 1935 and color negative
film in 1942. Portable lighting equipment was perfected, and in
1947 the Polaroid Land camera, which could produce a positive print
in seconds, was placed on the market. All of these technological
advances granted the photojournalist enormous and unprecedented
versatility.
The advent of large-circulation picture magazines, such as Life
(begun 1936) and Look (begun 1937), provided an outlet and a vast
audience for documentary work. At the same time a steady stream
of convulsive national and international events provided a wealth
of material for the extended photo-essay, the documentarian's natural
mode. One of these was the Great Depression of the 1930s, which
proved to be the source of an important body of documentary work.
Under the leadership of Roy Stryker, the photographic division of
the Farm Security Administration (FSA) began to make an archive
of images of America during this epoch of crisis. Walker Evans,
Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, and Dorothea Lange of the FSA group
photographed the cultural disintegration generated by the Depression
and the concomitant disappearance of rural lifestyles.
With the coming of World War II photographers, including Margaret
Bourke-White, Edward Steichen, W. Eugene Smith, Lee Miller, and
Robert Capa, documented the global conflict. The war was a stimulus
to photography in other ways as well. From the stress analysis of
metals to aerial surveillance, the medium was a crucial tool in
many areas of the war effort, and, in the urgency of war, numerous
technological discoveries and advances were made that ultimately
benefited all photographers.
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