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Articles on Documentary Photography

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Raphaela Rosella with Dayannah Baker Barlow, Kathleen Duncan, Gillianne Laurie, Tammara Macrokanis, Amelia Rosella, Nunjul Townsend, Laurinda Whitton, Tricia Whitton, and family, You’ll Know It When You Feel It, 2011–2023. Installation view, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2023. Photo: Louis Lim.

More than a picture: how the work of documentary photographer Raphaela Rosella is defined by co-creation

In You’ll Know It When You Feel It at the Institute of Modern Art, Raphaela Rosella and her co-creators have sought to reclaim and counteract the narratives formed by state records.
Lewis Wickes Hine, ‘A little spinner in a Georgia Cotton Mill, 1909.’ Gelatin silver print, 5 x 7 in. The Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (P545)

The US has a child labor problem – recalling an embarrassing past that Americans may think they’ve left behind

While Lewis Hine’s early-20th century photographs of working children compelled Congress to limit or ban child labor, the US Department of Labor is now under fire for failing to enforce these laws.
Photograph by Lewis W. Hine of a small spinner at Mollohan Mills, Newberry, S.C.: “She was tending her ‘sides’ like a veteran, but after I took the photo, the overseer came up and said in an apologetic tone that was pathetic, ‘She just happened in.’ Then a moment later he repeated the information. The mills appear to be full of youngsters that ‘just happened in,’ or ‘are helping sister.’ National Child Labor Committee/Library of Congress

Can a photograph change the world?

Documentary photography aims to portray reality and help transform the world.
When The Village Voice shut down in August, the city’s protest movements lost one of their biggest champions. Nick Lehr/The Conversation

The Village Voice’s photographers captured change, turmoil unfolding on New York City’s streets

For decades, the alternative weekly’s photographers served as the eyes of the streets, working with activists to document and publicize the anguish and rage of everyday New Yorkers.
A nurse treats Johnny at Vancouver’s Crosstown Clinic before he self-injects his medication. © Aaron Goodman

Humanizing the heroin epidemic: a photo essay

Hoping to avoid the pitfalls and tropes of drug genre photography, documentary photographer Aaron Goodman spent a year following three addicts enrolled in a heroin-assisted treatment program.

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