Photography in Europe was largely guided by the notions of the picturesque, the important, and the beautiful. Americans, less convinced of the permanence of any basic social arrangements, experts on the "reality" of change, have more often made photography partisan. Pictures were taken not only to show what should be admired but to reveal what needs to be confronted and fixed up. American photography implies a less stable relation with history; and a relation to social reality that is both more hopeful and more predatory.
The hopeful side is exemplified in the use of photographs in America to awaken conscience. Lewis W. Hine was appointed staff photographer to the National Child Labor Committee, which was preparing to recommend legislation; his photographs of children working in mills in the 1910s helped make child labor illegal. In the case of Roy Stryker's Farm Security Administration project, the camera was a way of "learning" about the rural poor, so the New Deal bureaucrats could figure out how to help them. But even at its most moralistic, documentary photography was always imperious in another sense. Both detached traveler's report and the more forthright angry muckraking reflect the urge to appropriate an exotic reality. And no reality is allowed the right to resist appropriation, whether it is scandalous or beautiful or picturesque.
The predatory side of photography is at the heart of the alliance between photography and tourism. The case of the American Indians is the most brutal. Discreet, serious amateurs had been operating since the end of the Civil War; the opening wedge of an army of tourists eager for "a goal shot" of Indian life. The tourists invaded the Indians' privacy, photographing sacred dances and places, paying the Indians to pose, and making them so self-conscious that they revised their ceremonies.
But native ceremonies that are changed by the tourists are not so different from a city scandal that is corrected because someone photographs it. In so far as the muckrakers got results, they too altered what they photographed; indeed, photographing reality was one way of altering it.
