Two Qualities: Beauty and Truth to Nature. Documentary Projects in the History of Photography

The author discusses a number of commissions given to
photographers by governments and specific institutions: the
Mission Heliographique (1851), commissioned reportages by
American photographers on the exploration of the American West
(Survey Photography), engineering photography (French Ecole
Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees), the FSA and the French DATAR.
In the introduction the author complains that much writing on
photography displays a notable deficiency in that the context of
the photography described, including the commissioning, is
discussed only briefly and unclearly. Some remarks are made on
the pure documentarian aspect of the assignments and the
(possible conflicting) artistic vision of the photographer. The
author deals more extensively with the FSA: a combining of the
topographic tradition with that of the reportage, resulting in
the documentary 'style'. This phenomenon of subjective 'style'
that has ultimately undermined the 'truth' of the documentary. A
notion that led the organizers of the most recent French
goverment commssion, the Mission Photographique de la DATAR, to
state: it is not the photo's themselves that are meant to be
credible but the photographic vision, the artistic
interpretation that has to be 'credible'. The historical result,
as the author states, is that another concept underlies new
documentary commissions.