The turn of the twentieth century witnessed a significant transformation in the perception of photography as a legitimate art form. During this period, photography was rapidly becoming more accessible to a wider market, owing to the availability of cheaper dry plates and the introduction of relatively simple Kodak cameras. Photography was also becoming more commercialised with an emphasis on utilitarian technological progress, often to the detriment of creative artistry. This naturally led some photographers to challenge conventional notions of photography with the emergence of Pictorialism, which sought to elevate photography beyond mere technical documentation and embrace it as a medium capable of expressing artistic vision and emotion by employing aesthetic techniques borrowed from painting and other art forms....

Social documentary photography (sometimes called concerned photography) is the recording of what the world looks like, with a social and/or environmental focus. It is a form of documentary photography, with the aim to draw attention to ongoing social issues, inequality and injustice. The genre has its roots in the 19th-century work of Henry Mayhew, Jacob Riis, and Lewis Hine, but began to take further form through the photographic practice of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the United States....

Group f/64 (sometimes referred to as the West Coast Photographic Movement) was founded by seven twentieth century San Francisco Bay Area photographers (including Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham) who shared a common photographic style, characterized by sharply focused, perfectly exposed and carefully framed images. They formed partly in opposition to the pictorialist photographic style that had dominated much of the early twentieth century and sought to redefine the possibilities of photography, advocating for a new modernist aesthetic of natural forms and found objects, free from photographic manipulation....

The emergence of Modernism in photography marked a significant turning point in the history of the medium. The early 20th century witnessed a departure from traditional photographic conventions, as photographers sought to break free from the limitations of objective representation and explore new ways of seeing and interpreting the world. The medium splintering into different movements reflected the political and cultural changes in the arts and society in general. If photography’s trajectory in the nineteenth century was always one step removed from the major art movements of the era, it collided head on with them from the beginning of the twentieth century....

By the mid-nineteenth century early photographic practices were already starting to mature and journalism was quick to see the benefit. Coverage of the Crimean War (1853-56) was the first significant role played by photography in mass media, when the British Government hired photographer Roger Fenton to document the war for The Illustrated London News. The images were intended to balance critical reporting from other outlets and ease the general unpopularity of the war among the British people....

The New York School of Photography is identified by American art curator Jane Livingston as a loosely defined group of photographers who lived and worked in New York City during the period 1936-63 and whilst not formally committing themselves to any group or belief “shared a number of influences, aesthetic assumptions, subjects, and stylistic earmarks”. The movement reflected the vibrant energy and spirit of post-war New York City. Livingston writes that their work was marked by humanism, a tough-minded style, photojournalistic techniques the influence of film noir and the photographers Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, and Henri Cartier-Bresson; and that it avoided “the anecdotal descriptiveness of most photojournalism” and the egoism of American action painting, and indeed that it was remarkably little influenced by contemporary painting or graphic design (even though a number of its exponents had direct experience of these)....

The New Documents was an influential documentary photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York curated in 1967 by John Szarkowski. It featured work by three (then) young and relatively unknown photographers - Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand - and had a lasting influence on modern photography. As curator John Szarkowski explained in his introduction to the exhibition, the three represented a new generation of photographer with markedly different aims than those of their predecessors of the 1930s and 1940s: they had “redirected the technique and aesthetic of documentary photography to more personal ends....

Landscape photography has long been associated with romanticized depictions of pristine nature and picturesque scenes. Most famously from the 1920s Ansel Adams cultivated an approach to landscape photography that posited nature as separate from human presence. Consistent with earlier American landscape painting, Adams photographed scenery in a manner intended to provoke feelings of awe and pleasure in the viewer, using vantage points that emphasized the towering scale of mountain peaks. With Group f/64 he advocated “pure” photography which favoured sharp focus and embraced a wide tonal range from black to white to record texture and dramatic effects of light and weather....

Today colour photography is common place in museums, exhibitions and the art market. The medium has been booming since the 1980s, even though a decade earlier it was still not really an acknowledged art form. Until well into the 1970s, the vast majority of photographs that were collected and exhibited were in black-and-white. There was an aesthetic prejudice against colour photography, since it was widely used by many amateurs, as well as by professional journalists, advertisers, mass media, and the entertainment industry....