In the 1970s and 1980s, a spirited attack on traditional documentary was mounted by historians, critics, and photographers. One of the most notable was the photographer-critic Allan Sekula, whose ideas and the accompanying bodies of pictures he produced, influenced a generation of "new new documentary" photographers, whose work was philosophically more rigorous, often more stridently leftist in its politics. Sekula emerged as a champion of these photographers, in critical writing and editorial work. Notable among this generation are the photographers Fred Lonidier, whose 'Health and Safety Game" of 1976 became a model of post-documentary, and Martha Rosler, whose "The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems" of 1974-75 served as a milestone in the critique of classical humanistic documentary as the work of privileged elites imposing their visions and values on the dis-empowered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_photography
◇ The New Documentary Tradition in Photography | Thematic Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History - The Metropolitan Museum of Art
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ndoc/hd_ndoc.htm
◇ Book review of David T. Hanson's Waste Land
Contra Pfahl's romanticism, Hanson's images of industrial rape of our lands depicts the machine as having wholly ruined the garden. He knowingly anchors his images within maps and textual support that goes far to overcome the dilemma of producing either beauty or a social critique, and does so without their overcoming residing in mere ambiguity. Filled with text, maps, and photographic mappings, the book breaks down firm differences between the map and the territory, between sign and referent, a textual strategy Abigail Solomon-Godeau attributed to "New Documentary."
http://www.uturn.org/Reviews/hugrevu1.htm
◇ Documentary Photography: New Documentary Photography U S A - photo-eye
New Documentary Photography U.S.A.
Edited by Nancy Howell-Koehler. Essays by Beaumont Newhall, William Messer. Photographs by Joseph Rodriguez, Ken Light and Morrie Camhi.
Images, Inc., Cincinnati, 1989. 39 pp., 6 color and 8 black-and-white illustrations, 9x11".This catalogue, produced with an exhibition and symposium held at Images gallery in Cincinnati, explores the status of documentary photography in the United States today. An introduction and an essay by Beaumont Newhall raise interesting points around the issues involved in documentary photography. The photographs and commentary included range from images of Mexican refugees to prison scenes and are all intriguing and vivid photographs.
http://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?catalog=II002&i=&i2=
