Inventing 'documentary' in American photography, 1930--1945

Multiple, competing concepts of "documentary" emerged in American photography between 1930 and 1945, formulated and circulated through new kinds of photographic projects, publications, criticism, and exhibitions. Contesting prevalent theories which treat documentary as a singular rule-bound genre, cultural imperative, or ideological apparatus, this dissertation seeks to historicize the term and its concatenation of nascent ideas: How did documentary acquire currency, energize innovation, and constitute a vital terrain for debates about photography's identity and uses in American culture? Never a settled method, style, or philosophy, the term "documentary" was subject to constant interrogation, revision, and contest in the era of its invention. Documentary becomes a wholly different critical and interpretive tool for historians, this study demonstrates, when treated as indicator of ideas about photography's roles and rhetorics under construction---rather than as a "realist" formula determining the expression and reception of a priori social and political agendas.;Four chapters focus on inventions of "documentary" by American vanguards of the 1930s---and inseparably, on the self-creation of this heterogeneous vanguard through the conceptual and cultural reinvention of photography. One traces how multiple notions of documentary were produced within the Thirties' widespread re-imagining of Civil War photography as stylistic and ethical "usable past." Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland's unpublished manuscript of Changing New York is examined in Two for its formulation of a documentary meant to inculcate a technologized perception of cityscape, history, and power which the women termed "dynamic equilibrium"---along with the subsequent transformation of their ideas in publication. Three treats the diverse vanguard literary and curatorial experiments undertaken with Farm Security Administration photographs that converted them from bureaucratic functions into agents of "cultural intelligence" for cultivating debate about the American social contract. Ansel Adams, at the opposite end of the vanguard spectrum from Abbott and McCausland, sought to reinvent photography's capacity for a peculiarly American idealism. Four exhumes his role as theorist and didact, examining how he crafted definitions of documentary to adjudicate genuine Americanism in both uses and concepts of the medium, and put them into practice at the Manzanar War Relocation Center.