From Traditional Documentary Photography To New Documentary Photography

In 1976, the “April 5th”photography began the age of documentary photography in China. Since then, Chinese documentary photography has gone through nearly a four decades development. Having experienced a beginning stage of the 1980 s, and an exploring stage of the 1990 s, since the late 20 th century, the rich practices in documentary photography gradually brought it into a mature stage. Accompanied by the gradually relaxed Chinese political environment and rapid economic growth, numerous literary theories and works were introduced into China. It is therefore, documentary photography, which closely relied on the social and historical environment, exhibited a diversified developmental trend.New documentary photography, which is characterized by its personal perspective, emerged in Chinese documentary photography since the late 20 th century. After the year of 2000, more diversified practices were performed and new types of documentary photography emerged. Among them were "landscape photography" "private documentary photography", "subjective documentary photography" etc. These photography practices have evolved great differences from the traditional documentary photography, in their selection of themes and expression techniques."Dengke Hou Documentary Photography Award” is one of the most influential awards in Chinese documentary photography and in its recent years’ selected and award-wining works, we can see the trend that documentary photography is developing into new documentary photography. In this paper, we aimed to clarify the phylogeny of Chinese documentary photography and, to further point out the features and problems of photographic works during the evolution of Chinese documentary photography.This paper contains five chapters. Besides the introductory and the conclusive parts, it can be divided into three parts.In part one, we elucidated the concepts of document of photography, documentary photography and new documentary photography; and we clarified the phylogeny of documentary photography in the West and in China.In part two, we used "Dengke Hou Documentary Photography Award” and its selected and award-wining works as an entry point, combined with practices in Chinese documentary photography, to analyze the changes from traditional documentary photography to new documentary photography. We also classified new documentary photography into four categories as “walking on the road”, “typological type of landscape photography”, “private documentary photography”, and “urban and self”. We then analyzed works of these categories and summed up the similarities and differences between traditional documentary photography and new documentary photography.In part three, we described the problems during the evolution of Chinese documentary photography, and our discussion focused on four issues: the interwoven relationship between traditional documentary photography and new documentary photography; should documentary photography enter the gallery or the mass media; homogenization in themes and expression forms of documentary photography; whether there is too much artistic tendency in documentary photography.