New Documents

New Documents refers to a mid-1960s shift in American documentary photography toward a more personal, interpretive kind of description. The term is most closely associated with the Museum of Modern Art exhibition New Documents (1967), curated by John Szarkowski, which framed a younger generation as redirecting documentary technique and aesthetics to personal ends. In Szarkowski’s formulation, the aim is not to reform life but to know it, treating the real world—however troubling—as a source of fascination and value. The sensibility is often traced to precedents such as Robert Frank’s The Americans and, in a different register, the observational rigor of Walker Evans.

In practice, New Documents images often adopt a casual, snapshot aesthetic: asymmetrical or seemingly messy compositions, skewed horizons, fragmentation, and an openness to blur, overexposure, and high contrast. The photographer’s presence may be indirectly signaled through shadows or reflections, underscoring participation rather than detached reporting. Working methods typically favor small handheld cameras and a quick, reactive responsiveness to the fleeting moment, accepting chance as part of the picture’s meaning while remaining committed to straight photographic procedures and unmanipulated prints. The subject is the social landscape—ordinary urban and suburban life, commonplace situations, and individuals at the margins—frequently rendered with an alienated or unsettling tone.

The movement is often contrasted with earlier social documentary that aimed to prove social facts or press for reform; New Documents instead privileges subjective truth and personal vision and overlaps strongly with street photography. The New Documents model became a watershed, validating subjectivity as a documentary strength and influencing later art photography, photojournalism, and even advertising through its broadened sense of what documentary images can be and do.