ABSTRACT
From the mid-1800s: photographers began to record human experience, anticipating what would in later decades become known as 'social documentary'. Then, as now, this type of photography often focused on the disadvantaged. The 19th-century preoccupation with classification extended to depictions of a more sociological nature, too. In 1844, portrait photographers Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill included societal archetypes in The Fishermen and Women of the Firth of Forth. Like August Sander's typological survey People of the Twentieth Century they function as historical evidence while providing insight into the social hierarchies of the time. In London Labour and the London Poor, social reformist Henry Mayhew illustrated interviews with street traders with engravings based on Richard Beard's daguerreotypes. The invention of the photomechanical Woodburytype process in 1866, however, introduced a successful method of reproducing photographs for publication at a quality and detail close to the original.
