부산대학교 도서관

This paper aims to reveal the complex meaning of this concept from the viewpoint of photo history and photographic aesthetics, focusing on Walker Evans' core thesis, documentary style. It explores the background of the 1930s documentary style, the form and content of the documentary style, and the aesthetic meaning of the documentary style. Through this, It intend to explore the origins and meanings of artistic photographs of document tendency, which is an important paradigm of Western contemporary photography since the 1990s. During the nineteenth century in photography, document and art have been perceived as conflicting concepts. However, these two concepts began to be combined through the documentary style of Evans from the 1930s. His documentary style is rooted in Europe's viewpoint of realistic aesthetics instead of the masters of American photography at the time. Evans' documentary form closely matches the form of real document photos, such as criminal photographs and science photographs. It features a precisely standardized picture form, with all the details revealing sharpness, simple framing, frontalism, static pose, and non-expression. Evans' documentary form exists not only in the interior of a document photo but also in the form of an outsider series and archive. He wanted to build a photo archive that examined, recorded, and classified American society. Evans' photographs are based on anonymity, a key feature of documentary photography. It is the dual anonymity, that is anonymity of objects and subjects. The people in his photos are anonymous subjects that float in a city, of which individuality has disappeared. The photographer's involvement in these series of photographs is minimized. Especially, by using the snap method which takes a moving object at random, the artist's anonymity is further strengthened. Evans thus wanted to reach a perfect document through pure recording by the death of the subject