Documentary art captures the unfolding realities of contemporary events and social conditions. In some cases, these subjects have otherwise been overlooked and the artist wishes to bring them greater attention. In the face of economic depression in Great Britain in the 1930s, a group of artists moved away from the prevailing idiom of abstraction in art. They wanted to explicitly draw attention to the hardships facing the British population, through figurative painting. Around the same time, photography created under the United States Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl brought images of rural poverty to public consciousness through work like Dorothea Lange’sMigrant Mother or Walker Evans’s works for the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Although innately subjective, documentary art is intended to relay objective truths about the world and social conditions.

Contemporary artists continue to use their work to highlight social conditions and causes they find compelling. Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar spends an enormous amount of time researching before making his works, which draw attention to war and social injustice around the world. Jaar is interested in the way the public has become inured to tragedy in the news, and he wrestles with this notion in his work. He created his Rwanda Project, for example, as a way to visually memorialize the one million casualties of the Rwandan genocide. Photographer Richard Misrach’s beautiful and unsettling photographs of Cancer Alley documented the environmental devastation of a region of the American South by petrochemical plants. Documentary artists tackle smaller, more personal subjects as well, like Doug Dubois’s intimate images of teenagers in Ireland. Other artists who create documentary art include Martin Parr and Gregory Crewdson.