ABSTRACT
The initial notion of documentary emerged as popular practice across a variety of media after the First World War, and continued to develop throughout the twentieth century. The birth of documentary as a popular movement is clearly linked historically to the rise of large-scale mass printing presses throughout the 1920s–30s. Editorial control is a key issue, and the conflict between photographer and editor over photographic meaning remains highly relevant for documentary photographers today, namely, the question of where, how, and under what conditions to the photographs should be published. The impetus for the commercial development of documentary came from the rise of mass democratic movements, given wider inspiration by the actual Russian Revolution of 1917. Documentary can refer to a category so wide as to be meaningless, or so narrow that it cannot deal with even its own eclectic history in social documentary.
