The '70s Lens: Reimagining Documentary Photography

While documentary photography used to adhere to a code of pure realism, the 1970s challenged that premise. From the rawness of the street to staged scenes, from social critique to conceptual appropriation, artists like Martha Rosler, Danny Lyon, and Sophie Rivera played with the boundaries of documentary photography and blurred the line between fact and interpretation. At the National Gallery, their works engage in dialogue with other voices that pushed photography beyond its supposed duty of representation, transforming it into an aesthetic weapon.

But the major disruption did not only come in the form of ideas but also colour. Black and white, long synonymous with documentary seriousness, was replaced by the vibrant explosion of colour by artists like William Eggleston and Stephen Shore. Their images capture the mundane and everyday with a visual force that challenges established hierarchies of art. The exhibition gives space to this transition, showing how documentary photography became a freer, less rigid narrative, more open to playing with perception and emotion.

The '70s Lens is more than just a look at a decade; it is a revision of how photography became a language charged with intent. In an era where images continue to function as an ideological battlefield, this exhibition invites us to ask whether there was ever such a thing as a neutral photograph. The National Gallery does not seek answers but proposes uncomfortable questions, much like those that, half a century ago, transformed documentary photography into a radical art form.