In the 1930s a broad artistic trend called “the documentary impulse” emerged in the United States. Its attempt to combine social relevance with distinctively American themes came to characterize American artistic expression during that decade. The documentary impulse focused on the communication of real life, the presentation of facts and events in a way that aroused the interest and emotions of its audience. It emphasized observation and narration, but without relying on overly elaborate language for impact. A photograph or some other visual image often supplied the emotional force that words could not convey. This treatment of subject material elevated the ordinary, finding beauty and emotion in topics not usually considered within the range of art. It tried to make the audience experience the subject as though it were actually on the scene.
The documentary impulse influenced every facet of American creative expression in the 1930s. It can be seen in novels, such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and in Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (1932). John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy used actual newspaper clippings, news reports, and headlines throughout its imaginary story. Filmmaker Pare Lorentz commissioned the composer Virgil Thomson to create music that set the mood for several documentary movies. The new photojournalism magazines, Life and Look, founded in 1936 and 1937, respectively, also reflected a documentary approach. The March of Time newsreels, which movie audiences saw before the feature film, presented images of the world in this period before television. The radio news broadcasts with their standard opening, “We now take you to...” did the same thing.
The camera was the prime instrument of the documentary impulse. The use of cameras to document social conditions and awaken social consciousness dated back to the probing photography of social reformers at the turn of the twentieth century. When the nation entered another period of intense social and economic questioning in the 1930s, photographers revived and updated this technique. Photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans shaped the image of the economic depression of the decade, and documentary photography became widely popular in magazines and books that combined photography with narration.