For many years photography has been used to document the most significant of events, whether they affect an entire society, like a war, or a specific person's life, such as a wedding. The reason that photography is used for such occasions instead of painting, drawing, or sculpting is quite simple. It is because photography is the most remarkable of the fine arts. Other forms of art are aesthetically pleasing and important in their own right, but photography is so monumental because of the power to depict fact.
One aspect that makes photography so important is that it can show feeling and emotion so much more vividly than a drawing. For instance, during the Great Depression, "the harsh realities were recorded thanks to the initiative of the Farm Security Administration (Daval, 186)." At this time, Dorothea Lange "documented the bitter poverty of migrant workers and their families (20th Century Photography, 1). These images, such as Migrant Mother and Cotton Picker near Firebrough, show, so clearly and almost effortlessly, the pain and despair that was occurring too frequently at this time. There is a loss of hope that is so clear and evident in these photographs from the longing in the eyes of the images shown. Such raw emotion is hard to come by in any other art form.
Another reason photography is more trustworthy than other forms of art is that the image that appears in a photograph, whether it is of a person or an event, has at one point existed or happened. This statement does not always hold true for paintings, sculptures, and drawings. It is simple and usual for an artist to conjure up an image of a person that has never existed and turn them into a work of art. For example, there has been a great deal of speculation about whether or not Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa is a portrait of a real person. Before the relatively recent technological advances, it was not possible to have a picture of a person or an incident...