Humanist Photography, also known as the School of Humanist Photography, manifests the Enlightenment philosophical system in social documentary practice based on a perception of social change. It emerged in the mid-twentieth-century and is associated most strongly with Europe, particularly France, where the upheavals of the two world wars originated, though it was a worldwide movement. It can be distinguished from photojournalism, with which it forms a sub-class of reportage, as it is concerned more broadly with everyday human experience, to witness mannerisms and customs, than with newsworthy events, though practitioners are conscious of conveying particular conditions and social trends, often, but not exclusively, concentrating on the underclasses or those disadvantaged by conflict, economic hardship or prejudice. Humanist photography "affirms the idea of a universal underlying human nature". Jean Claude Gautrand describes humanist photography as
a 'lyrical trend, warm, fervent, and responsive to the sufferings of humanity [which] began to assert itself during the 1950s in Europe, particularly in France ... photographers dreamed of a world of mutual succour and compassion, encapsulated ideally in a solicitous vision.
Photographing on the street or in the bistro primarily in black‐and‐white in available light with the popular small cameras of the day, these image-makers discovered what the writer Pierre Mac Orlan (1882-1970) called the 'fantastique social de la rue' (social fantasticality of the street) and their style of image making rendered romantic and poetic the way of life of ordinary European people, particularly in Paris.
The preoccupation with everyday life emerged after WW I. As a reaction to the atrocities of the trenches, Paris became a haven for intellectual, cultural and artistic life, attracting artists from the whole Europe and the United States. With the release of the first Leica and Contax range-finder cameras, photographers took to the street and documented life by day and night. Such photographers as André Kertész, Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson emerged during the period between the two world wars thanks to the Illustrated Press (Vu and Regards). Thanks to the Surrealists and Berenice Abbott, the life work of Eugène Atget in the empty streets of Paris also became a reference. At the end of WW2, in 1946, French intellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux embraced humanism; Sartre arguing that existentialism was a humanism entailing freedom of choice and a responsibility for defining oneself, while at the Sorbonne in an address sponsored by UNESCO, Malraux depicted human culture as ‘humanisme tragique’, a battle against biological decay and historical disaster. Emerging from brutal global conflict, survivors desired material and cultural reconstruction and the appeal of humanism was a return to the values of dignity, equality and tolerance symbolised in an international proclamation and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the General Assembly of the United Nations in Paris on 10 December 1948 That the photographic image could become a universal language in accord with these principles was an notion circulated at a UNESCO conference in 1958