Surveyors and Surveyed basically told development of documentary, both in form and concept since people began to use cameras to take pictures up until the 1950s.

The photograph's initial use was as a documentive device. It was a great alternative to the death mask and was used to document different events as well as people. During the Victorian era, a common subject were "far-away" places, people and cultures. This brought about the beggings of using the camera as a subjective device, seeing as how it was always exotic "to us" and far away "from here".

As the camera became more and more portable it began to be taken into more dangerious and difficult areas, such as battlefields or city slums. As taking pictures became easier and easier, the subjectivity of the photograph began to lay more and more on what was not taken rather than what was. Photographers deliberatly choose more charged shots or shots that reflected the "feeling of the times" better. Sometimes shots would even be altered to make it look more like what the photographer had in his mind.

The ease of photography also led photographers to be more bold. Their middle and upper class suroundings became boring to them, so they would seek to photograph laborers and the poor, whose lives they deemed more "real". This was also due in part that many middle and upper class areas began to impart serious restrictions on photographing in social centers, now annoyed by the taking of pictures. An extreme example of this was Jacob Riis, whose method of documenting the poor in New York slums could be catergorized as "guerilla photography".

This mindset continued throughout the 30s with photography during deppresion era america and the spanish civil war. However, commercial photography began to spring up, usually destributed via magazine. Because of the camera's reputation of being truthful or faithful to real life, it became a wonderful media to help advertise products. This notion of the honesty of the camera though, has been contested ever since the camera was used as a documentative device.

With the end of the 2nd world war, the United States' interest began to shift away from seens from the slums and of hardship to icons of pop-culture.