John Thompson

John Thompson is a Scotsman who were among the first pioneers to sail to the far east. He documented his adventures to this new foreign culture with photography. He documented people, artefacts and landscape of the eastern culture. He documented their lives and the way they lived as during that time the lives of people were alien to the western world.  His documentation and photojournalism of the eastern world shaped the perception of western society. He visited Singapore, Malaya, Sumatra, Ceylon, India, Bangkok, Cambodia, Vietnam and He is most famous for visiting China. John enlightened the opinions and stigmas the people of Victorian England had of Asia. 

John Thompson is an inspiration to me as he teaches me to visit places unknown and foreign to us. To also visit areas that are outside our comfort zones, we don't know how our pictures would impact people or even shape society. We should always try to document things that people are unaware of or things that are often overlooked. 

Lewis Hine

Hine Lewis was a sociologist and a photographer back in the 1920s. He documented the labours and labourers of that time. Showing the hardship and the poverty of the Industrial Revolution. His work is a classic example of good documentation and his works are what sparked the change in Child Labour laws of that time. He taught in New York and he encouraged his students to use cameras and photos as a means to document work during their Sociology classes. He soon realised that the images he took could actually make a difference. Throughout his pursuit to expose child labour in factories, he was threatened with violence and death by the security of the factories. But he did not stop. He was also commissioned to photograph the building of the Empire State Building, in which he photographed the construction workers in precarious positions whilst in a basket dangling 1000 feet in the air.