The 50th anniversary of Robert Frank's The Americans.
Meet for class at the regular time. We'll be doing a short lesson and leaving at 2 to go up to the Met.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Robert Frank: The Americans
Tomorrow we are going to go see a show that will change your life.
The 50th anniversary of Robert Frank's The Americans.
Meet for class at the regular time. We'll be doing a short lesson and leaving at 2 to go up to the Met.
The 50th anniversary of Robert Frank's The Americans.
Meet for class at the regular time. We'll be doing a short lesson and leaving at 2 to go up to the Met.
Photo Secession
Towards the end of the century there was a growing dissatisfaction with the photographic establishment in England and in America. In England this led to a mass of resignations from the Photographic Society, and the formation of a group known as the Linked Ring, whilst in America, in 1902, an avant-garde group of photographers, led by Stieglitz, also sought to break away from the orthodox approach to photography, and from what they considered was the stale work of fellow- photographers.
The American group came to be known as the Photo-Secession, the name Secession coming from groups of artists in Austria and Germany who had broken away from the academic establishment.
Their rejection of establishment photography was aptly summarised in "Photograms of the year" for 1900: "That wealth of trivial detail which was admired in photography's early days and which is still loved by the great general public.... has gone out of fashion with advanced workers on both sides of the Atlantic."
"Amateur Photographer", April 10, 1902, published an acount of this movement as follows:
Amongst the more advanced pictorial workers in America a definite movement has now taken place; comparable in some respects with the Link Ring movement in this country of ten years or more ago, and at the invitation of the National Arts Club of New York, an Exhibition of Photography is being held by contributors who now for the first time come before the public as an organised body; under the name of the Photo-Secessionists, the main idea of which is to bring together in America sympathetic spirits, whether active photographers or simply those interested in the movement.
The Exhibition is in many respects unique, consisting as it does of “ picked ” prints only, and representing only the very best work ever done in America.
This American movement is...an attempt... to produce pictures by means of photography. Pictures, that is to say, which shall stand the test of criticism; that one would apply to a picture in any other medium; that shall be satisfactory in composition, colour quality, tone and lighting; that shall have esthetic charm and shall involve some expression of the personal feeling of the photographer.
The photographers who profess these high artistic aims and scrupulously live up to their principles and have the ability
to practise them, are necessarily few in number, though steadily increasing; nor are they engaged in scholastic discussions as to whether photography can be reckoned among the fine arts, for they leave such theorising to the choppers of academic logic. It is not with phraseology they are concerned, but with facts.
‘ Here is a print,’ they say in effect; ‘ has it any of the qualities that you find in a black and white; does it give you anything of the pleasurable feeling that you experience before a picture in some other medium? If not, we try again; but if, on the other hand, it does, then at least to the extent in which this print has affected you, pray acknowledge that there may be possibility of artistic expression in a pictorial photograph. How far the camera is responsible for the result or how far our own modification of its record, we venture to say is not the question; the sole point, as between you and ourselves, being whether our prints have aesthetic qualities and will stand the test of the kind of criticism that you apply to other pictures."
Characteristic of the photography of this new movement was the employment of special printing processes (for example gum bichromate), and of artwork which lessened the detail on the finished print.
The movement was not without its critics. Sadakihi Hartmann reacted strongly to the idea of manipulating photographs, and decried those who strove hard to make their pictures seem as if they were not photographs at all. In American Amateur Photographer (1904) he wrote: "We expect an etching to look like an etching, and a lithograph to look like a lithograph, why should not then a photographic print look like a photographic print?"
It was not that he objected to retouching or "dodging": "'And what do I call straight photography,' (one might) say, 'can you define it?' Well, that's easy enough. Rely on your camera, on your eye, on your good taste and your knowledge of composition, consider every fluctuation of color, light and shade, study lines and values and space division, patiently wait until the scene or object of your pictured vision reveals itself in its supremest moment of beauty, in short, compose the picture which you intend to take so well that the negative will be absolutely perfect and in need of no... manipulation."
From November 1905 the group laid on exhibitions of work at "The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession" at 291 Fifth Avenue, New York, which came to be known simply as "291." The group lasted about ten years, though their influential and luxuriously printed journal called Camera Work continued publication for some years after. Notable members included Edward Steichen, Clarence White, Gertrude Kasebier, and Alvin Langdon Coburn.
© Robert Leggat, 1997.
The American group came to be known as the Photo-Secession, the name Secession coming from groups of artists in Austria and Germany who had broken away from the academic establishment.
Their rejection of establishment photography was aptly summarised in "Photograms of the year" for 1900: "That wealth of trivial detail which was admired in photography's early days and which is still loved by the great general public.... has gone out of fashion with advanced workers on both sides of the Atlantic."
"Amateur Photographer", April 10, 1902, published an acount of this movement as follows:
Amongst the more advanced pictorial workers in America a definite movement has now taken place; comparable in some respects with the Link Ring movement in this country of ten years or more ago, and at the invitation of the National Arts Club of New York, an Exhibition of Photography is being held by contributors who now for the first time come before the public as an organised body; under the name of the Photo-Secessionists, the main idea of which is to bring together in America sympathetic spirits, whether active photographers or simply those interested in the movement.
The Exhibition is in many respects unique, consisting as it does of “ picked ” prints only, and representing only the very best work ever done in America.
This American movement is...an attempt... to produce pictures by means of photography. Pictures, that is to say, which shall stand the test of criticism; that one would apply to a picture in any other medium; that shall be satisfactory in composition, colour quality, tone and lighting; that shall have esthetic charm and shall involve some expression of the personal feeling of the photographer.
The photographers who profess these high artistic aims and scrupulously live up to their principles and have the ability
to practise them, are necessarily few in number, though steadily increasing; nor are they engaged in scholastic discussions as to whether photography can be reckoned among the fine arts, for they leave such theorising to the choppers of academic logic. It is not with phraseology they are concerned, but with facts.
‘ Here is a print,’ they say in effect; ‘ has it any of the qualities that you find in a black and white; does it give you anything of the pleasurable feeling that you experience before a picture in some other medium? If not, we try again; but if, on the other hand, it does, then at least to the extent in which this print has affected you, pray acknowledge that there may be possibility of artistic expression in a pictorial photograph. How far the camera is responsible for the result or how far our own modification of its record, we venture to say is not the question; the sole point, as between you and ourselves, being whether our prints have aesthetic qualities and will stand the test of the kind of criticism that you apply to other pictures."
Characteristic of the photography of this new movement was the employment of special printing processes (for example gum bichromate), and of artwork which lessened the detail on the finished print.
The movement was not without its critics. Sadakihi Hartmann reacted strongly to the idea of manipulating photographs, and decried those who strove hard to make their pictures seem as if they were not photographs at all. In American Amateur Photographer (1904) he wrote: "We expect an etching to look like an etching, and a lithograph to look like a lithograph, why should not then a photographic print look like a photographic print?"
It was not that he objected to retouching or "dodging": "'And what do I call straight photography,' (one might) say, 'can you define it?' Well, that's easy enough. Rely on your camera, on your eye, on your good taste and your knowledge of composition, consider every fluctuation of color, light and shade, study lines and values and space division, patiently wait until the scene or object of your pictured vision reveals itself in its supremest moment of beauty, in short, compose the picture which you intend to take so well that the negative will be absolutely perfect and in need of no... manipulation."
From November 1905 the group laid on exhibitions of work at "The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession" at 291 Fifth Avenue, New York, which came to be known simply as "291." The group lasted about ten years, though their influential and luxuriously printed journal called Camera Work continued publication for some years after. Notable members included Edward Steichen, Clarence White, Gertrude Kasebier, and Alvin Langdon Coburn.
© Robert Leggat, 1997.
Edward Steichen
Profile: Edward Steichen
In the range and quality of his production in the fashion and advertising fields, Edward Steichen might be said to embody the development of utilitarian photography in the 20th century. Steichen was engaged with much that was vital and new in the medium during the 20th century, from a beginning as a Pictorialist photographer through activities in the commercial sector to a position as director of the most prestigious museum photography department in the United States (at the Museum of Modern Art). As a creative individual, as a designer of exhibitions and periodicals, as a director of projects, he left an unmistakable imprint on the photographic trends of his time.
Born Eduard Steichen, in Luxembourg in 1879, he was brought to the United States as an infant. When he displayed artistic ability he was apprenticed after 1894 to a firm of lithographers in Milwaukee; he both painted and photographed, submitting to Pictorialist salons during the 1890s. Clarence H. White noticed him in 1900 and soon after brought him to the attention of Stieglitz, with whom he shortly began to collaborate on the installations for the gallery 291 and on the founding of Camera Work, for which he designed the first cover and the initial publicity. Still not entirely committed to photography, Steichen spent the greater part of the period before the first World War painting in France. There his knowledge of Symbolism, Expressionism, and Cubism enabled him to direct Stieglitz's attention to these significant art movements. Besides paintings (nearly all of which he later destroyed), Steichen made sensitive photographs in the Symbolist style of landscapes, genre scenes, and New York cityscapes and perceptive portraits of wealthy and creative individuals in Paris and New York during this period. As part of the active New York art scene of the time, he was portrayed photographing Marcel Duchamp, in Sunday Afternoon in the Country, a 1917 oil by Florine Stettheimer. Other photographers included in the painted scene are Arnold Genthe and Baron de Meyer.
Steichen's experiences as director of aerial photography for the Allied Forces during World War I, followed by a period of several years of photographic experimentation based on his interest in the theory of dynamic symmetry, enabled him to shed the vestiges of his Pictorialist sensibility and open himself up to modernist ideas. In his position with Conde Nast from 1922 and also as a free-lance advertising photographer, he explored the vocabulary of the New Objectivity during the 1920s in order to create ingenious advertising and fashion images in what was still a relatively fresh field. This phase of Steichen's career, which he brought to an end in 1938 when he realized that commercial work was no longer personally stimulating, prepared him to embrace a broader concept of photography and to assume a role as administrator. Although not himself involved in photo-reportage or the documentary movement, by the late 1930s he was convinced that the fine quality of work produced by photographers working for the Farm Security Administration and for Life had effectively erased aesthetic distinctions among images made as personal expression, as photojournalism, or as social commentary.
In 1947, after serving as director of Naval Combat Photography during World War II, Steichen accepted the directorship of the Department of Photography of the Museum of Modern Art. His purpose, he said, was to make sure that what he called the "aliveness in the melting pot of American photography" and "the restless seekings, probing aspirations and experiments of younger photographers" would be represented in the museum collection. During his tenure, which lasted until 1961, he organized and promoted exhibitions, wrote numerous articles, helped publish books on the medium, and was instrumental in making photographic images acceptable in a museum setting. In 1955, Steichen organized The Family of Man exhibition and catalog, which he considered the culmination of his career. He believed that this show promoted photography as "a tool for penetrating beneath the surface of things" and that it proved that journalistic photographs had their own aesthetic forms. Long before he died in 1972, he was recognized as one of the small group of individuals whose ideas, energy, and images had helped shape photography in the 20th century.
Text from A World History of Photography
In the range and quality of his production in the fashion and advertising fields, Edward Steichen might be said to embody the development of utilitarian photography in the 20th century. Steichen was engaged with much that was vital and new in the medium during the 20th century, from a beginning as a Pictorialist photographer through activities in the commercial sector to a position as director of the most prestigious museum photography department in the United States (at the Museum of Modern Art). As a creative individual, as a designer of exhibitions and periodicals, as a director of projects, he left an unmistakable imprint on the photographic trends of his time.
Born Eduard Steichen, in Luxembourg in 1879, he was brought to the United States as an infant. When he displayed artistic ability he was apprenticed after 1894 to a firm of lithographers in Milwaukee; he both painted and photographed, submitting to Pictorialist salons during the 1890s. Clarence H. White noticed him in 1900 and soon after brought him to the attention of Stieglitz, with whom he shortly began to collaborate on the installations for the gallery 291 and on the founding of Camera Work, for which he designed the first cover and the initial publicity. Still not entirely committed to photography, Steichen spent the greater part of the period before the first World War painting in France. There his knowledge of Symbolism, Expressionism, and Cubism enabled him to direct Stieglitz's attention to these significant art movements. Besides paintings (nearly all of which he later destroyed), Steichen made sensitive photographs in the Symbolist style of landscapes, genre scenes, and New York cityscapes and perceptive portraits of wealthy and creative individuals in Paris and New York during this period. As part of the active New York art scene of the time, he was portrayed photographing Marcel Duchamp, in Sunday Afternoon in the Country, a 1917 oil by Florine Stettheimer. Other photographers included in the painted scene are Arnold Genthe and Baron de Meyer.
Steichen's experiences as director of aerial photography for the Allied Forces during World War I, followed by a period of several years of photographic experimentation based on his interest in the theory of dynamic symmetry, enabled him to shed the vestiges of his Pictorialist sensibility and open himself up to modernist ideas. In his position with Conde Nast from 1922 and also as a free-lance advertising photographer, he explored the vocabulary of the New Objectivity during the 1920s in order to create ingenious advertising and fashion images in what was still a relatively fresh field. This phase of Steichen's career, which he brought to an end in 1938 when he realized that commercial work was no longer personally stimulating, prepared him to embrace a broader concept of photography and to assume a role as administrator. Although not himself involved in photo-reportage or the documentary movement, by the late 1930s he was convinced that the fine quality of work produced by photographers working for the Farm Security Administration and for Life had effectively erased aesthetic distinctions among images made as personal expression, as photojournalism, or as social commentary.
In 1947, after serving as director of Naval Combat Photography during World War II, Steichen accepted the directorship of the Department of Photography of the Museum of Modern Art. His purpose, he said, was to make sure that what he called the "aliveness in the melting pot of American photography" and "the restless seekings, probing aspirations and experiments of younger photographers" would be represented in the museum collection. During his tenure, which lasted until 1961, he organized and promoted exhibitions, wrote numerous articles, helped publish books on the medium, and was instrumental in making photographic images acceptable in a museum setting. In 1955, Steichen organized The Family of Man exhibition and catalog, which he considered the culmination of his career. He believed that this show promoted photography as "a tool for penetrating beneath the surface of things" and that it proved that journalistic photographs had their own aesthetic forms. Long before he died in 1972, he was recognized as one of the small group of individuals whose ideas, energy, and images had helped shape photography in the 20th century.
Text from A World History of Photography
Alfred Stieglitz
Last class we watched Alfred Stieglitz: the Eloquent Eye If you missed it, please try to check it out, if that's not possible, here is some information to tie you over.
Bio from the Metropolitan Museum
Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1864, and schooled as an engineer in Germany, Alfred Stieglitz returned to New York in 1890 determined to prove that photography was a medium as capable of artistic expression as painting or sculpture. As the editor of Camera Notes, the journal of the Camera Club of New York—an association of amateur photography enthusiasts—Stieglitz espoused his belief in the aesthetic potential of the medium and published work by photographers who shared his conviction. When the rank-and-file membership of the Camera Club began to agitate against his restrictive editorial policies, Stieglitz and several like-minded photographers broke away from the group in 1902 to form the Photo-Secession, which advocated an emphasis on the craftsmanship involved in photography. Most members of the group made extensive use of elaborate, labor-intensive techniques that underscored the role of the photographer's hand in making photographic prints, but Stieglitz favored a slightly different approach in his own work. Although he took great care in producing his prints, often making platinum prints—a process renowned for yielding images with a rich, subtly varied tonal scale—he achieved the desired affiliation with painting through compositional choices and the use of natural elements like rain, snow, and steam
(58.577.11) to unify the components of a scene into a visually pleasing pictorial whole.
Stieglitz edited the association's luxurious publication Camera Work from 1902 to 1917, and organized exhibitions with the aid of Edward Steichen—who donated studio space that became the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in 1905, familiarly known as "291" for its address on Fifth Avenue. Through these enterprises, Stieglitz supported photographers and other modern American artists, while also apprising artists of the latest developments in early twentieth-century European modernism (with the help of Steichen's frequent reports from Paris), including the work of Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and Francis Picabia. His knowledge of this new kind of art is evident in photographs from these years such as The Steerage (33.43.419), in which the arrangement of shapes and tones belies his familiarity with Cubism, and From the Back Window, 291 (49.55.35), in which Stieglitz's internalization of avant-garde art combines with his own expertise in extracting aesthetic meaning from the urban atmosphere.
By 1917, Stieglitz's thinking about photography had begun to shift. Whereas, at the turn of the century, the best method for proving the legitimacy of photography as a creative medium seemed to suggest appropriating the appearance of drawing, prints, or watercolor in finished photographic prints, such practices began to seem wrongheaded by the end of World War I. Transparency of means and respect for materials were primary tenets of modern art, which derived meaning from the ephemera of contemporary life. Photography was naturally suited to representing the fast-paced cacophony that increasingly defined modern life, and attempting to cloak the medium's natural strengths by heavily manipulating the final print fell out of favor with Stieglitz and his associates. Stieglitz's support for the photography of Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler crystallized the new approach to the medium, and the change could also be seen in his own photographs. His celebrated portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe (1997.61.19) was one of his chief occupations between 1917 and 1925, during which time he made several hundred photographs of the painter (who became his wife in 1924). His refusal to encapsulate her personality into a single image was consistent with several modernist ideas: the idea of the fragmented sense of self, brought about by the rapid pace of modern life; the idea that a personality, like the outside world, is constantly changing, and may be interrupted but not halted by the intervention of the camera; and, finally, the realization that truth in the modern world is relative and that photographs are as much an expression of the photographer's feelings for the subject as they are a reflection of the subject depicted. Stieglitz's series of photographs of clouds, which he called Equivalents (49.55.29), were made in a similar spirit, embodying this last idea perfectly. The cloud pictures were unmanipulated portraits of the sky that functioned as analogues of Stieglitz's emotional experience at the moment he snapped the shutter.
In the final decades of his life, Stieglitz devoted his time chiefly to running his gallery (Anderson Galleries, 1921–25; The Intimate Gallery, 1925–29; An American Place, 1929–46), and he made photographs less and less frequently as his health and energy declined. When he did photograph, he often did so out of the window of his gallery. These final photographs, such as Looking Northwest from the Shelton (1987.1100.11), were impressive achievements that both synthesized the various stages of his photographic development and solidified his position as the most significant figure in American photography. These pictures, virtuoso compositions that emphasize the geometric forms of the city as seen from an upper floor of a modern skyscraper, are also exquisitely constructed and printed and serial in nature, again emphasizing the fragmented nature of contemporary life. Finally, this last series of his career implicitly described his own retreat from the hustle-and-bustle of New York life and embodied the contraction between photography's representative nature and its expressive potential, making them fitting codas in the oeuvre of one of photography's greatest advocates.
Lisa Hostetler
Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Steerage, 1907
As proprietor of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession and publisher of the photographic journals Camera Notes and Camera Work, Alfred Stieglitz was a major force in the promotion and elevation of photography as a fine art in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Steerage is considered Stieglitz's signature work, and was proclaimed by the artist and illustrated in histories of the medium as his first "modernist" photograph. It marks Stieglitz's transition away from painterly prints of Symbolist subjects to a more straightforward depiction of quotidian life.
The Steerage began its life as a masterpiece four years after its creation, with Stieglitz's publication of it in a 1911 issue of Camera Work devoted exclusively to his photographs in the "new" style, together with a Cubist drawing by Picasso. Stieglitz loved to recount how the great painter had praised the collagelike dispersal of forms and shifting depths of The Steerage. Canonized retroactively, the photograph allowed Stieglitz to put his chosen medium on par with the experimental European painting and sculpture he imported and exhibited so presciently at his gallery. In 1915, he lavishly reprinted the image in large-scale photogravure on both vellum and japanese paper for inclusion in his last magazine, 291.
Bio from the Metropolitan Museum
Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1864, and schooled as an engineer in Germany, Alfred Stieglitz returned to New York in 1890 determined to prove that photography was a medium as capable of artistic expression as painting or sculpture. As the editor of Camera Notes, the journal of the Camera Club of New York—an association of amateur photography enthusiasts—Stieglitz espoused his belief in the aesthetic potential of the medium and published work by photographers who shared his conviction. When the rank-and-file membership of the Camera Club began to agitate against his restrictive editorial policies, Stieglitz and several like-minded photographers broke away from the group in 1902 to form the Photo-Secession, which advocated an emphasis on the craftsmanship involved in photography. Most members of the group made extensive use of elaborate, labor-intensive techniques that underscored the role of the photographer's hand in making photographic prints, but Stieglitz favored a slightly different approach in his own work. Although he took great care in producing his prints, often making platinum prints—a process renowned for yielding images with a rich, subtly varied tonal scale—he achieved the desired affiliation with painting through compositional choices and the use of natural elements like rain, snow, and steam
(58.577.11) to unify the components of a scene into a visually pleasing pictorial whole.
Stieglitz edited the association's luxurious publication Camera Work from 1902 to 1917, and organized exhibitions with the aid of Edward Steichen—who donated studio space that became the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in 1905, familiarly known as "291" for its address on Fifth Avenue. Through these enterprises, Stieglitz supported photographers and other modern American artists, while also apprising artists of the latest developments in early twentieth-century European modernism (with the help of Steichen's frequent reports from Paris), including the work of Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and Francis Picabia. His knowledge of this new kind of art is evident in photographs from these years such as The Steerage (33.43.419), in which the arrangement of shapes and tones belies his familiarity with Cubism, and From the Back Window, 291 (49.55.35), in which Stieglitz's internalization of avant-garde art combines with his own expertise in extracting aesthetic meaning from the urban atmosphere.
By 1917, Stieglitz's thinking about photography had begun to shift. Whereas, at the turn of the century, the best method for proving the legitimacy of photography as a creative medium seemed to suggest appropriating the appearance of drawing, prints, or watercolor in finished photographic prints, such practices began to seem wrongheaded by the end of World War I. Transparency of means and respect for materials were primary tenets of modern art, which derived meaning from the ephemera of contemporary life. Photography was naturally suited to representing the fast-paced cacophony that increasingly defined modern life, and attempting to cloak the medium's natural strengths by heavily manipulating the final print fell out of favor with Stieglitz and his associates. Stieglitz's support for the photography of Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler crystallized the new approach to the medium, and the change could also be seen in his own photographs. His celebrated portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe (1997.61.19) was one of his chief occupations between 1917 and 1925, during which time he made several hundred photographs of the painter (who became his wife in 1924). His refusal to encapsulate her personality into a single image was consistent with several modernist ideas: the idea of the fragmented sense of self, brought about by the rapid pace of modern life; the idea that a personality, like the outside world, is constantly changing, and may be interrupted but not halted by the intervention of the camera; and, finally, the realization that truth in the modern world is relative and that photographs are as much an expression of the photographer's feelings for the subject as they are a reflection of the subject depicted. Stieglitz's series of photographs of clouds, which he called Equivalents (49.55.29), were made in a similar spirit, embodying this last idea perfectly. The cloud pictures were unmanipulated portraits of the sky that functioned as analogues of Stieglitz's emotional experience at the moment he snapped the shutter.
In the final decades of his life, Stieglitz devoted his time chiefly to running his gallery (Anderson Galleries, 1921–25; The Intimate Gallery, 1925–29; An American Place, 1929–46), and he made photographs less and less frequently as his health and energy declined. When he did photograph, he often did so out of the window of his gallery. These final photographs, such as Looking Northwest from the Shelton (1987.1100.11), were impressive achievements that both synthesized the various stages of his photographic development and solidified his position as the most significant figure in American photography. These pictures, virtuoso compositions that emphasize the geometric forms of the city as seen from an upper floor of a modern skyscraper, are also exquisitely constructed and printed and serial in nature, again emphasizing the fragmented nature of contemporary life. Finally, this last series of his career implicitly described his own retreat from the hustle-and-bustle of New York life and embodied the contraction between photography's representative nature and its expressive potential, making them fitting codas in the oeuvre of one of photography's greatest advocates.
Lisa Hostetler
Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Steerage, 1907
As proprietor of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession and publisher of the photographic journals Camera Notes and Camera Work, Alfred Stieglitz was a major force in the promotion and elevation of photography as a fine art in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Steerage is considered Stieglitz's signature work, and was proclaimed by the artist and illustrated in histories of the medium as his first "modernist" photograph. It marks Stieglitz's transition away from painterly prints of Symbolist subjects to a more straightforward depiction of quotidian life.
The Steerage began its life as a masterpiece four years after its creation, with Stieglitz's publication of it in a 1911 issue of Camera Work devoted exclusively to his photographs in the "new" style, together with a Cubist drawing by Picasso. Stieglitz loved to recount how the great painter had praised the collagelike dispersal of forms and shifting depths of The Steerage. Canonized retroactively, the photograph allowed Stieglitz to put his chosen medium on par with the experimental European painting and sculpture he imported and exhibited so presciently at his gallery. In 1915, he lavishly reprinted the image in large-scale photogravure on both vellum and japanese paper for inclusion in his last magazine, 291.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
photo lucida finalists
Jody Ake, a Brooklyn photographer and teacher, is one of the finalists. Check the other ones: CM09 Book Award Finalists
Monday, November 9, 2009
Two artist talks exploring Chicago's past and present
Both of these are at the Aperture gallery located at 547 w. 27th st.
Tuesday November 10th 2009 at 6:30 pm: artist talk and book signing by Michael Wolf.
Wednesday November 11th 2009 at 6:30 pm: artist talk and book signing by Barbara Crane.
Tuesday November 10th 2009 at 6:30 pm: artist talk and book signing by Michael Wolf.
Wednesday November 11th 2009 at 6:30 pm: artist talk and book signing by Barbara Crane.
Post lecture.
I hope everyone was as interested and inspired as I was by Santiago's presentation.
In case you need any more inspiration, here is a compiled list of advice from Magnum photographers
ps. today is also the 20 year anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down, which a lot of Magnum photographers such as Raymond Depardon happened to cover.
In case you need any more inspiration, here is a compiled list of advice from Magnum photographers
ps. today is also the 20 year anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down, which a lot of Magnum photographers such as Raymond Depardon happened to cover.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Don't forget!
Santiago Mostyn visiting artist lecture. Saturday at 1 pm. I'll have fliers with the room number posted at the front entrance and in the elevators. Can't miss it.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
PICTORIALISM
The modern usage of this term may give a misleading picture of the movement as it arose in the second half of the nineteenth century; in any case, like the all-embracing word "art" it is a most elusive, intangible, and highly subjective term. In modern parlance it is sometimes taken to suggest conservatism, and the unwillingness to explore new approaches. In its original meaning anything that put the finished picture first and the subject second was pictorialism. Given such a meaning, pictorialism by no means excluded more modern trends; any photograph that stressed atmosphere or viewpoint rather than the subject would come under this category.
By the second half of the nineteenth century the novelty of capturing images was beginning to wear off, and some people were now beginning to question whether the camera, as it was then being used, was in fact too accurate and too detailed in what it recorded. This, coupled with the fact that painting enjoyed a much higher status than this new mechanistic process, caused some photographers to adopt new techniques which, as they saw it, made photography more of an art form. These new techniques came also to be known as High-Art photography.
In effect, the term Pictorialism is used to describe photographs in which the actual scene depicted is of less importance than the artistic quality of the image. Pictorialists would be more concerned with the aesthetics and, sometimes, the emotional impact of the image, rather than what actually was in front of their camera.
Because pictorialism was seen as artistic photography, one would not be surprised that current styles of art would be reflected in their work; as impressionism was in vogue at the time, many photographs have more than a passing resemblance to paintings in this style.
Examples of this approach include combination printing, the use of focus, the manipulation of the negative, and the use of techniques such as gum bichromate, which greatly lessened the detail and produced a more artistic image.
© Robert Leggat, 1999.
O.G. Reijlander's 1857 combination print from 30 negatives, "the two ways of life" was highly controversial, innovative, and highly influential on other photographers such as Henry Peach Robinson.
By the second half of the nineteenth century the novelty of capturing images was beginning to wear off, and some people were now beginning to question whether the camera, as it was then being used, was in fact too accurate and too detailed in what it recorded. This, coupled with the fact that painting enjoyed a much higher status than this new mechanistic process, caused some photographers to adopt new techniques which, as they saw it, made photography more of an art form. These new techniques came also to be known as High-Art photography.
In effect, the term Pictorialism is used to describe photographs in which the actual scene depicted is of less importance than the artistic quality of the image. Pictorialists would be more concerned with the aesthetics and, sometimes, the emotional impact of the image, rather than what actually was in front of their camera.
Because pictorialism was seen as artistic photography, one would not be surprised that current styles of art would be reflected in their work; as impressionism was in vogue at the time, many photographs have more than a passing resemblance to paintings in this style.
Examples of this approach include combination printing, the use of focus, the manipulation of the negative, and the use of techniques such as gum bichromate, which greatly lessened the detail and produced a more artistic image.
© Robert Leggat, 1999.
O.G. Reijlander's 1857 combination print from 30 negatives, "the two ways of life" was highly controversial, innovative, and highly influential on other photographers such as Henry Peach Robinson.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Monday, November 2, 2009
Check this website for great work by upcoming photographers
jesuisunebandedejeunes.com
Has just been updated with some new portfolios. Take a gander, there is a lot of good work on the site.
Sean Stewart
Has just been updated with some new portfolios. Take a gander, there is a lot of good work on the site.
Sean Stewart
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