"They Stole So Much More" from John Adkisson on Vimeo.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Photojournalism
Toward the end of the 19th and into the early 20th century, greater numbers of magazines were published throughout the world. The enlarged demand for photographic illustration, along with the appearance of lighter, easier-to-use camera equipment, led to an increase in images of war for reproduction.
The Spanish-American War was documented by Jimmy Hare, the South African War by Horace W. Nicholls, the Russo-Japanese War by Luigi Barzini, and the Mexican Revolution
by Agustin Victor Casasola.
Although strict censorship prevailed with regard to the photographic record of World War I, the prominence of picture magazines from the 1920s through the 1950s ensured the continuance of war reportage.
A new approach to photojournalism began to emerge with the appearance of the
Ermanox in 1924 and the
Leica in 1925.
These two German-made miniature cameras, fitted with wide-aperture lenses, required extremely short exposure times for outdoor work and were even able to photograph indoor scenes with available light. The Leica had the added advantage of using 35-mm roll film that could be advanced quickly, allowing a succession of exposures to be made of the same subject. This capability led to photographs whose informality of pose and sense of presence were remarkable. (2007 Leica article from the New Yorker)
Owing to these developments, the photojournalist was able to perceive a significant moment in a fraction of a second and to use the camera with such speed and precision that the instantaneous perception would be preserved forever.
This is evident in the work of the Hungarian André Kertész
in Paris during the 1920s.
The Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson began about 1930 to develop the style that he later called the search for the “decisive moment.” To him the camera was an “extension of the eye.” Preferring the miniature 35-mm-film camera, he worked unobtrusively, making numerous exposures that usually included one in which all the elements come together to form a compelling psychological and visual statement.
In 1928–29 two of the largest picture magazines in Europe, the Münchner Illustrierte Presse
and the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung
began to print the new style of photographs. (Interesting article on photography changing magazines by Steven Heller)
Erich Salomon captured revealing candid portraits of politicians and other personalities
by sneaking his camera into places and meetings officially closed to photographers.
Felix H. Man
encouraged by Stefan Lorant, editor of the Münchner Illustrierte, made sequences of photographs at interviews and cultural and social events, which Lorant then laid out in imaginative picture essays.
The example of the German picture magazines was followed in other parts of Europe and in the United States. One was the short-lived Vu, established in Paris in 1928. An issue of Vu devoted entirely to the Spanish Civil War contained memorable photographs by Robert Capa.
(Read about accusations of what is possibly the most famous war photo being staged)
In 1936 both Life and Look were conceived in the United States, and a formula evolved in which the picture editor, photographer, researcher, and writer constituted a team.
Among Life’s first photographers were Bourke-White, already famous for her industrial photographs made largely for the magazine Fortune; Alfred Eisenstaedt
an experienced photo reporter for the Keystone Picture Agency in Germany; Hansel Mieth
also from Germany, who at times worked with her husband, Otto Hagel
and Peter Stackpole
whose photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco attracted much attention.
The concept of Life from the start, according to its founder, Henry Luce, was to replace haphazard picture taking and editing with the “mind-guided camera.”
Photographers were briefed for their assignments and encouraged to take great quantities of photographs so that the editors might have a large selection. The fact that selection and sequencing were a function of the editors led to objections on the part of some photographers, notably W. Eugene Smith, (Actually, they were talking about this on NPR this week during their discussion of his tapes of the jazz loft project) who left the employ of Life at one point in order to gain greater control over his own work. The visual organization of the picture story was carefully planned for maximum reader impact. The opening photograph of the photo-essay established the situation, and as with written narration there was a visual climax and a definite conclusion.
Initially Life and Look preferred to use pictures of great sharpness and depth. Thus, instead of unobtrusive miniature cameras, American photographers used large-format cameras requiring slow lenses, large plates, and additional flash light. This way of photographing was challenged by Lorant, who had left the Münchner Illustrierte Presse after being forced to leave Germany in 1934. He eventually settled in London, where he established the magazines Weekly Illustrated (1934) and Picture Post (1938). Staff photographers on both magazines included old colleagues also forced from Germany, such as Man and
Kurt Hutton.
They and other contributors were encouraged to develop the technique and pictorial style of taking photographs by using available light—i.e., not using a flash. Their pictures had a remarkable naturalness that brought great reader appeal—so much so that Life began to publish similar photographs and in 1945 hired a former Picture Post photographer, Leonard McCombe
with an extraordinary clause in his contract: he was forbidden to use a flash.
The photojournalistic style popularized by Life and Look influenced other activity in the field, in particular the exhibition “Family of Man,” which was mounted by Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1955. This highly popular exhibition presented over 500 photographs—mostly photojournalistic and documentary work—alongside texts of different sizes and formats, somewhat in the manner of a three-dimensional magazine.
Memorable groups of photographs were taken for the major picture magazines. Examples are Man’s A Day with Mussolini, first published in the Münchner Illustrierte Presse (1931) and then, with a brilliant new layout, in Picture Post; Smith’s Spanish Village (1951) and Nurse Midwife (1951) in Life; and Eisenstaedt’s informal, penetrating portraits of famous Britons, also in Life. Images by Eisenstaedt of the Italian incursion into Ethiopia and by David Seymour (“Chim”) and Capa of the Spanish Civil War made visible events leading up to World War II. This conflict was thoroughly documented for the Western allies by military personnel as well as by Capa, Bourke-White, Dmitry Baltermants, Yevgeny Khaldey, and Constance Stuart Larrabee on the North African, eastern European, and western European fronts and by Smith in the South Pacific. Heinrich Hoffman portrayed the war at home and at the front for Germany, and Yosuke Yamahata
documented the role of the Japanese army in the South Pacific.
The Spanish-American War was documented by Jimmy Hare, the South African War by Horace W. Nicholls, the Russo-Japanese War by Luigi Barzini, and the Mexican Revolution
by Agustin Victor Casasola.
Although strict censorship prevailed with regard to the photographic record of World War I, the prominence of picture magazines from the 1920s through the 1950s ensured the continuance of war reportage.
A new approach to photojournalism began to emerge with the appearance of the
Ermanox in 1924 and the
Leica in 1925.
These two German-made miniature cameras, fitted with wide-aperture lenses, required extremely short exposure times for outdoor work and were even able to photograph indoor scenes with available light. The Leica had the added advantage of using 35-mm roll film that could be advanced quickly, allowing a succession of exposures to be made of the same subject. This capability led to photographs whose informality of pose and sense of presence were remarkable. (2007 Leica article from the New Yorker)
Owing to these developments, the photojournalist was able to perceive a significant moment in a fraction of a second and to use the camera with such speed and precision that the instantaneous perception would be preserved forever.
This is evident in the work of the Hungarian André Kertész
in Paris during the 1920s.
The Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson began about 1930 to develop the style that he later called the search for the “decisive moment.” To him the camera was an “extension of the eye.” Preferring the miniature 35-mm-film camera, he worked unobtrusively, making numerous exposures that usually included one in which all the elements come together to form a compelling psychological and visual statement.
In 1928–29 two of the largest picture magazines in Europe, the Münchner Illustrierte Presse
and the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung
began to print the new style of photographs. (Interesting article on photography changing magazines by Steven Heller)
Erich Salomon captured revealing candid portraits of politicians and other personalities
by sneaking his camera into places and meetings officially closed to photographers.
Felix H. Man
encouraged by Stefan Lorant, editor of the Münchner Illustrierte, made sequences of photographs at interviews and cultural and social events, which Lorant then laid out in imaginative picture essays.
The example of the German picture magazines was followed in other parts of Europe and in the United States. One was the short-lived Vu, established in Paris in 1928. An issue of Vu devoted entirely to the Spanish Civil War contained memorable photographs by Robert Capa.
(Read about accusations of what is possibly the most famous war photo being staged)
In 1936 both Life and Look were conceived in the United States, and a formula evolved in which the picture editor, photographer, researcher, and writer constituted a team.
Among Life’s first photographers were Bourke-White, already famous for her industrial photographs made largely for the magazine Fortune; Alfred Eisenstaedt
an experienced photo reporter for the Keystone Picture Agency in Germany; Hansel Mieth
also from Germany, who at times worked with her husband, Otto Hagel
and Peter Stackpole
whose photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco attracted much attention.
The concept of Life from the start, according to its founder, Henry Luce, was to replace haphazard picture taking and editing with the “mind-guided camera.”
Photographers were briefed for their assignments and encouraged to take great quantities of photographs so that the editors might have a large selection. The fact that selection and sequencing were a function of the editors led to objections on the part of some photographers, notably W. Eugene Smith, (Actually, they were talking about this on NPR this week during their discussion of his tapes of the jazz loft project) who left the employ of Life at one point in order to gain greater control over his own work. The visual organization of the picture story was carefully planned for maximum reader impact. The opening photograph of the photo-essay established the situation, and as with written narration there was a visual climax and a definite conclusion.
Initially Life and Look preferred to use pictures of great sharpness and depth. Thus, instead of unobtrusive miniature cameras, American photographers used large-format cameras requiring slow lenses, large plates, and additional flash light. This way of photographing was challenged by Lorant, who had left the Münchner Illustrierte Presse after being forced to leave Germany in 1934. He eventually settled in London, where he established the magazines Weekly Illustrated (1934) and Picture Post (1938). Staff photographers on both magazines included old colleagues also forced from Germany, such as Man and
Kurt Hutton.
They and other contributors were encouraged to develop the technique and pictorial style of taking photographs by using available light—i.e., not using a flash. Their pictures had a remarkable naturalness that brought great reader appeal—so much so that Life began to publish similar photographs and in 1945 hired a former Picture Post photographer, Leonard McCombe
with an extraordinary clause in his contract: he was forbidden to use a flash.
The photojournalistic style popularized by Life and Look influenced other activity in the field, in particular the exhibition “Family of Man,” which was mounted by Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1955. This highly popular exhibition presented over 500 photographs—mostly photojournalistic and documentary work—alongside texts of different sizes and formats, somewhat in the manner of a three-dimensional magazine.
Memorable groups of photographs were taken for the major picture magazines. Examples are Man’s A Day with Mussolini, first published in the Münchner Illustrierte Presse (1931) and then, with a brilliant new layout, in Picture Post; Smith’s Spanish Village (1951) and Nurse Midwife (1951) in Life; and Eisenstaedt’s informal, penetrating portraits of famous Britons, also in Life. Images by Eisenstaedt of the Italian incursion into Ethiopia and by David Seymour (“Chim”) and Capa of the Spanish Civil War made visible events leading up to World War II. This conflict was thoroughly documented for the Western allies by military personnel as well as by Capa, Bourke-White, Dmitry Baltermants, Yevgeny Khaldey, and Constance Stuart Larrabee on the North African, eastern European, and western European fronts and by Smith in the South Pacific. Heinrich Hoffman portrayed the war at home and at the front for Germany, and Yosuke Yamahata
documented the role of the Japanese army in the South Pacific.
Tonight.
Join master photographer Joel Meyerowitz for a talk and book signing at The Strand Book Store on the occasion of the publication of Legacy: The Preservation of Wilderness in New York City Parks. This compelling body of work is the result of a unique commission Meyerowitz received from the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation to document, interpret, and celebrate one of the city’s greatest legacies: nearly nine thousand acres of parks in the five boroughs that still exist close to their original pristine state, as well as areas within parks that have been left to revert to wilderness.
Legacy: The Preservation of Wilderness in New York City Parks
Joel Meyerowitz: Artist’s Talk and Book Signing
Wednesday, December 9, 7 pm
FREE
The Strand Book Store
828 Broadway (@ 12th Street)
2nd floor/Art Department
New York, New York
Legacy: The Preservation of Wilderness in New York City Parks
Joel Meyerowitz: Artist’s Talk and Book Signing
Wednesday, December 9, 7 pm
FREE
The Strand Book Store
828 Broadway (@ 12th Street)
2nd floor/Art Department
New York, New York
Monday, December 7, 2009
Documentary photography
Working mainly in the opening years of the 20th century, French photographer Eugène Atget documented
shop fronts, architectural details and statuary, trees and greenery, and individuals who made their living as street vendors, producing some 10,000 photographs of Paris and its environs.
Unlike many of the architectural photographers before him, Atget showed a remarkable attention to composition,
the materiality of substances, the quality of light, and especially the photographer’s feelings about the subject matter. His work was bought mainly by architects, painters, and archivists. The visually expressive force of Atget’s work, produced with a large-format camera, is a testament to the capacity of documentation to surpass mere record making to become inspiring experience.
In like manner, although not as extensively, Czech photographer Josef Sudek created an artistic document of his immediate surroundings.
He was particularly fascinated with his home and garden, often shooting the latter through a window.
Lewis W. Hine created a similarly thorough document of a subject, in his case immigrant and working-class life in the United States.
One of the first to refer to himself as a social photographer, Hine began his documentation of immigrants at Ellis Island while still a teacher at the Ethical Culture School in New York.
Eventually he gave up teaching to work for the National Child Labor Committee, an organization of progressives seeking to make the American industrial economy more aware of its effects on individual workers.
From 1908 to 1916 Hine concentrated on photographing child workers, producing thousands of individual portraits and group scenes of underage children employed in textile mills, mines, canning establishments, and glass factories and in street trades throughout the United States. His work was effective in prompting first state regulation and eventually federal regulation of child labour.
Documentary photography experienced a resurgence in the United States during the Great Depression, when the federal government undertook a major documentary project. Produced by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) under the direction of Roy E. Stryker, who earlier had come in contact with Hine’s work, the project comprised more than 270,000 images produced by 11 photographers working for varying lengths and at different times in different places. All worked to show the effects of agricultural displacement caused by the economic downturn, lack of rain, and wasteful agricultural practices in the American South and midlands. In this project, documentation did double duty. One task was to record conditions both on nonfunctioning farms and in new homesteads created by federal legislation. Another was to arouse compassion so that problems addressed by legislative action would win support.
A portrait of a pea picker’s wife,
made by California portraitist turned documentarian Dorothea Lange, became an icon of the anxiety generated by the Great Depression.
Walker Evans was another photographer whose work for the FSA transformed social documentation from mere record making into transcendent visual expression. On leave from the FSA, Evans worked with James Agee on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941; reissued 1966), a compelling look at the lives of a family of Southern sharecroppers.
Although unaffiliated with the FSA, Margaret Bourke-White, formerly one of the era’s foremost industrial photographers, also worked in the South. With her husband, writer Erskine Caldwell, she produced You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), one of the first photographic picture books to appear in softcover.
Documentary projects underwritten by other federal agencies also existed. One of more significant projects was executed by Berenice Abbott. Inspired in part by Atget’s studies of Paris, she endeavoured to photograph the many parts of New York City and to create “an intuition of past, present, and future.”
She was able to interest the Works Projects Administration (WPA) in underwriting an exhibit and publication along these lines entitled Changing New York (1939).
The German portraitist August Sander, intent on creating a sociological document of his own, generated a portrait of Germany during this period.
His focus was on the individuals composing German society, documenting a class structure with workers and farmers on the bottom. Sander’s inclusion of types not considered Aryan by German authorities brought him into conflict with the Nazi regime, which destroyed the plates for a proposed book entitled Antlitz der Zeit (“Face of Our Time”).
Among the many other amateur and professional photographers who interested themselves in the documentation of everyday life were Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, who portrayed everyday life in Russia;
Manuel Alvarez Bravo,
who created images that offer a psychologically nuanced glimpse of Mexican life.
Robert Doisneau
Brassaï
both of whom captured vibrant images of everyday life in Paris. (Doisneau photo I used above obviously not from Paris)
Perhaps the most extensive ethnographic documentation was that of Edward S. Curtis, who produced 20 volumes of studies of Native American tribes people over the course of some 20 years.
The enormous interest in how people outside Western culture appeared and behaved was a factor in the increasing popularity of National Geographic during this period.
text from britannica
shop fronts, architectural details and statuary, trees and greenery, and individuals who made their living as street vendors, producing some 10,000 photographs of Paris and its environs.
Unlike many of the architectural photographers before him, Atget showed a remarkable attention to composition,
the materiality of substances, the quality of light, and especially the photographer’s feelings about the subject matter. His work was bought mainly by architects, painters, and archivists. The visually expressive force of Atget’s work, produced with a large-format camera, is a testament to the capacity of documentation to surpass mere record making to become inspiring experience.
In like manner, although not as extensively, Czech photographer Josef Sudek created an artistic document of his immediate surroundings.
He was particularly fascinated with his home and garden, often shooting the latter through a window.
Lewis W. Hine created a similarly thorough document of a subject, in his case immigrant and working-class life in the United States.
One of the first to refer to himself as a social photographer, Hine began his documentation of immigrants at Ellis Island while still a teacher at the Ethical Culture School in New York.
Eventually he gave up teaching to work for the National Child Labor Committee, an organization of progressives seeking to make the American industrial economy more aware of its effects on individual workers.
From 1908 to 1916 Hine concentrated on photographing child workers, producing thousands of individual portraits and group scenes of underage children employed in textile mills, mines, canning establishments, and glass factories and in street trades throughout the United States. His work was effective in prompting first state regulation and eventually federal regulation of child labour.
Documentary photography experienced a resurgence in the United States during the Great Depression, when the federal government undertook a major documentary project. Produced by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) under the direction of Roy E. Stryker, who earlier had come in contact with Hine’s work, the project comprised more than 270,000 images produced by 11 photographers working for varying lengths and at different times in different places. All worked to show the effects of agricultural displacement caused by the economic downturn, lack of rain, and wasteful agricultural practices in the American South and midlands. In this project, documentation did double duty. One task was to record conditions both on nonfunctioning farms and in new homesteads created by federal legislation. Another was to arouse compassion so that problems addressed by legislative action would win support.
A portrait of a pea picker’s wife,
made by California portraitist turned documentarian Dorothea Lange, became an icon of the anxiety generated by the Great Depression.
Walker Evans was another photographer whose work for the FSA transformed social documentation from mere record making into transcendent visual expression. On leave from the FSA, Evans worked with James Agee on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941; reissued 1966), a compelling look at the lives of a family of Southern sharecroppers.
Although unaffiliated with the FSA, Margaret Bourke-White, formerly one of the era’s foremost industrial photographers, also worked in the South. With her husband, writer Erskine Caldwell, she produced You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), one of the first photographic picture books to appear in softcover.
Documentary projects underwritten by other federal agencies also existed. One of more significant projects was executed by Berenice Abbott. Inspired in part by Atget’s studies of Paris, she endeavoured to photograph the many parts of New York City and to create “an intuition of past, present, and future.”
She was able to interest the Works Projects Administration (WPA) in underwriting an exhibit and publication along these lines entitled Changing New York (1939).
The German portraitist August Sander, intent on creating a sociological document of his own, generated a portrait of Germany during this period.
His focus was on the individuals composing German society, documenting a class structure with workers and farmers on the bottom. Sander’s inclusion of types not considered Aryan by German authorities brought him into conflict with the Nazi regime, which destroyed the plates for a proposed book entitled Antlitz der Zeit (“Face of Our Time”).
Among the many other amateur and professional photographers who interested themselves in the documentation of everyday life were Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, who portrayed everyday life in Russia;
Manuel Alvarez Bravo,
who created images that offer a psychologically nuanced glimpse of Mexican life.
Robert Doisneau
Brassaï
both of whom captured vibrant images of everyday life in Paris. (Doisneau photo I used above obviously not from Paris)
Perhaps the most extensive ethnographic documentation was that of Edward S. Curtis, who produced 20 volumes of studies of Native American tribes people over the course of some 20 years.
The enormous interest in how people outside Western culture appeared and behaved was a factor in the increasing popularity of National Geographic during this period.
text from britannica
Experimental approaches
By 1916 abstract ideas were appealing to a number of other photographers. Photo-Secessionist Alvin Langdon Coburn, living in England, created a series of photographs known as vortographs, in which no subject matter is recognizable.
During the late 1910s, students and faculty at the Clarence H. White School of Photography (started by another former colleague of Stieglitz), in particular Bernard S. Horne and
Margaret Watkins, also produced works that displayed the influence of Modernist abstraction.
Between the two world wars, an experimental climate—promoted by Constructivist ideology and by Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus—admitted an entire range of new directions in photography. One aspect of this experimentalism involved eschewing subject matter and instead creating photographs that more closely resembled abstract paintings.
Photographers again manipulated images, experimented with processes, and used multiple images or exposures. Sometimes, rather than experimenting with the camera itself, they experimented with light and sensitized paper. For a brief time this direction was allied with Dadaist ideas about accident, chance, and the subconscious. One important exponent of photographic experimentalism was the American expatriate Dada artist Man Ray, whose “rayographs,” photographs that appeared as series of swirling abstract shapes,
were created without a camera by exposing objects placed on sensitized paper to light.
Cameraless photography, which came to be called “light graphics,” also appealed to Moholy-Nagy and his wife, Lucia Moholy, who called the products of their experimentation “photograms.” Photographs made by using this kind of manipulation of light could have completely abstract shapes or forms or feature recognizable objects. A number of artists in central Europe also manipulated light and objects to produce abstract images; among them were
Jaroslav Rössler
Gyorgy Kepes, who eventually taught at the Chicago Institute of Design. There Kepes was instrumental in introducing its methods to American photographers, among them Carlotta Corpron, who produced a series of abstractions by using a device, called a light modulator, favoured at the Bauhaus.
The manipulative strategies of photocollage and montage had considerable appeal during the interwar period in part because—by appropriating “content” from other sources—they could deal with complex political or psychological feelings and ideas. Czech and German artists were especially drawn to this type of experimentation. Herbert Bayer, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, and Hannah Höch were unusually adept in their innovative use of collage and montage to make ironic comments on a range of political and social issues in German society. Heartfield,
whose work appeared on book jackets and posters, savaged the political thuggery behind the rise of Nazism by juxtaposing political imagery—for example, a stock photograph of Hitler—with unexpected, provocative imagery.
Höch concentrated on portraying the role of the “new woman” emerging in the chaos of postwar German society; for example, the title of one work by Höch,
The Cut with the Kitchen Knife, suggests a female domain, yet the image shows women freed from housewifely duties, cavorting among machinery and political figures as part of the world at large.
Similarly, montage enabled Soviet Constructivists to suggest complex ideas, as in El Lissitzky’s self-portrait,
which integrates drafting tools and geometric shapes to suggest that the artist himself was an architect of society.
text from Britannica
During the late 1910s, students and faculty at the Clarence H. White School of Photography (started by another former colleague of Stieglitz), in particular Bernard S. Horne and
Margaret Watkins, also produced works that displayed the influence of Modernist abstraction.
Between the two world wars, an experimental climate—promoted by Constructivist ideology and by Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus—admitted an entire range of new directions in photography. One aspect of this experimentalism involved eschewing subject matter and instead creating photographs that more closely resembled abstract paintings.
Photographers again manipulated images, experimented with processes, and used multiple images or exposures. Sometimes, rather than experimenting with the camera itself, they experimented with light and sensitized paper. For a brief time this direction was allied with Dadaist ideas about accident, chance, and the subconscious. One important exponent of photographic experimentalism was the American expatriate Dada artist Man Ray, whose “rayographs,” photographs that appeared as series of swirling abstract shapes,
were created without a camera by exposing objects placed on sensitized paper to light.
Cameraless photography, which came to be called “light graphics,” also appealed to Moholy-Nagy and his wife, Lucia Moholy, who called the products of their experimentation “photograms.” Photographs made by using this kind of manipulation of light could have completely abstract shapes or forms or feature recognizable objects. A number of artists in central Europe also manipulated light and objects to produce abstract images; among them were
Jaroslav Rössler
Gyorgy Kepes, who eventually taught at the Chicago Institute of Design. There Kepes was instrumental in introducing its methods to American photographers, among them Carlotta Corpron, who produced a series of abstractions by using a device, called a light modulator, favoured at the Bauhaus.
The manipulative strategies of photocollage and montage had considerable appeal during the interwar period in part because—by appropriating “content” from other sources—they could deal with complex political or psychological feelings and ideas. Czech and German artists were especially drawn to this type of experimentation. Herbert Bayer, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, and Hannah Höch were unusually adept in their innovative use of collage and montage to make ironic comments on a range of political and social issues in German society. Heartfield,
whose work appeared on book jackets and posters, savaged the political thuggery behind the rise of Nazism by juxtaposing political imagery—for example, a stock photograph of Hitler—with unexpected, provocative imagery.
Höch concentrated on portraying the role of the “new woman” emerging in the chaos of postwar German society; for example, the title of one work by Höch,
The Cut with the Kitchen Knife, suggests a female domain, yet the image shows women freed from housewifely duties, cavorting among machinery and political figures as part of the world at large.
Similarly, montage enabled Soviet Constructivists to suggest complex ideas, as in El Lissitzky’s self-portrait,
which integrates drafting tools and geometric shapes to suggest that the artist himself was an architect of society.
text from Britannica
Paul Outerbridge
Text from Jeannine Fiedler, "Paul Outerbridge, Jr" (Schirmer/Mosel Munich)
The Olfactory Nude
During the centuries-long process of the growth of civilization, the sense of smell has more and more been excluded as something base and primitive. Although it is the primary mediator of sense impressions from our immediate vicinity, it is rarely activated during the reception of impressions from the fine arts, the gigantic flood of printed media, or even in the contemporary electronic entertainment industry. Now that the mechanical reproduction of sterile worlds of objects and images has become possible, the sense of sight, considered by Kant to be the noblest, has become the exclusive transmitter of perceptions from an environment in which visual stimuli are rampant. At the beginning of the 1930s, Outerbridge stood on the verge of the era of color reproduction - in which familiar images today range from micro-organisms to the whole of the blue planet Earth - and he was working with relatively primitive techniques of color processing. He decided to abandon the realm of black-and-white photography, which he had come to find tedious, and move forward to face the challenges of color photography. The spectrum of the gray scale associated with black-and-white photography even today, however, is associated with an element of artificiality and alienation, since it is simply an unavoidable fact that we do see and experience the world in color. In the genre of nude photography, this meant that the depiction of the human body lost its initial shock, civilization's embarrassment over naked skin, as it was mercifully concealed behind a gray veil. Outerbridge's nudes, in brilliant color reproduction and with a drastic, hitherto unparalleled realism, were seen by an American public firmly anchored in its Puritan foundations. For a society that valued ascetic ideals, it was a shock, and it caused a scandal that pushed Outerbridge, till then a successful photographer, into the commercial wilderness and ultimately meant the end of his career as a photographer.
The body, referred to by Paul Valéry as "the unique, the true, the eternal, the perfect, the insurmountable reference system", was simply terra incognita to John Doe, the average American citizen at the end of Prohibition (which also had its origins in efforts by bigoted women's associations to repress sensuality). And now came Outerbridge's women: nude photographs in color that have a haptic quality that makes the models' skin almost touchable; the eye can feel its way along delicate arterial branches under an alabaster sheen; shaved montes veneris and pudenda without the slightest retouching; delicate, pink hollows and folds - the scent of women streams from the photographs, affronting the plain soul of every good American. But for an observer prepared to go "wandering," it was an "adventure of the epidermis," exciting senses other than that of sight.
From Dandy to Playboy
"For everyone, life is an act of the body,"' as Valéry also wrote. During Outerbridge's black-and-white period in the "Golden Twenties," he produced a famous self-portrait in which he is dressed up in all the insignia of a dandy, at the same time distorting these symbols to make them grotesque - the top hat worn above a mask resembling racing driver's or diver's goggles, with an Adolphe Menjou mustache, stand-up collar, a dickey inside his tuxedo and the obligatory (canary yellow?) Baudelairean glove. Outerbridge left all the traditional views of the nude behind. From the powdered, shimmering boudoirs of the bohemian world the dandy entered the cool, satin glitter of Art Déco salons, building one himself in his studio in Nyack in upstate New York. It was here that he began his dialogue with the model he preferred - the female. The usual division of roles between the one taking photographs and the object (of desire) becomes obsolete. It is not clear who is playing with whom here. Or perhaps the photographer is simply being ignored by his model, who is stretching like Danaé in a kind of lascivious absentmindedness. Whether she is leaning against pillars or walls, looking contentedly at her image in the mirror while the male idol Clark Gable, hidden behind the mirror, shrinks to insignificance, whether she touches herself or enters into dialogue with the observer/photographer, always conscious of her own body, her own beauty - the women in Outerbridge's nudes never allow themselves to be used. This balance, which especially in this genre often tips over to women's disadvantage into a pornographic commercialization that stamps the human body with the quality of a commodity, seems not yet to be threatened here. With an absolute will to achieve structure and an obvious aesthetic pleasure on the photographer's part, and on the part of the model an equally pleasurable experience of her own body, the observer is shown not merely a "nude," but an extraordinary equilibrium of harmonious understanding. A comparable harmony between the model and the photographer is seen in E. J. Bellocq's Storyville Portraits, in which New Orleans prostitutes gaze into the camera in a similarly relaxed and self-aware way.
This establishment of a "who is being mirrored by whom?" problem is of course present as a classically psychological Narcissus motif in Outerbridge's nudes as well. But of greater significance for the interpretation of his work is the element of fetishism in it, a point we will return to below. For Outerbridge, the interest in creating an image of the human body lies in a form of the Narcissus complex, which is common to all of humanity. Julia Kristeva asserts that the mythical Narcissus has a tremendous affinity for modern humanity: "He breaks with the antique world because he makes himself the origin of seeing, and seeks the other facing him as the product of his own seeing. In this he discovers that this image is not another, but that he himself has presented it, that the other is a self-representation. In this way, and in a manner opposed to that of mysticism, Narcissus discovers in pain and in death the constitutive alienation of his own image."
A new self-awareness among women in the USA during the 1930s grew out of their increasing acceptance in the working world. Their growing share in the economic life of crisis-ridden New Deal America also encouraged their emancipation. Entertainers such as Mae West and Jean Harlow, however, with their superb, self-ironic escapades, soon had their openly erotic and even vicious statements clamped down on by the reactionary censorship of the Hays Office. The "wenches" were not to get above themselves. A parade of Hollywood divas was manufactured, and although a certain sarcastic touch could still occasionally be noted as a leftover from the earlier sexual toughness, after 1933 the "battle of the sexes" was reduced to squabbles between couples. Nevertheless, the verbal exchanges between the mixed-sex screwballs in the later comedies have never been matched in their rhetorical brilliance. What Hollywood, under official instructions, had to wrap up more subtly for prudish America continued to be dreamt about in the movie theaters; and in Outerbridge's studio on the east coast it was extrapolated into flesh and blood.
A certain "clean" or cosmetic appearance in his photographs is, on the one hand, inevitable in color photography; on the other hand, it corresponds to an aesthetics that was dominant in the USA between the wars. It is an aesthetics which, always oriented towards sales strategies, was symbiotically absorbed into advertising. In accordance with socially imposed restrictions, the naked body was frowned on; but basic capitalist attitudes and - with relaxing moral standards - ever more permissive behavior patterns in social interactions led to more and more skin appearing in advertising images. In Vargas's streamlined, almost sexless pin-ups, this aesthetic ideal reached its ultimate refinement in relation to the female body.
In the same period, photographers such as Josef Sudek or André Kertész were working on abstract, surreal distortions of their nudes, and Man Ray decorated his solarized models with an ethereal second "photoskin" and produced weightless torsos that seem to be from another world. But all of them remained bound to a tradition of nude photography that attempts to elevate the body, to transcend it, to deprive it of its nudity. It would have been unthinkable for these representatives of a black-and-white ideology to suddenly start working in color. For his time, Outerbridge was too advanced to be able to find broad public acceptance for his nude studies; his presentation of the flesh was too vivid and, like nineteenth-century erotic images, was suspected of being indecent. He produced his work for a small group of potential clients who even then were prepared to pay four-figure sums for the valuable prints.
Despite all the moral indignation and lack of understanding for Outerbridge's art during the 1930s, his brilliant realism ironically opened the way for the populist, trivial, and vulgar marketing of the female body: society was overtaken by its own lewdness. In 1953, little more than fifteen years after the first color nudes and during the mid-century period of restoration, Hugh Hefner was to start his victory march among frustrated husbands all over the world with his idea for an ever-available, unresisting Eve, shining and wrinkle-free. Where models with minds of their own took an active share in the production of fantasies (their own or others') in Outerbridge's work, Playboy degraded women into passive sex kittens. The witty, challenging aggressiveness of the screwballs and of Outerbridge's women, aware of their own bodies, was completely extinguished in the Eisenhower decade, which was fixated on traditional values: what remained were fantasies produced by men for men that excluded the female imago and alienated women from their own desires. Hefner exploited conditioned male perceptions to the utmost, using the slogan of American sales strategy "easy to consume." The blank spaces left by Outerbridge, places in which playful symbolism and fetishistic settings can release the observer's imagination, were steamrollered by the banal Playboy aesthetics. As early as 1939, the American critic Clement Greenberg published his precise definition of the "substitute culture" and kitsch that only reached its full development after the Second World War and in newly established markets in a consumer society hungry for new print media. Television was still a rare commodity. "Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money - not even their time."
Snap Magazine
As you may well know by now, I am no stranger to shamelessly using this tool for self promotion purposes. I present you now with the latest installment of this: a 4 page spread in Snap Magazine.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
The New Objectivity
In the period immediately following World War I, much photography was characterized by sharply defined imagery, especially of objects removed from their actual context. The clean lines and cool effects of this style—variously called the “New Objectivity,” the “new vision,” or “Precisionism”—was a reflection, perhaps, of the overarching role of industry and technology during the 1920s.
Strand, continuing in the direction he had unveiled in 1917, produced powerful, highly detailed close-ups of machines
and organic matter and made sparkling landscapes in Gaspé, Quebec, and the American West. His approach changed again when he was invited to Mexico to produce educational films for the government. There he made a series of portraits (again with the prism lens) and landscapes, which he published in 1940 as gravure prints.
Steichen, who had been in command of aerial photography for the American Expeditionary Forces, abandoned his earlier impressionistic handling in favour of crisp, sharply focused celebrity, fashion, and product images, which appeared in Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines.
Others whose sharp, well-designed images of industrial products appeared in advertising brochures and magazines included
Margaret Bourke-White,
Paul Outerbridge,
and Charles Sheeler.
A preference for a straight, highly detailed presentation of natural and manufactured forms also characterized the work of California photographer Edward Weston. Using large-format (8-by-10-inch [20.3-by-25.4-cm]) equipment with lenses stopped down to the smallest aperture, Weston, whose earlier career had been in commercial portraiture, formulated a method of “rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.” Further, Weston, like Strand, did not approve of cropping or hand work of any kind on the negative; both held that the final image should be composed in the ground glass of the camera prior to exposure.
Several Californians, a number of whom looked to Weston as a mentor, took up the concentration on organic forms and objects and the preference for using the smallest aperture of the lens to create maximum depth of field and sharpness. Known as Group f.64, for the smallest lens aperture, the group included, besides Weston and his son Brett,
Ansel Adams
and Imogen Cunningham.
After seeing Strand’s negatives, Adams decided to pursue photography as a profession, specializing in photographing Western wilderness areas such as Yosemite National Park and the Sierra Nevada mountain range. His dramatic photographs masterfully captured the beauty of such natural wonders, and the popularity of his photographs helped raise awareness of the importance of preservation efforts. He also was a teacher of great persuasiveness who advocated the exact control of tonal quality through what he called the “zone system.”
In Europe this approach of favouring extremely sharp definition was known as Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”). Its outstanding proponents were the German photographers Karl Blossfeldt and Albert Renger-Patzsch. Blossfeldt made
highly detailed and magnified images of plants, removed from their natural habitat. Renger-Patzsch, a professional photographer in Essen, was fascinated by
the formal qualities of everyday objects, both organic and manufactured. Like those of his American counterparts, his images featured strong design components and stressed the materiality of substances rather than the maker’s emotional attitude toward the subject. He too believed that the final image should exist in all its completeness before the exposure was made and that it should be an unmanipulated record. His ideas and images, published in 1928 in Die Welt ist schön (“The World Is Beautiful”) and translated into a number of languages, exerted considerable influence on European photography of the time. Hans Finsler, of Swiss origin and working in Germany, Piet Zwart in The Netherlands, and Emmanuel Sougez and Florence Henri in France were among the many producing highly defined close-ups of objects and people in a style similar to that of the Neue Sachlichkeit.
A similarly objective approach characterized the work of photographers interested in the artistic ideas embodied in Constructivism; the movement proposed that photographs could be a means to present the commonplace from fresh vantage points and thereby reawaken interest in routine objects and processes. This idea, which originated in the Soviet Union and spread quickly to Germany and central European countries during the late 1920s and early 1930s, granted greater latitude for experimentation with form. Its foremost spokesman was Russian painter and ideologue Aleksandr Rodchenko, who employed distinctly unusual vantage points
in order to give the mundane world a new appearance. The visual ideas underpinning Constructivism appealed to Hungarian photographer László Moholy-Nagy, who reinterpreted them
during his tenure first at the Bauhaus in Weimar, then in Dessau, Germany, and later at the School of Design in Chicago, where they influenced several generations of American photographers.
Similar ideas were utilized by photographers in Japan, especially following the earthquake of 1923. Among those whose imagery reflected the new sharper style, with its emphasis on form rather than atmosphere, was Yasuzō Nojima, who gained a reputation for his incisive portraits, groundbreaking nudes, and landscapes. Shinzō Fukuhara’s photographs, particularly his landscapes, were also highly regarded.
text from Britanicca
Strand, continuing in the direction he had unveiled in 1917, produced powerful, highly detailed close-ups of machines
and organic matter and made sparkling landscapes in Gaspé, Quebec, and the American West. His approach changed again when he was invited to Mexico to produce educational films for the government. There he made a series of portraits (again with the prism lens) and landscapes, which he published in 1940 as gravure prints.
Steichen, who had been in command of aerial photography for the American Expeditionary Forces, abandoned his earlier impressionistic handling in favour of crisp, sharply focused celebrity, fashion, and product images, which appeared in Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines.
Others whose sharp, well-designed images of industrial products appeared in advertising brochures and magazines included
Margaret Bourke-White,
Paul Outerbridge,
and Charles Sheeler.
A preference for a straight, highly detailed presentation of natural and manufactured forms also characterized the work of California photographer Edward Weston. Using large-format (8-by-10-inch [20.3-by-25.4-cm]) equipment with lenses stopped down to the smallest aperture, Weston, whose earlier career had been in commercial portraiture, formulated a method of “rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.” Further, Weston, like Strand, did not approve of cropping or hand work of any kind on the negative; both held that the final image should be composed in the ground glass of the camera prior to exposure.
Several Californians, a number of whom looked to Weston as a mentor, took up the concentration on organic forms and objects and the preference for using the smallest aperture of the lens to create maximum depth of field and sharpness. Known as Group f.64, for the smallest lens aperture, the group included, besides Weston and his son Brett,
Ansel Adams
and Imogen Cunningham.
After seeing Strand’s negatives, Adams decided to pursue photography as a profession, specializing in photographing Western wilderness areas such as Yosemite National Park and the Sierra Nevada mountain range. His dramatic photographs masterfully captured the beauty of such natural wonders, and the popularity of his photographs helped raise awareness of the importance of preservation efforts. He also was a teacher of great persuasiveness who advocated the exact control of tonal quality through what he called the “zone system.”
In Europe this approach of favouring extremely sharp definition was known as Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”). Its outstanding proponents were the German photographers Karl Blossfeldt and Albert Renger-Patzsch. Blossfeldt made
highly detailed and magnified images of plants, removed from their natural habitat. Renger-Patzsch, a professional photographer in Essen, was fascinated by
the formal qualities of everyday objects, both organic and manufactured. Like those of his American counterparts, his images featured strong design components and stressed the materiality of substances rather than the maker’s emotional attitude toward the subject. He too believed that the final image should exist in all its completeness before the exposure was made and that it should be an unmanipulated record. His ideas and images, published in 1928 in Die Welt ist schön (“The World Is Beautiful”) and translated into a number of languages, exerted considerable influence on European photography of the time. Hans Finsler, of Swiss origin and working in Germany, Piet Zwart in The Netherlands, and Emmanuel Sougez and Florence Henri in France were among the many producing highly defined close-ups of objects and people in a style similar to that of the Neue Sachlichkeit.
A similarly objective approach characterized the work of photographers interested in the artistic ideas embodied in Constructivism; the movement proposed that photographs could be a means to present the commonplace from fresh vantage points and thereby reawaken interest in routine objects and processes. This idea, which originated in the Soviet Union and spread quickly to Germany and central European countries during the late 1920s and early 1930s, granted greater latitude for experimentation with form. Its foremost spokesman was Russian painter and ideologue Aleksandr Rodchenko, who employed distinctly unusual vantage points
in order to give the mundane world a new appearance. The visual ideas underpinning Constructivism appealed to Hungarian photographer László Moholy-Nagy, who reinterpreted them
during his tenure first at the Bauhaus in Weimar, then in Dessau, Germany, and later at the School of Design in Chicago, where they influenced several generations of American photographers.
Similar ideas were utilized by photographers in Japan, especially following the earthquake of 1923. Among those whose imagery reflected the new sharper style, with its emphasis on form rather than atmosphere, was Yasuzō Nojima, who gained a reputation for his incisive portraits, groundbreaking nudes, and landscapes. Shinzō Fukuhara’s photographs, particularly his landscapes, were also highly regarded.
text from Britanicca
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