The changing of: a century/photography

Excuse me for using links to photos instead of just putting them in here. Due to this crutches thing, I am working from home on a laptop with a bootleg internet connection, so it just makes it much faster this way.

Two classes ago we took a close look at Alfred Stieglitz, who was the main person behind the Photo-Secession group founded in 1902. Last class we got a little more in depth look at some of the artists that were involved with the group and other work that was kicking around at the turn of the 20th century.

The first person we started with was Edward Steichen, who, as you learned from the documentary, was the co founder of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, which was better known as “291”

Steichen was born in Luxemborg. His family came over to America when he was a little boy. He went back to Europe to study painting in Paris. In 1900 Clarence White saw some of his photographs and egged him on to pursue photography. Meanwhile, White also wrote to Stieglitz about Steichen.

In 1901 Steichen was elected into the Linked Ring. (full info on the Linked Ring is in a post below)

Its first major exhibition took place in November 1893, and was known as the Photographic Salon, a title chosen deliberately, in order to associate itself with painting exhibitions, where the same term was used.

The exhibition was very well received, and for a number of years - up to the group's demise, it was an important annual event for photographers both in England and abroad.

Other members of the Linked Ring were: Frank Sutcliffe, Frederick Evans, Paul Martin, and also Alfred Stieglitz.

Frank Sutcliffe, A photographer who is regarded as a pictorialist, there is also the documentary aspect of much of his work, portraying as it does the life of the times, with their street musicians, farmers, and other ordinary people. The full extent of his contribution was not recognised until long after his death.


Frederick Evans, who was looking for an artist approach towards architecture photography. While many of his contemporaries were working with gum bichromate, he was printing with platinum process.

Paul Martin was shooting with a an unusual camera called the "Facile", a large box that looked like a brown paper parcel which was held under the arm, and which gave him the opportunity to take some excellent candid photographs of scenes in London.

In 1908 there was a major rift within the Linked Ring because the English photographers were becoming frustrated that there were so many Americans involved. A lot of these photographers, like Stieglitz, Steichen, and White, were also members of the Photo-Secession, so they withdrew their membership from Linked Ring and it fell apart soon after due to inner squabbles.

Steichen’s early work had an impressionist influence with soft focus. As you may remember, that was one of the ways that members of the Photographic Society thought you could have photography resemble painting and be more artistic.

Steichen abandoned his soft focus style at the beginning of the first World War for a more “straight” photography approach. At this time he destroyed nearly all of his paintings and also went through several years f photographic experimentation based on his interest in the theory of dynamic symmetry…this allowed him to open up to modernist ideas.

During the majority of the 1920s and 30s, he was under contract with conde naste where he really helped push advertising and fashion imagery, both of which were relatively new fields at the time.

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.

After serving as a director of naval combat photography during wwII, Steichen accepted the directorship of the Department of Photography at MOMA.

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.

In 1955 he organized the Family of Man exhibit, which is probably the most important show in the history of photography, which we will learn about in a later class.



So, now going back to some of the other photographers involved with the photo-secession:


Alvin Langdon Coburn, Coburn passionately believed in liberating photography from the notion that it is only artistic if it depicted reality, and he is perhaps best known for producing Vortographs, non-objective photographs of such items as a piece of wood or crystal, through an arrangement of mirrors, resulting in multiple images.

In 1916 Coburn designed an item the poet Ezra Pound called a Vortoscope, which consisted of three mirrors arranged like a kaleidoscope, which enabled multiple-image photographs to be taken.

Gertrude Kasebler, She was the first woman to be elected to the prestigious Linked Ring, and was also a founder-member of the Photo-Secession, her portraits standing out over the work of her contemporaries. A contemporary critic praised her for haing done more for artistic portraiture than any other of her time (painter or photographer) by her sense of "what to leave out." Her work was featured in the first issue of Camera Work.
She was keen on allegorical themes, and one of her series was on motherhood. It was said of her that her purpose in taking photographs was "not to inform, but to share an experience, to evoke an emotional response from the viewer."

Clarence H. White, Together with Gertrude Kasebier he founded the Pictorial Photographers of America, an organization that continues to exist today.

Clarence White's portraits and landscapes showing a particular interest in chiaoscuro (the technique of representing three dimensions by carefully using light and shadow). None of his pictures have heavy shadows or dark tones; he specialized in light, delicate pictures.

Important documentary photographers working during the beginning of the 20th century…

Eugene 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.

He took them not as portraits however, but artistic documents.
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.

Among the first of photography's social documenters, has come to be regarded as one of the medium's major figures. His images of Paris are perhaps the most vivid record of a city ever made.

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.

One of Atget's earliest admirers was the young Ansel Adams, who wrote in 1931: "The charm of Atget lies not in the mastery of the plates and papers of his time, nor in the quaintness of costume, architecture and humanity as revealed in his pictures, but in his equitable and intimate point of view. . . . His work is a simple revelation of the simplest aspects of his environment. There is no superimposed symbolic motive, no tortured application of design, no intellectual ax to grind. The Atget prints are direct and emotionally clean records of a rare and subtle perception, and represent perhaps the earliest expression of true photographic art."

In 1926 Atget's neighbor Man Ray published (without credit) a few of Atget's photographs in the magazine La revolution surrealíste. This marked the beginning of the important surrealist appreciation of his work. Berenice Abbott, a student of Man Ray's, was impressed by Atget's photographs in 1925, and has been responsible for rescuing his work from obscurity and preserving his prints and negatives, which she acquired upon his death in 1927. She has written: "He will be remembered as an urbanist historian, a genuine romanticist, a lover of Paris, a Balzac of the camera, from whose work we can weave a large tapestry of French civilization."

video with Atget photos / info

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.

Sudek was injured during WWI and had to get one of his arms amputated. He took up photography and due to his war pension was able to make art. He worked through the 1920s in a romantic pictorialist style.

Always pushing at the boundaries, a local camera club expelled him for arguing about the need to move forwards from 'painterly' photography. Sudek then founded the progressive Czech Photographic Society in 1924. Despite only having one arm, he used large, bulky cameras with the aid of assistants.

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 non-functioning 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 migratory 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.



(might want to turn the music down on this one, it's a bit over the top)


Margaret Bourke-White 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.

Bernice Abbot 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). Other urban documentary projects were undertaken under the aegis of the Photo League, an association of photographers of varying background and class who set out to document working-class neighbourhoods in New York.

August Sander, (german) 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”).