Lecture 2

Editor's Notes

• #2: Overview:
• #3: Overview of lecture: Photography and the ‘avant garde’ become linked. Photographers begin to reject the world as a subject and see the literal act of recording as limited.
• #4: From the 1890’s: Photographers created responses that recast the medium of photography in the new language of ‘Modernism’. There is a growing interest in ‘artistic’ camera images. The simplification of processes and procedures meant that photography was used more as a past time. As a result of this there was an increase in photographers and images. Photographs and images of the visual arts were able to reach a wider audience- public becam more visually aware. Developments in photography pushed artists to expand their horizons and confront new subject matter. Slide specific: The invention of the camera meant that artists no longer had to depict the world in a realistic way. The Impressionists focussed more on capturing the changing qualities of light and atmosphere. They aimed to evoke a mood in the viewer, they interpreted a scene rather than creating a realistic representation.
• #5: Pictorialism Photography’s critics felt that the medium lacked creativity because it was a purely mechanical process. Pictorialism challenged this outlook. It was a movement in photography that aimed to promote the photograph to the same status as an art object. Pictorialists hoped to express and engage feelings and senses and felt that their images should be concerned with beauty rather than fact. Developments in processing meant that photographers could manipulate their prints during the processing and printing stages. Gum printing, gelatin and carbon printing made the surface of the prints more maleable. They could manipulate this with fingers, pencils, brushes and etching tools to alter tone, introduce highlights, obscure and remove details. In this way no positive print was an exact version of the negative. In this way a photograph was more like an art object, a one off, an original. At the same time new societies began to be set up throughout Europe. New galleries and journals promoted photography and photographers. Alred Stieglitz in particular was a pioneer for photography, dedicationg his life to raising it’s status and experimenting with new concepts, approaches and techniques. Stieglitz Image: Fishermen’s wives in Katwyck, Holland. Uncluttered arrangement. Tones create atmospheric haze. The manipulated surface softens the forms in the background and give the women a larger than life stature. The appearance of the print resembles woodblock printing.
• #6: Edward Steichen Another advocate for photography. He was engaged with much that was vital and new in the medium during the 20th century, from a Pictorialist, through activities in the commercial sector to becoming the director of the photography dept. in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He collaborated with Stieglitz on gallery 291 and the journal, ‘Camera Work’. This slide: As in art, landscapes were popular subjects but here again Steichen has manipulated the surface of the print so that the image becomes more atmospheric and is more evocative than factual.
• #8: Photo Secession The movement was founded by Stieglitz in 1902. It had the ideals of Pictorialism but the concerned photographers also wanted the mechanical origins to be apparent. They felt that Pictorial images were becoming smudgy messes and lost it’s way. In the main secessionists produced landscapes, figure studies etc. but a small number chose to portray the city. This was an untrodden field in artistic photography. Photographers included Stieglitz,Steichen, Clarence White and Alvin Langdon Coburn. These photographers found their subjects in the bridges, skyscrapers and construction sites that they felt were the exciting symbols of urban life during the opening years of the 20th century. .
• #9: Alvin Langdon Coburn Another important figure during these stages of the development of photography. He was only 22 when he became a Secessionist and pioneered developments for the next twenty years, particularly in relation to Modernism. Coburn considered the camera as the only instrument, and photography as the only medium, capable of capturing the constantly changing grandeur of the modern city. He believed the new structures being built were metaphors for the conquest of nature by human intelligence Madison Square under snow. This image anticipates more abstract work by Rodchenko and Kertesz. The Octopus The dark pathways create a radiating pattern, the tower casts a pale shadow across the gleaming, white ground.
• #10: Stieglitz spanned the transition from the victorian to the modern world. He was dedicated to the gallery as an environment, a sacred place, where photographic images could be viewed in an ideal context. He made great efforts to improve exhibitions and the quality of reproductions in periodicals. He promoted the idea of a photograph as an art object.
• #11: End of Secessionism: WW1 ended the pre-war leisurely life many had enjoyed. Steiglitz felt the work was lacking creativity and ‘Camera Works’ began including less and less ‘artistic’ photography replacing it with more candid images by photographers such as Paul Strand.
• #17: Group f/64 was organised in 1932 by Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham, and others, to promote "straight" photography. The group was in response to the "artistic," soft-focus, pictorial type of photography which was popular at the time. Emphasis was placed on "pure" photography, sharp images, maximum depth-of-field, smooth glossy printing paper, emphasizing the unique qualities of the photographic process. The significance of the name lies in the fact that f/64 is the smallest aperture on the lens of a large-format camera and therefore provides the greatest depth-of-field. In 1922 Weston traveled to New York City, where he met Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Charles Sheeler. His photographs of the ARMCO Steelworks in Ohio at this time marked a turning point in his career. These industrial photographs, similar to work by Sheeler, were true "straight" images: unpretentious, and true to the reality before the photographer. Weston later wrote, "the camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.” In 1923 Weston moved to Mexico City where he opened a studio with his apprentice and lover Tina Modotti, of whom he made important portraits and nude studies over several years. Through Modotti, who fast became an accomplished photographer in her own right, Weston became friendly with artists of the Mexican Renaissance including Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco, all of whom encouraged his new direction. In 1924 Weston abandoned the use of soft-focus techniques entirely and started his precise studies of natural forms. He returned to California permanently in 1926 and began the work for which he is most deservedly famous: natural-form close-ups, nudes, and landscapes. "The hour is late, the light is failing, I could not expose another film. So there stands my camera focused, trained like a gun, commanding the shells not to move a hair's breath. And death to anyone who jars out of place what I know shall be a very important negative."
dward Weston - The Daybooks
• #18: Emphasis on form, light and texture. The eye makes connections between the pepper and similar forms. Object is ignored for what it is and gains importance. Weston created images that were polished and pristine, he abolished traces of the world outside.
• #19: It was during her time in San Francisco that Cunningham refined her style and began taking a greater interest in pattern and detail, as shown in her works of the time about bark textures and trees as well as a series about zebras. It was also during this time that Cunningham became increasingly interested in botanical photography, especially the form of the flower, and between 1923 and 1925 carried out an in-depth study of the magnolia flower. She had similar concerns to Weston and was committed to the intense and detailed scrutiny of the world.
• #20: Photographer, conservationist; born in San Francisco. A commercial photographer for 30 years, he made visionary photos of western landscapes that were inspired by a boyhood trip to Yosemite. He developed zone exposure to get maximum tonal range from black-and-white film. Adams transforms the obvious, ordinary into something strange and unique. He alerts us to the potential of a scene. Celebrates external world full of visual significance.