Exam 2 Terms Flashcards
The Photo-Secession
Early in 1902 Stieglitz announced the existence of a new organization called the Photo-Secession, a group dedicated to promoting photography as an art form. The name of the group suggested that it was designed to break away from stodgy and conventional ideas. In fact, all the Photo-Secessionist photographers were committed in greater or lesser degrees to what was called the Pictorialist style, meaning they favoured traditional genre subjects that had been sanctified by generations of conventional painters and techniques that tended to hide the intrinsic factuality of photography behind a softening mist. Members of the group were elected by Stieglitz, and eventually its roll included 17 fellows and almost twice as many associates. Founding members included Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Clarence H. White, and Joseph Keiley.
Pictorialism
Pictorialism is the name given to an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the later 19th and early 20th centuries.
This movement, known as Pictorialism, was characterized by painterly techniques involving soft focus lenses and heavily manipulated printing processes like gum bichromate and bromoil. Typically, a pictorial photograph appears to lack a sharp focus (some more so than others), is printed in one or more colors other than black-and-white (ranging from warm brown to deep blue) and may have visible brush strokes or other manipulation of the surface. For the pictorialist, a photograph, like a painting, drawing or engraving, was a way of projecting an emotional intent into the viewer’s realm of imagination.
By the end of World War I, Stieglitz and Steichen (33.43.39) were shedding Pictorial photography’s painterly facade in order to promote an unvarnished display of the medium’s natural strength—namely, its capacity for producing a truthful rendering of abstract form and tonal variation in the real world.
The Bauhaus
German art school created by Walter Gropius. Operated from 1919 to 1933
School aimed to bring all types of art together and unite different mediums and artists to enhance the future of art. The school inspired its own style and was very influential, particularly to the modernist movement.
Straight Photography
Straight or “Pure” Photography is creating an image that objectively portrays the reality of the world; without manipulating the photograph after it has been produced. The Straight Photography movement was first publicized in the early 1900’s through a note by The New York Times on an exhibition in New York with photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Kasebier, Clarence H. White and many others. Advocates of this practice believed that by manipulating a picture after it had been taken, one loses the purity or tone which can be rooted directly to a unique photograph. Alfred Stieglitz was a pioneer in the process. The Straight photography process strived to encourage photographers to experiment with the limits of the camera and developing process to create abstract and unique photographs instead of manipulating the image with a brush after it had been printed.
The term straight photography probably originated in a 1904 exhibition review in Camera Work by the critic Sadakichi Hartmann, in which he called on photographers “to work straight.” He urged them to produce pictures that looked like photographs rather than paintings—a late-nineteenth-century approach known as Pictorialism. To do so meant rejecting the tricky darkroom procedures that were favored at the time, including gum printing, the glycerine process, and scratching and drawing on negatives and prints. The alternative demanded concentrating on the basic properties of the camera and the printing process.
Surrealism
a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature that sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.
Figures like Salvador Dalí and Man Ray not only had an important influence on avant-garde art, but through their commercial work - in fashion photography, advertising and film - they brought the style to a huge popular audience.
Influenced also by Karl Marx, they hoped that the psyche had the power to reveal the contradictions in the everyday world and spur on revolution. Their emphasis on the power of the imagination puts them in the tradition of Romanticism, but unlike their forbears, they believed that revelations could be found on the street and in everyday life.
Naturalistic Photography
The study of Naturalism in photography may be one of the last frontiers in the history of photography. Naturalism was the principal forerunner of Pictorialism in art photography. Although the Naturalists worked to create photographs that were sharply focused, simple in composition, and evoked a sense of serenity between man and nature, they also managed to imbue ordinary everyday subjects with a sense of artistry. Eventually this led to Pictorialism, and in many ways the Photo-Secession movement emerged as a reaction to the Naturalist style. The Photo-Secession not only seceded from existing photography clubs in a political sense, but also seceded aesthetically and stylistically.
Dada
Dada was an artistic and literary movement that began in 1916 in Zurich, Switzerland. It arose as a reaction to World War I, and the nationalism, and rationalism, which many thought had brought war about. Influenced by ideas and innovations from several early avant-gardes - Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, and Expressionism - its output was wildly diverse, ranging from performance art to poetry, photography, sculpture, painting and collage. Dada was born out of a pool of avant-garde painters, poets and filmmakers who flocked to neutral Switzerland before and during WWI.
Important Dates
1900s- Cameras are miniaturized, photo post cards and pictorialism flourishes
1902- Stieglitz, Steichen and others found Photo Succession
1903- Camera Work Journal founded
1904- Autochrome Color Process and Lewis Hines begins photographing Ellis Island immigrants
1905- Little Galleries of Photo Succession Open
Precisionism and Group f64
Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Preston Holder, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Van Dyke, Brett Weston, and Edward Weston.
The name referred to the smallest aperture available in large-format view cameras at the time and it signaled the group’s conviction that photographs should celebrate rather than disguise the medium’s unrivaled capacity to present the world “as it is.” As Edward Weston phrased it, “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.
The group’s effort to present the camera’s “vision” as clearly as possible included advocating the use of aperture f/64 in order to provide the greatest depth of field, thus allowing for the largest percentage of the picture to be in sharp focus; contact printing, a method of making prints by placing photographic paper directly in contact with the negative, instead of using an enlarger to project the negative image onto paper; and glossy papers instead of matte or artist papers, the surfaces of which tended to disperse the contours of objects.
uch methods transformed the role of the artist from printmaker to selector: it was the photographer’s choice of form and his or her framing of it that made the picture.
The Linked Ring
association of English photographers formed in 1892 that was one of the first groups to promote the notion of photography as fine art. Henry Peach Robinson was notable among the founding members.
The Linked Ring held annual exhibitions from 1893 to 1909 and called these gatherings “salons,” a name they borrowed from the world of painting in an attempt to demonstrate their artistic purpose. The aesthetic approaches of the members varied, but they were all united by the desire to reject the strictly technical approach of much contemporary photography. The members of the group refused to exhibit photographs that, in their judgment, failed to further “the development of the highest form of art of which photography is capable.” They also made innovations in the display of photographs: instead of crowding photographs onto a wall from ceiling to floor, as was usually done at the time, the Linked Ring photographers displayed their work at eye level.
In order to spread their views on photography, the Linked Ring admitted to their association respected international photographers such as Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Gertrude Käsebier, and Clarence H. White. Many of these artists went on to form the Photo-Secession, which promulgated similar ideas in the United States.
Constructivism
Constructivism was the last and most influential modern art movement to flourish in Russia in the 20th century. It evolved just as the Bolsheviks came to power in the October Revolution of 1917, and initially it acted as a lightning rod for the hopes and ideas of many of the most advanced Russian artists who supported the revolution’s goals. It borrowed ideas from Cubism, Suprematism and Futurism, but at its heart was an entirely new approach to making objects, one which sought to abolish the traditional artistic concern with composition, and replace it with ‘construction.’
The seed of Constructivism was a desire to express the experience of modern life - its dynamism, its new and disorientating qualities of space and time. But also crucial was the desire to develop a new form of art more appropriate to the democratic and modernizing goals of the Russian Revolution. Constructivists were to be constructors of a new society - cultural workers on a par with scientists in their search for solutions to modern problems.
Constructivist art often aimed to demonstrate how materials behaved - to ask, for instance, what different properties had materials such as wood, glass, and metal. The form an artwork would take would be dictated by its materials (not the other way around, as is the case in traditional art forms, in which the artist ‘transforms’ base materials into something very different and beautiful).
