Exam 3 Flashcards
Dorothea Lange
Influential American Documentary Photographer/PhotoJournalist
Social Realism Period
Best Known for Depression Era Work for the Farm Security Administration and Resettlement Administration.
This agency oversaw loans, migrant camps and agricultural education. Stryker hired other photographers Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott…
Dorothea Lange cared about social justice and how photography could reveal inequality. She focused on the plight of migrant farmworkers.
Walker Evans
Photographed for the Farm Security Administration. He was the bad boy.
Social Realism Period
He saw Eugene Atget’s photographs and liked the recording of historical buildings and streets.
He believed in finding scenes and objects whose appearance implied a story or acted as a metaphor for an attitude toward life.
Desire to record handmade advertising signs, austere domestic interiors, and lifted poverty and the economic effects of the Depression into picturesque. He continued with artful documentary pics of the subways.
James Van Der Zee
Popular Portraitist/Street Photographer
African American/ Leading Figure in Harlem Resistance
Photographed Middle Class African American life–post war mass movement of blacks from the south to take factory jobs in northern cities–in idealistic images
Henri Cartier Bresson
French Photographer/Father of PhotoJournalism
Captured and imprisoned by Germans in the war but escaped to join the French Resistance and recorded the reaction of French people to those who aided the Nazis.
He sought the decisive moment that told the story of the denunciation of a French Gestapo informer…
Eye-Witness documentary style during World War II
Robert Frank
Photographer and Documentary Filmmaker
1958 Book “The Americans” captured the sense of unfulfilled lives and spiritually vacant environments of the post-World War 2 Period
Mentor/Friend was Walker Evans
He saw a soul damaged population, full of violence, ignorance and despair.
“The only mobile person in Robert Frank’s The Americans is the artist himself” There were sometimes American Flags.
Shoots gritty, tilted and blurred. Fragmented Indecisive Moments.
Frank said “Photography is a solitary journey for creative photographers and only few accept this fact”
W. Eugene Smith
Photojournalist
(Specialized in Photo Essay)
Political Related Photographs
Brutally Vivid World War 2 Images- pictures centered on the physical and emotional experiences of soldiers on the front line
War Correspondent for America against Japanese and got injured
Refused to use medium format cameras
Robert Capa
“If you’re pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough”
War Photographer and PhotoJournalist (D-Day, Russian Ruins)
Worked for Life Magazine
Speculation over the legitimacy of “Death of a Loyalist Soldier” which was taken before World War 2 during the Spanish Civil War
Action Shots that weren’t in true focus
Friends with Henri Cartier Bresson
John Baldessari
Conceptual Artist
Burned his easel works and turned to photography and video “I will not make anymore boring art”
200
Roy DeCarava
African American Photographer
Harlem Renaissance Times
Published book The Sweet Flypaper of Life
He didn’t want to make a sociological report or advocate reform measures, just wanted to render Harlem artistically
Thick shadows or blurred images, sharp light and shade
In 1963, he formed Kamoinge, a forum for African American photographers. He felt black people weren’t being portrayed in a serious or artistic way.
Minor White
Photographer/Spiritual Activist
He sought spiritual insights in poetry, psychological theory, myth, and religion. He was seen as a mystic, “your photographs are still mirrors of yourself, raw, naked..”
He admired Stieglitz, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams
Founded Aperture along with Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams
Surrealism, Abstraction, Pictorialism
White’s influence on photography endures in the meditative fine printing and his spiritualism had a lasting impact on photography
Garry Winogrand
Street Photographer
Social Landscape Image Maker/ Social Landscape Photography had a big influential impact in the 1960s
Known for his portrayal of American Life, social issues and Mid-20th Century
Toured America in 1964 to photograph the United States in the wake of the 1963 assassination of President JFK.
“I photograph to find out what the world looks like photographed”
Pictures shows interpersonal tension and inner turmoil. He does this by cropping his images or tilting his camera.
Diane Arbus
Photographs deviant or marginal people or people whose normality seems ugly or surreal. She made the ordinary seem bizarre and naturalized the unusual. She considered marginal people to be symbols of her own psychological fragility and trauma. Student of photographer/ art freelancer Lisette Model
Uta Barth
Contemporary Photographer
Creates fragmentary, fuzzy pictures that depict light and color, seemingly out of focus approach. Her photographs express the impossibility of intelligible experience or certain definition and repressed desire to seek pleasure in looking.
Cindy Sherman
Series of Black and White Photographs called Untitled Film Stills (Late 70’s Early 80’s)
Seemed like they came from 1950’s B-movie melodramas and they exaggerated movie-born gender stereotypes like “frightened heroine”
She photographed herself in makeup, wigs, and costumes. Her poses and set ups look like the repeated scenes of women in films so its hard to place them.
Exposed the shallowness of gender stereotyping and the titillating pleasure of looking.
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Photographer
Has regard for the fragile beauty of uncertainty, expressed in grainy atmospheric effects.
Traveled the world to seek high vantage points to aim his camera at the pint where the sky and ocean meet at the horizon
Work falls between Visual Pleasure and Cold Comfort of human systems of measurements.
