History of Photo II: Final Quiz

Question 1

Robert Adams

Answer 1

• One of the most prolific and influential photographers
featured in New Topographics.

• Noted for both photography and writing (PhD in
English): The New West: Landscapes Along the Colorado
Front Range, 1974. Beauty In Photography: Essays in
Defense of Traditional Values, 1981. Why People
Photograph, 1994.

Question 2

Lewis Baltz

Answer 2

• Featured in New Topographics.

• The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California, 1974,
Park City, 1980, San Quentin Point, 1986.

• Ravages of construction and development presented
in a seemingly neutral style.

• More recent work takes the form of large scale color
installations with sound & video dealing with
interactions of humans, machines, technology.

Question 3

Joe Deal

Answer 3

• Featured in New Topographics.

• High viewpoint, square format suburban
landscapes; intersection/transition between
development and wilderness.

• Taught at RISD and other institutions.
• Guggenheim and NEA fellowships.

Question 4

Frank Gohlke

Answer 4

• Featured in New Topographics.
• Texas/midwest based, rather than far west.
• Studied with Paul Caponigro.

• Subjects include the plains, grain elevators, natural
disasters, and man-made effects on land.

Question 5

Stephen Shore

Answer 5

• Featured in New Topographics.

• Inspired by Walker Evans at age 10. Lived at Andy
Warhol’s Factory 1965-68, studied with Minor White
1970, U.S. road trips beginning 1972.

• First solo show by a living photographer at the
Metropolitan Museum 1971, solo show at MoMA
1976. Uncommon Places published 1982.

• Understated large format color work; carefully
composed images of often mundane subject matter.

Question 6

Rephotographic Survey Project

Answer 6

• 1977-80, Second View published 1984.

• Project sponsored in part by Polaroid by providing
Type 55 Positive/Negative film for field work.

• Personnel:
- Ellen Manchester: Project Director (IMP/GEH)
- Mark Klett: Chief Photographer
- JoAnn Verburg: Project Coordinator,
Photographer
- Rick Dingus, Gordon Bushaw: Photographers

• Since late 1990s Klett has continued, expanded, and
updated the project with new personnel, especially
Byron Wolf: Third Views book, DVD, and website
published 2004.

• More recent work includes new innovative
rephotographic projects dealing with Yosemite and
the Grand Canyon.

Question 7

Mark Klett

Answer 7

• Arizona based, background in geology.

• Chief photographer & current project director of
Rephotographic Survey Project.

• Personal work acknowledges man’s effect on land,
past vs. present, but implies a more positive
possibility of balance and coexistence.

• All his work, rephotographic or not, deals in some
way with ideas about time & change.

• Teaches at University of Arizona, active in SPE.

Question 8

Richard Misrach

Answer 8

• California based, known for lush, large format color,
politically inspired images of U.S western deserts.

• Desert Cantos, 1987. Bravo 20, 1990. Violent Legacies,
1992, others.

Question 9

The new landscape photography

Answer 9

• acknowledged
and critiqued man’s presence & impact on the land,
including the implicit and/or explicit political &
environmental implications of the man-altered
landscape.

• The new style deliberately created the impression
of a low-key, emotionally understated, neutral,
objective, realistic, unsentimental b&w
documentary style (think Walker Evans), but over
time an extensive use of more overtly romantic
color began to appear.

• 1975: Era of Exploration at Albright-Knox Gallery,
curated by Weston Naef & James Wood. Revived
interest in post-Civil War 19th century images of
the opening of the largely untamed American
West. Commercial artistic style of Muybridge,
Watkins, etc., vs. scientific documentary style of
O’Sullivan, Jackson, etc.

Question 10

William Eggleston

Answer 10

• William Eggleston’s Guide, groundbreaking 1976
MoMA show & book curated by John Szarkowski.

• Quirky, unsentimental, unromantic images of the
banal & ordinary in the tradition of Winogrand,
Friedlander, Evans.

• Travels widely, but based in Memphis, TN. Much of
his work deals with subject matter in the U.S. south.
Has worked exclusively in color since 1967.

Question 11

Joel Meyerowitz

Answer 11

• NYC commercial art directing/advertising
background, street photography influenced by
Frank, Winogrand, studied w/ Brodovitch and
Avedon.

• Known for action-oriented 35mm street color, then
slower paced 8x10 sensuous, unashamedly romantic
& beautiful color/light landscape & cityscape
studies.

• Cape Light: Color Photographs, 1978 images of Cape
Cod summers helped popularize color.

• Co-author with Colin Westerbeck of Bystander: A
History of Street Photography 1994.

• Noteworthy for his unprecedented, privileged
access to 9/11 Ground Zero site in the immediate
aftermath & cleanup of the attack.

Question 12

John Pfahl

Answer 12

• Innovative, influential landscape photographer, and
one of the pioneers in the 1970s use of color.

• Early work (Altered Landscapes, c.1976) had strong
conceptual framework, containing multi-layer
references to mixed media, earthworks, performance
art, photo historical references, etc., combined with
traditional craft & beauty.

• Other projects include: Picture Windows, Power
Places, Arcadia Revisited, others.

• Taught at RIT 1968-83 (Mosch’s MFA thesis advisor).

• His work is essentially meta-landscape photography:
it is simultaneously about the landscape itself as
well as commentary on our art historical visual
strategies & traditions of seeing and representing
the landscape as a picture.

Question 13

William Christenberry

Answer 13

• Born & raised in Hale County, Alabama.

• Painting/sculpture background, influenced by
Evans/Agee Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which
was produced in his home area, 1936.

• Teaches painting at the Corcoran, Washington, DC,
but returns to AL annually to photograph.

• Photos, paintings, sculptures, etc., deal with
personal attachments to place, time, memory, decay,
southern culture.

Question 14

Marie Cosindas

Answer 14

• Studied b&w with Ansel Adams.

• 1962: Began testing new Polacolor film at Edwin
Land’s request.

• Part of 1960s New York area group Association of
Heliographers (White, Caponigro, & others).

• Shows of Polaroids at MoMA & IMP/GEH, 1968.

• Commercial & personal portraiture & still life using
mostly natural light.

Question 15

Chuck Close

Answer 15

• Photorealist painter known for large scale,
impersonal air brush mug-shot-like portrait
paintings based on gridded photos.

• Large scale multi-print Polaroid portraits & selfportraits,
primarily of friends in the art world.

• Recently has worked in the daguerreotype process
in addition to large paintings, all despite severe
paralysis after a 1988 illness.

Question 16

David Hockney

Answer 16

• Picasso-influenced pop art painter.

• 1980s joiners (his term): multi-print photo collages
reflecting a cubist interest in space, time, &
perspective: “a critique of photography made in the
medium of photography.”

• Has also written extensively regarding his
controversial art historical theories dealing with Old
Master painters’ alleged use of optical devices.

Question 17

Lucas Samaras

Answer 17

• Painter, sculptor, and along with Allan Kaprow &
Fluxus movement, an early innovator of happenings
(Kaprow’s term), guerrilla public performance art
events often documented with photography. The
performance aspect remains in his work.

• Known for lurid, highly expressionistic, often
grotesque & confrontational directorial selfportraiture
using manipulated Polaroids.

• Photo-Transformations, 1973, 1st known SX-70 dye
manipulations during development.

Question 18

William Wegman

Answer 18

• Background in 1960s painting, video, performance,
& satirical conceptual art, influenced by Dada &
Surrealism.

• Extensive use of photos, videos, etc.

• Began incorporating his dog, Man Ray, 1970s, then
Fay Ray & her descendants in comical & kitschy
situations & narratives.

• 1980s switched to large-scale Polaroids.

Question 19

Irving Penn

Answer 19

• Student of & assistant to famed art director Alexey
Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar.

• Joined Vogue in 1943 as assistant to art director
Alexander Liberman where he first designed, then
began shooting covers.

• Opened his own NY studio, 1953 & continued
commercial work for Vogue & others.

• With his model-collaborator-wife Lisa Fonssagrives,
he developed an austere, clean, cool, formal, elegant
style of chic glamour using neutral backgrounds,
artificial light, and a strong sense of control &
perfectionism.

• One of the first commercially successful
photographers to then be recognized as a fine artist
through his carefully crafted platinum prints of
portraits, nudes, & still lifes of non-glamorous, noncommercial
subjects.

• Worlds in a Small Room, 1974, which depicted people
in various countries in their native cultural fashions,
and many other books.

Question 20

Richard Avedon

Answer 20

• Spent WWII in Merchant Marines making ID
mugshots of sailors.

• Studied w/ Brodovitch at New School, joined
Harper’s Bazaar, 1945-65 under Brodovitch & Marvin
Israel.

• Worked under contract for Vogue, 1946-90 with
Diana Vreeland, Alexander Lieberman, Carmel
Snow, etc.

• 1st staff photographer for New Yorker, 1990s.

• Influenced by Munkacsi, he used high energy
movement & action in & out of the studio to treat
fashion as a mixture of theater and documentary.

• As an artist he was known for his severe, clinical,
uncompromising, unsentimental & unflattering
portraits of both celebrities and unknowns.

• Portraits, 1976. In the American West, 1985.

Question 21

Arnold Newman

Answer 21

• Started in commercial portraiture & later gained
support & recognition from Adams, Newhall,
Stieglitz, Man Ray & others.

• Best known for meticulously arranged & composed
environmental portraits of famous artists, leaders &
other personalities in which props, settings,
composition, etc., become both stylized formal
elements and descriptive aspects of the subject.

Question 22

Philippe Halsman

Answer 22

• Self-taught, moved to Paris 1928, befriended Man
Ray & others in the avant-garde.

• Emigrated to U.S. in 1940, where he shot 103 LIFE
covers, (also Saturday Evening Post, Paris Match, etc.)
and developed a psychological style of portraiture in
which he tried to reveal the subject’s inner character.

• Also known for his more whimsical jumpology (his
term) technique & collaborations with Dali.

• First president of ASMP, c.1945.

Question 23

Robert Mapplethorpe

Answer 23

• Known for his 1980s slick, classically beautiful
celebrity portraits in Andy Warhol’s Interview
magazine, and for his equally well-crafted flower
still lifes & controversial homoerotic images.

• Retrospective show, Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect
Moment, after his death from AIDS proved to be a
controversial battleground over government
funding for the arts, resulting in severe cutbacks in
the availability of individual artist and institutional
NEA and other grants.

Question 24

Nicholas Nixon

Answer 24

• Architectural photos of Boston featured in 1975 New
Topographics show.

• Now best known for his intense, intimate largeformat
8x10 portraits of family members, strangers,
AIDS sufferers, the elderly in nursing homes, and
other projects.

Question 25

Sally Mann

Answer 25

• Known for her beautifully crafted, large format,
stylized, often staged, & controversial (because of
nudity, sexual themes) portraits of adolescent girls
and her own 3 children in their rural Lexington, VA
home setting.

• At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women, 1988. Immediate
Family, 1992. Still Time, 1994. What Remains, 2003.

• Recent work involves landscapes and images
dealing with death and shot with 19th century
equipment and collodion process.

Question 26

Nick Waplington

Answer 26

• Living Room, 1991, a book of his medium format
color images documenting his blue collar/working
class neighbor families.

• Shot in an unpretentious, naturalistic, spontaneous,
snapshot documentary style, they have a strong
sense of family ties, affection, authenticity, and
enthusiasm for life.

Question 27

Richard Billingham

Answer 27

• Ray’s A Laugh, 1996, a book of candid, point-andshoot
style documentary snapshots of his own blue
collar dysfunctional family. Relentlessly honest,
alternately depressing, poignant, affectionate, and
humorous.

• Now works primarily in video and landscape.

Question 28

Phillip-Lorca DiCorcia

Answer 28

• Post-modern photographer who carefully stages
and lights his images to create the illusion of
mundane, candid snapshots, and who lights
spontaneous street photographs to create the
illusion of theatrical fictions.

• His aim is to make us question our assumptions &
preconceptions about what we see and the alleged
truth of the photograph.

Question 29

Main Characteristics & Issues of Postmodernism

Answer 29

• Postmodernism can be seen as a continuation &
extension of Conceptual Art & Pop Art.

• It is an idea-based art that addresses issues of life
in a mass media dominated world that is
saturated with images, most of which are
photographically based.

• Can be seen as an analysis & critique of images in
mass media, commercial/advertising, art history,
film/TV, etc.

• Many of the ideas are rooted in post WWII French
philosophy & theories of linguistics, semiotics,
structuralism, post-structuralism put forth by
authors such as Lacan, Derrida, Lyotard, and others.

• Postmodernism questions or attacks Modernist
ideas of individual genius, authenticity, originality,
& creativity at a time when it seems we’ve seen it all
already. It also questions the Modernist idea of art
somehow transcending or being aloof from the
context of its own making.

Question 30

Richard Prince

Answer 30

• Uses appropriation, radical cropping, rephotography,
etc., to deconstruct advertising images
and reveal their strategies of manipulation, use of
icons & stereotypes, etc.

• One of his appropriated images set a controversial
auction record for a photograph by a living artist
when it sold for over $1.2M in 2005.

• Copyright lawsuits over recent work have
continued to raise questions of authorship,
originality, fair use, etc.

Question 31

Anne Rowland

Answer 31

• Rowland constructs collage reproductions of photos
of iconic women, then re-photographs them
projected onto herself.

• Raises questions of personal & public identity, iconic
role models, hero worship, authenticity and
uniqueness.

Question 32

Sherrie Levine

Answer 32

• Blatant, largely unchanged appropriations of classic
photos, paintings, etc., which push to their logical
extreme questions of originality & emphasize loss of
uniqueness through endless reproduction.

Question 33

Ann Fessler

Answer 33

• Former RISD photo dept. head.

• Makes books, videos, etc., using appropriated
images with her own texts to give the images new,
contemporary ironic meanings.

• Subjects often deal with feminist, gender, identity, &
adoption issues.

Question 34

Yasumasa Morimura

Answer 34

• Elaborate, witty, and satirical self-portrait remakes
of iconic western images from art history, film, etc.,
which draw attention to issues of gender, race, east/
west stereotypes & cultural influences.

• Published Daughter of Art History, 2003.

Question 35

Barbara Kruger

Answer 35

• Studied at School of Visual Arts w/ Arbus & at
Parsons w/ Marvin Israel.

• Worked at Condé Nast as graphic designer, art
director, picture editor at Mademoiselle, House &
Garden, & other fashion and society magazines.

• Combines b&w appropriated images w/ bold text to
create large-scale poster-like images that are visually
reminiscent of Soviet Constructivist style
propaganda posters.

• Often presented as site-specific installations dealing
with feminist, consumer, & political issues
criticizing the media world in which she worked.

Question 36

Eileen Cowin

Answer 36

• Creates overtly theatrical, fictional tableaux of quasinarrative,
TV soap opera-like scenes of family
tension, strife & dysfunction.

• Uses herself, twin sister, & other friends & family as
actors.

• Family Docu-Dramas, 1980s.

Question 37

Laurie Simmons

Answer 37

• Uses miniature figures, dolls, props, etc., as standins/
surrogates to construct still lifes dealing with
suburban middle-class values & stereotypes.

• In and Around the House, 1983.

Question 38

Cindy Sherman

Answer 38

• One of the best known & most successful of the
postmodernists, she uses costumes, props, masks,
prostheses, mannequins, etc., to make conceptual
self-portraits portraying a wide variety of female
characters & situations.

• Without taking a particular stand, her work
comments on contemporary and historical female
identity/stereotypes/archetypes.

• Untitled Film Stills 1977-80, Untitled series 1981,
Fashion Pictures 1983-84, all dealing primarily with
various feminine stereotypes.

• More recent work of the late 1980s-90s moves into
areas of myth, horror, fairy tales, art history (History
Portraits 1988-90) pornography, the grotesque, and
exaggerated fashion makeovers.

• Major MoMA retrospective, 2012.

Question 39

Lorna Simpson

Answer 39

• Conceptual artist who uses simple but stylized
photos combined with deliberately oblique/
ambiguous text to raise issue of race, hidden
prejudice, gender, & other issues relevant to African-
American women.

• 1st African-American woman solo show at MoMA,
1990.

Question 40

David Levinthal

Answer 40

• Uses custom-made miniature dolls, figures, props,
etc., to create lush studio still lifes dealing with
issues such as the conquest of the American west
(Wild West, 1987-89), WWII, and the Holocaust (Mein
Kampf, 1993-94).

• Other series deal with eroticism, pornography,
religion, sports, etc.

• Often works in large format Polaroid.

Question 41

Sandy Skoglund

Answer 41

• Starting out in photorealist pop & conceptual art,
she moved into large scale photography and
construction of elaborate, colorful, surrealistic studio
sculptural installations.

• The viewers’ initial reaction of humor and wonder
often gives way to a more sinister and obsessive
underlying tone.

• Reality Under Siege, 1998.

Question 42

Nancy Burson

Answer 42

• Pioneering example of the use of early 1980s digital
techniques in conceptual art.

• While working & teaching at MIT, she developed
and used digital compositing & morphing
techniques with appropriated images to create
fictional “portraits” of non-existent people:
archetypes/generics dealing with beauty, race,
politics, war, and other themes.

• Composites: Computer Generated Portraits, 1986.