Photography Flashcards
Diane Arbus
A Young Man in Curlers at Home on West Twentieth Street, New York City
1966
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
An American photographer and writer noted for black-and-white square photographs of “deviant and marginal people (dwarfs, giants, transgender people, nudists, circus performers) or of people whose normality seems ugly or surreal”.[2] Arbus believed that a camera could be “a little bit cold, a little bit harsh” but its scrutiny revealed the truth; the difference between what people wanted others to see and what they really did see – the flaws.[3] A friend said that Arbus said that she was “afraid … that she would be known simply as ‘the photographer of freaks’”; however, that phrase has been used repeatedly to describe her.
The Arbuses’ interests in photography led them, in 1941, to visit the gallery of Alfred Stieglitz, and learn about the photographers Mathew Brady, Timothy O’Sullivan, Paul Strand, Bill Brandt, and Eugène Atget.
Grew up very wealthy in New York. In the early 1940s, Diane’s father employed Stieglitz to take photographs for the department store’s advertisements.
In 1956, Arbus quit the commercial photography business.[5] Although earlier she had studied photography with Berenice Abbott, her studies with Lisette Model, beginning in 1956, led to Arbus’s most well-known methods and style.[5] She began photographing on assignment for magazines such as Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, and The Sunday Times Magazine in 1959.[6] Around 1962, Arbus switched from a 35 mm Nikon camera which produced grainy rectangular images to a twin-lens reflex Rolleiflex camera which produced more detailed square images.
In 1963, Arbus was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for a project on “American rites, manners, and customs”; the fellowship was renewed in 1966. er methods included establishing a strong personal relationship with her subjects and re-photographing some of them over many years.
A Young Man in Curlers at Home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. 1966 — A close-up shows the man’s pock-marked face with plucked eyebrows, and his hand with long fingernails holds a cigarette. Early reactions to the photograph were strong; for example, someone spat on it in 1967 at the Museum of Modern Art.[11] A print was sold for $198,400 at a 2004 auction.
Robert Mapplethorpe
Ajitto, 1981
Robert Mapplethorpe arrived in New York in the 1970s amid two simultaneous but disparate events: the rise of the market for photography as a fine art, and the explosion of punk and gay cultures. Originally trained in painting and sculpture, Mapplethorpe gravitated toward photography, first making erotic collages in 1969–70 with images cut from magazines, then creating his own images using a Polaroid camera. Within a few years he was exhibiting erotic male and female nudes, still lifes of flowers, and celebrity portraits, all made with a large-format camera. By the late 1970s his work had developed into a style that was at once classical and stylish yet retained the explicit homoerotic themes for which the artist is perhaps best known. Mapplethorpe’s subject matter made his work a lightning rod for the contentious debates on public funding for the visual arts during the 1980s that would ultimately decimate the federal government’s support for artists. However, this legacy of controversy tends to overshadow Mapplethorpe’s aesthetic impact.
Although he occasionally worked with color, Mapplethorpe remained devoted to the minimal elegance of black-and-white photography, using the medium in part as an agent to explore certain paradoxes and binary relationships. In many of his works, for example, the distinction between male and female is problematized: in Ken and Tyler the male assumes the more traditionally femininized role of the nude, while Calla Lily takes an object used as a cipher of femininity and redeploys it as a male organ. The black male nude is often juxtaposed with an emphatically white object—a shroud, marble statuary, flowers, or, in the case of Ken and Tyler, another nude male.
Mapplethorpe’s sustained investigation of black-and-white photography may seem nostalgic next to the preference for color demonstrated by most artists working with photography in the 1980s. But his restricted palette, which recalls that of the modern masters whose work he emulated (especially George Platt Lynes), proved most effective at conveying the poetic and often melancholic quality of his subjects. At the height of his career, Mapplethorpe was stricken with AIDS. In contrast to earlier self-portraits in which Mapplethorpe assumed various personae such as rocker, leather fetishist, cross-dresser, fashion plate, and so on, Self-Portrait, taken about a year before his death, has a more somber mood. The photograph serves as a haunting document of the artist’s transitory existence.
Jeff Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai), 1993
Tate Gallery, London
Conceptual Photography
A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) is a large colour photograph displayed in a light box. It depicts a flat, open landscape in which four foreground figures are frozen as they respond to a sudden gust of wind. It is based on a woodcut, Travellers Caught in a Sudden breeze at Ejiri (c.1832) from a famous portfolio, The Thirty-six Views of Fuji, by the Japanese painter and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Wall photographed actors in a landscape located outside his home town, Vancouver, at times when similar weather conditions prevailed over a period of five months. He then collaged elements of the photograph digitally in order to achieve the desired composition. The result is a tableau which appears staged in the manner of a classical painting. As in Hokusai’s original, two men clutch their hats to their heads while a third stares up into the sky, where his trilby is being carried away by the wind. On the left, a woman’s body is halted in a state of shock, her head concealed by her scarf which has been blown around her face. A sheaf of papers in her hand has been dispersed by the gust and their trajectory, over the centre of the image, creates a sense of dynamic movement. Two narrow trees, also in the foreground, bend in the force of the wind, releasing dead leaves which mingle with the floating papers. In Hokusai’s image the landscape is a curving path through a reed-filled area next to a lake, leading towards Mount Fuji in the far distance. In Wall’s version, flat brown fields abut onto a canal. Small shacks, a row of telegraph poles and concrete pillars and piping evoke industrial farming. The unromantic nature of the landscape is reinforced by a small structure made of corrugated iron in the foreground. The pathway on which the figures stand is a dirt track extending along the front of the photograph from one side to the other. There is no sense of connection between the characters, whose position in the landscape appears incongruous. Two wear smart city clothes, adding to the sense of displacement.
Wall trained initially as a painter at the University of British Colombia, Vancouver. After completing an MA in 1970, he moved to London to undertake doctoral research in art history at the Courtauld Institute (completed 1973) and became interested in film, working on collaborative film projects and producing his own feature film scripts. In 1977, after a break of nearly seven years, he returned to the studio with an idea for a new, hybrid form of art. He explained:
I felt very strongly at that time that … painting as an art form did not encounter directly enough the problem of the technological product which had so extensively usurped its place and its function in the representation of everyday life … I remember being in a kind of crisis at the time, wondering what I would do. Just at that moment I saw an illuminated sign somewhere, and it struck me … that here was the perfect synthetic technology for me. It was not photography, it was not cinema, it was not painting, it was not propaganda, but it has strong associations with them all … It seemed to be the technique in which this problem could be expressed, maybe the only technique because of its fundamental spectacularity.
(Quoted in Barents, p.99.)
The large-scale photographic transparency displayed in a light box became Wall’s signature medium. In early works such as The Destroyed Room 1978 (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa) and Picture for Women 1979 (Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) Wall referred directly to old master paintings – The Death of Sardanapalus 1827 (Musée du Louvre, Paris) by Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) and A Bar at the Folies-Bergères 1881-2 (Courtauld Institute, London) by Edouard Manet (1832-83) respectively. Wall’s contemporary restaging added a subversive political undercurrent, resulting from the influence of feminism on his reading of theoretical texts. Subsequent works continue to represent the subjects of the traditional ‘painted drama’ – actors as models arranged in constructed tableaux - using contemporary technology and landscapes. They remain politically engaged. However, Wall quickly moved away from overt references to classical painting and began to depict scenes he had witnessed on the street. Instead of photographing these ‘spontaneous moments’ in the manner of reportage, Wall used them as starting points for his own image. In the late 1980s his subject matter began to shift from events he had seen to scenes from his imagination and dreams. At the same time the suggested narrative present in the earlier images was replaced by an allegorical dimension. In the early 1990s Wall began to use digital manipulation to collage photographic constituents, heightening the contrast between the real and the fictional. Collaging elements from a range of sources was standard practice in the making of a classical painting. For Wall, applying this technique to photographic material is a process akin to cinematography. In common with film, the image on a light box relies on a hidden space from which light emanates to be seen. Wall believes that this inaccessible space produces an ‘experience of two places, two worlds in one moment’, providing a source of disassociation, alienation and power (quoted in Barents, p.99).
Timothy O’Sullivan, Ancient Ruins in the
Canyon de Chelle, 1873
Alexander Rodchenko,
Assembling for a Demonstration, 1928
Russian Constructivism
n 1921 he became a member of the Productivist group, with Stepanova and Aleksei Gan which advocated the incorporation of art into everyday life. He gave up painting in order to concentrate on graphic design for posters, books, and films. He was deeply influenced by the ideas and practice of the filmmaker Dziga Vertov, with whom he worked intensively in 1922.
Impressed by the photomontage of the German Dadaists, Rodchenko began his own experiments in the medium, first employing found images in 1923, and from 1924 on shooting his own photographs as well.[3] His first published photomontage illustrated Mayakovsky’s poem, “About This”, in 1923.
From 1923 to 1928 Rodchenko collaborated closely with Mayakovsky (of whom he took several striking portraits) on the design and layout of LEF and Novy LEF, the publications of Constructivist artists. Many of his photographs appeared in or were used as covers for these journals.
Concerned with the need for analytical-documentary photo series, he often shot his subjects from odd angles—usually high above or down below—to shock the viewer and to postpone recognition. He wrote: “One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again.”
Photographs made from above or below or at odd angles are all around us today—in magazine and television ads, for example—but for Rodchenko and his contemporaries they were a fresh discovery. To Rodchenko they represented freedom and modernity because they invited people to see and think about familiar things in new ways. This courtyard certainly was familiar to Rodchenko; he made the picture from the balcony of his own Moscow apartment.
The photograph strikes a perfect balance between plunging depth and a flat pattern—two darker forms enclosing a lighter one—and between this simple pattern and the many irregular details that enliven it. Rodchenko’s control over the image is suggested by his particular point of view: to keep the balcony below him from intruding its dark form into the lighter courtyard, he was obliged to lean rather precariously over the railing of his own balcony.
Gerhard Richter, Atlas, panel no.11, 1960‐6
Conceptual Art
Gerhard Richter’s Atlas is a collection of photographs, newspaper cuttings and sketches that the artist has been assembling since the mid 1960s. A few years later, Richter started to arrange the materials on loose sheets of paper.
At present, Atlas consists of 802 sheets. Spanning a period of almost four decades, the individual sheets reflect different phases of Richter’s life and work:
Although Gerhard Richter had already begun collecting photographs and press cuttings, he started working on Atlas started in the early 1970s by arranging his own and other family photographs on paper.
Subsequent to these photographs, he included pictures taken from newspapers and magazines, some of which he used as source images for his 1960s photo paintings [e.g. Sheets: 5–15]. For the group of works 48 Portraits for example, sketches of how to hang the paintings can be found in addition to source images and installation views of the paintings at the Venice Biennale in 1972. [Sheets: 30–41]
Atlas offers insights into Richter’s artistic practice and his way of creating imagery. The Atlas sheets allow one to track how first experiments with Holocaust photographs eventually let to Black, Red, Gold, executed in colour-coated glass; the piece was commissioned by the Deutsche Bundestag (German Government) [Sheets: 635–655].
However, photographs taken by the artist himself are the main focus of Atlas. Extensive series of landscapes, still lifes and family photographs were meticulously arranged on the sheets. Some of these photographs were later used as source images for paintings or were included in his artist’s books, as can be seen Wald. The Atlas sheets 697–736 even include the complete layout of the artist’s book War Cut from 2004.
Gerhard Richter’s life and art interrelate in Atlas in a multilayered way: banal subjects such as a toilet roll [Sheet: 14] are juxtaposed with horrifying Holocaust images [Sheets: 16–20]; serial landscape pictures are lined up with intimate family photographs; colour samples attached to source images can be found as well as photographs showing museum installations. On the basis of its complexity and diversity, the importance of Atlas exceeds simple documentation, and Atlas is widely considered as an independent artwork.
Eugene Atget, Magasin, avenue des Gobelins,
1925
For more than three decades, Atget photographed Paris—its ancient streets and monuments and finely wrought details, its corners and hovels and modern commerce, and its outlying parks. He was not an artist in the conventional sense but a specialized craftsman, who supplied pictorial records of French culture to artists, antiquarians, and librarians. That, at least, is how he earned his living. Shortly before his death, however, other photographers began to recognize that Atget’s work is art in everything but name: full of wit, invention, beauty, wisdom, and the disciplined cultivation of original perceptions.
This picture of the front of a men’s clothing store belongs to a series of photographs of store windows that Atget made in the highly creative last years of his life. He easily could have minimized the reflection in the window, in which we see part of the Gobelins complex, where tapestries had been made for nearly three centuries. Instead, he welcomed it. Indelibly melding two images into one, the photograph simultaneously evokes France’s modern fashions and one of her most noble artistic traditions.
Louis‐Jacques‐Mandé Daguerre, Boulevard du Temple, Paris, c. 1838
Candida Höfer, BNF Paris VII, 1998
A former student of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Like other Becher students – Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth – Höfer’s work is known for technical perfection and a strictly conceptual approach.
Höfer began taking color photographs of interiors of public buildings, such as offices, banks, and waiting rooms, in 1979 while studying in Düsseldorf.[5] Her breakthrough to fame came with a series of photographs showing guest workers in Germany, after which she concentrated on the subjects “Interiors”, “Rooms” and “Zoological Gardens”. Höfer specialises in large-format photographs of empty interiors and social spaces that capture the “psychology of social architecture”. Her photographs are taken from a classic straight-on frontal angle or seek a diagonal in the composition.
Paul Strand, Blind, 1916
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
While he was in high school in New York City, Paul Strand studied photography with Lewis Hine, the social reformer and photographer. He also frequented Alfred Stieglitz’s Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession—later known as “291” for its address on Fifth Avenue—where he quickly absorbed the lessons of modern European art through the work of Picasso, Brancusi, and Cézanne, among others. In 1916, Strand made a series of candid street portraits with a handheld camera fitted with a special prismatic lens, which allowed him to point the camera in one direction while taking the photograph at a ninety-degree angle. This seminal image of a street beggar was published in 1917 as a gravure in Stieglitz’s magazine Camera Work and immediately became an icon of the new American photography, which integrated the objectivity of social documentation with the boldly simplified forms of modernism.
Richard Estes, Bus Reflections (Ansonia), 1972
Photorealistic Painting
The paintings generally consist of reflective, clean, and inanimate city and geometric landscapes. He is regarded as one of the founders of the international photo-realist movement of the late 1960s, with such painters as John Baeder, Ralph Goings, Chuck Close, and Duane Hanson. Author Graham Thompson wrote, “One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called super-realism or hyper-realism and painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs.”
Estes stayed true to the photographs: when his paintings included stickers, signs, and window displays, they were always depicted backwards, because of the reflection. His works rarely included litter or snow around the buildings, because he believed these details would detract attention away from the buildings themselves. The settings were always in the daytime, never the nighttime, suggesting “vacant and quiet Sunday mornings.” Estes’ works strive to create a three-dimensional feel on a two-dimensional canvas. His work has been considered using a variety of terms, ranging from super-realism, sharp-focus realism, neo-realism, photo-realism, to radical realism. The most frequented term is super-realism.
eginning around 1967, he began to paint storefronts and buildings with glass windows and, more importantly, the reflected images shown on these windows. The paintings were based on color photographs he would take, which trapped the evanescent nature of the reflections, which would change with the lighting and the time of day. Estes’ paintings were based on several photographs of the subject. He avoided using famous New York landmarks. His paintings provided fine detail that were invisible to the naked eye, and gave “depth and intensity of vision that only artistic transformation can achieve.”[
Henry Peach Robinson, Carolling, 1886‐87
English pictorialist photographer best known for his pioneering combination printing [1] - joining multiple negatives or prints to form a single image;[2] an early example of photomontage.
He advocated strongly for photography to be regarded as an art form.
Aaron Siskind, Chicago, 1949
Abstract Expressionist
merican photographer widely considered to be closely involved with, if not a part of, the abstract expressionist movement.[1] In his autobiography he wrote that he began his foray into photography when he received a camera for a wedding gift and began taking pictures on his honeymoon. He quickly realized the artistic potential this offered. He worked in both New York City and Chicago.
Siskind’s work focuses on the details of nature and architecture. He presents them as flat surfaces to create a new image out of them, which, he claimed, stands independent of the original subject.
Early in his career Siskind was a member of the New York Photo League. Working with that group, Siskind produced several significant socially conscious series of images in the 1930s. Among them the “Harlem Document” remains the most famous.[2] He originally was a grade school English teacher in the New York Public School System.
In 1950 Siskind met Harry Callahan when both were teaching at Black Mountain College in the summer. Later, Callahan persuaded Siskind to join him as part of the faculty of the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago (founded by László Moholy-Nagy as the New Bauhaus). In 1971 he followed Callahan (who had left in 1961) to teach for the rest of his life at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Lewis Hine
Child in Carolina Cotton Mill, 1908
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
American photographer. Following several years as a factory worker in Oshkosh, and a short period at the University of Chicago, where he studied sociology and pedagogy (1900–01), he went to New York to teach at the Ethical Culture School (1901–8). There he acquired a camera as a teaching tool and soon set up a club and ran classes at the school, while improving his own skills as a self-taught photographer. In 1904 Hine’s interest in social issues led him to document newly arrived immigrants at Ellis Island as a way of demonstrating their common humanity, for example Young Russian Jewess at Ellis Island (1905; see Rosenblum, Rosenblum and Trachtenberg, p. 43). Thereafter he sought to demonstrate the efficacy of the photograph as a truthful witness, accepting commissions from social-work agencies. Towards the end of the first decade he became official photographer on the Pittsburgh Survey, a seminal investigation of America’s archetypal industrial city, producing such images as Tenement House and Yard (1907–8; Rosenblum, Rosenblum and Trachtenberg, p. 56).
This experience, coupled with the fact that half-tone process printing had made photographic reproduction more accessible to popular and specialized periodicals, impelled Hine to leave teaching to devote himself entirely to the documentation of social conditions. During almost a decade as staff photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), he travelled throughout the USA photographing child workers in mills, mines, on the streets and in fields and canneries. These images, for example Breaker Boys in Coal Shute, South Pittston, Pennsylvania, January, 1911 (see Rosenblum, Rosenblum and Trachtenberg, p. 59), were used by the NCLC in periodicals, pamphlets, exhibitions (for a time designed by Hine), and as lantern slides for public lectures in an effort to bring about legislation regulating child labour. Hine’s photographs, however, transcend basic documentation in that he sought out poses, facial expressions and gestures that not only would be perceived as truthful but would also stir the viewer’s sympathy and spur them to action.
Andre Kertesz, Distortion No. 4, 1933
Photojournalism
A Hungarian-born photographer known for his groundbreaking contributions to photographic composition and the photo essay. In the early years of his career, his then-unorthodox camera angles and style prevented his work from gaining wider recognition. Kertész never felt that he had gained the worldwide recognition he deserved. Today he is considered one of the seminal figures of photojournalism.
In 1933 Kertész was commissioned for the series, Distortion, about 200 photographs of Najinskaya Verackhatz and Nadia Kasine, two models portrayed nude and in various poses, with their reflections caught in a combination of distortion mirrors, similar to a carnival’s house of mirrors. In some photographs, only certain limbs or features were visible in the reflection. Some images also appeared in 2 March issue of the “girly magazine” Le Sourire and in 15 September 1933 issue of Arts et métiers graphiques.[1][4] Later that year, Kertész published the book Distortions, a collection of the work.
This continued until much later in his life, when Kertész stopped accepting commissions. He served briefly in World War I and moved to Paris in 1925, then the artistic capital of the world, against the wishes of his family. In Paris he worked for France’s first illustrated magazine called VU. Involved with many young immigrant artists and the Dada movement, he achieved critical and commercial success.
Due to German persecution of the Jews and the threat of World War II, Kertész decided to emigrate to the United States in 1936, where he had to rebuild his reputation through commissioned work.
Kertész was among numerous Hungarian artists who emigrated during these decades, including François Kollar, Robert Capa, Emeric Fehér, Brassaï, and Julia Bathory. Man Ray, Germaine Krull and Lucien Aigner also emigrated to Paris during this period.
Visiting his sculptor friends, he was fascinated by the Cubism movement. He created photo portraits of painters Piet Mondrian[10] and Marc Chagall, the writer Colette,[4] and film-maker Sergei Eisenstein.[4]
H. Bechard, Egyptian Peasant Girl, 1880
There are quite a number of photographs taken in Egypt that have a signature “H. Bechard” in the negative. Recent research is starting to question who this was. It may be that “Henri Bechard” never existed and H. Bechard” refers to “Hippolyte Bechard” who was the brother of Émile Bechard. “Hippolyte Bechard” never visited Egypt but may have been responsible for printing and/or marketing his brother’s Egyptian photographs in France.
The Middle East and North Africa—the “Orient” to 19th-century European travelers—played crucial roles in the development of photography as both a new technology and an art form. At the same time, photography was pivotal in developing and maintaining Europe’s distinctively Orientalist vision of the region. Orientalist photographs permit research into the role of photography in shaping European and non-European views of the Middle East and North Africa; further, attention to the local artists, patrons, audiences, and collectors of these photographs troubles the coherence of the “Orient”—both geographically and culturally.
Attending to the exchanges, tensions, and collaborations visible in Orientalist photography enables a greater understanding of the history of photography, the role of cultural documentation both inside the borders of the “Orient” and beyond, and evolving perceptions about the Middle East. However, despite the importance of such images, there is a dearth of scholarly publishing on Orientalist photography. In recent years, essays have addressed some of the aesthetic and political dimensions of these photographs, while numerous exhibition catalogs engage with these photographs in an uncritical fashion.
Emile Bechard is best known for presenting the 1878 Universal Exhibition in Paris a set of views of Egypt, which earned him a gold medal. They were published in 1887 by the photomechanical process Quinsac in a giant portfolio of one hundred and fifty plates, with an introductory text Palmieri. The variety of topics, the quality of the reproductions, the large size of the album are a milestone in the literature on the East. Item: Egypt and Nubia: large monumental album, historical, architectural, Cairo, É. Bechard and A. Palmieri, 1887.
Margaret Bourke‐White, Fort Peck Dam,
Montana, 1936
Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966
James Van Der Zee, Harlem Billiard Room, n. d.
Eadweard Muybridge, Horse in Motion, 1878
Albert Renger‐Patzsch,
Irons Used in Shoemaking, Fagus Works, c. 1925
New Objectivity
A second book followed in 1928, Die Welt ist schön (The World is Beautiful). This, his best-known book, is a collection of one hundred of his photographs in which natural forms, industrial subjects and mass-produced objects are presented with the clarity of scientific illustrations. The book’s title was chosen by his publisher; Renger-Patzsch’s preferred title for the collection was Die Dinge (“Things”).
In its sharply focused and matter-of-fact style his work exemplifies the esthetic of The New Objectivity that flourished in the arts in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Like Edward Weston in the United States, Renger-Patzsch believed that the value of photography was in its ability to reproduce the texture of reality, and to represent the essence of an object.
Hans Bellmer, La Poupee (The Doll), 1935
Manoukian Collection, Paris
Surrealism
The female mannequin in this photograph is utterly fragmented. Decapitated and dismembered, the figure has a glass eye placed nowhere near the head, legs splayed, and a tousled wig resting at the juncture between knee, head, and hip. This is one in a series of Hans Bellmer photographs that were published in the Surrealist publication Minotaure in 1934 depicting a female mannequin (La Poupée) in various stages of construction, from wood-and-metal skeleton to the fleshy plaster and papier-mâché shell. A system of ball joints allowed Bellmer to dismantle and reassemble the doll in many combinations. The doll was a lifetime obsession for the artist, who explored similar imagery in his drawings and sculptures.
Bellmer began creating and photographing these disturbing dolls in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler assumed power in Germany. Many have interpreted them as acts of political defiance against the ideals and social norms promoted by the Nazis, and expressions of the personal outrage he felt towards his father, who joined the Nazi party. Bellmer himself stated, “If the origin of my work is scandalous, it is because for me, the world is a scandal.”
German artist, best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. Historians of art and photography also consider him a Surrealist photographer.
Bellmer’s 1934 anonymous book, The Doll (Die Puppe), produced and published privately in Germany, contains 10 black-and-white photographs of Bellmer’s first doll arranged in a series of “tableaux vivants” (living pictures). The book was not credited to him, as he worked in isolation, and his photographs remained almost unknown in Germany. Yet Bellmer’s work was eventually declared “degenerate” by the Nazi Party, and he was forced to flee Germany to France in 1938. Bellmer’s work was welcomed in the Parisian art culture of the time, especially the Surrealists around André Breton, because of the references to female beauty and the sexualization of the youthful form. His photographs were published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure, 5 December 1934 under the title “Poupée, variations sur le montage d’une mineure articulée” (The Doll, Variations on the Assemblage of an Articulated Minor)
Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock painting
Autumn Rhythm, 1950
German-born photographer. Namuth specialized in portraiture, photographing many artists, including abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. His photos of Pollock at work in his studio increased Pollock’s fame and recognition and led to a greater understanding of his work and techniques. Namuth used his outgoing personality and persistence to photograph many important artistic figures at work in their studios.
Namuth photographed many other painters such as Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, and Mark Rothko and architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and Louis Kahn. Namuth focused on his rapport with his subjects, getting many reclusive figures such as Clyfford Still to agree to be photographed. Namuth’s work not only captured his subjects in their studios with their works, but also captured the relationship between photographer and subject as well as the subjects’ levels of self-consciousness. Besides famous art figures, Namuth photographed the Mam people of Todos Santos, whose native lifestyles were being overrun by Western influences.
Hans Namuth was not initially interested in the work of Jackson Pollock, but was convinced by his teacher Alexey Brodovitch that Pollock was an important painter.[1] In July 1950, Namuth approached Pollock and asked to photograph the artist working in his studio. Pollock agreed, encouraged by his wife, Lee Krasner, who was aware of the importance of media coverage.[1] The resulting images helped to demystify Pollock’s famous “drip” technique of painting, revealing it to be a deliberative process rather than a random splashing of paint.[4] They “helped transform Pollock from a talented, cranky loner into the first media-driven superstar of American contemporary art, the jeans-clad, chain-smoking poster boy of abstract expressionism,” according to acclaimed culture critic Ferdinand Protzman.[5] Not satisfied with black and white stills, Namuth wanted to create a color film that managed to focus on Pollock and his painting at the same time, partially because he found more interest in Pollock’s image than in his art.[6] His solution was to have Pollock paint on a large sheet of glass as Namuth filmed from underneath the work.[4][7] As Namuth could not afford professional lighting, the film was shot outside Pollock’s Long Island home.[7] This documentary (co-produced with Paul Falkenberg) is considered one of the most influential for artists.[
These photos were first published in 1951 in Portfolio, a journal edited by Alexey Brodovitch and Franz Zachary.[6] After the death of Pollock in 1956, Namuth’s photos grew in popularity and were often used in articles about the painter in place of Pollock’s artwork itself.[6] Art historian Barbara Rose states that the photographs changed art by focusing on the creation of art rather than the final product alone.[6] Younger artists such as Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, and Robert Morris were able not only to view Pollock’s paintings, but, with Namuth’s images, to see Pollock in the act of painting, giving rise to the popularity of Process Art.[6] These photos have also allowed art historians to dissect the details of Pollock’s method. For example, art historian Pepe Karmel found that Pollock’s painting in Namuth’s first black-and-white film began with several careful drippings forming two humanoid figures and a wolf before being covered beneath several layers of paint.[6]
Dorothea Lange
Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California
1936, Farm Security Administration, Library
of Congress
Harry Callahan, Cape Cod, 1972
Callahan left almost no written records—no diaries, letters, scrapbooks or teaching notes. His technical photographic method was to go out almost every morning, walk the city he lived in and take numerous pictures. He then spent almost every afternoon making proof prints of that day’s best negatives. Yet, for all his photographic activity, Callahan, at his own estimation, produced no more than half a dozen final images a year.
He photographed his wife and daughter and the streets, scenes and buildings of cities where he lived, showing a strong sense of line and form, and light and darkness. Even prior to the birth his daughter showed up in photographs of Eleanor’s pregnancy. From 1948 to 1953 Eleanor, and sometimes Barbara, were shown out in the landscape as a tiny counterpoint to large expanses of park, skyline or water.
He also worked with multiple exposures. Callahan’s work was a deeply personal response to his own life. He encouraged his students to turn their cameras on their own lives, leading by example. Callahan photographed his wife over a period of fifteen years, as his prime subject. Eleanor was essential to his art from 1947 to 1960. He photographed her everywhere - at home, in the city streets, in the landscape; alone, with their daughter, in black and white and in color, nude and clothed, distant and close. He tried several technical experiments - double and triple exposure, blurs, large and small format film.
Walker Evans,
Miner’s Home, West Virginia, 1935
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.
Ansel Adams
Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite
National Park
1927
This beautiful photograph is from Ansel Adams’ first portfolio “Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras”, consisting of 18 prints, privately published in late summer of 1927. Although the print is vintage and over 75 years old, it looks like it was made yesterday.
This portfolio was quite successful, enough so that Adams could begin his photography pursuits full time, leaving behind his previous aspirations of being a classical pianist. He used the term “Parmelian” rather than, say, “photographic” to glamorize the standard silver gelatin process. The extremely thin paper is Kodak Vitava Athena Parchment T.
Adams wrote to his new wife, “My photographs have now reached a stage when they are worthy of the world’s critical examination. I have suddenly come upon a new style which I believe will place my work equal to anything of its kind. I have always favored the effect of engravings–the neat, clean, clear-cut technique fascinates me. In this new effect I will try to combine the two processes of photography and the press into a result that will be exceptionally beautiful and unique…..”
Thomas Struth, Museum of Modern Art I, 1994
A range of different experiences contributed to the conception of a major new series of large-scale colour works that Struth titled Museum Photographs. His experiences living in Naples and Rome, the proximity to a culture where painting was intimately connected to religion, were a catalyst for a reflection on the different function of art in a more secular world and the ways in which historic paintings are experienced in museums today. Although most of Struth’s photographs through the 1980s pictured traces and signs of human activity, with the exception of a few single and family portraits, they rarely pictured people themselves.
In pictorial terms, a portrait Struth had made of Giles Robertson at his home in Edinburgh in 1987 was significant. He photographed the art historian looking at a book with three historic paintings from the 17th or 18th century on the wall in the background. Struth recalls “this suggested to me the potential for including a marriage of a contemporary moment and a historical moment in one photographic plane.” The photograph of The Restorers at the former refectory of San Lorenzo Maggiore in Naples encouraged Struth to explore further the possibilities of pictures of people with pictures in them and Giulia Zorzetti with a painting by Francesco de Mura established the possibility for a different scale of work.
Helen Levitt, New York, 1940
During the early 1940’s Helen Levitt made many photographs on the streets of New York. Her photographs were not intended to tell a story or document a social thesis; she worked in poor neighborhoods because there were people there, and a street life that was richly sociable and visually interesting.
Levitt’s pictures report no unusual happenings; most of them show the games of children, the errands and conversations of the middle-aged, and the observant waiting of the old. What is remarkable about the photographs is that these immemorially routine acts of life, practiced everywhere and always, are revealed as being full of grace, drama, humor, pathos, and surprise, and also that they are filled with the qualities of art, as though the street were a stage, and its people were all actors and actresses, mimes, orators, and dancers.
Some might look at these photographs today, and, recognizing the high art in them, wonder what has happened to the quality of common life. The question suggests that Levitt’s pictures are an objective record of how things were in New York’s neighborhoods in the 1940’s.
She associated with Walker Evans in 1938-39. She enjoyed early success. In July 1939, the new photography section of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City included Levitt’s work in its inaugural exhibition.[5] In 1943, Nancy Newhall curated her first solo exhibition “Helen Levitt: Photographs of Children” there. Her next major shows were in the 1960s; Amanda Hopkinson suggests that this second wave of recognition was related to the feminist rediscovery of women’s creative achievements.
Mathew Brady, Dead Soldier, Civil War, c. 1863
Father of photojournalism
Berenice Abbott, New York at Night, 1933
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Straight Photography
Abbott went to Europe in 1921, spending two years studying sculpture in Paris and Berlin.[1] During this time, she adopted the French spelling of her first name, “Berenice,” at the suggestion of Djuna Barnes.[7] In addition to her work in the visual arts, Abbott published poetry in the experimental literary journal transition.[8] Abbott first became involved with photography in 1923, when Man Ray, looking for somebody who knew nothing about photography and thus would do as he said, hired her as a darkroom assistant at his portrait studio in Montparnasse. Later she would write: “I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else.” Ray was impressed by her darkroom work and allowed her to use his studio to take her own photographs.[9] In 1926, she had her first solo exhibition (in the gallery “Au Sacre du Printemps”) and started her own studio on the rue du Bac. After a short time studying photography in Berlin, she returned to Paris in 1927 and started a second studio, on the rue Servandoni.
In 1925, Man Ray introduced her to Eugène Atget’s photographs. She became a great admirer of Atget’s work, and managed to persuade him to sit for a portrait in 1927. He died shortly thereafter. While the government acquired much of Atget’s archive — Atget had sold 2,621 negatives in 1920, and his friend and executor André Calmettes sold 2,000 more immediately after his death[13] — Abbott was able to buy the remainder in June 1928, and quickly started work on its promotion. An early tangible result was the 1930 book Atget, photographe de Paris, in which she is described as photo editor. Abbott’s work on Atget’s behalf would continue until her sale of the archive to the Museum of Modern Art in 1968. In addition to her book The World of Atget (1964), she provided the photographs for A Vision of Paris (1963), published a portfolio, Twenty Photographs, and wrote essays.
Using this large format camera, Abbott photographed New York City with the diligence and attention to detail she had so admired in Eugène Atget. Her work has provided a historical chronicle of many now-destroyed buildings and neighborhoods of Manhattan.
Abbott worked on her New York project independently for six years, unable to get financial support from organizations (such as the Museum of the City of New York), foundations (such as the Guggenheim Foundation), or even individuals. She supported herself with commercial work and teaching at the New School of Social Research beginning in 1933.
In 1935, however, Abbott was hired by the Federal Art Project (FAP)[1] as a project supervisor for her “Changing New York” project. She continued to take the photographs of the city, but she had assistants to help her both in the field and in the office. This arrangement allowed Abbott to devote all her time to producing, printing, and exhibiting her photographs. By the time she resigned from the FAP in 1939, she had produced 305 photographs that were then deposited at the Museum of the City of New York.
Robert Capa, Normandy Invasion, June 6, 1944, 1944
Hungarian war photographer and photojournalist who covered five different wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and the First Indochina War. He documented the course of World War II in London, North Africa, Italy, the Battle of Normandy on Omaha Beach and the liberation of Paris.
In 1947, Capa co-founded Magnum Photos in Paris with David “Chim” Seymour, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and William Vandivert. The organization was the first cooperative agency for worldwide freelance photographers.
At the start of World War II, Capa was in New York City, having moved there from Paris to look for work, and to escape Nazi persecution. During the war, Capa was sent to various parts of the European Theatre on photography assignments. He first photographed for Collier’s Weekly, before switching to Life after he was fired by Collier’s. He was the only “enemy alien” photographer for the Allies. During July and August 1943 Capa was in Sicily with American troops, near Sperlinga, Nicosia and Troina. The Americans were advancing toward Troina, a strategically located town which controlled the road to Messina (Sicily’s main port to the mainland). The town was being fiercely defended by the Germans, in an attempt to evacuate all German troops. Robert Capa’s pictures show the Sicilian population’s sufferings under German bombing and their happiness when American soldiers arrive. One notable photograph from this period shows a Sicilian peasant indicating the direction in which German troops had gone, near Sperlinga. On 7 October 1943 Robert Capa was in Naples with Life reporter Will Lang Jr., and there he photographed the Naples post office bombing.
Probably his most famous images, The Magnificent Eleven, are a group of photos of D-Day. Taking part in the Allied invasion, Capa was with the second wave of American troops on Omaha Beach. The men storming Omaha Beach faced some of the heaviest resistance from German troops within the bunkers of the Atlantikwall. While under constant fire, Capa took 106 pictures, but all but eleven were destroyed in a photo lab accident back in London.
Brassaï, Nude, 1933
One of the most radically abstract of Brassaï’s nudes, this image was published in 1933 in the inaugural issue of the avant-garde magazine Minotaure. With the figure’s head and legs cut off by the picture’s edges, the twisting, truncated torso seems to float in space like an apparition—an ambiguous, organic form with an uncanny resemblance to a phallus. This transformation of the female figure into a fetish object is a hallmark of Surrealism that reflects the important influence of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory on European art of the early twentieth century.
Hungarian photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker who rose to international fame in France in the 20th century. He was one of the numerous Hungarian artists who flourished in Paris beginning between the World Wars. In the early 21st century, the discovery of more than 200 letters and hundreds of drawings and other items from the period 1940–1984 has provided scholars with material for understanding his later life and career.
Brassai photographed many of his artist friends, including Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, and several of the prominent writers of his time, such as Jean Genet and Henri Michaux.
Young Hungarian artists continued to arrive in Paris through the 1930s and the Hungarian circle absorbed most of them. Kertèsz emigrated to New York in 1936. Brassai befriended many of the new arrivals, including Ervin Marton, a nephew of Tihanyi, whom he had been friends with since 1920. Marton developed his own reputation in street photography in the 1940s and 1950s. Brassaï continued to earn a living with commercial work, also taking photographs for the United States magazine Harper’s Bazaar.[6] He was a founding member of the Rapho agency, created in Paris by Charles Rado in 1933.
Tina Modotti,
Number 29: Hands of Marionette Player, 1929
The Museum of Modern Art, New YorkItalian photographer, active in Mexico. She emigrated to the USA in 1918 and met Edward Weston in 1921, moving with him to Mexico City in 1923. There he taught her photography. Modotti’s early platinum prints were close-up photographs of still-lifes such as wine glasses, folds of fabric or flowers, as in Calla Lilies (c. 1927; see Constantine, p. 98). She also made prints of finely composed architectural spaces. By 1927, when she joined the Communist Party, she was starting to incorporate more overt social content in her work. She also gave up making expensive and time-consuming platinum prints in favour of silver gelatin prints.
Modotti photographed political events, for example Diego Rivera Addressing a Meeting of the International Red Aid, Mexico (c. 1928; see Constantine, p. 117), as well as bullfights and the circus; she focused on the proud faces and hands of mothers, children, artisans and labourers. She was deported from Mexico for her political activities in 1929; during the next decade she dedicated herself to revolutionary and anti-fascist activities in Russia and Spain and took few photographs. In 1939 she returned to Mexico City. Although Modotti photographed from 1923–32, her work is relatively scarce. There is a large collection at MOMA, New York.
Bernd and Hilla Becher, Pitheads, 1974
Tate London
Husband and wife team Bernd and Hilla Becher began photographing old industrial sites in the 1950s, and described their subjects as ‘buildings where anonymity is accepted to be the style’. The coal bunkers in these photographs were located in Germany, France and Britain, while the photographs of pitheads were all taken at British collieries between 1965 and 1973. Within a few years of completing this work, almost all of the structures had been demolished.
Bernd and Hilla Becher met while they were working for an advertising agency in Düsseldorf in the late 1950s. Bernd had trained as a painter and lithographer, and Hilla had studied photography. Working collaboratively, they began to document the often overlooked architecture of industrial sites around Europe and the U.S., taking photographs of structures such as cooling towers, lime kilns, pitheads and silos, many of which were soon to become obsolete.
They usually take several views to provide a clear and objective documentation of each structure. The prints are then grouped according to certain categories and are often arranged in a grid to highlight typological similarities and differences. Bernd Becher taught at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, and their work has become an important influence for many of his former students, including Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth.
Robert Frank, Political Rally, Chicago, 1956,
from The Americans 1958
The Americans, by Robert Frank, was a highly influential book in post-war American photography. It was first published in France in 1958, and the following year in the United States. The photographs were notable for their distanced view of both high and low strata of American society. The book as a whole created a complicated portrait of the period that was viewed as skeptical of contemporary values and evocative of ubiquitous loneliness.
With the aid of his major artistic influence, the photographer Walker Evans, Frank secured a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1955 to travel across the United States and photograph its society at all strata. He took his family along with him for part of his series of road trips over the next two years, during which time he took 28,000 shots. Only 83 of those were finally selected by him for publication in The Americans.
Though sales were also poor at first, Kerouac’s introduction helped it reach a larger audience because of the popularity of the Beat phenomenon. Over time and through its inspiration of later artists, The Americans became considered a seminal work in American photography and art history, and the work with which Frank is most clearly identified.
Frank’s style—seemingly loose, casual compositions, with often rough, blurred, out-of-focus foregrounds and tilted horizons—was just as controversial and influential as his subject matter.
Louise Lawler
Pollock and Tureen, Arranged by Mr. and Mrs.
Burton Tremaine, Connecticut, 1984
Institutional Critique
Lawler is a spy in the house of art, casting sidelong glances at modernist masterpieces as they wend their way from the pristine white cubes of galleries and the carpeted walls of auction previews to museum storerooms, corporate boardrooms, and cloistered private homes around the world. Her career began in the early 1980s, at the precise moment when the art market began to partake of the speculative frenzy of Wall Street, and pictures provided instant cultural capital for their owners. In its exposure of the art world’s usually invisible machinery of possession, display, and circulation, Lawler’s work fits comfortably within the tradition of institutional critique that began with Duchamp’s readymades and continues through the postwar period in the work of Hans Haacke and Daniel Buren. Yet, her effortlessly cool, deliberately neutral images are never cheap shots or tendentious sermons and, as Walker Evans once wrote of Diane Arbus, there is more of wonder than sociopolitical conviction in her gaze.
Lawler’s greatest coup came in 1984, when she was granted full access to the Connecticut home of twentieth-century collectors Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine (as it turns out, just a few years before much of their collection was dispersed at Christie’s). As sometimes happens in the history of photography, the artist serendipitously discovered in one place the crux of her entire project. Working in available light with a 35mm camera, she found treasures everywhere she looked, such as this decorator’s duet between the tortured gestural slashes of a late Jackson Pollock and the filigree of a soup bowl. One of the highlights of this artist’s most important series, Pollock and Tureen is simultaneously trenchant and poignant—a cutting comment laced with the love of an undercover aesthete.
Bill Brandt, Portrait of a Young Girl, Eaton
Place, London, 1955
Bill Brandt (1904 – 1983) was an influential British photographer and photojournalist known for his high-contrast images of British society and his distorted nudes and landscapes.
Brandt assisted Man Ray in Paris for several months in 1930. Here he witnessed the heyday of Surrealist film and grasped the new poetic possibilities of photography.
Some early photographs are modelled on works by the French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927). Atget made a living selling his photographs, mainly of old Paris, to painters, designers and libraries. In the 1920s he was taken up by Man Ray and other Surrealists as a major photographer in his own right.
In addition to Surrealism, early Brandt photographs experiment with angular modernist styles and night photography. He travelled in continental Europe with Eva Boros, whom he had met in the Vienna portrait studio. They married in Barcelona in 1932. Shortly after, the first collection of Brandt’s photographs were published.
Born in Hamburg, Germany, son of a British father and German mother, Brandt grew up during World War I. Shortly after the war, he contracted tuberculosis and spent much of his youth in a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland. He traveled to Vienna to undertake a course of treatment for TB by psychoanalysis. He was in any case pronounced cured and began an apprenticeship in a portrait studio in the city. When Ezra Pound visited a mutual friend, Eugenie Schwarzwald, Brandt made his portrait. In appreciation, Pound offered Brandt an introduction to Man Ray, in whose Paris studio, Brandt would assist in 1930.
In 1933 Brandt moved to London and began documenting all levels of British society. This kind of documentary was uncommon at that time. Brandt published two books showcasing this work, The English at Home (1936) and A Night in London (1938). He was a regular contributor to magazines such as Lilliput, Picture Post, and Harper’s Bazaar. He documented the Underground bomb shelters of London during The Blitz in 1940, commissioned by the Ministry of Information.
During World War II, Brandt focused every kind of subject - as can be seen in his “Camera in London” (1948) but excelled in portraiture and landscape. To mark the arrival of peace in 1945 he began a celebrated series of nudes. His major books from the post-war period are Literary Britain (1951), and Perspective of Nudes (1961), followed by a compilation of the best of all areas of his work, Shadow of Light (1966). Brandt became Britain’s most influential and internationally admired photographer of the 20th century. Many of his works have important social commentary but also poetic resonance. His landscapes and nudes are dynamic, intense and powerful, often using wide-angle lenses and distortion
Andre Disderi,
Portrait of Empress Eugenie, 1858
Early Portraiture
André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, former merchant, actor, and daguerreotypist, patented his invention, the carte-de-visite (visiting card) photograph, in 1854. At nine-by-six centimeters, cartes were primarily portraits, about the size of a conventional calling card and soon just as popular. Disdéri established his photographic practice with the manufacture of these tiny photographs; he divided a single glass plate negative to make ten different exposures and then printed them simultaneously. By 1862 he had expanded his operation to include a second studio in Paris, devoted entirely to equestrian portraits. Studios in London followed, and Disdéri, ever the showman and enterprising businessman, developed numerous photographic gimmicks to keep business afloat.
The carte-de-visite was popular until the late 1860s, when it was replaced by the larger cabinet card format. Disdéri photographed views of the siege of Paris in 1870 and 1871, but the changed political and social climate contributed to the demise of his studio business. Following several bankruptcies, he moved to Nice in 1877 and ran a series of photography studios there. He returned to Paris in the late 1880s and died in an institution.
The last Empress consort of the French from 1853 to 1871 as the wife of Napoleon III, Emperor of the French.
Emily Jacir, Munir, from the series Where We Come From, 2001‐03
Whitney Museum of American Art
Julia Margaret Cameron, Portrait of Sir John
Herschel 1867
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Cameron’s technique was unorthodox. She purposely avoided the perfect resolution and minute detail that glass negatives permitted, opting instead for carefully directed light, soft focus, and long exposures (counted in minutes, when others did all they could to reduce exposure times to a matter of seconds). No commercial portrait photographer of the 1860s, for instance, would have portrayed Sir John Herschel (1792–1871)—the nation’s preeminent scientist and mathematician, considered the equal of Sir Isaac Newton—as Cameron did in 1867. In Cameron’s portraits, there are no classical columns, no piles of weighty volumes, no scientific attributes, no academic pose, for Herschel was to her more than a renowned scientist; he was “as a Teacher and High Priest,” an “illustrious and revered as well as beloved friend” whom she had known for thirty years. It was he who had written to Cameron in Calcutta of Talbot’s invention when the art of photography was in its infancy; and it was he who sent her the first photographs she had ever seen—scientific discoveries that were “water to the parched lips of the starved,” she recalled. And so her image of him would be no stiff and formal effigy; she had him wash and tousle his hair to catch the light, draped him in black, brought her camera directly in front of his face, and photographed him emerging from the darkness like a vision of an Old Testament prophet. Her portrait is direct, unmediated by convention, recording faithfully, she hoped, “the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man.”
British photographer. She became known for her portraits of celebrities of the time, and for photographs with Arthurian and other legendary or heroic themes.
Thomas Demand, Room, 1996
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Conceptual Photography
Thomas Demand makes full-scale paper and cardboard recreations of seemingly mundane scenarios, and then photographs them. The scenes, typically devoid of human presence, appear banal but often reference an event of historical or sociopolitical significance.
Room (Zimmer) is based on an unauthorized photograph of the New York City hotel room where L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Church of Scientology, lived in during the early 1970s. In this small and unkempt room, Hubbard wrote Dianetics, the book that was the basis for the controversial religion of Scientology.
At first, Demand’s models seem an accurate depiction of each location, but closer examination reveals a lack of details in the paper fabrications. This tension in Demand’s photographs raises questions about whether photography is a tool for capturing reality or whether photographs capture an interpretation of reality based on prior knowledge or experience. “It’s not about the real place,” Demand has said. “It’s much more about what we have seen as the real place.”1
Andreas Gursky, Salerno, 1990
At their best, Gursky’s photographs are enormous, suffocating presences which transport the viewer deep into their impossible perfection, transforming the everyday into the monumental.
Similarly, Gursky’s photograph of Salerno might be seen as a Claude for the 1990s, complete with artfully layered landscape. But instead of the Embarkation for Cythera on some ethereal barque, Gursky offers us the promised departure of thousands of new motorcars, bound for the towns and villages of provincial Italy.
Sometimes Gursky’s parallel lines come from familiar scenes of contemporary life, like store shelves and divided highways. Sometimes they are uncanny, as in “Engadine” (1995), where a trail of tiny skiers runs parallel to a vast mountain range, each echoing the other as they stretch from one frame of the photo to the other. Sometimes the lines are constructed and intentional, as in “EM, Arena, Amsterdam I” (2000), which offers up a painted soccer field, or “Untitled XII” (1999), which gives us a vastly magnified image of a leaf from a printed book, where the lines of words trace perfect parallels across the page. But at other times Gursky’s parallels seem eerily found or given, as in “Rhein II” (1999), which shows us a slice of the river running in a single straight path and flanked by green lawns in such perfectly straight lines that nature itself defies belief. Or the brilliant “Salerno” (1990), where a view of a harbor becomes mysteriously ordered and arranged in juxtaposed planes: first rows of colored cars, then rows of packing crates, then rows of houses, and finally rows of mountains and the sky. Nature and industry, sports and government, sneakers and mountain ranges, mundane and transcendent–all resolve into the twinned tracks of the parallel in Gursky’s glossy universe.
Nadar, Sarah Bernhardt, 1864
The extraordinary actress Sarah Bernhardt was about twenty when she posed for Nadar and had barely begun her long and phenomenally successful career. Nadar’s photograph was probably the first of innumerable images by painters, photographers, sculptors, and graphic artists. At a time when Nadar was preoccupied with ballooning and willing to leave most of the portrait work to studio assistants, Bernhardt drew him back into the studio to make touching images of her delicate face. Here he wrapped her with a great sweep of velvet that bared one shoulder but showed no more of her slender body, centering all attention on her head, which is seen nearly in profile.
The young woman with the supple shoulders and the golden voice became an incomparable and indomitable actress, famous first in France and then throughout the world for playing heroines-and heroes-in a wide variety of plays. Bernhardt’s celebrity and the enormous attention she attracted everywhere she went anticipated the phenomenon of late twentieth-century media stars.
French photographer, caricaturist, journalist, novelist, and balloonist.
Bruce Nauman, Self‐Portrait as a Fountain, 1966‐70
Since the mid-1960s, Bruce Nauman has questioned traditional ways of making art, rethinking what an artist might do and what art can be. The way he approaches art differs from artists who go to their studios to make paintings or sculptures. Instead, Nauman thinks of art as a type of research or investigation. He is interested in the ways that ideas and activities can be transformed into works of art. Nauman has often used his own body in his work and he has recorded his activities in his studio with photography and video. Self Portrait as a Fountain is part of a series of eleven photographs about language, puns, and humor.
This photograph shows the artist doing a kind of performance in which he is the work of art! His raised arms and open hands imitate the pose of nude statues often found on decorative fountains. Here, Nauman also acts like a fountain by sending a jet of water from his mouth into the air.
American sculptor, photographer and performance artist working with video. He studied mathematics and later art with Italo Scanga (b 1932) at the University of Wisconsin (1960–64). At the University of California at Davis (1965–6) his teachers included William T. Wiley (b 1937) and Robert Arneson (b 1930). Upon graduation (MFA, 1966) he exhibited enigmatic, fibreglass sculpture. Nauman himself was already the subject of his art. Although he was a formidable draughtsman, Nauman’s neon works, films, videotapes, performances, installations, sculpted body parts and word plays at first seemed frustratingly art-less. His was an art of exploration: he used himself, his person and his witty brand of inquiry to examine the parameters of art and the role of the artist. This questioning elicited strong emotional, physical and intellectual responses, and it often resulted in objects of formal beauty. Neon Templates of the Left Half of my Body, Taken at Ten Inch Intervals (1966; priv. col., see 1972 exh. cat., no. 17) and the colour photograph Self Portrait as a Fountain (1966; New York, Whitney) show him first extracting strangely compelling neon forms from the contours of his body and, in the latter, whimsically challenging preconceived notions of the ‘fountain’.
Interested in new forms of music and literature, Nauman used the evocative power of language (in drawings, video scripts and neon installations), dismantling linguistic structure, creating puns and oxymorons, and linking contradictory words in alliterative sequences, as in Violins Violence Silence (neon tubing, 1.58×1.66×0.15 m, 1981–2; Baltimore, MD, Mus. A.). Using flashing neon signs, he stripped words and, later, actions of their conventional meanings, as in Welcome Shaking Hands (1985; see Silverthorne and others, pp. 52–3), leaving disquieting ironies and moral dilemmas.
Henri Cartier‐Bresson, Seville, Spain, 1934
Cartier-Bresson recorded the destruction in Seville leading up to the Spanish Civil War in this confronting image. It clearly reveals Bresson’s desire to capture the decisive moment and his aim “to testify with a quicker instrument than a brush to the scars of the world” and foregrounds his later photojournalist work for Magnum. Bresson depicts the spontaneous play of the children framed by the jagged brick work. He places the impulsive play of the children in the violent context of the time with his viewpoint through the bombed out building. His selection of frame for the inherent if reckless actions of the children confront the audience and amplify the impact of the scene. The photograph records the influence of Munkacsi in the instinctive actions of the children, that he is free to observe due to his choice of camera, and reveals his innate capacity to identify and record, ” the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression.” Although Bresson’s choices are instinctive the formal qualities of the composition, the snaking line of children with their thrashing limbs accentuating the diagonal and thus suggesting frantic movement, are carefully considered.
French photographer considered to be the father of photojournalism. He was an early adopter of 35 mm format, and the master of candid photography. He helped develop the street photography or life reportage style that was coined The Decisive Moment that has influenced generations of photographers who followed.
Edward Weston, Shells, 1927
In February, 1927, Weston visited the studio of local Carmel artist Henrietta Shore and noticed several paintings she had made of sea shells. Only one of these paintings is known to still exist (as of January, 2011), and it shows a stark and solitary nautilus on a dark field, not unlike Weston’s resulting photographs.
Within a month he began photographing several different large chambered nautiluses, either whole or cut in half to reveal their inner structure.
Due to the technical limitations of the film and the camera he used, he was forced to make extremely long exposures that were easily ruined by vibrations.
Considered a hallmark of modernist photography
“It is this very combination of the physical and spiritual in a shell…which makes it such an important abstract of life,” wrote Edward Weston of his still life compositions of seashells. Bored with portraiture, Weston began to experiment with the symbolic and formal potential of objects he found. By nesting one chambered nautilus shell inside another, he created a powerful sinuous form not seen in nature. The polished surface of the shells reflects the light, interrupting the sensual curve with piercing highlights. The shells stand in bold relief against the stark black background.
Gerhard Richter, Shot Down, 1988
from the series 18 October 1977
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Minor White, Sun in Rock, Devil’s Slide, 1947
Museum of Modern Art, New York
American photographer born in Minneapolis, Minnesota.He spent two years studying aesthetics and art history at Columbia University under Meyer Schapiro and developing his own distinctive style. He became involved with a circle of influential photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Walter Chappell and Ansel Adams; hearing Stieglitz’s idea of “equivalents” from the master himself was crucial to the direction of White’s mature post-war work.
At Ansel Adams’ invitation, White moved back to the West Coast to join Adams, Dorothea Lange and Imogen Cunningham in the first American fine art photography department which was forming at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. White served from 1946 to 1953.
White co-founded the influential magazine Aperture in 1952 with fellow photographers Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Barbara Morgan; writer/curator Nancy Newhall; and Newhall’s husband, historian Beaumont Newhall. White edited the magazine until 1975.
J. Kuhn, The Champ‐de‐Mars and the Eiffel Tower,
1889‐90
Weegee, The Critic, 1943
The Art Institute of Chicago
Much of his work depicted unflinchingly realistic scenes of urban life, crime, injury and death. Weegee published photographic books and also worked in cinema, initially making his own short films and later collaborating with film directors such as Jack Donohue and Stanley Kubrick.
“The Critic” is probably Weegee’s most famous image, and certainly his most widely published. The opening night of the Metropolitan Opera in 1943 was advertised as a Diamond Jubilee to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the company. In a recent interview, Louie Liotta, a photographer who acted as Weegee’s assistant, recalled that Weegee has been planning this photograph for a while. Liotta, at Weegee’s request, picked up one of the regular women customers at Sammy’s on the Bowery at about 6:30 p.m. With a sufficient amount of cheap wine for the woman, they proceeded to the opera house. When they arrived, the limousines owned by the members of high society were just beginning to discharge their passengers. Weegee asked Liotta to hold the now intoxicated woman near the curb as he stood about twenty feet away from the front doors of the opera house. With a signal worked out in advance, Weegee gave the sign to Liotta, who releasd the woman, hoping all the while that she could keep her balance long enough for Weegee to expose several plates. The moment had finally arrived: Mrs. George Washington Kavenaugh and Lady Decies were spotted getting out of a limousine. Both women were generous benefactors to numerous cultural institutions in New York and Philadelphia, and Weegee knew that they were known to every newspaper in New York. Liotta recalled the moment he released the disheveled woman: “It was like an explosion. I thought I went blind from the three or four flash exposures which Weegee made within a very few seconds.” For his part, Weegee told the story that he “discovered” the woman viewing the opera patrons after the negative had been developed, never revealing the prank, saying it was as much a surprise to him as anyone.
The photograph that LIFE printed, which is the version most often reproduced, is only one third of the original negative. On the opposite page from the women arriving at the opera was another photograph by Weegee taken during the performance of the opera with the caption, “The plain people waited in line for hours to get standing room, listened intently and, as always, showed better musical manners than the people sitting in boxes.” This contrast of images, the rich with the jewels, and the well-mannered “plain people” was exactly what Weegee was striving for in all of his photography. The incongruence of life, between the rich and poor, the victims and the rescued, the murdered and the living - his photographs had the ability to make us all eyewitnesses and voyeurs. The first time the photo appeared with the actual title, “The Critic,” was in Weegee’s own book, Naked City.
Edward Steichen, The Flatiron, 1908
Steichen added color to the platinum print that forms the foundation of this photograph by using layers of pigment suspended in a light-sensitive solution of gum arabic and potassium bichromate. Together with two variant prints in other colors, also in the Museum’s collection, The Flatiron is the quintessential chromatic study of twilight. Clearly indebted in its composition to the Japanese woodcuts that were in vogue at the turn of the century and, in its coloristic effect, to the Nocturnes of Whistler, this picture is a prime example of the conscious effort of photographers in the circle of Alfred Stieglitz to assert the artistic potential of their medium.
Steichen and Stieglitz selected this photograph for inclusion in the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography held at the Albright Art Gallery (now the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) in Buffalo, New York, in 1910. The exhibition of 600 photographs represented the capstone of Stieglitz’s efforts to promote Pictorialist photography as a fine art.
Steichen was the most frequently featured photographer in Alfred Stieglitz’ groundbreaking magazine Camera Work during its run from 1903 to 1917. Together Stieglitz and Steichen opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, which eventually became known as 291 after its address.
Charles Nègre, The Gargoyle of Notre Dame,
original negative 1840s or 1850s
The above picture littled “Henri Le Secq et La Stryge“* was by Charles Nègre (1820–1880), a pioneering French photographer. Le Secq himself was a photographer and both of them made photos as large as 20 by 29 inches called ‘calotypes’, and recorded the cathedrals of Notre-Dame (Paris), Chartres, and Amiens and other ancient architectural masterpieces. Nègre, was trained as a painter under Delaroche, Ingres and Drolling before deciding to use photography as research for painting.
In Gargoyle of Notre Dame (1851) as it came to be known as, the gargoyle seems more alive, more animate, than his human companion Le Secq. The gargoyle’s features are large and invisible, but they overpower smaller, shadow-obscured features of Le Secq and convey more forcefully a sense of life. In this shadow, one can clearly see Le Secq’s enormous beard–an obvious political statement; in 1848, the Ministry of Public Instruction banned college professors from wearing beards because they were ‘the symbols of anarchy”. The photo was also a Hugolian propaganda, in the honor of Victor Hugo who fled Paris for the fear of his life a year before.
The gargoyle, under the light of this Hugolâtre leanings, seems to have dual significance. On one hand, it is the symbol of weight and oppression of un unchangable past curved in stone; on the other, it stood watch over Paris, a homely demon secured against all the horrors of the new regime under Napoleon III. In the heavily censored police state of France in the 1850s, the photo was a surreptitous jab at the authorities.
Robert Doisneau, from the series The Sideways
Glance, 1949
Robert Doisneau was born in Gentilly in the Val-de-Marne, France. He studied engraving at the Ecole Estienne in Chantilly, but found his training antiquated and useless upon graduation. He learned photography in the advertising department of a pharmaceutical firm. He began photographing details of objects in 1930. He sold his first photo-story to the Excelsior newspaper in 1932. He was a camera assistant to the sculptor Andrei Vigneaux and did military service prior to taking a job as an industrial and advertising photographer for the Renault auto factory at Billancourt in 1934. Fired in 1939, he took up freelance advertising and postcard photography to earn his living.
Robert Doisneau worked for the Rapho photo agency for several months until he was drafted in 1939. He was a member of the Resistance both as a soldier and as a photographer, using his engraving skills to forge passports and identification papers. He photographed the Occupation and Liberation of Paris.
Immediately after the war he returned to freelance work for Life and other leading international magazines. He joined the Alliance photo agency for a short time and has worked for Rapho since 1946. Against his inclinations, Doisneau did high-society and fashion photography for Paris Vogue from 1948 to 1951. In addition to his reportage, he has photographed many French artists including Giacometti, Cocteau, Leger, Braque, and Picasso.
Alfred Stieglitz
The Steerage, 1907
William Henry Fox Talbot
Trafalgar Square, London, During the Erection of the Nelson Column, 1843
Made just five years into the history of photography by the medium’s inventor, Nelson’s Column is among William Henry Fox Talbot’s most complex and beautiful images, and this example is a particularly fine print. By April 1844, photography was still new and handcrafted but no longer experimental. Talbot could turn his attention from the mechanics of making a picture to the aesthetics, and, having executed numerous carefully arranged photographs at his home, Lacock Abbey, he felt confident enough to go out into the world to find his subjects. Many of his images taken “on the road” were predictably picturesque or topographic, but at Trafalgar Square, Talbot found a compelling perspective, a daring composition, and a fascinating intersection of the religious and secular, the historic and present-day. Instead of choosing a more distant vantage point or a vertical format to show the entire column, with its bronze capital and seventeen-foot-tall statue, he framed a view in which the bill-posted construction fence and the column’s massive base dominate the foreground, while the steeple of St. Martin-in-the-Fields rises in the background to the very edge of the picture. Nelson’s Column marks the beginning of a new, photographic way of seeing.
Imogen Cunningham, Two Callas, 1929
Imogen Cunningham was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She began her photographic studies at the University of Washington and went on to become one of photography’s early pioneers and commenced what became one of the longest photographic careers in the history of the medium.
In the 1920’s, Cunningham turned her attention to artistic nudes of friends and family and the study of plant forms found in her garden. The results are staggering; an amazing body of work comprised of bold, contemporary forms.
Two Callas is considered one of Imogen’s most striking photographs, with its flowing form and intimate details. This image was originally displayed in Stuttgart, Germany by request of Edward Weston. Imogen’s botanical work expressed by these photos of Calla Lilies and Magnolias were pivotal works that helped define Imogen as one of America’s eminent photographers.
Man Ray, Untitled, 1922
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Dada / Rayograph
Man Ray made his “rayographs” without a camera by placing objects-such as the thumbtacks, coil of wire, and other circular forms used here-directly on a sheet of photosensitized paper and exposing it to light. Man Ray had photographed everyday objects before, but these unique, visionary images immediately put the photographer on par with the avant-garde painters of the day. Hovering between the abstract and the representational, the rayographs revealed a new way of seeing that delighted the Dadaist poets who championed his work, and that pointed the way to the dreamlike visions of the Surrealist writers and painters who followed.
Born in Philadelphia, Emmanuel Radnitsky grew up in New Jersey and became a commercial artist in New York in the 1910s. He began to sign his name Man Ray in 1912, although his family did not change its surname to Ray until the 1920s. He initially taught himself photography in order to reproduce his own works of art, which included paintings and mixed media. In 1921 he moved to Paris and set up a photography studio to support himself. There he began to make photograms, which he called “Rayographs.” In the 1920s, he also began making moving pictures. Man Ray’s four completed films–Return to Reason, Emak Bakia, Starfish, and Mystery of the Chateau–were all highly creative, non-narrative explorations of the possibilities of the medium.
Shortly before World War II, Man Ray returned to the United States and settled in Los Angeles from 1940 until 1951. He was disappointed that he was recognized only for his photography in America and not for the filmmaking, painting, sculpture, and other media in which he worked. In 1951 Man Ray returned to Paris. He concentrated primarily on painting until his death in 1976.
Roy DeCarava, Shirley Embracing Sam, 1952
The DeCarava Archive
This picture appeared in DeCarava’s book The Sweet Flypaper of Life, in 1955, with a text by the American poet Langston Hughes. The book has been praised as a sympathetic view of everyday life in Harlem, New York, drawn by two members of the community rather than by visiting sociologists or reformers. The praise is reasonable as far as it goes, but it fails to note the originality of the photographs DeCarava made behind closed doors, which describe his friends with the same gentleness and warmth they accord to each other. No photographer before him had pictured domestic life—black or white—with such unsentimental tenderness.
To make a picture, a photographer must be in the presence of the subject. This simple fact, often overlooked, except where inaccessible mountain peaks or bloody battlefields plainly have demanded the photographer’s resourcefulness or heroism, is a fundamental condition of photography. It helps to explain the relative rarity (apart from snapshots) of intimate pictures of domestic life: to photograph in another person’s home, the photographer must be invited inside.
Oscar Dominguez, Untitled, 1936
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Surrealist (Decalcomania)
Oscar M. Domínguez (January 3, 1906 – December 31, 1957) was a Spanish surrealist painter.
He went to Paris at 21 where he first worked for his father in the central market of Les Halles, and spent his nights diving in cabarets. He then frequented some art schools, and visited galleries and museums.
Domínguez was rapidly attracted by avant-garde painters, notably Yves Tanguy and Pablo Picasso, whose influences were visible in his first works.
Technique for generating images used, for example, by the Surrealist artist Oscar Domínguez: paint is applied to a piece of paper that is then either folded, creating a mirrored pattern, or pressed against another sheet
In 1933 Domínguez met André Breton, a theoretician of Surrealism, and Paul Éluard, known as the poet of this movement, and took part a year later in the Surrealist exhibition held in Copenhagen and those of London and Tenerife in 1936.
He took up the Russian-invented technique of decalcomania in 1936, using gouache spread thinly on a sheet of paper or other surface (glass has been used), which is then pressed onto another surface such as a canvas.
Term appropriated by the Surrealists from physiology and psychiatry and later applied to techniques of spontaneous writing, drawing and painting. In physiology, automatism denotes automatic actions and involuntary processes that are not under conscious control, such as breathing; the term also refers to the performance of an act without conscious thought, a reflex. Psychological automatism is the result of a dissociation between behaviour and consciousness. Familiarity and long usage allow actions to become automatic so that they are performed with a minimum of thought and deliberation. Pathological automatism, also the consequence of dissociative states, ensues from psychological conflict, drugs or trance states; automatism may also be manifested in sensory hallucinations.
Laszlo Moholy‐Nagy, Untitled (looking down
from the Radio Tower, Berlin), c.1928
Bauhaus
Over the winter and spring of 1927–28, Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy took a series of perhaps nine views looking down from the Berlin Radio Tower, one of the most exciting new constructions in the German capital. Moholy had already photographed the Eiffel Tower in Paris, looking up through the tower’s soaring girders. In Berlin, however, Moholy turned his camera around and pointed it straight down at the ground. This plunging perspective showed off the spectacular narrowness of the Radio Tower, finished in 1926, which rose vertiginously to a height of 450 feet from a base seven times smaller than that of its Parisian predecessor (which opened in 1889). Moholy attached exceptional importance to this, his boldest image: he hung it just above his name in a room devoted to his work at the Berlin showing of Film and Foto, a mammoth traveling exhibition that he had helped to prepare. Moholy also chose this view and one other to offer Julien Levy, the pioneering art dealer, when Levy visited him in Berlin in 1930. The following year the pictures went on view at the Levy Gallery in New York, in Moholy’s first solo exhibition of photographs.
Shirin Neshat, Untitled (Rapture), 1998
The work of Neshat addresses the social, political and psychological dimensions of women’s experience in contemporary Islamic societies. Although Neshat actively resists stereotypical representations of Islam, her artistic objectives are not explicitly polemical. Rather, her work recognizes the complex intellectual and religious forces shaping the identity of Muslim women throughout the world. Using Persian poetry and calligraphy she examined concepts such as martyrdom, the space of exile, the issues of identity and femininity.
Rapture, one of Neshat’s early works, consists of two projections shown on opposing gallery walls. One projection shows a group of men dressed alike in Western-style white shirts and black pants. The other shows a group of women wearing traditional Iranian dress, including the chador,which covers their heads and most of their bodies, and in some cases, the niquab, a face covering. Despite these garments, the viewer is able to decipher individual features and expressions.
The installation, which is 13 minutes long and shown in continuous loops, shows elegiac and meditative scenes of the two groups. As the women traverse landscapes of sand and stone, the men navigate the stone architecture of an ancient city. As the women cry out—whether in celebration or anger, it’s unclear—the men unroll Persian prayer rugs and quarrel. In the final scene, the women gather on a beach, where they maneuver a small boat into the crashing waves. As their bare feet break the sand surface, the hems of their chadors become wet with salt water. Ultimately, six women remain in the boat as it drifts out to the sea.
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21, 1978
http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/cindy-sherman.html
Cindy Sherman, Untitled No. 224, 1990
http://www.walkerart.org/art-on-call/stops/611
In this history portrait, Sherman has taken on the role of Caravaggio’s Sick Bacchus, the painting from the late 16th century. It’s different from some of the other works in the series that may be more caricatured. In this one we see this mimicking of the original painting much more clearly.
The costume consists exactly of what Caravaggio is wearing in his painting. She’s in the exact same pose, clutching these grapes in her hand. Caravaggio’s painting is thought to be a self-portrait of the artist as the Roman god of wine, Bacchus. So this picture has a number of layers. It’s a female artist in the role of a male artist in the role of the Roman god of wine. It’s a way of reminding us of art history.
This series was one of the first times Sherman took on the guises of male characters. She has this deftness with makeup, with prosthetics, with costume. But in another way, they’re not completely illusionistic. We’re always able to remember that this is a portrait by Sherman.
