Quiz 3 Flashcards
Surrealist psychic automatism, aka automatic writing (Miro)
• An effort to depict inner emotional states in a
non-representational manner
• Placed great emphasis on individual style of
mark-making/gesture, flatness of canvas.
• Styles ranged from spontaneous violent gesture to
calm meditative color fields: Pollock, Kline, de
Kooning, Motherwell, Rothko, etc.
• Intense search for personal meaning & spiritual
fulfillment outside of society’s norms.
• Anti-establishment/anti-bourgeois liberated
attitudes & lifestyles.
Nathan Lyons
• IMP/GEH curator
• Initiates formation of Society for Photographic Education
(SPE) & is elected 1st president, with Board of
Directors including Aaron Siskind, Art Sinsabaugh,
Henry Holmes Smith, Clarence White, Jr., Minor
White.
• Contemporary Photographers Toward a Social Landscape
• Often highlighting marginalized forms of photography
and spotting significant new directions in their early
stages.
• Founder of Visual Studies Workshop,
Rochester, NY.
• • Books include: Notations in Passing, 1974; Verbal
Landscape: Dinosaur Sat Down, 1987; Riding First Class
on the Titanic, 2000; After 9/11, 2003; Whiteout: Poems
by Marvin Bell, Photographs by Nathan Lyons, 2011;
Return Your Mind to Its Upright Position, 2014. He
also edited several important anthologies of writing
on photography.
• Post-modern tendency to treat the photograph as a
cultural sign/indicator, using images & found
words in groups and sequences to comment on
modern day visual culture.
Abstract Expressionism
- Jackson Pollock
- Franz Kline
- Willem DeKooning
- Robert Motherwell
- Mark Rothko
- Helen Frankenthaler
Aaron Siskind
• Began in social documentary tradition with Photo
League (Harlem Project, etc.)
- Shift in style, began personal abstractions
- SPE founding member
Minor White
• Work influenced by Stieglitz’s concept of
equivalence & spiritual mysticism via Zen
Buddhism, Taoism, Gurdjieff philosophy, etc.
• Began in botany, poetry, then documentary with
WPA in Oregon
• Served in Army & converted to Roman Catholicism,
1940s, beginning a lifelong spiritual search.
• Met and befriended Newhalls, Stieglitz, Weston,
Adams
• Taught at CA School Fine Arts with Ansel Adams &
abstract expressionist painter Clyfford Still
- Aperture magazine cofounder/editor
- Curator at IMP/GEH under Newhall
- Founding member SPE
Harry Callahan
• His work reflects a varied & experimental approach
& wide range of subjects: large format straight b&w,
35mm street, photograms, collages, color,
landscapes, architecture, and especially numerous
portraits of his wife Eleanor.
• Lifelong attempt to use photography to express
visual curiosity and to better understand himself
and his world.
• Traveled to Europe on a Graham Foundation Grant
(1st for a photographer)
• Started & taught influential photo MFA program at
Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)
Henry Holmes Smith
• Bauhaus influenced experimental organic
abstractions using color/dye-transfer process &
photogram techniques.
• Founding member SPE
• Emphasized study of photo history and early
processes.
• He and his students helped spur revival &
experimental use of non-silver, mixed media, &
alternative processes during the 1960s-70s.
• Influential students include Jerry Uelsmann, Betty
Hahn, Robert Fichter.
Wynn Bullock
• In his version of equivalence, he professed a
mystical interest in the “transforming power of
light,” space-time concepts, energy, opposites, visual
symbols, metaphors.
• Patents on variations of solarization process used
earlier by Man Ray.
- Influenced by Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, Weston.
- Studied operatic voice/music, then law.
Frederick Sommer
• Born in Italy, raised in Brazil, settled & taught at
Prescott College in Prescott, AZ, 1931. Architect,
musician, painter, poet, and photographer.
• Self-taught, influenced by Stieglitz, Weston, Sheeler,
Surrealists (especially friend Max Ernst).
• Late work abandoned photography in favor of
collages made from 19th century anatomical &
medical illustrations.
Emmet Gowin
• Known for intense, stylized & staged large format
portraits of family, especially wife Edith, in a rural
VA setting, rooted in but transcending the family
snapshot.
• More recent work is environmentally oriented aerial
landscapes using expressive printing techniques.
• student of Callahan at RISD, and with
Sommer privately.
• Taught at Princeton for many years.
Paul Caponigro
• Mystical straight images of what he calls “the
landscape beyond the landscape” with great
attention to the craft, or “voice” of the print.
• Co-founder, along with Marie Cosindas, Walter
Chappell, Carl Chiarenza (mostly Minor White
students) & others, of NYC co-op group Association
of Heliographers, c.1963-65. Promoted fine art
photography & equivalence through exhibitions, etc.
Carl Chiarenza
• First Harvard Art History PhD dissertation on a
living artist & photographer (Siskind). Helped
legitimize photo history as an academic discipline.
• Published Landscapes of the Mind 1988, retrospective
including studio constructions of paper, foil, etc.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard
• Snapshot based, often directorial images: mysterious
staged tableau, and experimental work.
• Self taught amateur, later studied with Henry
Holmes Smith, Minor White. Became well versed in
ideas presented in Aperture, Zen Buddhism, etc.
• Optometrist in Lexington, KY. Joined local camera
club, influenced by future MoMA curator Van Deren
Coke.
Weegee
Arthur Fellig
- NYC freelance newspaper work
- Published Naked City
• Brutal, sensationalistic, but often witty tabloid
images of murders, accidents, fires, street characters,
etc.
• Harsh, flash-on-camera style later emulated by
Diane Arbus, who sometimes rode with him on his
nightly prowls.
Lisette Model
• Paris 1930s, studied music & voice with
contemporary avant-garde Austrian composer
Arnold Schoenberg (12-tone composition technique)
and painting w/ Andre Lhote.
• Magazine work, including Harper’s Bazaar under
Alexey Brodovitch, member of the Photo League.
• Hired by Berenice Abbott to teach at New
School, where she taught Diane Arbus
William Klein
• Mainly in Paris since 1948, studied painting with
Fernand Leger.
• Innovative high energy fashion, graphic design,
typography, & street photography.
• Life is Good and Good for You in New York: Trance
Witness Revels, published 1954-55.
- Shot for Vogue under Alexander Liberman
- Experimental and avant-garde filmmaker
• Street work (Life is Good…) was under-appreciated
in U.S. until 1980s.
Helen Levitt
• Inspired by Cartier-Bresson to photograph
Harlem children/streets.
• 1939: First published in Fortune magazine.
• Collaborated w/ Agee on two films (The Quiet One,
1949, In the Street, 1952) and one book (A Way of
Seeing, 1946/65).
• Worked primarily as a professional film editor
throughout her photo career.
• Guggenheim Fellowships 1959-60 for her NYC color
street work.
• NEA Fellowship 1976.
Roy DeCarava
• Never considered himself a documentary or street
photographer, but an artist responding to his
environment in a personal and poetic way.
• Native of Harlem, studied art & printmaking at
Cooper Union & Harlem Art Center.
• Sports Illustrated staffer briefly, but preferred
personal work over assignments.
• 1952, first black photographer to receive a
Guggenheim Fellowship, resulting in The Sweet
Flypaper of Life, a collaboration with Harlem poet
Langston Hughes, 1955.
• 1955-57 opened & ran A Photographer’s Gallery, one
of the first NY galleries devoted to contemporary art
photography.
• 1963-66 started & ran Kamoinge Workshop, art for
inner city youth.
Robert Frank
• Came to U.S./NYC from Switzerland
• Shot for Harper’s Bazaar under Alexey Brodovitch, but
did not like assignment work, so he began to travel to
Europe, South America.
• Published Les Americains in France, 1958, then The
Americans in U.S., 1959 with introduction by kindred
spirit, Beat writer Jack Kerouac.
• 1959-80s: turned mostly to semi-autobiographical
filmmaking & video.
NEA/NEH (National Endowment for the
Arts/Humanities)
• formed as part of LBJ’s Great
Society programs, making U.S. government grant
money available for artists, organizations,
workshops, etc.
Friends of Photography
• Founded in San
Francisco, CA by Ansel Adams, sponsoring
workshops, publications, exhibitions, etc.
Garry Winogrand
• Magazine work for Collier’s, Sports
Illustrated, Pageant, etc., after studying briefly with
Brodovitch.
• 1955: Began cross-country travels after being
inspired by Evans’ American Photographs.
• Obsessively prolific. Numerous grants
(Guggenheim, 1964), books (The Animals, 1969), etc.
• Szarkowski/MoMA posthumous retrospective, c.
1984: Figments From the Real World.
Lee Friedlander
• Early freelance commercial work of jazz musicians
for album covers.
• Influenced by Frank, Evans, Atget, his images are
packed with visual info, indirect social commentary,
and formal complexity with an individual,
idiosyncratic style.
Diane Arbus
• Grew up in NYC insulated & wealthy, attended the
Ethical Culture School.
• 1940s: Married photographer Alan Arbus & opened
studio for fashion & magazine work.
• 1972: Aperture monograph published, and she was
the first photographer to be included in the Venice
Biennale.
Bill Owens
• Introduced to photography while working in Peace
Corps, later studied visual anthropology.
• c.1968: Newspaper photographer for the Livermore
Independent, CA.
• Suburbia, 1973 photos with captions taken from
interviews of subjects.
• Working: I Do It for the Money, later 1970s.
• 1982: sold equipment, opened a brewpub, &
published American Brewer Magazine.
• Recent color work deals with quirky and humorous
aspects of U.S. pop culture.
Jim Goldberg
• Rich & Poor, nursing homes c.1985-86, Raised by
Wolves 1995.
• Work often reflects intense, long-term, sympathetic
involvement with ‘outsider’ subcultures & their
participation in the process via hand-written
comments on photos.
Larry Clark
• studied portraiture at Layton School of Art,
Milwaukee, WI.
• Published Tulsa 1971, Teenage Lust 1983.
• Intense, graphic autobiographical documentary; a
participant, not an outsider. Drugs, sex, violence,
voyeurism, etc.
• Film director: Kids 1995, Another Day in Paradise
1998, Bully 2001, Wassup Rockers 2006, etc.
Nan Goldin
• Intense, graphic autobiographical documentary; a
participant, not an outsider. Drugs, sex, AIDS,
physical abuse, rehab, alternative lifestyles, etc.
• Works in color, often using ‘incorrect’ color and/or
mixed light sources for expressionistic and
emotional effect.
- The Ballad of Sexual Dependency 1986.
- The Other Side, and I’ll Be Your Mirror 1990s.
Bill Burke
• Known for his artist books dealing with portraiture,
autobiographical journals, scrapbooks of personal
travels, experiences, etc.
• Appalachian Portraits; They Shall Cast Out Demons
1970s; I Want to Take Picture 1983; Minefields 1995.
