short answer and essay Flashcards
Lászlo Moholy-Nagy
also experimented with the optical and expressive properties of light captured in the photogram. He made these images without a camera by placing objects on a sheet of light-sensitive paper and exposing it. Moholy-Nagy experimented with unusual perspectives as he was not satisfied that all photographs had to be taken straight-on like a portrait. It was his experimentation that led to many techniques in use today. Enlargements Bird’s-eye view Worms-eye view Distortions Repetition Extreme close-ups Drop-outs Light & dark interplay
- Alfred Steiglitz
photosuccesison group camera work. Stieglitz became increasingly intrigued with a more modern visual aesthetic for photography as the European avant-garde works started to filter into America. The Pictorialism of the Photo-Secessionists became a thing of the past. He became interested in this “New Vision” that was embodied by bold lines of everyday forms.
- Ansel Adams,
1927 was the pivotal year of Adams’s life.
He made his first fully visualized photograph, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome. Adams began to pursue “straight photography,” in which the clarity of the lens was emphasized, and the final print gave no appearance of being manipulated in the camera or the darkroom. Adams was soon to become straight photography’s insistent champion.In 1927 Adams met photographer Edward Weston. They became increasingly important to each other as friends and colleagues. They would later found the f/64 group together. Adams felt an intense commitment to promoting photography as a fine art and played a key role in the establishment of the first museum department of photography, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His images became the symbols, the veritable icons, of wild America. There is a vast amount of true and truly protected wilderness in America, much of it saved because of the efforts of Adams and his colleagues.
- Richard Avedon
He worked for Harper’s Bazaar from 1945 to 1965. Avedon took to photography quickly and developed a unique style in his fashion and portrait photographs. No matter what the current fashion trend was, he found ways to dramatize the ‘spirit’ of that trend. His fashion photographs captured models in action - moving, talking, running, jumping, and being about town. Even the few images of his models standing still have a vitality and energy about them.Avedon’s portraits confront us with miners, drifters, farmers, cowboys and convicts. Most of those photographed try to give as little of themselves away with expressions of reserve. But these portraits are expressive nonetheless. The harshness of their everyday lives has etched onto their features. It is the landscape of the faces that Avedon captures.
Weegee
Weegee could easily be described as one of the most important freelance photojournalists who ever worked in the profession. What he accomplished, in one decade of news photography from the mid-1930s through the mid-1940s, around 1935, armed with his Speed Graphic camera and working out of Police Headquarters in lower Manhattan, he began his career as a freelance press photographer. His New York photographs became the frozen moments that are the icons of urban life in its calm, joy, and chaos during that period. He took powerful photographs capturing just the right moment in time to reveal the peak of action, and yet his images had strong captions. His images of dead gangsters and his own flamboyant personality established his reputation as New York’s resident “crime photographer”. Weegee had a darkroom set-up in the trunk of his car so he could develop his photographs right away. He would capture these amazing photographs through the evening hours, then in the morning sell them to whichever newspaper or magazine would buy them.
- Elliot Porter
Trained as a chemical engineer and doctor he moved into photography as a result of connections with Stieglitz and Adams in the 1930s. Unlike many other straight photographers of the time, Porter quickly switched to color photography, which more accurately captured photographs of birds. His subjects quickly grew to all sorts of natural themes. His rich photographs of nature made him the first established art photographer committed to exploring the colorful beauty of the natural world. Porter’s studies in chemistry had him experimenting with color photographic development processes. He was exceptional using the dye transfer method, giving his prints a depth and saturation that flat printing (in your book) and computer screen imaging (seen here) cannot fully capture. Porter’s Dye transfer process Porter preferred the dye transfer process because it delivered richly colored prints and allowed him to control the exact hues and contrast of each final print. He had immense control over the colors that made up each final print with this process, while not altering the actual details of the photographic image.
digital photography and space travel
1957 – The Russians launch the first satellite “Sputnik” into space. The space race is on and countries are looking for ways to spy on one another, but photographs are still on film that cannot be transmitted back to earth.
1959 – The first microchip was invented by Jack Kilby. (It will take over a decade for improvement to make it practical to photography.)
1962 – Astronaut Walter Schirra brings the first camera, a Hasselblad 500c, into space.
1966 – NASA contracts Boeing and Eastman Kodak to design the Lunar Orbiter camera payload. In a special NASA contract for the Lunar Orbiter Program, Boeing and Eastman Kodak collaborated to build this specially designed camera used in 1966 and 1967 to map the moon and determine the best site for the Apollo landing. It had two lenses and used 65mm film. Once the photographs were taken, they were developed, digitally scanned and the images were transmitted back to earth.
How did the development of Modernism in other art fields influence photography?
While Modernism came slowly to other arts such as painting and sculpture, mostly brought by the younger generations looking for something new, Photography was embraced by its practitioners much more easily. Much of Modernism came about because of artistic response to the new technologies coming out of the Industrial revolution, and well – Photography was one of those technologies. Photography is also in part a catalyst for Modernism since painters were no longer needed to capture a true-to-life likeness. the basic Modern characteristics are: Minimalism, Emphases on shapes over subject, Exploration of geometric forms, Use of primary color schemes (Note that color was just hitting photography in 1907 when Autochrome was put on sale, which was the same year Picasso paints Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and starts Cubism.)
doretha lang
Lange’s career of photographing the hardships endured by American families brought on by the Great Depression started in the streets of San Francisco, where she photographed unemployed men wandering the city. She documented the sufferings of the dispossessed, in breadlines and labor strikes, in the wrenching drama of endless waiting. An exhibition of these photographs caught the attention of the f/64 group and led to her most important commission for the California and Federal Resettlement Administration (later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA)). The agency hoped that Lange’s powerful images would bring the conditions of the rural poor to the public’s attention. Her limp, she thought, created an instant rapport between herself and her subjects. “Migrant Mother, Nipoma, California, 1936,” The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.” During World War II Dorothea Lange received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1942 to record the mass evacuation of Japanese-Americans to detention camps after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. She then turned her lens on women and members of minority groups at work side by side in California shipyards. Lange quote - “I had to get my camera to register things that were more important than how poor they were–their pride, their strength, their spirit.” Dorothea Lange’s work reflects insight, compassion and profound empathy for her subjects.
eugene richards
Eugene Richards documented a photo essay on his home town of Dorchester, Massachusetts. Dorchester Days But he did not capture the pretty façade that most would have expected. He looked behind the closed doors at racial tension, violence, poverty and crime. He even tackled such subjects as the Klu Klux Klan. Other books by Eugene Richards include Knife and Gun Club and Cocaine True Cocaine Blue. These books continue with these darker themes that we often hide behind closed doors, but are still a part of our culture. In 2002 Eugene Richards completed a book Stepping Through the Ashes. This book uses an evocative collection of images of the aftermath of the World Trade Center collapse on 9/11. Again he captures the truth of our culture with black-and-white photographs and stories from the survivors and relatives of victims.
Compare the Surrealistic photography of early Modernism with that of Digital image manipulations today
Surrealist photographers used double exposure, blurring and light manipulation to “disrupt photographic realism.” Clarence john Laughlin Some historians credit Laughlin with being the first true Surrealist photographer in the United States. He often constructed elaborate stages and employed models, costumes, and props to create haunting abstractions. MARTINA LOPEZ - Working with snapshots from family vacations, Lopez began to stitch together new images of her family that would exist in an artificial space of her own creation, outside of a specific moment in time. DIANE FENSTER California floods The use of digital imaging programs to collage different original photographs together quickly exploded as software programs improved layering and feathering options. SONIA LANDY SHERIDAN was a groundbreaking artist that experimented with the use of commercial photocopiers as a creative tool. Sonia Sheridan was the artist-in-residence at the 3M’s Color Research lab and instructor at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. Sheridan shaped her art and teaching on the premise that art, science and technology function as intertwining systems of thought.
