Week 7 Final Exam Flashcards
Adolf, the superman, swallows gold & sprouts junk
John Heartfield
1932
Photomontage of Hitler, mouth agape in speach, see into his belly coins. Showing emtiness inside. Conjured images of fractured torn urban life. Metaphore for weimer republic. Featured in AIZ workers illustrated newspaper. Completed work was photographed to be used for mass printing.
Pushed idea of using mass printed source material by inventing photomontage in which pieces of photographs were combined into new compositions. completed work photographed and converted back into photographic print. Uses photographic methods to hide sources of the works various images and materials to create new seamless representation.
Montage = assembly line Moneur = engineered
Heartfield changed his name from Herzfeld to protest anti-british campain.
Photomontage = observers are convinced ot its message before they have time to analyze how they have been persuaded.
Criss Cross Conveyors Ford Plant
Charles Sheeler
1927
“I favor the picture that is planned and executed with the same consideration for its parts, within the complete design as is necessary in the buildin gof a watch or an aeroplane.”
Absolute, unqualified objectivity
Celebrating the strait American style of form and texture
Commissioned to photograph Ford Motor works delivered interacting geometric forms without a trace of disorderly humanity. Mechanical perfection reined. Leading viewer to believe that industrial landscape could lead to a logical utopia.
Precisionism, beautify of lines, enhanced with diagonal crossing, towering smoke stacks. Iconic pictures, early esthetic growth of American Industry.
Double Akely
Paul Strand
1922
Became intrested in Photography at the Ethical Culture High School in NY. Took photography iwth Lewis Hine, who sent class to Stieglitz 291 Gallery, who told him to experiement with principles of cubism.
Motion picture camera, abstracted, close up, close cropped, part of machine reminicent of Charlie Chaplin film about factory “Modern Times”.
Symbolized the new securlar era whos deity was the machine opposed the emotional and irrational.
Fire Escape (Buildin gon Miasnitskala Street series)
Alexander Rodchenko
1925
Unexpected, unconventional angle, person climbing up or down fire escape, photographed from below, close up to viewer, more dominant in space, unconventional cropping.
Rodchenko - constructivist leader and supporter of Russian Revolution. Viewed suprematism way of seeing as a way to reshape society. integrate art in to everyday life. Poster was primary form of mass communication.
Photography the ideal socialist medium because it is inexpensive, quick and repeatable. Used small hand camera to make photographs of people and ordinary scenes.
Used small hand camera to make photographs of peopl eand ordinary scenes with unconventional points of view. Disturbed rules of composition and subject heirarchy, tilted camera, shooting from below or above subject, instantaneous sense of the snapshot. Diagonal compositions, rythmic sense of contrast between highlights and shadows. Valued destabilizing an audience by portraying everyday scenes from unfamiliar angles.
Portrait of the Artist’s Mother
Alexander Rodchenko
1924
Mother, close up, cropped, squinting hard to read something no longer in the frame due to cropping close. Face becomes strange up so close. Rodchenko’s mother learned to read very late in her life.
Rodchenko - constructivist leader and supporter of Russian Revolution. Viewed suprematism way of seeing as a way to reshape society. integrate art in to everyday life. Poster was primary form of mass communication.
Photography the ideal socialist medium because it is inexpensive, quick and repeatable. Used small hand camera to make photographs of people and ordinary scenes.
Used small hand camera to make photographs of peopl eand ordinary scenes with unconventional points of view. Disturbed rules of composition and subject heirarchy, tilted camera, shooting from below or above subject, instantaneous sense of the snapshot. Diagonal compositions, rythmic sense of contrast between highlights and shadows. Valued destabilizing an audience by portraying everyday scenes from unfamiliar angles.
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Alexander Rodchenko
1923
Vladimir Mayakovsky was part of the Futurist movement pre-Russian revolution. He was a poet, playright, edited the art journal LEF. He commited suicide. Joseph Stalin posthumously declared Mayakovsky “the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch.”
Rodchenko - constructivist leader and supporter of Russian Revolution. Viewed suprematism way of seeing as a way to reshape society. integrate art in to everyday life. Poster was primary form of mass communication.
Photography the ideal socialist medium because it is inexpensive, quick and repeatable. Used small hand camera to make photographs of people and ordinary scenes.
Used small hand camera to make photographs of peopl eand ordinary scenes with unconventional points of view. Disturbed rules of composition and subject heirarchy, tilted camera, shooting from below or above subject, instantaneous sense of the snapshot. Diagonal compositions, rythmic sense of contrast between highlights and shadows. Valued destabilizing an audience by portraying everyday scenes from unfamiliar angles.
Georgia O’Keeffe’s Hand and Wheel
Alfred Stieglitz
1933
Stieglitz married Georgia O’Keeffe. Between 1917 and 1937, Stieglitz made hundreds of portraits of his wife, painter Georgia O’Keeffe. Endeavoring to capture her unique personality and physical presence, Stieglitz found that the essence of O’Keeffe was expressed not only in her face but also in close-up studies of parts of her body—especially her hands. In 1933, O’Keeffe was completing a long recovery from a nervous breakdown she suffered late in 1932. She was overjoyed to be reunited with her Ford V-8 convertible—a potent symbol ofher personal freedom. To convey O’Keeffe’s affection for the vehicle, Stieglitz used the motif of her hand caressing the gleaming cover of the car’s spare tire.
Alfred Stieglitz was a pivotal force during the late 19th and 20th centuries in promoting photography in America and gaining its acceptance as an art form. He also pioneered in bringing modern art to this country through the avant-garde European and American work presented in the pages of his well-known journal, Camera Work, and at his gallery, “291.”
Wall Street, New York
Paul Strand
photogravure
I was trying to recreate the abstract movement of people in a city; what kind of movement really feels like and is like… they required a technique which coul only be described as a snapshot. When it becomes necessary to stop movment.”
Insect sized human figures justaposed with monumental contreteness of the metropolis. Reporduced in 1916 Camera work. Abstract representation linking modern art and photography.
Paul Strand became interested in photography at the Ethical Culture High School where he took photography with Lewis Hine. Hine sent class to Stiglitz’ 291 Gallery. They told him to eperiment with the principles of cubism
White Fence, Port Kent, NY
Paul Strand
1916
“Why did I photograph that white fence up in Port Kent, New York, in 1916? Because the fence itself was fascinating to me. It was very much alive, very American, very much a part of the country . . . “ —Paul Strand
“The White Fence . . . a picture, I think, that has etched itself into the pictorial memory of every young photographer who ever saw it, except perhaps for the most insensitive.” —John Szarkowski
The White Fence, Port Kent, 1916, is one of Paul Strand’s best-known images. It followed his New York City photographs, and Strand himself declared it his next step in abstraction and “the basis for all the work” that followed. At the time, taking a simple weathered white picket fence, an ordinary object, and making it the subject of a photograph was not only a move away from the Pictorialist movement, but also a groundbreaking one. Its subject matter, combined with its composition, makes it a pivotal image in the history of photography.
Blind
Paul Strand
1916
photogravure
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 camrea in one direction while taking the photograph at a 90 degree angle. This image of a street begger was publishe din 1917 as a gravure in Stiglitz’ magazine Camera Work. It integrated objectivity of social documentary wtih bodiliy simplified forms of modernism.
In high school Paul Strand studied with Lewis Hine, social reformer and photographer. He frequented the “291” gallery and saw works of Picasso, Brancusi and Cezanne.
Portrait of the Artist’s Mother
Alexander Rodchenko
1924
This is one of Rodchenko’s earliest photographs. It is a closely cropped, deeply moving, photograph of his mother holding a lens of her folded wire framed glasses to one eye. A washerwoman, she had been illiterate most of her life. This photo gives hope in revolution, that through learning, literacy, a value on technology and most importantly photography change is possible. This photograph signifies revolution on many levels. While his mothre holds up one half of a pair of spectacles to help her read (only learned at the age of 50) Rodchenko stands before her testing a rececntly purchased camera, the monocular medium of the future. Rodchenko famously cropped his negative, cutting ou the walls adn table to yield a dynamic close up view. His mothers face forrowed in concentration ,her work worn hands adn the hankercheif wrapped around her head thereby convey a heroic character without tradigin in sentimentality.
Both lenses bring the world radically into focus.
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Alexander RODCHENKO
1942
Rodchenko embraced a more functional view of art and of the artists adn began collaborating with the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky on a series of advertising campaigns. Their work not only introduced modern desing into Russian advertising, but it attempted to sell the values o fthe Revolution along with the products being promoted.
Impatient with the backardness of Russia, and in search of a concrete, immediate art, Mayakovsky became the poet of a revolutionary regime. Rodchenko, a fellow revolutionary, evoked his friend’s inner convition in a series of brilliant portraits that match Boris Pasternak’s description of Mayakovsky’s character: “He sat on a chair as on the saddle of a motorcycle…His way of carrying himself something like a decision when it has been executed adn its consequences are irevocable. The decision was his very genious…and he had devoted his whole being to incarnate it without any pity or reserve.”
