Week 8 Social Document FINAL Flashcards
Five cents a spot
from How the Other Half Lives
Jacob Riis
1890
Police reporter in worst slum district of NY
lodging house, many bodies in each room. Awoken by flash powder. Trying to bring reform. Turned to photography to document the evidence of social wrongs and use the photographs as weapons of social change. Horrid details of grim poverty, dirt, trash, pealing paint, starkness of having nothing. Not concerned with individuals, but collective problems. First public glimpse into unmerciful, claustrophobic life of the destitute. Saw poverty, crime, ignorance and vice as the effects rather than the causes of poverty. Pushed for social uplift. Programs and government to lift people.
Italian Madonna, Ellis Island
Lewis Hine
1907
Hine began to photograph Ellis Island in 1904 where most immigrants to America landed between 1892 - 1924.
Sociologist from Coumbia U. Taught camera courses at Ethical Culture School in NY and took students to 291 gallery. Used photography to combat the rampant prejudice against the newly arrived peoples from Eastern and Southern Europe. Used a 5x7 inch camera. Documantary style combined facts and subjective emotions to form concerned photographer. Photographed for the National Child Labor Committee.
Carolina Cotton Mill
Lewis Hine
1908
Focused on human social landscape. Exploration of child labor, cotton mills, tiny bodies chained to machinery. Innocent, fearful, charity portrait. Photographed for the National Child Labor Committee which needed facts to document abuses of children in the workforce. Took demographic information such asnames, agest and injuries from children. Psoed as a fire inspector, postcard vender, bible salesman, an industrial photographer, even asked that children posed next to machinery for scale.
Was sociologist from Columbia U. Taught camera courses and took students to 291 gallery. Taught at Ethical Culture Schol in NY.
Empire State Building
Lewis Hine
1930s
MEN AT WORK photobook Focus on workers, not buildings, dramatic, impossible looking scenes. Angels of NY allowing NY to grow, risking lives, body stregths, labor dicodomy, workforce, incredible wealth through labor. MEN AT WORK photobook showed friction between humans and technology. “The character of men is being put into the motors, the airplanes, the dynamos upon which the life and happines of millions of us depend.” Showing the insignificance of people in the urban landscape. Justaposed human and machine characteristics, emphasized faces of the workers.
Lewis Hine sociologist from Columbia taugth camera courses at Ethical Culture School in NY and took students to 291 Gallery.
Bethlehem, PA
Walker Evans
1936
Taken by 8x10 large format camera. Showing smokestacks no smoke, symbol of death of factory, joblessness. Workers housing, graveyard echoing personless landscape, poverty, loss of community, derelect. Iconic Pennsylvania buildngs, no people in shot.
Walker wantede to be a writer, but realized not a good writer and turned to photography. He allows the unexpected beauty of the everyday to reveal itself. Clinical recordings of ignored scenes from a fading regional american culture. Objectivity and pessimism. Showing us the present as if it were the past.
Roadside Stand, Birmingham, AL
Walker Evans
1936
Playfulness, boys posed with big watermenlons, signage, advertisement, fish work, fish drawing, enhances flatness by being square on, not much horizon line. A little slice of life.
Walker Evans allows the unexpected beauty of the everyday reveal itself. Used 8x10 inch large format camera shwoing unheroic, clinical recordings of ignored scenes from a fading regional American culture. Objectivity and pessimism. Showing us the present as if it were the past. Wanted to be a writer, but realized not a good writer, and turned to photography.
Migrant Mother
Dorothea Lange
1936
Hired to phograph for the Farm Securities Administration, pea farm. Photograph became recognized as the symbol of the depression. Shwoing the human cost of the depression. Motherhood, madonna and child, responsibility of motherhood, babes in arms, iconic visually and formally. “An American Exodus” Photobook by Dorothea Lange about migrant workers.
Cattle Skull, Bad Lands, SD
Arthur Rothstein
1936
Rothstein enhances the sense of death with skull used as prop. In May, 1936 Rothstein spotted a steer skull, victim of severe weather drought, moved skull around to get different exposures. Became symbol for the drought of 1936. Dakota Newspaper (national) called it Faked Photograph used it to discredit FDR policies
Rothstein studied under Styker at Comumbia University
Young Farmers, Westerwald Germany
Agust Sander
1913
Boys in ill fitting suits, embody their own role of elegant men, procession. Snder interested in showing sitters to tell story about who they were. Fine line between detachment and empathy. Deliberate convesation between sitter and photographer. SOciological study of German peoples.
Sander biked across germany took photos at Eye level, straight forward, un retouched, large lense, similar to sudio backdrop, placing attention on the subject, uncovering universal landscape. Nazis banned his book “Face of Our Time” destroyed the printing plates and seized the negatives because they revealed a diversity of physical characteristics that did not match their genetic mythology.
Fort Peck Dam
Margaret Bourke White
1936
Hired by Henry Luce for Foturne and then Life, this photograph first cover of Life Magazine. Fort Peck Dam, human technology and construction. First issue of life magazine about construction workers on fort peck dam Montana.
Life Mission “To see life; to see the world; to witness great events… to take pleasure in seeing; and be amazed; to see and be instructed; thus to see and to be shown, is now the will and new expectancy of half mankind.” Life had a social agenda.
