Anti-Family Man

Robert Frank

Family of Man was seen by 9 million people. Frank says something else with photography. Sets out on a road trip across America.

Moments of unease, alienation. Only in the USA, only named by place and site. Some families have mroe than others. In opposition to "togetherness" show the imbalances and rascism that underpins social life in the USA. Challenges that people encounter.

Crowd scences are not filled with joy. Looking for the particularity. Not entirely composed in an artful way. Immediate, not reworked in any way. Pictures viewed as a publication. Darker tone to Frank.

Considered a controversial book in USA. Frist printed in France.

Interrogated for being a communist spy. Time filled with suspicion and not togetherness. Realistic view of divisions on society. Not intended to be viewed as single photograph. Meant to be a series. Not perfect - doesnt have a beginning and an end. Frustrating, stunning, confusing.Represent the people who would not be included. Emgree americans write.

American version of 1959 is removed for being "un-American"

The Family of Man 1950s

Steichen
Becomes the director of photography at MoMa.

The Family of Man Cover - mass accumulation of photograpger. Title says a lot about the humanistic project that Steichen saw himself part of. Cold War and Nuclear Age is going on. Era of McCarthyism. Political and Social tension. Democratic premise that we are all the same.

Family of Man p. 182
"We 2 form a multitude" Different economic social backgrounds, many famous photographers. Not about authorship - mroe about Steichen and his ideological theme.

Act of voting all around the world. Pictures of mothers and children. Things like "we are all born."

Vehicle of cold-war politics under capitalism. This is the way we live. Use a photograph as a means of levelling people. We aree the same through the photograph. People reduced to a photograph are interchangable.

Ripped from youre contexts.

Installation photograph - make us feel warm. touchstones of photography. Social mission of photography. Democracy of the photograph should be questioned. Ethics of photographs - how they can promote a kind of universal. Careful of not losing the particular.

Picture of Atomic Explosion at the end of the exhibition - edited out of exhibition

France Photography

Henri Cartier-Bresson

The Decisive moment is a kind of pre-visualisation different from Steiglitz "proper moment." Considers it his special artistic intuition. Looking for significant moments in ordinary life that surprise us. Instant in which formal spacial relationship of the subject are composed to reveal a special meaning. Acutely aesthetic. Dont compose the scene - you find it.

Place de l'Europe: Man jumping, caught mid-air. Formally composed well.

Gestapo Informer Accused - Shot of a victim of the Nazi's. Woman is pointing out an informant. Capturing of the expression and historical document becomes important. Excitement of winning and exposing perpetrators.

Different subjects with different ideas of meaning. All about a single shot. Not about a manipulation. tHe real photographer has the patience to make these pictures. Described as a detective laying in wait with his camera

France PhotographyN

Henri Cartier-Bresson

The Decisive moment is a kind of pre-visualisation different from Steiglitz "proper moment." Considers it his special artistic intuition. Looking for significant moments in ordinary life that surprise us. Instant in which formal spacial relationship of the subject are composed to reveal a special meaning. Acutely aesthetic. Dont compose the scene - you find it.

Place de l'Europe: Man jumping, caught mid-air. Formally composed well.

Gestapo Informer Accused - Shot of a victim of the Nazi's. Woman is pointing out an informant. Capturing of the expression and historical document becomes important. Excitement of winning and exposing perpetrators.

Different subjects with different ideas of meaning. All about a single shot. Not about a manipulation. tHe real photographer has the patience to make these pictures. Described as a detective laying in wait with his camera

Later photographers

Man Ray

Noir et Blanche - first exhibited in 291, and was inspired by African Art. Experiments with the picture - bulding off something like the pictorialists to the point of taking it apart. Shows us the blowout negative. Considered strange. Associated with surrealists. Taking things that were ordinary and showing us the strangeness of these things. Challenging the ordinariness of the photogrpah

Anatomies - Transformed into something else. Shows the womans head leaning back to show repressed urges. Tilted head looks like a penis head. Experiment with technique and subject matter. Morphing is important. Not so different from Dali's Metamorphosis

Minotaur - Female body turns into monster, interest in myth, title of another surrealist image. Like pictorialism it shares an interest in light

Chance Encounter,.... - 

Portrait of Meret Opperheim - Experiments with sunjects in strange places. Paint across arm that is not shadow. But in contrast to real shadows. Illusions to rela things. Deliberately suggestive - looking for poetic metaphor. Interest in solarization.(light onto -ve)  

Belle Haleine - Fashion photographer. Dopcuments other surrealists - Duchamp's work. Challenge to authorship. 

Rayograph - Experiments of actual objects onto the printing paper as it is developing. Claims that it is "by chance". Surrealist enigma at play 

Rayograph 1925 - What is it? "Throw your camera away if you want to make photographs" It is not the machine and even if you use the machine - it is not the art. Before and after shot is where the art lies. Way of making claims for photography as art

Paul Strand: 

Drawn to Steiglitz ideas and his ideas. Steiglitz becomes mroe experimental - begins to move away from pictorialsim. Tries ot be more modernist. Advises Strand to try and find a way to do photography that connects to cubism or surrealism 

Wall Street : People look like little bugs put against a monumental structure. Not entirely decipherable (connections to cubism and surrealism) Shapes that dominate the composition - emphasis on straight planes and overlapping planes in an effort to reveal a modern tension between man and industry. Alienation

Steiglitz - Equivalen( 1929, 1930)t: Pushes abstraction through close-ups, magnifiying or a crop. Took photograph of the cloud from the ground. Become unrecognizable. Other art is also more abstract. But there is a connection - where is there up or down. Confusion of up and down in abstract art is addressed here. Similar to monochromes. 

Edward Weston 

Worked in Cali as a portrait photographer - was successful - reads about Steiglitz and goes to New York.On his drive across the country he stops in numerous towns and takes pictures that are not pictorial. Uses sharp-focus. 1922, meets Steiglitz and shows his pcitures. 

Combination of sharp photography and pictorialists ideas become his own look. Isolates a subject to its simplified, semi-abstract form. Marks the distinctive break in Abstract. 

Pepper # 30 - Compare to Weston's Nude. Maginified to the point of abstraction. 

Nude: What lies beyond subject and form. Looks for "a kind of life-force". Idea from Bergson. Searching for some pure essence of existence. Heavy task 

Cabbage Leaf - Close to a surrealist image. See parts/fragments as universal symbols that (for him) were interchangable. Symbols of life-force. Reduced subject to their fundamental structure. 

Excusado - Toilet - concept of pre-visualisation. The important moment is before you take the photograph when you visualise what will be on the glass. What qualities and values are you looking for? Tight compositions, exclusion of non-essentials. "Subject matter is not important. Instead what the photographer brings to it" 

By magnifying things finds something elemental in it. "Elegant accessory of human heygine" Toilet echoes lines of body. Even the greeks did not reach this level fo sensuality as we did in modernity. 

Photo-Secessionists

Organised by Steiglitz.

 Include Frank Eugene. Printed in Camera Work (until 1917) that is the nest journal he begins. Takes a needle and scratches on the negative. Scratches on Adam's body in Adam and Eve. 

Gertrude Kasebier. 

Atmospheric effect lends mystery to a traditional Mother and Child picture. Simplified subject with a main focal point. 

Going through portraiture and giving it an artistic touch that was not there before. Commercial portraits tried to stay as true to life as possible. Makes it out of focus

Clarence White: 

Nude - Romantic subject - art that is romantic

Edward Steichen

August Rodin - portrait of the sculpture with his sculpture. Resembles painting but done in a pictoral way in a pictorial space. Reflect 19th Century prepensity for moodiness, meditative fantasies. Fascinated by light. Light was particularly special to light becasue it is the direct translation of the writing of light. 

Moonlight: The Pond: Dark, enigmatic, brooding. Looking for transitions between light and dark. Sums up photo-seccessionists aesthetic. Evoke a mood in order to be suggestive of something beyond visual experience. Something metaphoric.

The Flatiron Building - 1905

Steiglitz creates 291 in NY to promote photography. 

November 4 Lecture

Modern Photography

- used previously in Futurism, Cubism, Constructivism

- Allowed art to follow different goals than mimesis

The invention of photography in 1839 is one of the most pivotal inventions that will change the way visual culture is organised, presented and circulated. It engaged with modern life in a way no other media had. 

Used for portraiture, documentation. Humans are attached to photographs 

Shifting understanding of photography in Modernism and in relation to the concept of art.

Idea of photography as art is a modern art - upon invention was seen as "not art" 

Art used to be restricted to Painting and Sculpture

Resistance to Photography of Art 

- It is a machine - person who snaps a photograph does nothing 

           but some artists thought that this made it art 

- Photography was increasingly democratic 

            more convenient, quicker, more accessible 

            Kodak Eastman - Started in Rochester, signifies the moment when photography is totally democratic 

            Slogan "You Press the Button, We Do the Rest"

           sounds "too easy" to be art 

Walter Benjamin:

- Acknowledgement in 1936 that mass reproduction of imagery that could be circulated would forever change the traditional notion of what art is 

-Works of art had traditionally been precious, unique - this was shattered 

-Democratic impulse of photography - high art is accessible to the masses 

-Thinking about art could be available to everyone 

-Shattering of aura that original works of art had - religious aura 

-Removed from the original context and put into another in the mass media through photographs 

-Challenges notions of uniqueness, originality, authorship, authenticity 

- A political potential to photography through and by virtue of its reproductivity 

-photographs can spread messages 

- Can be used to subvert dominant ideology - Hartman 

-Place for political discourse activated through photographs 

1. Portrait of Stieglitz: Its mechanical nature made photography and "underdog." Some practitioners tried to make it art. Photographers tried to imitate art to make claims for it as art. American born son of Jewish immigrants. Most adamant advocate for art. Editor of the American Photographer. Promotes the hand-held camera. Stresses importance of development as opposed to taking the picture. Manipulation of negative leads to the artistic result. 
2. Fountain - Stieglitz
3. Winter on 5th Ave: Cropped out sides of the negative. Choice is the determinant of art. Uses less than 1/2 of his plate to make photograph. Looking for "proper moment" in his photo. Tried to show weather was not a deterrent. You can make excellent photographs in any weather
4. Reflections, Night, NY : Also interested in Rain. His reputation regarding photography was built on the fact that he was using an hand-held camera observing moments in real time 
5. Sunlight and Shadow: Photographed in difficult moments. Called them "snapshots." Quick, in the moment. Its what happens afterward that make it artistic. Trying to break away from idea of photography as nothing but a painted image. Believed that quickness makes the media intrinsic. Looked for the intrinsic qualities of the painting. Although he was a proponent of the hand-held camera. He was opposed to the idea of art as democratic. Only inspired artists can make fine images. In 1869, he changes his journal as Camera Notes (1897 - 1903). These practitioners are writing and sharing their images across channels. Camera Notes was international in scope. Tried to build a discourse on photography on art. Looked for photographers that emphasized his take on photography. It has a certain aesthetic that other media dont. This journal leads to American Pictorial Movement. This was a circle of american photographers who steer clear of topical issues. It is about how a subject is handled. Almost anything can be photographed, but how it was handled. Chief tool was soft focus to evoke a kind of mystery in the picture. Lend something to the subject that it does not inherently possess. Photography's connection to relaity is what made it "not art". Showed simplified compositions - wanted to remove image from its dependence on the real world and tried to constitute it as a separate image. Challenged artistis to not imitate art and construct visual models specific to the camera. Wanted to create an exhibition specific to photgraphy to show post-camera, tonal values, play between light and shadow. Showed that photography was as legitimate as painting but did not have to imitate it. He realised that camera clubs are not the way to go. Becasue they popularise it. He solicits other photographers and organise themselves as the Photo-Sessecvitionists.