Hist of Photog exam 3

Manuel Alvarez Bravo Good Reputation Sleeping, 1938

A doctor bandaged the model's feet and hips as she lay on a rough blanket against an adobe wall next to four thorny pieces of cacti. •Good Reputation Sleeping from 1939 creates surrealistic sexual tension by contrasting concealment and display with the psychological interaction of seduction, threat and humor. •The enigmatic tableau blends the reality and fantasy of a woman alone, asleep and vulnerable with what is private now public. •The model does not appear concerned as the cacti stands guard, protecting her against the perils of desire.

Seydou Keïta Two Women, 1959

Considered to be one the important precursors of African photography, Seydou Keita was born in Bamako, Mali in 1920. •Like many of his contemporaries, nothing particularly predestined him to become a photographer. •His uncle brings back a camera from a trip to Senegal, and the young Seydou is fascinated. •He starts photographing his relatives and discovers a deep passion for this art. •Although he makes furniture for a living, he spends much time with Pierre Garnier who has his own studio. •There, Seydou Keita learns the secrets of the trade and soon realizes that there was an enormous demand for individual pictures.

Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) American Legion Convention, Dallas, Texas 1964

Garry Winogrand photographed to see what things looked like photographed. • He first picked up a camera in the 1950's and didn't put it down until his untimely death in 1984. • During the 30 years he photographed, Winogrand created numerous images, produced five books, and exhibited extensively throughout the United States and abroad. • He shot in the street, from the hip, up close with a wideangle lens, often tilting the camera. • He was a prolific shooter and his images capture what is known to photographers as the 'decisive moment.' • Winogrand's subject was America. • He documented the city and the urban landscape, concentrating on its unusual people and capturing odd juxtapositions of animate and inanimate objects.

Roy DeCarava (b. 1919) The Graduation 1949 (from his book The Sweet Flypaper of Life, 1955)

He gave up painting to devote himself to photography. His first solo exhibition of photographs was held at the FortyFourth Street Gallery in New York in 1950. • In 1952 DeCarava became the first black artist to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. • The photographs he made during his Fellowship year included many which appeared in Sweet Flypaper of Life. • From 1954 to 1956 DeCarava operated A Photographer's Gallery in New York, one of the first galleries devoted to photography as a fine art.

Harry Callahan Eleanor, 1947

He photographed his wife and daughter and the streets, scenes and buildings of cities where he lived, showing a strong sense of line and form, and light and darkness. Even prior to birth, his daughter showed up in photographs of Eleanor's pregnancy. From 1948 to 1953 Eleanor, and sometimes Barbara, were shown out in the landscape as a tiny counterpoint to large expanses of park, skyline or water. He also worked with multiple exposures. Callahan's work was a deeply personal response to his own life. He encouraged his students to turn their cameras on their own lives, leading by example. Callahan photographed his wife over a period of fifteen years, as his prime subject. Eleanor was essential to his art from 1947 to 1960. He photographed her everywhere—at home, in the city streets, in the landscape; alone, with their daughter, in black and white and in color, nude and clothed, distant and close. He tried several technical experiments—double and triple exposure, blurs, large and small format film.

Robert Frank (b.1924) Drug Store Detroit, 1955 plate 147 (from his book The Americans, 1959)

He would often shoot at night using imprecise focus, incorporated blur into his work, and would use grainy film. • Not only that, but Frank experimented printing his photographs with extreme contrast (disregarding the need to create an image with good tonal range) and would crop radically. • If you look closely at his contact sheets, many of his photographs were either too bright, too dark, so offbalance, and out-of-focus that "Frank seems at times not even to have looked through the viewfinder or bothered to check the controls on his camera." • Frank certainly did this with the purpose to better convey the feelings that he had about America- the dark, alienating, and foreign.

Eikoh Hosoe (b. 1933), Kamaitachi 31, 1968, from his book Kamaitachi, 1969

Hosoe photographed Hijikata's spontaneous interactions with the landscape and the people they encountered. • A seductive combination of performance and photography, the two artists enact an personal and symbolic investigation of Japanese society during a time of massive upheaval. •Like many artists in Japan after WWII, Hosoe was struggling to resolve issues about his Japanese identity. •His photographs combine ancient aspects of Japan-- the concept of the kamaitachi-- with cultural aspects of the new Japan-- butoh dancing, which was developed after WWII.

Eugene Atget (1857-1927) Café, Avenue de la Grande-Armée, 1924

In recording the daily appearance of a rapidly changing Paris, Atget made methodical surveys of the old quarters of the city. • In the manner of a cinematic director, Atget made close-ups, long shots, details, views from different angles, at different times, almost as though in his mind he were challenging time by preserving this world in photographic form. • The vast number of images - perhaps 10,000 - of storefronts, doorways, arcades, vistas, public spaces, and private gardens, of crowds in the street and workers pursuing daily activities - of just about everything but upper-class life - evoke a Paris that appears as part legend, part dream, yet profoundly real.

Harry Callahan, Chicago, 1961

In the 1960s Callahan began a new way of photographing. • For Harry Callahan, as he walked on the streets of Chicago, he found fresh material for his photographs. • He called this "seeing photographically." • So Callahan shot on the street. • He crammed his images with stark contrasts of black and white- allowing for few middle gray tones. • He saw the city as tense and inhospitable, opposed to the beautiful lyrical portraits he took of his wife...

Lee Friedlander (b. 1934) New Orleans, 1968

Lee Friedlander often includes his reflection or shadow in his photographs. • This is not a personal statement, but a reminder that the viewer is looking at a photograph, a flat two-dimensional object made with a camera and not a "window out into the world." • His images often featured undramatic views from automobiles and a variety of reflections and images within images. • Friedlander's images often resemble collages, with many different perspectives layered together. • Both Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander are famous for exposing many hundreds of rolls of film and then selecting their images from their contact sheets. • Lee Friedlander was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960 and again in 1962 for photographic studies of the changing American scene.

Margaret Bourke-White Cover of Life, vol. 1, no. 1, November 23, 1936 (First Life magazine cover, Nov. 1936

Margaret Bourke-‐White was a forerunner in the newly emerging field of photojournalism and the first woman to be hired as a photojournalist She was the premiere female industrial photographer. In 1930, she was the first Western photographer allowed into the Soviet Union. She was the first female photojournalist for Life magazine and one of her photographs was on its first cover (November 23, 1936). She was the first female war correspondent and the first to be allowed to work in combat zones during World War II, first woman to fly a combat mission She was one of the first photographers to enter and document the concentration camps.

Weegee (Arthur Felig) Their First Murder, 1941

The golden period of American news photography began in the 1920s and continued to the 1950s when it was displaced by televison news. • Weegee used flashbulbs on his camera so he could shoot at night without worrying about whether there was enough light. • The flashbulb lights everything evenly and creates a signature style for Weegee. • Graphic images, revealing secrets of the nighttime world. His images are raw and spontaneous and show us a pessimistic view of humanity. • Weegee shows us a world of brutality, fear and confusion.

Dorothea Lange Migrant Mother, Nipomo, CA, 1936

The photograph that has become known as "Migrant Mother" is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made of Florence Owens Thompson and her children in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California. Lange was concluding a month's trip photographing migratory farm labor around the state for what was then the Resettlement Administration. The images were made using a Graflex camera. The original negatives are 4x5" film.

Photographer Unknown, Family of Man Exhibition, 1955 (Curator: Edward Steichen)

The photographs included in the exhibition focused on the commonalties that bind people and cultures around the world and the exhibition served as an expression of humanism in the decade following World War II. Steichen was very influenced by the design aesthetics of the Russian and German photographers like El Lssitzky and Rodchenko but these influences were not acknowledged at the time.

Walker Evans Bethlehem graveyard and steel mill, Pennsylvania, 1935

was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans's work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8×10-inch (200×250 mm) camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent". Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art or George Eastman House.

Diane Arbus (1923-1971) Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, New York City, 1962

• Stylistic Qualities • Snap shot composition • Confrontational • Frontal flash • Heroically centered • Used twin lens camera • Square image • Normal people look strange • Reveals the hidden self of people • Broke down public personas Her use of a square medium format camera with a waist-level finder meant that she could view her subjects while talking to them but not actually looking at them. • She observed their image in the viewfinder, seeking to catch the moment when they looked somehow different, of a peculiar dislocation. • The relationship between photographer and subject is quite different when using a waist level finder compared to a camera held at eye-level. • Using the camera at the eye pointing at the subject is clearly an aggressive and intrusive act - a kind of amplified staring at the subject. It maintains and exaggerates eye contact. • To use the waist level finder, and eye contact is broken. • The subjects are less aware of the photographer and less aware of what she is doing. They may even be puzzled as to what is happening. • When using a camera in this way, the communication between photographer and subject is mainly by talking (or not), whereas at eye-level gesture often dominates.