Terms, History of Photo Final Exam

"The New Topographics"

"New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape" was an exhibition that epitomized a key moment in American landscape photography. The show was curated by William Jenkins at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House (Rochester, New York), and remained open to the public from October 1975 until February 1976. he exhibition had a ripple effect on the whole medium and genre, not only in the USA, but in Europe too where generations of landscape photographers emulated and are still emulating the spirit and aesthetics of the exhibition.

The New Vision

"new vision" rooted in the technological culture of the twentieth century... closely tied to Bauhaus school. use "mechanical" photographic process as means of understanding the soul of the new industrial society. look at the world through the camera lens, using it as a mirror to the reality of the everyday, and also a framing device for the documentary and experimental. Moholy-Nagy championed unexpected vantage points and playful printing techniques to engender a fresh rapport with the visible world Other photographers in Germany, such as August Sander (1876-1964) (1987.1100.82) and Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897-1966) (2005.100.147), emphasized a rigorous objectivity grounded in the close observation of detail

Abstract expressionism

post-World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York in the 1940s. Comes after surrealism... inspired by surrealist idea that art should come from unconscious mind. using abstraction to convey strong emotional or expressive content

Tulsa

Larry Clark life of young people in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Its publication in 1971 "caused a sensation within the photographic community", leading to a new interest in autobiographical work.[1] Later better known for directing the movie Kids, Clark was a Tulsa native and a drug addict during the period (1963-1971) when he took the photographs.

Cubism

/////Cubism (~ 1907-11) art movement which brought European painting and sculpture historically forward toward 20th century Modern art. ///// confusing? In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from a single viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. See photo eg: Paul Strand, Abstraction, Porch Shadows, Connecticut, 1916.

Postmodernism

1960s (pop art) to..... Pulls away from personal focus of modernism...often deliberately impersonal. Born of skepticism and a suspicion of reason. It challenged the notion that there are universal certainties or truths. advocated that individual experience and interpretation of our experience was more concrete than abstract principles. While the modernists championed clarity and simplicity; postmodernism embraced complex and often contradictory layers of meaning. eg. Warhol: removes "direct touch" using silk screen, references mass reproduction

291 (1905-17)

291 is the commonly known name for an internationally famous art gallery that was located in Midtown Manhattan at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York City from 1905 to 1917. Originally known as the "Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession", the gallery was created and managed by photographer Alfred Stieglitz. the exhibitions there helped bring art photography to the same stature in America as painting and sculpture

Camera Work (1903-17)

Alfred Stieglitz luxurious and influential photographic quarterly Stieglitz originally positioned Camera Work as the unofficial organ for the Photo-Secession platform for debate about photography's aspirations to high art and about the relationship of artistic photography to developments in modern art, especially the recent art from Europe, which gradually infiltrated its pages.

Dada

Dada (Dadaism) was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century. Developed in reaction to World War I, the Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works. Dadaist artists expressed their discontent with violence, war, and nationalism, and maintained political affinities with the radical left.

Animal Locomotion (1887)

Edward Muybridge work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-motion photographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography. capturing what the human eye could not distinguish as separate movements

Futurism

Emphasized speed, technology, youth, and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city.

Bauhaus school

German art school operational from 1919 to 1933, founded by architect Walter Gropius. sought to bring together the fine and applied arts + modern technology. László Moholy-Nagy = professor at school unusual camera vantages, various darkroom techniques constituted a "new vision" for a medium: expressive vehicle of the future.

f64

Group f/64 was a group founded by seven 20th-century San Francisco photographers who shared a common photographic style characterized by sharp-focused on and carefully framed images seen through a particularly Western (U.S.) viewpoint. In part, they formed in opposition to the pictorialist photographic style that had dominated much of the early 20th century, but moreover, they wanted to promote a new modernist aesthetic that was based on precisely exposed images of natural forms and found objects.

The Decisive Moment (1952)

Henri Cartier-Bresson published photo book. French language title actually translates as "images on the sly" or "hastily taken images" The book's cover was drawn by Henri Matisse. fell into a circle of friends that included surrealist artists who advocated linking the subconscious and the immediate to their work. "There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment" "Photography is not like painting," he told The Washington Post in 1957. "There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera." "That is the moment the photographer is creative," he said. "Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever."

Surrealism

Launched in 1924 by the poet André Breton, the Surrealist movement aimed at the psychic and social transformation of the individual through the replacing of bourgeois conventions (logic/reason) with new values of spiritual adventure, poetry, and eroticism. Saw the forces of reason blocking the access routes to the imagination. goal = tap the creative powers of the unconscious. explore dreams, intoxication, chance, sexual ecstasy, and madness. Photography came to occupy a central role in Surrealist activity. In the works of Man Ray and Maurice Tabard, the use of such procedures as double exposure, combination printing, montage, and solarization dramatically evoked the union of dream and reality. Other photographers used techniques such as rotation (1987.1100.49) or distortion (1987.1100.321) to render their images uncanny.

Magnum

Magnum was a cooperative picture agency owned by its members. The team split photo assignments among the members. Magnum's mission was to "feel the pulse" of the times. Aimed to use photography in the service of humanity, and provided arresting, widely viewed images.

Photomontage/collage

Photomontage is the process and the result of making a composite photograph by cutting, gluing, rearranging and overlapping two or more photographs into a new image. The German Dadists were instrumental in making montage into a modern art-form. during World War I, when photographers in France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, and Hungary produced a profusion of postcards showing soldiers on one plane and lovers, wives, children, families, or parents on another. Photomontage survived Dada and was a technique inherited and used by European Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí.

Straight photography

Pure photography or straight photography refers to photography that attempts to depict a scene or subject in sharp focus and detail, in accordance with the qualities that distinguish photography from other visual media, particularly painting. Originating as early as 1904, the term was used by critic Sadakichi Hartmann in the magazine Camera Work, and later promoted by its editor, Alfred Stieglitz, as a more pure form of photography than Pictorialism. Once popularized by Stieglitz and other notable photographers, such as Paul Strand, it later became a hallmark of Western photographers, such as Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and others. Although taken by some to mean lack of manipulation, straight photographers in fact applied many common darkroom techniques to enhance the appearance of their prints. Rather than factual accuracy, the term came to imply a specific aesthetic typified by higher contrast and rich tonality, sharp focus, aversion to cropping, and a Modernism-inspired emphasis on the underlying abstract geometric structure of subjects.

The Americans (1958)

Robert Frank With the aid of his major artistic influence, the photographer Walker Evans, Frank secured a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation[2] in 1955 to travel across the United States and photograph its society at all strata. He took his family along with him for part of his series of road trips over the next two years, during which time he took 28,000 shots. Only 83 of those were finally selected by him for publication in The Americans.

Modernism

Shift away from art-by-commission (utilitarian... upper class/church request portraits and religious scenes) to art for arts sake. Perfect, seamless technique and strict notions of beauty are rejected in favor of viewing art is a means of personal expression. idealism + utopian vision of human life and society, belief in progress. Experimented with form, technique and processes rather than focusing on subjects, belief they could find a way of purely reflecting the modern world.

"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936)

by Walter Benjamin, is an essay of cultural criticism which proposes that the aura of a work of art is devalued by mechanical reproduction.

The Photo Secession

The Photo-Secession was an early 20th century movement that promoted photography as a fine art in general and photographic pictorialism in particular. A group of photographers, led by Alfred Stieglitz and F. Holland Day in the early 20th century, held the then controversial viewpoint that what was significant about a photograph was not what was in front of the camera but the manipulation of the image by the artist/photographer to achieve his or her subjective vision. The movement helped to raise standards and awareness of art photography. See straight photography

Aperture magazine (1952-present)

The magazine was founded in 1952 by a consortium of photographers and proponents of photography: Ansel Adams, Melton Ferris, Dorothea Lange, Ernest Louie, Barbara Morgan, Beaumont Newhall, Nancy Newhall, Dody Warren, and Minor White. It was the first journal since Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Work to explore photography as a fine art. first two decades the photographs discussed and published in its pages were exclusively black and white (the preferred mode of most art photographers of the era)

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)

book with text by American writer James Agee and photographs by American photographer Walker Evans, first published in 1941 in the United States. The work documents the lives of impoverished tenant farmers during the Great Depression. Although it is in keeping with Evans' work with the Farm Security Administration, the project was initiated not by the FSA, but by Fortune magazine. The title derives from a passage in the Wisdom of Sirach (44:1) that begins, "Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us".

"The Family of Man"

brought together hundreds of images by photographers working around the world, was a forthright declaration of global solidarity in the decade following World War II. Organized by noted photographer and director of MoMA's Department of Photography Edward Steichen, the exhibition took the form of a photo essay celebrating the universal aspects of the human experience.

Autochrome

early color photography process patented in 1903 by the Lumière brothers in France and first marketed in 1907. principal color photography process in use before the advent of subtractive color film in the mid-1930s. Because of the light loss due to all the filtering, Autochrome plates required much longer exposures than black-and-white plates and films, which meant that a tripod or other stand had to be used and that it was not practical to photograph moving subjects

Previsualization

photographer can see the final print before the image has been captured. Ansel Adams dedicates the beginning of his first book to previsualization, and is often quoted as saying "Visualization is the single most important factor in photography" 1- Need, or desire to photograph. Catalysts such as assignments or travel can increase our desire to photograph. 2- Discovery of the subject, or recognition of its essential aspects will evoke the concept of the image. This leads to the exploration of the subject and the optimum viewpoint. 3- Visualization is the ability to anticipate a finished image before making the exposure. 4- Execution. Take pic

"Rayograph"/photogram

photographic image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light. The usual result is a negative shadow image that shows variations in tone that depends upon the transparency of the objects used. While this simple process was practiced by photography's founders in the nineteenth century and was later popularized as a child's amusement, avant-garde artists in the twentieth century revived the photogram technique as a means for exploring the optical and expressive properties of light. With this shadow-image of a hand and paintbrush, Moholy-Nagy ambitiously suggests that photography may incorporate, and even transcend, painting as the most vital medium of artistic expression in the modern age.

Gum bichromate

printing process... "photographically controlled watercolors" though the image may resemble a color photograph, it is only a fabrication of layers of pigment and hardened gum Arabic. It is in some ways closer to painting than photography. For a tricolor print there must be three layers - blue, yellow, and magenta. Often a fourth layer of either blue or black will be added to give a print extra punch, or perhaps another color to correct the color balance slightly.

Life magazine

ran regularly from 1883 to 1972 and again from 1978 to 2000 first all-photographic American news magazine, and it dominated the market for more than 40 years.

Social documentary photography

recording of how the world looks like, with a social and/or environmental focus. It is a form of documentary photography, with the aim to draw the public's attention to ongoing social issues. It may also refer to a socially critical genre of photography dedicated to showing the life of underprivileged or disadvantaged people.

Street Life in London (1877)

series of articles by the radical journalist Adolphe Smith and the photographer John Thomson. based on interviews with a range of men and women living marginal existence working on the streets of London... unique selling point = photographic component. see social doc photography

Half-tone reproduction

technique that simulates continuous tone imagery through the use of dots, varying either in size or in spacing, thus generating a gradient-like effect.[1] "Halftone" can also be used to refer specifically to the image that is produced by this process. Easier to reproduce/publish/spread images.

Semiotic theory

the study of meaning-making, the study of sign process (semiosis) and meaningful communication In general, semiotic theories take signs or sign systems as their object of study

Street photography

unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places. does not necessitate the presence of a street or even the urban environment. Though people usually feature directly, street photography might be absent of people and can be of an object or environment where the image projects a decidedly human character in facsimile or aesthetic.