Photo History Final

Camera Work

quarterly photographic journal published by Alfred Stieglitz from 1903 to 1917. It is known for its many high-quality photogravures by some of the most important photographers in the world and its editorial purpose to establish photography as a fine art. It has been called "consummately intellectual",[1] "by far the most beautiful of all photographic magazines",[2] and "a portrait of an age [in which] the artistic sensibility of the nineteenth century was transformed into the artistic awareness of the present day."

Becher, Bernd and Hilla

Bernhard "Bernd" Becher 1931 - 2007. and Hilla Becher, née Wobeser (September 2, 1934 - October 10, 2015), were German conceptual artists and photographers working as a collaborative duo. They are best known for their extensive series of photographic images, or typologies, of industrial buildings and structures, often organised in grids. As the founders of what has come to be known as the 'Becher school' or the 'Düsseldorf School' they influenced generations of documentary photographers and artists.

Lange, Dorothea

1895 - 1965. American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography. Famous for her photo of the "Migrant Mother"

Friedlander, Lee

1934 - present. American photographer and artist. Working primarily with Leica hand-held 35 mm cameras and black-and-white film, Friedlander's style focused on the "social landscape". His photographs used detached images of urban life, store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, and posters and signs all combining to capture the look of modern life

Day, F. Holland

(1864 - 1933)One of the first photographers to defend photography as a fine art. F. Holland Day belonged to the pictorialist movement which regarded photography as a fine art and which often included symbolist imagery. The Photo-Secessionists invited him to join, but he declined the offer. As was common at the time, his photographs allude to classical antiquity in manner, composition and often in theme. From 1896 through 1898 Day experimented with Christian themes, using himself as a model for Jesus. This culminated in his series of self-photographs, The Seven Last Words, depicting the seven last words of Christ.

291

(1905-17). 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 gallery is famous for two reasons. First, the exhibitions there helped bring art photography to the same stature in America as painting and sculpture. Pioneering artistic photographers such as Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Käsebier and Clarence H. White all gained critical recognition through exhibitions at 291. Equally important, Stieglitz used this space to introduce to the United States some of the most avant-garde European artists of the time.

Muybridge, E.

(9 April 1830 - 8 May 1904). English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection. Used wet collodion process. Today, Muybridge is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-motion photographs. He was able to separate frames and dissect movements that humans could not see with their bare eye.

Sherman, Cindy

1954 - present. American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits. Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting. To create her photographs, she assumes multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, and wardrobe mistress.

Marey, Etienne

1830-1904. He is widely considered to be a pioneer of photography and an influential pioneer of the history of cinema. Marey's chronophotographic gun was made in 1882, this instrument was capable of taking 12 consecutive frames a second, with all the frames recorded on the same picture. Using these pictures he studied horses, birds, dogs, sheep, donkeys, elephants, fish, microscopic creatures, molluscs, insects, reptiles, etc. Some call it Marey's "animated zoo". Marey also conducted the famous study about cats always landing on their feet. He conducted very similar studies with a chicken and a dog and found that they could do almost the same. Marey also studied human locomotion.

Eakins, Thomas

1844 - 1916. For the length of his professional career, from the early 1870s until his health began to fail some 40 years later, Eakins worked exactingly from life, choosing as his subject the people of his hometown of Philadelphia. --Eakins performed his own independent motion studies, usually involving the nude figure, and even developed his own technique for capturing movement on film. Whereas Muybridge's system relied on a series of cameras triggered to produce a sequence of individual photographs, Eakins preferred to use a single camera to produce a series of exposures superimposed on one negative.

Riis, Jacob

1849 - 1914. Social documentary photographer. He is known for using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City; those impoverished New Yorkers were the subject of most of his prolific writings and photography. Riis was among the first Americans to use flash photography. Pistol lamps were dangerous and looked threatening, and would soon be replaced by another method for which Riis lit magnesium powder on a frying pan.

Käsebier, G.

1852 - 1934. One of the most influential American photographers of the early 20th century. She was known for her images of motherhood, her portraits of Native Americans and her promotion of photography as a career for women. Over the next decade she would take dozens of photographs of the Indians in the show, some of which would become her most famous images. Unlike her contemporary Edward Curtis, Käsebier focused more on the expression and individuality of the Indian person than the costumes and customs. While Curtis is known to have added elements to his photographs to emphasize his personal vision, Käsebier did the opposite, sometimes removing genuine ceremonial articles from a sitter in order to concentrate on the face or stature of the person. In July 1899 Alfred Stieglitz published five of Käsebier's photographs in Camera Notes, declaring her "beyond dispute, the leading artistic portrait photographer of the day."

Atget, Eugène

1857 - 1927. Pioneer of documentary photography, noted for his determination to document all of the architecture and street scenes of Paris before their disappearance to modernization. While his work was perceived as straight photography at the time, it inspired and made way for future generations of surrealists. Surrealist American photographers Man Ray and Berenice Abbott disco vered him right before his death.

Stieglitz, A.

1864 - 1946. Amrican pictorial photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz was known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century, where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S. In 1902 published a completely independent magazine of pictorial photography to carry forth the artistic standards of the Photo-Secessionist called Camera Work.

Blossfeldt, Karl

1865 - 1932. German photographer, sculptor, teacher, and artist who worked in Berlin, Germany. He is best known for his close-up photographs of plants and living things, published in 1929 as, Urformen der Kunst. He was inspired, as was his father, by nature and the ways in which plants grow. He believed that 'the plant must be valued as a totally artistic and architectural structure.' Blossfeldt made many of his photographs with a homemade camera that could magnify the subject up to thirty times its size, revealing details within a plant's natural structure. Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature) was swiftly regarded as a seminal book on photography.

White, Clarence

1871 - 1925. American photographer, teacher and a founding member of the Photo-Secession movement. Internationally known for his pictorial photographs that captured the spirit and sentimentality of America in the early twentieth century. As he became well known for his images, White was sought out by other photographers who often traveled to Ohio to learn from him. He became friends with Alfred Stieglitz and helped advance the cause of photography as a true art form. In 1906 White and his family moved to New York City in order to be closer to Stieglitz and his circle and to further promote his own work. While there he became interested in teaching photography and in 1914 he established the Clarence H. White School of Photography, the first educational institution in America to teach photography as art.

Hine, Lewis

1874 - 1940. American sociologist and photographer. Hine used his camera as a tool for social reform. His photographs were instrumental in changing child labor laws in the United States. In 1907, Hine became the staff photographer of the Russell Sage Foundation; he photographed life in the steel-making districts and people of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for the influential sociological study called The Pittsburgh Survey. Child laborers in glasswork. Indiana, 1908 Little Lottie, a regular oyster shucker in Alabama Canning Co. (Bayou La Batre, Alabama, 1911) In 1908 Hine became the photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), leaving his teaching position. Over the next decade, Hine documented child labor.

Sander, August

1876 - 1964. German portrait and documentary photographer. Sander's first book Face of our Time (German: Antlitz der Zeit) was published in 1929. Sander has been described as "the most important German portrait photographer of the early twentieth century. His work includes landscape, nature, architecture, and street photography, but he is best known for his portraits, as exemplified by his series People of the 20th Century. In this series, he aims to show a cross-section of society during the Weimar Republic.

Steichen, E.

1879 - 1973. Born in Luxembourg. Steichen was the most frequently featured photographer in Alfred Stieglitz' groundbreaking magazine Camera Work during its run from 1903 to 1917. Together Stieglitz and Steichen opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, which eventually became known as 291 after its address. Early work was pictorial much like that of his friend Steiglitz.

Coburn, Alvin Langdon

1882 - 1966. Became a key figure in the development of American pictorialism. He became the first major photographer to emphasize the visual potential of elevated viewpoints and later made some of the first completely abstract photographs.

Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo

1895 - 1946. Hungarian painter and photographer as well as a professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts. Throughout his career, he became proficient and innovative in the fields of photography, typography, sculpture, painting, printmaking, and industrial design. One of his main focuses was photography. He coined the term Neues Sehen (New Vision) for his belief that photography could create a whole new way of seeing the outside world that the human eye could not.

Weston, E.

1886 - 1958. American photographer. He has been called "one of the most innovative and influential American photographers..." and "one of the masters of 20th century photography." Over the course of his 40-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of subjects, including landscapes, still lifes, nudes, portraits, genre scenes and even whimsical parodies. Some of Weston's most successful photos were those in which he treated fruits, vegetables, and the human body as abstracted subjects for his still life photos. It is said that he developed a "quintessentially American, and specially Californian, approach to modern photography" because of his focus on the people and places of the American West.

Duchamp, M.

1887 - 1968. French-American painter, sculptor, chess player and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, conceptual art, and Dada. Considered one of the most important conceptual artists of all time. "Rrose Sélavy", also spelled Rose Sélavy, was one of Duchamp's pseudonyms. Sélavy emerged in 1921 in a series of photographs by Man Ray showing Duchamp dressed as a woman. Through the 1920s Man Ray and Duchamp collaborated on more photos of Sélavy. Duchamp later used the name as the byline on written material and signed several creations with it.

Hoch, Hannah

1889 - 1978. German Dada artist best known for her work of the Weimar period, when she was one of the originators of photomontage. Höch's work was intended to dismantle the fable and dichotomy that existed in the concept of the "New Woman": an energetic, professional, and androgynous woman, who is ready to take her place as man's equal. Her interest in the topic was in how the dichotomy was structured, as well as in who structures social roles. Other key themes in Höch's works were androgyny, political discourse, and shifting gender roles.

Lissitzky, El

1890 - 1941. Russian avant-garde artist. Made a career of utilizing art for social and political change. Although often highly abstract and theoretical, Lissitzky's work was able speak to the prevailing political discourse of his native Russia, and then the nascent Soviet Union. Following Kazimir Malevich in the Suprematist idiom, Lissitzky used color and basic shapes to make strong political statements. Lissitzky also challenged conventions concerning art, and his Proun series of two-dimensional Suprematist paintings sought to combine architecture and three-dimensional space with traditional, albeit abstract, two-dimensional imagery. A teacher for much of his career and ever an innovator, Lissitzky's work spanned the media of graphic design, typography, photography, photomontage, book design, and architectural design.

Man Ray

1890 - 1976. Romanian-American artists who grew up in United State. Was friendly with Stieglitz and that crowd. Man Ray and Duchamp met each other and began a very close friendship. When Duchamp went back to Paris after the war, Man Ray joined him there. They became surrealist Dadaists. Duchamp would sometimes appear in drag as "Rrose Seval" They were combining life and art. Messing with their identities, what they considered a series of masks. The performance of identity. Chance is a huge element in the work of surrealist artists. It does not have to do with your consciousness. Man Ray chose what objects to put on a piece of paper, but then he would contact print them, without knowing how the light would hit paper. It gave the artist a chance to be surprised by the result of the contact print. Man Ray thought he had discovered the process of photogram—although Talbot had created it. Man Ray calls them Rayographs.

Rodchenko, Alexander

1891 - 1956. Russian artist, sculptor, photographer and graphic designer. He was one of the founders of constructivism and Russian design; he was married to the artist Varvara Stepanova. Rodchenko was one of the most versatile Constructivist and Productivist artists to emerge after the Russian Revolution. He worked as a painter and graphic designer before turning to photomontage and photography. His photography was socially engaged, formally innovative, and opposed to a painterly aesthetic. Concerned with the need for analytical-documentary photo series, he often shot his subjects from odd angles—usually high above or down below—to shock the viewer and to postpone recognition.

Heartfield, John

1891 - 1968. German visual Dada artist who pioneered the use of art as a political weapon. Some of his most famous photomontages were anti-Nazi and anti-fascist statements. It was through rotogravure, an engraving process whereby pictures, designs, and words are engraved into the printing plate or printing cylinder—that Heartfield's montages, in the form of posters, were distributed in the streets of Berlin between 1932 and the 1933 Nazi rise to power. His political montages regularly appeared as covers for communist magazines. Heartfield lived in Berlin until April 1933, when the Nazi Party took power. On Good Friday, the SS broke into his apartment, but he escaped by jumping from his balcony and hiding in a trash bin. He fleed Germany and rose to number-five on the Gestapo's most-wanted list. In 1934, he montaged four bloody axes tied together to form a swastika to mock the "Blood and Iron" motto of the Reich.

Benjamin, Walter

1892 - 1940. German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist. Wrote "A Short History of Photography", marked by nostalgia, and concentrates on typical and salient aspects of very early portrait photography, noting the importance of long exposure and posing times.

Cahun, Claude

1894 - 1954. French. They adopted the gender-ambiguous name Claude Cahun in 1917 and is best known for self-portraits, in which they assume a variety of personas. highly staged self-portraits and tableaux that incorporated the visual aesthetics of Surrealism. During the 1920s Cahun produced an astonishing number of self-portraits in various guises such as aviator, dandy, doll, body builder, vamp and vampire, angel, and Japanese puppet.

Kertész, André

1894 - 1985. Hungarian-born photographer known for his groundbreaking contributions to photographic composition and the photo essay. In the early years of his career, his then-unorthodox camera angles and style prevented his work from gaining wider recognition. Now considered one of the seminal figures of photojournalism.

Lartigue, J. H.

1894 - 1986. French photographer and painter, known for his photographs of automobile races, planes and female Parisian fashion models. At age 69 his boyhood photographs were 'discovered' by Charles Rado of the Rapho agency who introduced Lartigue to John Szarkowski, curator of the Museum of Modern Art, who arranged an exhibition of his work at the museum. Life magazine published the photos in 1963. This exhibition gained him fame and exposure to the industry. He then got opportunities to work with several fashion magazines and became famous in other countries as well. In 1974 he was commissioned by the newly elected President of France Valéry Giscard d'Estaing to shoot his official portrait.

Weegee

1899 - 1968. American photographer and photojournalist, known for his stark black and white street photography. Weegee worked in Manhattan, New York City's Lower East Side, as a press photographer during the 1930s and 1940s, and he developed his signature style by following the city's emergency services and documenting their activity. Much of his work depicted unflinchingly realistic scenes of urban life, crime, injury and death. in 1935, he became a freelance news photographer. He centered his practice around police headquarters and in 1938 obtained permission to install a police radio in his car. This allowed him to take the first and most sensational photographs of news events and offer them for sale to publications

Brassai

1899 - 1984. French documentary photographer. In the early thirties he set about photographing the night of Paris, especially at its more colorful and more disreputable levels. The results this project --- a fascinatingly tawdry collection of prostitutes, pimps, madams, transvestites, apaches, and assorted cold-eyed pleasure-seekers --- was published in 1933 as Paris de Nuit, one of the most remarkable of all photographic books. Took up photography to make a living. There was a picture magazine explosion after the first world war. There was a need for photographers and these very artistic photographers who were already artists in one way or another found themselves uniquely qualified to make the stylish avant grade photos these magazines wanted. Brassai made photos with found objects. Thought they represented subconscious sexual desires.

Model, Lisette

1901 - 1983. Austrian-born photographer. Primarily known for the frank humanism of her street photography. She was captivated by the energy of New York City, which she expressed through her separate series Reflections and Running Legs. She also took particular interest in distinct areas of the city, specifically the Lower East Side and Coney Island, where she made hundreds of photographs depicting ordinary American people.

Bellmer, Hans

1902 - 1975. German artist, best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. Historians of art and photography also consider him a Surrealist photographer. Bellmer's 1934 anonymous book, The Doll (Die Puppe), produced and published privately in Germany, contains 10 black-and-white photographs of Bellmer's first doll arranged in a series of "tableaux vivants" (living pictures). Created highly surreal, erotic, bondage-focused artworks.

Adams, Ansel

1902 - 1984. American photographer and environmentalist. Black-and-white landscape photographs of the American West--Yosemite National Park especially. Adams and Fred Archer developed the Zone System as a way to determine proper exposure and adjust the contrast of the final print. The resulting clarity and depth characterized his photographs. He primarily used large-format cameras because the large film used with these cameras (primarily 4x5 and 8x10) contributed to the clarity of his prints. Adams initiated the photography group known as Group f/64,

Evans, Walker

1903 - 1975. 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. Very well known for work he did in the Deep South. He was always resistant to the directives from Striker and the main office (did not want to do people photos) He made very quiet photos often without people. He conceived of the picture as a composition and not just as a snatched telling moment. He was often using a large format camera. Worked for the FSA (farm administration) for less than 2 years.

Siskind, Aaron

1903 - 1991. American photographer. He is considered to be closely involved with, if not a part of, the abstract expressionist movement. Siskind's work focuses on the details of nature and architecture. He presents them as flat surfaces to create a new image which stands independent of the original subject. For some his work has been described as crossing the line between photography and painting, his photographs are works unique to the art form of photography.

Sommer, Frederick

1905 - 1999. Italian artist raised in Brazil. Considered a master photographer, Sommer first experimented with photography in 1931. Along with his painting works on paper, Sommer started to seriously explore the artistic possibilities of photography in 1938 when he acquired an 8×10 Century Universal Camera, eventually encompassing the genres of still life (chicken parts and assemblage), horizonless landscapes, jarred subjects, cut-paper, cliché-verre negatives and nudes.

White, Minor

1908 - 1976. American photographer. one of the masters of photographic modernism. Throughout his career, White sought to photograph things not only for what they are but also for what they may suggest, and his pictures teem with symbolic and metaphorical allusions. Coming of age when homosexuality was socially unacceptable, White sought comfort in a variety of Western and Eastern religious practices. Photography became both a way to make visible his ongoing search for spiritual transcendence and a medium through which he could express his sexual desire for men. He combined an intense interest in how people viewed and understood photographs with a personal vision that was guided by a variety of spiritual and intellectual philosophies. Starting in Oregon in 1937 and continuing until he died in 1976, White made thousands of black-and-white and color photographs of landscapes, people and abstract subject matter, created with both technical mastery and a strong visual sense of light and shadow.

Cartier-Bresson, Henri

1908 - 2004. French humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35 mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment. The Surrealist movement, was founded in 1924 and Cartier-Bresson began socializing with the Surrealists at a Café. He met a number of the movement's leading protagonists, and was drawn to the Surrealist movement's technique of using the subconscious and the immediate to influence their work.

Ruscha, Ed

1937- present. American. Despite being credited with a Pop sensibility, Ed Ruscha defies categorization with his diverse output of photographic books and tongue-in-cheek photo-collages, paintings, and drawings. Ruscha's work is inspired by the ironies and idiosyncrasies of life in Los Angeles, which he often conveys by placing glib words and phrases from colloquial and consumerist usage atop photographic images or fields of color. Known for painting and drawing with unusual materials such as gunpowder, blood, and Pepto Bismol, Ruscha draws attention to the deterioration of language and the pervasive cliches in pop culture

Callahan, Harry

1912 - 1999. Twentieth century American photographer. Callahan left almost no written records—no diaries, letters, scrapbooks or teaching notes. His technical photographic method was to go out almost every morning, walk through the city he lived in and take numerous pictures. He then spent almost every afternoon making proof prints of that day's best negatives. Yet, for all his photographic activity, Callahan, at his own estimation, produced no more than half a dozen final images a year. He would choose a subject, such as nature or city street life, photograph it in a variety of ways, and then experiment with extreme contrast, double exposure, all-white and all-black prints, and much else. His images are cool, often tough, and he never presses a personal agenda upon the viewer. 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.

Arbus, Diane

1923 - 1971. American photographer noted for photographs of marginalized people—dwarfs, giants, transgender people, nudists, circus performers—and others whose normality was perceived by the general populace as ugly or surreal. Her work has been described as consisting of formal manipulation characterized by blatant sensationalism

Frank, Robert

1924 - Present. Swiss-American photographer and documentary filmmaker. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans, earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider's view of American society. Frank's restless, gritty, melancholic vision marked him as an astute documentarian of the postwar American landscape.

Winogrand, Garry

1928 - 1984. American street photographer, from the Bronx, New York, known for his portrayal of U.S. life, and its social issues, in the mid-20th century. Though he photographed in Los Angeles and elsewhere, Winogrand was essentially a New York photographer. He photographed business moguls, everyday women on the street, famous actors and athletes, hippies, politicians, soldiers, animals in zoos, rodeos, car culture, airports, and antiwar demonstrators and the construction workers who beat them bloody in view of the unmoved police. Daily life in postwar America—rich with new possibility and yet equally anxious, threatening to spin out of control—seemed to unfold for him in a continuous stream.

Warhol, Andy

1928 - 1987. American artist, director and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture, and advertising that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans

Klein, William

1928 - present. American-born French photographer and filmmaker noted for his ironic approach to both media and his extensive use of unusual photographic techniques in the context of photojournalism and fashion photography achieved widespread fame as a fashion photographer for Vogue and for his photo essays on various cities. Despite having no formal training as a photographer, Klein won the Prix Nadar in 1957 for New York, a book of photographs taken during a brief return to his hometown in 1954. Klein's work was considered revolutionary for its "ambivalent and ironic approach to the world of fashion", its "uncompromising rejection of the then prevailing rules of photography" and for his extensive use of wide-angle and telephoto lenses, natural lighting and motion blur.

Heinecken, Robert

1931 - 2006. American artist who referred to himself as a "paraphotographer" because he so often made photographic images without a camera. Heinecken was known for appropriating and re-processing images from magazines, product packaging or television. In "Are You Rea" series from 1964 to 1968, for instance, he created a portfolio of images filled with unexpected and sometimes surreal juxtapositions by placing a single magazine page on a light table, so that the resulting contact print picks up imagery from both sides of the page. In the late 1960s, he also began cutting up popular magazines such as Time and Vogue and inserting sexual or pornographic images into them. He would place his collage-publications back on newsstands in Los Angeles to be sold to unsuspecting buyers

Baldessari, John

1931 - Present. American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. Best known for works that blend photographic materials (such as film stills), take them out of their original context and rearrange their form, often including the addition of words or sentences. Related to his early text paintings were his Wrong series (1966-1968), which paired photographic images with lines of text from an amateur photography book, aiming at the violation of a set of basic "rules" on snapshot composition.

Michals, Duane

1932 - present. American photographer. Michals's work makes innovative use of photo-sequences, often incorporating text to examine emotion and philosophy.

Sontag, Susan

1933 - 2004. American writer, filmmaker, teacher, and political activist. Sontag writes that the convenience of modern photography has created an overabundance of visual material, and "just about everything has been photographed". This has altered our expectations of what we have the right to view, want to view or should view. "In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notion of what is worth looking at and what we have the right to observe" and has changed our "viewing ethics". Photographs have increased our access to knowledge and experiences of history and faraway places, but the images may replace direct experience and limit reality. She also states that photography desensitizes its audience to horrific human experiences, and children are exposed to experiences before they are ready for them.

Pfahl, John

1939 - present. American landscape photographer. Pfahl is known for his innovative landscape photography such as Altered Landscape, his first major series of un-manipulated color photographs on which he worked from 1974 through 1978. In these pictures Pfahl manipulates the optics of the camera and plays tricks with perspective by using cleverly placed manmade objects in the landscape to mislead the eye of the viewer. For the past thirty years, Pfahl has been creating images of nature that transcribe the forces of nature and how humans affect it. His work has been shown in over hundred group and solo exhibitions and is held in many public and private collections throughout the world.

Witkin, Joel Peter

1939 - present. American photographer who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His work often deals with such themes as death, corpses (and sometimes dismembered portions thereof), and various outsiders such as dwarves, transsexual and intersex persons, as well as physically deformed people. Witkin's complex tableaux often recall religious episodes or classical paintings.

Eggleston, W.

1939 - present. American photographer. He is widely credited with increasing recognition for color photography as a legitimate artistic medium to display in art galleries. Before Eggleston, color had been used primarily in advertising and fashion photography. in 1976, when MoMA's director of photography John Szarkowski organized a solo show of Eggleston's work, these shots were nothing less than shocking. Up to that point, color photography had been derided by fine artists for its use in advertising and photojournalism. American photographer Walker Evans summarized the feeling in 1969 when he stated, "There are four simple words for the matter, which must be whispered: Color photography is vulgar."

Clark, Larry

1943 - present. American film director, photographer, writer and film producer who is best known for his controversial teen film Kids (1995) and his photography book Tulsa. His work focuses primarily on youth who casually engage in illegal drug use, underage sex, and violence, and who are part of a specific subculture, such as surfing, punk rock or skateboarding. Clark documented the culture of drug use and illicit activity of his friends in Tulsa, and his photographs from those years were published as Tulsa (1971).

Cumming, Robert

1943 - present. American painter, sculptor, photographer, and printmaker best known for his photographs of conceptual drawings and constructions, which layer meanings within meanings, and reference both science and art history. Surreal, abstract sculptural photographer.

Baltz, Lewis

1945 - 2014. Visual artist and photographer who became an important figure in the New Topographics movement of the late 1970s. His work is focused on searching for beauty in desolation and destruction. Baltz's images describe the architecture of the human landscape: offices, factories and parking lots. His pictures are the reflection of control, power, and influenced by and over human beings

Kruger, Barbara

1945-present. American conceptual artist and collagist. Most of her work consists of black-and-white photographs, overlaid with declarative captions, stated in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed text. The phrases in her works often include pronouns such as "you", "your", "I", "we", and "they", addressing cultural constructions of power, identity, and sexuality.

Wall, Jeff

1946 -present. Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit cibachrome photographs Wall is known for large-scale photographs of contemporary everyday genre scenes populated with figures, in the early 1990s he became interested in still lifes. He distinguishes between unstaged "documentary" pictures, like Still Creek, Vancouver, winter 2003, and "cinematographic" pictures, produced using a combination of actors, sets, and special effects, such as A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993. Created "Picture for Women" and "A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)"

Shore, Stephen

1947 - present. American photographer known for his images of banal scenes and objects in the United States, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography.[1] His books include Uncommon Places (1982) and American Surfaces (1999), photographs that he took on cross-country road trips in the 1970s.

Prince, Richard

1949 - present. Appropriative photography. American painter and photographer. He began copying other photographers' work in 1977. His image, Untitled (Cowboy), a rephotographing of a photograph by Sam Abell and appropriated from a cigarette advertisement, was the first rephotograph to be sold for more than $1 million at auction at Christie's New York in 2005. Starting in 1977, Prince photographed four photographs which previously appeared in the New York Times. This process of rephotographing continued into 1983, when his work Spiritual America featured Garry Gross's photo of Brooke Shields at the age of ten, standing in a bathtub, as an allusion to precocious sexuality and to the Alfred Stieglitz photograph by the same name. His Jokes series (beginning 1986) concerns the sexual fantasies and sexual frustrations of white, middle-class America, using stand-up comedy and burlesque humor.

Serrano, Andres

1950-present. American photographer and artist who has become famous through his photos of corpses and his use of feces and bodily fluids in his work, notably his controversial work "Piss Christ", a red-tinged photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass container of what was purported to be the artist's own urine. He is also notable for creating the artwork for the heavy metal band Metallica's Load and ReLoad albums.

Goldin, Nan

1953 - present. American photographer. Her work often explores LGBT bodies, moments of intimacy, the HIV crisis, and the opioid epidemic. Her most notable work is The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), which documents the post-Stonewall gay subculture and Goldin's family and friends. She lives and works in New York City, Berlin, and Paris.

Calle, Sophie

1953 - present. French writer, photographer, installation artist, and conceptual artist. Calle's work is distinguished by its use of arbitrary sets of constraints, and evokes the French literary movement of the 1960s known as Oulipo. Her work frequently depicts human vulnerability, and examines identity and intimacy. Calle, Sophie. She is recognized for her detective-like ability to follow strangers and investigate their private lives. Her photographic work often includes panels of text of her own writing.

Gursky, Andreas

1955-present. German photographer and professor, known for his large format architecture and landscape color photographs, often employing a high point of view. The perspective in many of Gursky's photographs is drawn from an elevated vantage point. This position enables the viewer to encounter scenes, encompassing both centre and periphery, which are ordinarily beyond reach. This sweeping perspective has been linked to an engagement with globalization. Visually, Gursky is drawn to large, anonymous, man-made spaces—high-rise facades at night, office lobbies, stock exchanges, the interiors of big box retailers

Simpson, Lorna

1960 - present. African-American. Simpson first came to prominence in the 1980s for her large-scale works that combined photography and text and defied traditional conceptions of sex, identity, race, culture, history, and memory. Drawing on this work, she started to create large photos printed on felt that showed public but unnoticed sexual encounters. Recently, Simpson has experimented with film as well as continuing to work with photography.

modernism

A general term used to encompass trends in photography from roughly 1910-1950 when photographers began to produce works with a sharp focus and an emphasis on formal qualities, exploiting, rather than obscuring, the camera as an essentially mechanical and technological tool. This approach abandoned the Pictorialist mode that had dominated the medium for over 50 years throughout the United States. Rejected the artistic manipulations, soft focus, and painterly quality of Pictorialism and praising the straightforward, unadulterated images of modern life in the work of artists such as Alfred Stieglitz. Innovators like Paul Strand and Edward Weston would further expand the artistic capabilities and techniques of photography, helping to establish it as an independent art form.

"The Family of Man"

Ambitious photography exhibition curated by Edward Steichen, the director of the Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA) Department of Photography. It was first shown in 1955 at the New York MoMA, then toured the world for eight years. According to Steichen, the exhibition represented the "culmination of his career." The photographs included in the exhibition focus on the commonalities that bind people and cultures around the world and the exhibition itself served as an expression of humanism in the decade following World War II. Though it did not tour Russia, the collection's overtones of peace and human brotherhood symbolized a lifting of the overhanging danger of an atomic war for Soviet citizens. The physical installation and layout of the Family of Man exhibition aimed to enable the visitor to read this as a photo-essay about human development and cycles of life.

Life magazine

American magazine that ran regularly from 1883 - 1972 and again from 1978 to 2000. During its golden age from 1936 to 1972, Life was a wide-ranging weekly general interest magazine notable for the quality of the photography. Strong emphasis on photojournalism. Life developed as the photo magazine in the U.S., giving as much space and importance to images as to words. Focused entirely on the visual story of white people. Enforced rigid gender roles.

appropriation

Appropriation in art is the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them. The use of appropriation has played a significant role in the history of the dada movement and all photographic styles relying on photo montage. Artists other than those involved with Dada included those such as Barbara Kruger and her political pop art sensibilities.

Dada

Art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centers in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire (circa 1916); New York Dada began circa 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Paris. 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. The art of the movement spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, and sculpture. Dadaist artists expressed their discontent with violence, war, and nationalism, and maintained political affinities with the radical left. Included photographers like Marcel Duchamp and his overturned urinal. Also Hannah Höch and Marcel Duchamp.

Animal Locomotion (1887)

Eadward Muybridge is known for his pioneering 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. Muybridge was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection.

autochrome

Early color photography process patented in 1903 by the Lumière brothers in France and first marketed in 1907. It was the principal color photography process in use before the advent of subtractive color film in the mid-1930s. Autochrome is an additive color "mosaic screen plate" process. The medium consists of a glass plate coated on one side with a random mosaic of microscopic grains of potato starch dyed red-orange, green, and blue-violet (an unusual but functional variant of the standard red, green, and blue additive colors) which act as color filters.

cubism

Early-20th-century art movement which brought European painting and sculpture forward toward 20th century Modern art. an early 20th-century style and movement in art, especially painting, in which perspective with a single viewpoint was abandoned and use was made of simple geometric shapes, interlocking planes, and, later, collage. there was a widespread international interest in experimental photography in the 20's that owed its existence only indirectly, if at all, to Cubism. Unusual vantage points, repetitive designs, abstractions, close-ups and cameraless images characterize this activity, which included such figures as Alexander Rodchenko in Russia and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer and Florence Henri in Germany. The movement was pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, joined by Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, and Fernand Léger. One primary influence that led to Cubism was the representation of three-dimensional form in the late works of Paul Cézanne.

The Photo Secession

Formed in 1902. 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.

Aperture magazine

Founded in 1952. International quarterly journal specializing in photography. founded in 1952 by Minor White. It was the first journal since Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Work to explore photography as a fine art. The journal's mission, as stated in its inaugural issue: Aperture has been originated to communicate with serious photographers and creative people everywhere, whether professional, amateur or student... Aperture is intended to be a mature journal in which photographers can talk straight to each other, discuss the problems that face photography as profession and art, share their experiences, comment on what goes on, descry the new potentials. We, who have founded this journal, invite others to use Aperture as a common ground for the advancement of photography.

Magnum

Founded in Paris in 1947. International photographic cooperative owned by its photographer-members. According to co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson, "Magnum is a community of thought, a shared human quality, a curiosity about what is going on in the world, a respect for what is going on and a desire to transcribe it visually." Magnum is one of the first photographic cooperatives, owned and administered entirely by members. The staff serve a support role for the photographers, who retain all copyrights to their own work. Similar to a modern day union. The Magnum cooperative has included photojournalists from across the world, who have covered many historical events of the 20th century. The cooperative's archive includes photographs depicting family life, drugs, religion, war, poverty, famine, crime, government and celebrities. Magnum In Motion is the multimedia offshoot of Magnum Photos and is based in New York City.

Bauhaus school

German art school operational from 1919 to 1933. The school brought fine arts and industrial arts onto the same plane, equalizing and democratizing them. Combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. The Bauhaus was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. The German term Bauhaus. It was founded with the idea of creating a "total" work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) in which all arts, including architecture, would eventually be brought together. The Bauhaus style later became one of the most influential currents in modern design. Housed such photographers as László Moholy-Nagy.

f64

Group f/64 was founded by Ansel Adams in 1932 when he decided to organize some of his fellow photographers for the purposes of promoting a common aesthetic principle. 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.

gum bichromate

Gum bichromate is a 19th-century photographic printing process based on the light sensitivity of dichromates. It is capable of rendering painterly images from photographic negatives. Gum printing is traditionally a multi-layered printing process, but satisfactory results may be obtained from a single pass.

surrealism

In 1924, with André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto, Surrealism was born. Drawn to the writings of Sigmund Freud, artists of the movement explored the unconscious in their works. They embraced the element of chance, engaged with dreams, and created a visual language of latent sexual desire through symbolism and the female form. Many of them also looked to Freud's idea of "the uncanny" to transform the recognizable world into an unfamiliar version of itself to disquieting effect. Anti-authoritarian and anti-Fascist, the Paris-based movement drew a wide range of artists. Their varied practices have inspired diverse subsequent movements, from Pop to Feminist Art. Photographers included Man Ray, Claude Cahun, Hans Bellmer.

The Decisive Moment

In 1952 Henri Cartier-Bresson, a founder of modern photojournalism, proposed one of the most fascinating and highly debated concepts in the history of photography: "the decisive moment." This moment occurs when the visual and psychological elements of people in a real life scene spontaneously and briefly come together in perfect resonance to express the essence of that situation. The Decisive Moment "contains what is probably Cartier-Bresson's most comprehensive and important statement on the meaning, technique, and utility of photography. The title refers to a central idea in his work—the decisive moment—the elusive instant when, with brilliant clarity, the appearance of the subject reveals in its essence the significance of the event of which it is a part, the most telling organization of forms"

social documentary photography

It is a form of documentary photography, with the aim to draw the public's attention to ongoing social issues. Social documentary photography or concerned photography may often be devoted to 'social groups' with socio-economic and cultural similarities, showing living or working conditions perceived as shameful, discriminatory, unjust or harmful. Examples include child labor, child neglect, homelessness, poverty among segments of society, impoverished children and the elderly, and hazardous working conditions. The poor, the social outcasts, or lower classes are portrayed in compassionate observation. The documentary power of the images is associated with the desire for political and social change. Social documentary photography has its roots in the 19th Century work of Henry Mayhew, Jacob Riis, and Lewis Hine, but began to take further form through the photographic practice of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the USA. The FSA hired photographers and writers to report and document the plight of poor farmers.

The New Vision

László Moholy-Nagy enthusiastically described an abstraction of prior forms of photography as a "new vision" rooted in the technological culture of the twentieth century. Developed in the 1920s. The New Vision was intricately linked to the urban culture it came from, in which high-angle shots, low-angle shots, deliberately imbalanced images, unfamiliar shots, distortion and other treasures glorified the dynamism and modernity of machines and cities. Experimental in nature, it focused on camera-free images (photograms), photomontages, collages and overprinting. Anything that could revitalize human vision via photography "educated the eye by optical mechanics".

"Rayograph"/photogram

Man Ray made his "rayographs" without a camera by placing objects-such as the thumbtacks, coil of wire, and other circular forms used here-directly on a sheet of photosensitized paper and exposing it to light. Began doing so in the early 1920s.Man Ray had photographed everyday objects before, but these unique, visionary images immediately put the photographer on par with the avant-garde painters of the day. The British inventor of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), produced his first 'photogenic drawings' in 1834. Man Ray just rediscovered the process.

modernism/postmodernism

Modernism emphasises on rationality, technical progress and the power of sciences. An example of modernism photography would be landscape photographer, Ansel Adams.Modernism photography sticks to the 'rules' and postmodernism rejects the 'rules'. Modern photography is filled with warmth and passion, while post-modern photography is said to be dispassionate and cold.Postmodernism is anything that challenges modern concepts and concerns; photographer William Eggleston is a good example of postmodernism. Postmodernism lasted from the 1920's to the early 1970's . Postmodernism rejects the tenets of modernism, such as belief in reason and notion of truth, Postmodernism rejects the elements that comprise the modernist world, including the ideas of truth, self meaning and purpose.

"The New Topographics"

New topographics was a term coined by William Jenkins in 1975 to describe a group of American photographers (such as Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz) whose pictures had a similar banal aesthetic, in that they were formal, mostly black and white prints of the urban landscape. A turning point in the history of photography, the 1975 exhibition New Topographics signaled a radical shift away from traditional depictions of landscape. Pictures of transcendent natural vistas gave way to unromanticized views of stark industrial landscapes, suburban sprawl, and everyday scenes not usually given a second glance. Included photographers like Stephen Shore.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Published in 1941 in the United States.Book with text by American writer James Agee and photographs by American photographer Walker Evans. 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.

staging

Photographs that capture staged or artificially constructed scenes made only for the purpose of photography.

postmodernism

Postmodernism arose after World War II as a reaction to the perceived failings of modernism, whose radical artistic projects had come to be associated with totalitarianism or had been assimilated into mainstream culture. Postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal. Postmodernism is "post" because it is denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything for everybody - a characterisitic of the so-called "modern" mind. The paradox of the postmodern position is that, in placing all principles under the scrutiny of its skepticism, it must realize that even its own principles are not beyond questioning. As the philospher Richard Tarnas states, postmodernism "cannot on its own principles ultimately justify itself any more than can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has defined itself." Includes such photographers as Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall and Michael Wolf.

photomontage/collage

Process and the result of making a composite photograph by cutting, gluing, rearranging and overlapping two or more photographs into a new image. Sometimes the resulting composite image is photographed so that a final image may appear as a seamless photographic print. Many Dada artists were critical of the dominant social structures and political strategies that led to World War I. To them, the carnage of war was proof enough that the rationalism and order of civilization was an illusion. Rather than preventing mass destruction, many believed that the acceptance of reason as the supreme authority in matters of opinion, belief, or conduct had, in fact, enabled and justified the slaughter of millions. Included such artists as Hannah Höch of the Berlin Dadaists. Also employed by Russian Constructivists like El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko and Gustav Klutsis for the means of propaganda artwork.

half-tone reproduction

Reprographic technique that simulates continuous tone imagery through the use of dots, varying either in size or in spacing, thus generating a gradient-like effect "Halftone" can also be used to refer specifically to the image that is produced by this process. The halftone process proved almost immediately to be a success. The use of halftone blocks in popular journals became regular during the early 1890s. Where continuous tone imagery contains an infinite range of colors or greys, the halftone process reduces visual reproductions to an image that is printed with only one color of ink, in dots of differing size (amplitude modulation) or spacing (frequency modulation). This reproduction relies on a basic optical illusion: the tiny halftone dots are blended into smooth tones by the human eye. At a microscopic level, developed black-and-white photographic film also consists of only two colors, and not an infinite range of continuous tones. For details, see film grain. The relief halftone process proved almost immediately to be a success. The use of halftone blocks in popular journals became regular during the early 1890s.

The Americans

Robert Frank, was a highly influential book in post-war American photography. It was first published in France in 1958, and the following year in the United States. The photographs were notable for their distanced view of both high and low strata of American society. The book as a whole created a complicated portrait of the period that was viewed as skeptical of contemporary values and evocative of ubiquitous loneliness. "Frank set out with his Guggenheim Grant to do something new and unconstrained by commercial diktats" and made "a now classic photography book in the iconoclastic spirit of the Beats". Emblematic of social landscape photography.

social landscape photography

Social landscape photography portrays the effects of human beings on the earth; it is photography of the human-built or human-altered landscape. Photos primarily of the way people interact with their surrounding cities and lives. It may incorporate the natural landscape, the usual domain of landscape or nature photography—but it is most distinctly not about the natural world. In the more traditional approach human beings, any sign of human beings like roads and cabins, and any human effects on earth are notably absent. I believe this general attitude is a deliberate absence. In the late 1950s and early '60s, American photographers reinvented the documentary tradition once again. This time the subjective tradition that had emerged in the 1940s and early '50s became a kaleidoscope through which photographers like Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and Lee Friedlander looked at the world. Larry Fink.

straight photography

Starting in early 1900. Paul Strand and Alfred Stieglitz pioneered Straight photography in New York while the Hungarian-born László Moholy Nagy exploited pure photography to maximize the graphic structure of the camera-image. These straight or pure approaches to photography continue to define contemporary photographs, while being the foundation for many related movements, such as Documentary, Street photography, Photojournalism, and even later Abstract photography. Straight photography for the first time, since the invention of photography, respects the medium's own technical visual language. The camera's distinctive vocabulary includes form, sharp focus, rich detail, high contrast, and rich tonalities.

Street Life in London

Street Life in London, published in 1877, consists of a series of articles by the radical journalist Adolphe Smith and the photographer John Thomson. The pieces are short but full of detail, based on interviews with a range of men and women who eked out a precarious and marginal existence working on the streets of London, including flower-sellers, chimney-sweeps, shoe-blacks, chair-caners, musicians, dustmen and locksmiths. The subject matter of Street Life was not new - the second half of the 19th century saw an increasing interest in urban poverty and social conditions - but the unique selling point of Street Life was a series of photographs 'taken from life' by Thomson. The authors felt at the time that the images lent authenticity to the text, and their book is now regarded as a key work in the history of documentary photography.

previsualization

The term previsualization has been attributed to Minor White who divided visualization into previsualization, referring to visualization while studying the subject; and postvisualization, referring to remembering the visualized image at printing time. However, White himself said that he learned the idea, which he called a "psychological concept" from Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Visualization is a central topic in Ansel Adams' writings about photography, where he defines it as "the ability to anticipate a finished image before making the exposure".

"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

The Work of Art in the Age of Industry (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. Benjamin here attempts to mark something specific about the modern age; of the effects of modernity on the work of art in particular. Film and photography point to this movement. Benjamin writes of the loss of the aura through the mechanical reproduction of art itself. The aura for Benjamin represents the originality and authenticity of a work of art that has not been reproduced. A painting as an aura while a photograph does not; the photograph is an image of an image while the painting remains utterly original. During the Nazi regime (1933-45) in Germany, Benjamin wrote the essay to produce a theory of art that is "useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art" in mass culture; that, in the age of mechanical reproduction, and the absence of traditional and ritualistic value, the production of art would be inherently based upon the praxis of politics. The sense of the aura is lost on film and the reproducible image itself demonstrates a historical shift that we have to take account of even if when we don't necessarily notice it. What does it mean when the aura is lost? How does it function and how does it come about? Benjamin writes of the loss of the aura as a loss of a singular authority within the work of art itself. But what comes through in this new space left by the death to the aura? How does the mechanically reproduced work of art manage to make up for this void? As Benjamin continues, a tension between new modes of perception and the aura arise. The removal of authority within the original work of art infers a loss of authority, however, in regards to mass consumption, this liberation is not necessarily contingent. The cameraman, for example, intervenes with what we see in a way which a painting can never do.

street photography

The beginning of the 20th century brought optimism and technological development. The reason street photography was not possible in the 19th century is that the long exposure time meant that the majority of people on the street that were present as the image was made were invisible in the final product. Street photography became possible with advancements of hand held cameras and made it possible to capture the artistic beauty present in everyday scenery. it is usually accepted that Eugene Atget is the rightful father of the genre. Atget worked the streets of Paris beginning in the 1890s and continued into the 1920s. He was really the one to establish the street as a meaningful location for photography. The next big name to enter the scene would be Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom nearly every photographer is familiar with in some way. HCB was one of the first to focus on human action in the streets and to photograph what he termed the "decisive moment". This is the idea that there is a "perfect" moment to take a photograph in any unfolding human scene on the street.

performance

Will want us to name someone who used performance in their work...Claude Cahun or Cindy Sherman or...

abstract expressionism

a development of abstract art that originated in New York in the 1940s and 1950s and aimed at subjective emotional expression with particular emphasis on the creative spontaneous act (e.g., action painting). Leading figures were Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Primary photographers of the movement included Aaron Siskind. Political instability in Europe in the 1930s brought several leading Surrealists to New York, and many of the Abstract Expressionists were profoundly influenced by Surrealism's focus on mining the unconscious. It encouraged their interest in myth and archetypal symbols and it shaped their understanding of painting itself as a struggle between self-expression and the chaos of the subconscious.

Tulsa

collection of black-and-white photographs by Larry Clark of the 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. Clark was a Tulsa native and a drug addict during the period (1963-1971) when he took the photographs. The book is prefaced by the statement: Introduction to book reads: "i was born in tulsa oklahoma in 1943. when i was sixteen i started shooting amphetamine. i shot with my friends everyday for three years and then left town but i've gone back through the years. once the needle goes in it never comes out."