Module 6: Straight Photography

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Straight Photography

***naturalistic emerson make camera see like human to strand save humanity by creative control of camera while weston wants to see like camera*** -removed pictorialism's handwork -in focus versus fuzzygraphs of pictorialism (not naturalistic) -pictorialists thought photography had to look like paintings to claim itself as art, but straight photographers believed in the very modernist idea of making clear what makes that medium unique; in order words, don't make photos look like anything but a photo and painting can abandon representational as it is a flat surface with forms and colors added (leads to abstract painting) -distinguish photos from painting with their capacity for sharpness of focus and isolating corner of world -At the beginning of the twentieth century, progressive artists were groping for a new aesthetic based upon the unique properties and characteristics of their chosen medium. -"Form follows function" became their slogan - Progressive painters found photography a liberation. They now felt free of the need to produce representational pictures: Cubism and abstract art were born. -This functional aesthetic also influenced photography. Critics began to praise "photographs that look like photographs," those devoid of the manipulation so prevalent in the work of pictorialists who strove to force photography to emulate the surface textures of pictures made by other media. -Articles began to appear in the photographic press in praise of "pure photography." -Art critic Sadakichi Hartmann, in an otherwise highly laudatory review of the Photo-Secession exhibition at the Carnegie Institute in 1904, condemned gum printing, the glycerine process, and handwork on negatives and prints. He called upon pictorialists "to work straight" -Working straight: "...in short, compose the picture which you intend to take so well that the negative will be absolutely perfect and in need of no or but slight manipulation. I do not object to retouching, dodging or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique... I do not want him to be less artistic than he is to-day, on the contrary I want him to be more artistic, but only in legitimate ways" -Straight photography had existed since the medium first appeared, but What was new in the opening years of the twentieth century was the acceptance of the straight photograph as a "legitimate" art medium -Hartmann also said, "... the painter composes by an effort of imagination. The photographer interprets by spontaneity of judgment. He practices composition by the eye." -Although Alfred Stieglitz championed many photographers who manipulated negative and prints, and experimented with gum printing and the glycerine process, in his mature years he preferred to stick closely to the basic properties of camera, lens, and emulsion. -Charles H. Caffin in 1901 said he, "...fully conceiving his picture before he attempts to take it, seeking for effects of vivid actuality and reducing the final record to its simplest form of expression." -In 1907 Stieglitz photographed The Steerage, a picture that in later life he considered his finest. -The picture was the result of instant recognition of subject and form-"spontaneity of judgement" and "composition by the eye," as his friend Hartmann put it. No longer, as in his Winter on Fifth Avenue, did he find an environment and patiently wait until "everything was in balance." Now he instantly, without hesitation or even conscious thought, put a frame around the subject. Furthermore, he printed the full negative, without cropping. -So the transition. Tori list photography with a heavy emphasis on.Handwork and soft focus and a lot of blurry. Hensonand very kind of super impressionistic. Rule the Day from to the 1890s up through thefirst decade of the 20th century and it started sort of fading out then as we got into the 19teens by the time you got into Route 19 between 1915 and 1920 pretty much all the major photographers madea shift if they were already practicing and new photographers were just coming straight in with this kind of verydetailed clear focused kind of class at what we've considered 20th century classic modern Free formalist look.

Beaumont Newhall/Museum of Modern Art Essay

-Beaumont Newhall covered straight photography; wrote that first history of photography that turned into textbook for class like this, but also founded curator of department of photography at MOMA (first museum to have dedicated department of photography as an artistic medium instead of just documenting collection); recognized as aesthetic medium in own right in late 30s -also tells something about way in which museums presented photography and way people wrote about for decades to come; that then became dominant aesthetic till end of 20th century -At the beginning of the twentieth century, progressive artists were groping for a new aesthetic based upon the unique properties and characteristics of their chosen medium. -"Form follows function" became their slogan - Progressive painters found photography a liberation. They now felt free of the need to produce representational pictures: Cubism and abstract art were born. -This functional aesthetic also influenced photography. Critics began to praise "photographs that look like photographs," those devoid of the manipulation so prevalent in the work of pictorialists who strove to force photography to emulate the surface textures of pictures made by other media. -Articles began to appear in the photographic press in praise of "pure photography." -Art critic Sadakichi Hartmann, in an otherwise highly laudatory review of the Photo-Secession exhibition at the Carnegie Institute in 1904, condemned gum printing, the glycerine process, and handwork on negatives and prints. He called upon pictorialists "to work straight" -Working straight: "...in short, compose the picture which you intend to take so well that the negative will be absolutely perfect and in need of no or but slight manipulation. I do not object to retouching, dodging or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique... I do not want him to be less artistic than he is to-day, on the contrary I want him to be more artistic, but only in legitimate ways" -Straight photography had existed since the medium first appeared, but What was new in the opening years of the twentieth century was the acceptance of the straight photograph as a "legitimate" art medium -Hartmann also said, "... the painter composes by an effort of imagination. The photographer interprets by spontaneity of judgment. He practices composition by the eye." -Although Alfred Stieglitz championed many photographers who manipulated negative and prints, and experimented with gum printing and the glycerine process, in his mature years he preferred to stick closely to the basic properties of camera, lens, and emulsion. -Charles H. Caffin in 1901 said he, "...fully conceiving his picture before he attempts to take it, seeking for effects of vivid actuality and reducing the final record to its simplest form of expression." -In 1907 Stieglitz photographed The Steerage, a picture that in later life he considered his finest. -The picture was the result of instant recognition of subject and form-"spontaneity of judgement" and "composition by the eye," as his friend Hartmann put it. No longer, as in his Winter on Fifth Avenue, did he find an environment and patiently wait until "everything was in balance." Now he instantly, without hesitation or even conscious thought, put a frame around the subject. Furthermore, he printed the full negative, without cropping. -It was also at this time that Stieglitz, at the instigation of Steichen and with his enthusiastic help, began to champion the most progressive painting and sculpture, as well as photography. -The original announcement of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue, New York, proclaimed that future exhibitions were to be arranged, not only of photographs, but also of "such other art productions as the Council will from time to time secure." -in this confined space Stieglitz, with the enthusiastic aid of Steichen, introduced the most avantgarde painting and sculpture that America had seen: drawings by Auguste Rodin, watercolors and lithographs by Paul Cezanne, drawings and sculpture by Henri Matisse and Constantin Brancusi, Cubist paintings by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Francis Picabia. -Soon paintings by Americans were shown as well as those of European origin, including work by John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Max Weber, Arthur Dove, and later, Georgia O'Keeffe. -Photographers were bewildered, often angry, that the Photo-Secession should place such emphasis on non photographic works of art. -Camera Work explained editorially that "291," as the Little Galleries came to be familiarly called, was "a laboratory, an experimental station, and must not be looked upon as an Art Gallery, in the ordinary sense of that term. -In 1917 the Photo-Secession and "291" came to an end, when the building was torn down. Many of the members had already drifted away. Steichen joined the United States Army. Clarence H. White opened a highly influential School of Photography, and with Gertrude Kasebier and Alvin Langdon Coburn founded in 1916 a new organization, The Pictorial Photographers of America. -During the immediate postwar years Stieglitz brought his photography to a new intensity. In 1921 he arranged an exhibition of both old and new work at the Anderson Galleries in New York. -Every one of the photographs was startlingly direct, and the effect upon the public was electric. -John A. Tennant, editor and publisher of The Photo Miniature, reviewed the exhibition: "...in the Stieglitz prints, you have the subject itself in its own substance or personality, as revealed by the natural play of light and shade about it, without disguise or attempt at interpretation, simply set forth with perfect technique..." -In the catalog Stieglitz wrote that the exhibition was "the sharp focusing of an idea .. .. My teachers have xen life-work--continuous experiment. . . . Every print I make, even from one negative, is a new experience, A new problem .... Photography is my passion. The search for Truth my obsession." -Those who knew Stieglitz knew the force of his personality, and they attributed his success in portraiture to a kind of hypnotic power over his sitters. To show that this was not so, Stieglitz chose subject matter over which he could not possibly have any control: the sky and clouds. -He called these pictures "equivalents," and he put them in series with other pictures of expressive, often evocative, content and handling-a meadow glistening with raindrops, a woman's hands pressed palm to palm between her knees. -He found them to be equivalents to his thoughts, to his hopes and aspirations, to his despairs and fears. 0Viewed objectively, many of these rich prints with deep blacks and shimmering grays and incandescent whites delight us for their sheer beauty of form. They are photographic abstractions, for in them form is abstracted from its illustrative significance. -Yet paradoxically the spectator is not for an instant left unaware of what has been photographed. With the shock of recognition one realizes almost at once that the form that delights the eye is significant, and one marvels that such beauty can be discovered in what is commonplace. -For this is the power of the camera: it can seize upon the familiar and endow it with new meanings, with special significance, with the imprint of a personality. -In the last two issues of Camera Work, dated 1916 and 1917, Stieglitz reproduced photographs by a newcomer, Paul Strand. -They included a forceful series of portraits taken unawares in the streets with a Graflex camera, and pictures in which form and design were emphasized-a semi abstraction of bowls, a view looking down from a viaduct, an architectural scene dominated by the vertical accents of a white picket fence. As Stieglitz wrote, the work was "brutally direct, pure and devoid of trickery." -was in striking contrast ro much of the work produced by members of the Photo-Secession. It was prophetic of the reorientation in phorographic aesthetics and of the return to the traditions of straight phorography, which was ro gain strength in the years after the war. -Strand wrote in 1917: The photographer's problem is to see clearly the limitations and at the same time the potential qualities of his medium, for it is precisely here that honesty no less than intensity of vision is the prequisite of a living expression. This means a real respect for the thing in front of him expressed in terms of chiaroscuro ... through a range of almost infinite tonal values which lie beyond the skill of human hand. The fullest realization of this is accomplished without tricks of process or manipulation through the use of straight photographic methods. -Strand was among the first to discover the photographic beauty of precision machines. - He made a series of extreme close-ups of his Akeley motion picture camera and of power lathes. On a trip to Maine he discovered the beauty of large-scale details of driftwood, cobwebs, plants, and other natural objects. -In 1923, lecturing to the students of the Clarence H. White School of Photography, he made a strong plea for the revival of craftsmanship and told them of the need to free photography from the domination of painting, and ro recognize that the camera had its own aesthetic. -Strand's negatives were seen with intensity and sureness; his work has a quality rarely found in photography, a quality that can only be described as lyrical. -he photographed people and the landscape, seeking always the feeling of place, the land, and the inhabitants. -He did a series of books beginning with Time in New England ( 1950), edited by Nancy Newhall, who selected New England writings from the seventeenth century to the present to accompany the photographs. Words and pictures reinforce and illuminate one another with synergistic effect -Strand's later books explore a wide range of countries, from the Hebrides to Egypt and Ghana. -In 1914 Charles Sheeler began to discover with his camera the beauty of indigenous American architecture, photographing with honest directness the texture of white painted and weathered wood, and the beautifully proportioned rectangular forms of Pennsylvania barns. -first and foremost a painter, Sheeler had a keen appreciation of the photograph as a distinct medium. -He told his biographer, Constance Rourke: "I have come to value photography more and more for those things which it alone can accomplish, rather than to discredit it for the things which can only be achieved through another medium. In painting I have had a continued interest in natural forms and have sought the best use of them for the enhancement of design. In photography I have strived to enhance my technical equipment for the best statement of the immediate facts." -Charles Sheeler's contribution to photography has been his sensitive interpretation of the form and texture of man's work in precise, clean photographs of African Negro masks (1918), the industrial architecture of the Ford plant at River Rouge (1927), the Cathedral of Chartres, seen in a series of details (1929) , and in the photographs of ancient sculpture that he did for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York ( 1942-45). -Edward Steichen, placed in charge of aerial photography of the American Air Service during the second Battle of the Marne, was faced with the problem of securing photographs with a maximum of detail, definition, and brilliance. -He found such beauty in these straight photographs that in 1920 he repudiated his gum prints, abandoned painting, and set out to master pure photographic processes almost as if he were a beginner, setting himself such extreme problems as the rendition of the brilliant contrasts of a white teacup on black velvet. -Armed with this mastery of technique, and with his brilliant sense of design and ability to grasp in an image the personality of a sitter, he began to raise magazine illustration to a creative level -Younger photographers in New York, particularly Paul Outerbridge, Jr., Ralph Steiner, and Walker Evans, were quick to recognize in the early 1920s the new aesthetic of straight photography. -Outerbridge's precise still-life studies and Steiner's photographs of the strident forms of skyscrapers and vernacular buildings won international recognition. -Evans became preoccupied with the American scene: he photographed architecture, the folk art of signs and billboards, and people in the streets with a sensitivity that lifted the images above records. He is best known for later work with the Farm Security Administration and was instrumental in forming the documentary style of that government project. -In California, around 1920, Edward Weston, who had been honored by election to the London Salon of Photography ( successor to The Linked Ring) , began a critical reexamination of his work, which up to that time had been soft in focus, but always done with a sense of light and form. -He experimented with semiabstractions: R.S. -A Portrait is a bold, unconventional placing of the upper half of the sitter's head at the very bottom of a composition of triangles and diagonals. A detail of a nude woman-circle of breast and diagonal of arm-was equally abstract. -On a trip to New York in 1921 he met Alfred Stieglitz, who received him courteously, but without the affirmation he had hoped for. -From 1922 to 1926 Weston lived in Mexico and became a friend of many of the artists of the Mexican Renaissance. It was for him a period of transition, of self-analysis and self-discipline, which he recorded with unusual frankness in his Daybooks. -He wrote that of the two directions he saw in his most recent work-abstraction and realism-the latter was the stronger and offered the greatest potential for creative expression, and commented: The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh . . . I shall let no chance pass to record interesting abstraction, but I feel definite in my belief that the approach to photography is through realism. -His technique and aesthetic became one: "Unless I pull a technically fine negative, the emotional or intellectual value of the photograph is for me almost negated." -He simplified his working method, preferring contact prints to enlargements, gelatin-silver paper to the softer platinotype. -He replaced his expensive soft-focus lens with an inexpensive, sharply cutting rapid rectilinear lens. "The shutter stops down to 256," he noted. "This should satisfy my craving for depth of focus.'' -The most important part of Edward Weston's approach was his insistence that the photographer should previsualize the final result. -Weston developed this approach to the point of virtuosity. He demanded clarity of form, he wanted every area of his picture clear-cut, with the substances and textures of things appreciable to the point of illusion. -The fact that the camera can see more than the unaided eye he long regarded as one of the great miracles of photography. -In a Weston landscape, everything is sharp from the immediate foreground to the extreme distance -In 1909 Willi Warstat, in his Allgemeine Asthetik de photographischen Kunst, a book that is perhaps the earliest systematic examination of photographic aesthetics from the standpoint of modern psychological and physiological theories of vision, succinctly analyzed this aspect of the mechanics of seeing. He found that the compression of all-over detail was something to be avoided by the photographer in his "battle with realism." -Weston had no quarrel with realism. His vision led him to a straight, often brutally direct approach that made use of the phenomenon with powerful effects. -It must be noted, however, that the rendering of detail alone was not his criterion; it was governed by his taste, imagination, and feeling for form. -In 1937 Edward Weston was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship--the first photographer to be so honored. His style expanded, the variety of subject matter increased, and a rich human quality pervaded his later work. -Brett Weston began to photograph in 1925, when he was thirteen years old and living with his father in Mexico. Even his early photographs had an individual style, one marked by a strong appreciation of shadow forms and textures, as in his Tin Roof of 1926. -His more recent work is on a larger scale, with bolder compositions producing powerful abstraction, yet always with recognizable subjects. -In 1932 a number of younger photographers, greatly impressed by Edward Weston and his work, formed a society to which they gave the name "Group f / 64." -They chose an optical term because they habitually set their lenses to that aperture to secure maximum image sharpness of both foreground and distance. -The charter members-Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Van Dyke, and Edward Weston-formulated an aesthetic that in retrospect now appears dogmatic in its strict specifications: any photograph not sharply focused in every detail, not printed by contact on glossy black-and-white paper, not mounted on a white card, and betraying any handwork or avoidance of reality in choice of subject was "impure." -It was a violent reaction to the weak, sentimental style then popular with pictorial photographers in California, as seen particularly in the anecdotal, highly sentimental, mildly erotic hand-colored prints of William Mortensen. -The M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco presented the group's inaugural exhibition in 1932. -For a few years the informal society was the most progressive in America. -Even after they disbanded, their influence persisted; "f / 64" came to be a convenient label for straight photography, and was applied to photographers who had nothing to do with the original group. -Ansel Adams, in his photography, his writing, and his teaching, has brilliantly demonstrated the capabilities of straight photography as a medium of expression. -Trained as a musician, he began to photograph as an avocation under the strong influence of pictorialism. -In 1930 he met Paul Strand, whose negatives so impressed him that he realized the validity of the straight approach and began to devote all of his time to photography. -His new work received international recognition in 1935 when the London Studio published his Making a Photograph, an instruction manual distinguished for its illustrations, which are such faithful reproductions that they have more than once been mistaken for actual photographic prints. -His work was shown by Stieglitz at An American Place in 1936; it had a sensitivity and direct, honest integrity that were rare. -Conservationist, mountaineer, lover of the wilderness, he specialized in the interpretation of the natural scene. -Like Strand, and in the tradition of Emerson, Stieglitz, and Coburn, he learned the complexities of photomechanical reproduction. -He produces prints specifically for the platemaker's camera and checks proofs on the printing press itself, so that the results will be as close to his original concept as possible. -This Is the American Earth ( 1960) is a magnificent poem by Nancy Newhall of the land and man's relation to it, with photographs by Adams and others. -Adams uses all types of cameras and constantly experiments with new techniques. -With his "zone system" he has worked out a highly ingenious and practical rationale for determining exposure and development, based upon sensitometric principles, which gives the photographer precise control over his materials. -Adams first teaches the photographer to master the characteristic of the photographic emulsion by determining-not by laboratory test, but with the photographer's own working equipment-the interrelation of the four principal variables: sensitivity of the negative material, amount of exposure, subject luminances ( i.e. brightness), and development -From this data he can obtain in his negative any one tone and will know exactly the tones that other subject luminances will produce. -The infinite gradation of light and shade found in nature Adams divides into ten zones. Zone O is black, Zone IX is white. Between these extremes are eight tones of gray, Zone V being the "middle" tone-not by objective measurement, but by subjective judgment-and next to it, marked VI, the value that conveys to the photographer the feeling of the tone of average, well-lighted skin. -Using a photoelectric exposure meter Adams measures the luminances of the various parts of the scene he is photographing. These measurements are correlated with exposure and development procedures, so that the photographer can visualize the entire gamut of values that will appear in the final print. - The control is comparable to that which a musician has over his instrument. -Guesswork is eliminated, and the photographer can concentrate upon aesthetic problems, secure in the knowledge that his results will not only be of technical excellence, but will embody his subjective interpretation of the scene. -With this mastery of technique, coupled with his lifelong deep spiritual resonance with the wilderness areas of the earth, Adams has produced magnificent landscapes of the American West and Alaska. -In Europe a somewhat similar respect for straight photography is found in the work of the German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch. -His book, Die Welt ist schon ( "The World is Beautiful"), published in 1928, was hailed as the photographic counterpart of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement in painting. -The pictures were strong and direct: extreme closeups of plants and animals, lonely city streets, bold forms of industrial buildings, details of machinery, and still-life studies of their products. -The freshness of Renger-Patzsch' s vision was impressive. -Thomas Mann found his photographs "exact statements drawn from the whole and that's the way it usually is with this man who is, in his way, impassioned. The detail, the objective, is removed from the world of appearances, isolated, sharpened, made meaningful, animated. What more, I would like to ask, has art or the artist done? -Renger-Patzsch himself said, quite simply, "Let us leave art to the artist, and let us try-with photographic means-to create photographs which can stand alone because of their very photographic character-without borrowing from art." -The growing appreciation of straight photography brought about the recognition in the late 1920s of photographers of the older generation whose work had been overlooked by the pictorialists. -Jean Eugene Auguste Atget was virtually unknown when he died in 1927. He never showed in a salon. Not a single one of the thousands of photographs he had taken since 1898 of his beloved Paris had been reproduced in a photographic magazine. -Painters had found his street scenes helpful documents, and the Surrealist artists, ever sensitive to the melancholy that a good photograph can so powerfully evoke, reproduced a few of his pictures in 1926 in their magazine La Revolution surrealiste. -"For some time he had had the ambition to create a collection of all that which both in Paris and its surroundings was artistic and picturesque," wrote his friend Andre Calmettes. -A great deal of his work was photographing the historic buildings of Paris in detail. He made a series of photographs of iron grill work, another of the fountains of Paris. He photographed the statues in the park at Versailles, and statues on the medieval churches in Paris. These he sold to the Parisian museums. -But he did not limit himself to works of art and historic monuments: he photographed the face of Paris in all its aspects -Each of these categories is a series comprising hundreds of photographs. For Atget was in truth, as Calmettes wrote, a collector. He is, too, a picture maker, un imagier, in the words of his friend. -His technique was of the simplest: a view camera lLways used on a tripod-for plates 18 x 24 centimeters in size. -His lens was a rapid rectilinear, used well stopped down. Its focal length is not known, but it must have been fairly short, for so many of his pictures show steep perspective and the tops of many of the negatives show bare glass where the image fell off. -He printed the glass plates by daylight on aristotype printing-out paper, toning the prints with gold chloride. -Atget' s technical approach was, therefore, that of the nineteenth century and, looking at his prints, it is often hard to believe that he did most of his work after 1900. -He seldom made an exposure that could be called a snapshot: moving objects are often blurred, and when he photographed people it is obvious that he asked them to pose. In an Atget photograph every detail stands forth with a clarity that is remarkable. -Among the thousands of photographs Atget took, there are those that reach beyond the record and approach the lyric, for he had a remarkable vision. -He could find a human quality where no human being appears. His interiors lead one to feel that the people whose home he is photographing have just stepped behind the camera while he focuses and makes his exposure and will return the moment the lens is closed. -Out-of-doors he worked early in the morning to avoid being disturbed by the curious, and his pictures have the atmosphere of early light. -His work has no references to any graphic medium other than photography. -There is a curious parallel between Atget's photographs of Paris and the Berlin scenes taken by his contemporary, Heinrich Zille. -Both chose the same type of subjects-the streets, shops fronts, peddlers, street fairs, of the poorer quarters of each city. -Zille's photographs, for all their feeling for the urban environment and sympathy toward the working class, are slices of life, taken mostly with a hand camera for a specific purpose: to provide documentation for his drawings, which appeared as illustrations in popular magazines. -The very immobility of Atget's :tripod camera, and the long exposures that his slow plates and slow lens required, seem to have fairly forced deliberation upon him. -But the process was, of course, Atget's choice; it was his preferred way of working. He was no primitive. His approach to technique was far from naive. It was deliberate. -Julien Levy, proprietor of an avant-garde art gallery in New York and a friend of the Surrealists, recollected that Man Ray offered to lend Atget a small hand camera. But Atget would have none of it: he complained that "le snapshot went faster than he could think. ... 'Trop vite, enfin.' Too fast.

Edward Steichen

-Edward Steichen, placed in charge of aerial photography of the American Air Service during the second Battle of the Marne, was faced with the problem of securing photographs with a maximum of detail, definition, and brilliance. -He found such beauty in these straight photographs that in 1920 he repudiated his gum prints, abandoned painting, and set out to master pure photographic processes almost as if he were a beginner, setting himself such extreme problems as the rendition of the brilliant contrasts of a white teacup on black velvet. -Armed with this mastery of technique, and with his brilliant sense of design and ability to grasp in an image the personality of a sitter, he began to raise magazine illustration to a creative level -Younger photographers in New York, particularly Paul Outerbridge, Jr., Ralph Steiner, and Walker Evans, were quick to recognize in the early 1920s the new aesthetic of straight photography. -Outerbridge's precise still-life studies and Steiner's photographs of the strident forms of skyscrapers and vernacular buildings won international recognition. -Evans became preoccupied with the American scene: he photographed architecture, the folk art of signs and billboards, and people in the streets with a sensitivity that lifted the images above records. He is best known for later work with the Farm Security Administration and was instrumental in forming the documentary style of that government project. Edward steichen is a really interesting case in point hereas you know we've seen his work before was he was very active with the pictorialist movement he was aprotege of stieglitz early on and helped to found the photo secession with stieglitz was one of the original membersof that helped organize the exhibition program for 291 the galleries that stiglitz ran into you. - Steichen was very dedicated as a pictorialist photographer. Committed to the.Kind of impressionistic looking aesthetic bed that movement and Brace. - He maintained that Pretty much until he went into service in. 1917.Working for the US Army Air Service he volunteered to. The list of to help the American war effort in1917 was the year in which the US got involved in World War I. -And seiken because of his background in photography quite soonfound himself made chief of the photographic section of the US Army Air Service. - World War 1 was the first conflict that was fought using airplane. Will you let her use planes in a number ofways that you know sometimes they had sort of fighter ...planes that. Can have have dog fights in the air with eachother they delivered very early forms of bombs and but ...one of the most useful ways in which airplanes servedthe war effort was for reconnaissance photography. - So they would take photographs of the battlefield to understandyou know exactly where the enemy had their soldiers and where the artillery and battlements were and all that's whatit. So cycling is in his role run. - Anybody as you might imagine in this capacity making reconnaissancephotography all of them. Fuzzy soft focus pictorialist kind of aesthetic. Useless in that contest. -And so seiken through his experience in the war. You got very familiar with. A very different kind of Photography something. Recorded on a tremendous amount of detail and sharpness offocus was very much prize. And so he came through that experience and out theother side. Completely changed his photographic is. -After he came back from the war and again it'smuch more formalist.Pettit it's a straight photographic approach there's not the offiddling around with printing methods everything is very kind of ...clear.And tight and contrast. -Wheelbarrow with flower pots.Image steichen made 1912. It seems actually quite similar and few think about itto some of those images we saw from Paul strand. -Well it's very abstract image. Edges of the subject are.Tightly contained within the frame of the. There's a certain. Geometric regularity to it it's very formally driven. So the formalist interest and the clarity of focus andyou know that it means even a relatively. Everyday subject matter. - It's not not they've been spectacularly interesting subject matter butby virtue of the sort of intense Focus.Oh and the framing and The rhythms that are setup by the rounded edges. The flower pot. - Basically but this speaks of formal language. Clear and very distinct and this is absolutely part ofwhat straight photography is all a. - Here we find some of steichen. Exceedingly successful advertising. -Basically he made this transition to the straight photographic approachafter his engagement World War 1 as we mentioned And he went on then in the twenties and thirtiesto become literally the most highly paid photographer in the world. -A tremendous amount of commercial advertising photography he was associatedwith magazines in particular Vogue and Vanity Fair for whom he did editorial photographs all of which earned him quitea large amount of money. - And in fact it was this commercial success that steichen enjoyed after World War 1 that put pressure on what had been already a sort of fraying relationshipthat he had with Steve. -Alfred stieglitz who love to be sort of the mentorand discover new talented and be the sort of source ...of wisdom to guide along his protegerse in a psychichaving been one of them never seemed very comfortable in adapting that relationship later on. To be. I'm more of a sort of peer relationship -so whensteichen came into his own as a photographer and proceeded ... to have his own kind of independent career career independentof Stieglitz's influence, he didn't take it well - came to be so Ibroke the big rift between the two men and they really disassociated from each. In addition part of the problem was this very CommercialSuccess that steichen had -Stieglitz felt like he had sold out he'd stopped beingan artist. When in fact I think you can argue potentially thatpsychic. Was yes he was he was doing very well forhimself paid a lot of money has world's highest paidphotographer for. Time there.But he was also exploring creatively a lot of thesethings straight photographic approach that you see in these photographs ... of Gorham Sterling so this is.Manufacturer of.Table. -The plate the spoons and knives and forks it's.In a number of interesting sort of patterns thinking verymuch about the lighting thing and all of their they're very formal again very clear. - They show you the product but they make it lookinteresting and sort of abstract and it appeals to very much to that that new Straight photographic is. - He was really really good at this. And as you'll see for the next couple of slidesit wasn't just product shots like this. But he also made quite a name for himself infashion photography. - He also did an amazing series of portraits a veryInnovative kind of portrait photography that was published in alongside articles. Vanity Fair and another publication.

Ansel Adams

-In 1932 a number of younger photographers, greatly impressed by Edward Weston and his work, formed a society to which they gave the name "Group f / 64." -They chose an optical term because they habitually set their lenses to that aperture to secure maximum image sharpness of both foreground and distance. -The charter members-Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Van Dyke, and Edward Weston-formulated an aesthetic that in retrospect now appears dogmatic in its strict specifications: any photograph not sharply focused in every detail, not printed by contact on glossy black-and-white paper, not mounted on a white card, and betraying any handwork or avoidance of reality in choice of subject was "impure." -Ansel Adams, in his photography, his writing, and his teaching, has brilliantly demonstrated the capabilities of straight photography as a medium of expression. -Trained as a musician, he began to photograph as an avocation under the strong influence of pictorialism. -In 1930 he met Paul Strand, whose negatives so impressed him that he realized the validity of the straight approach and began to devote all of his time to photography. -His new work received international recognition in 1935 when the London Studio published his Making a Photograph, an instruction manual distinguished for its illustrations, which are such faithful reproductions that they have more than once been mistaken for actual photographic prints. -His work was shown by Stieglitz at An American Place in 1936; it had a sensitivity and direct, honest integrity that were rare. -Conservationist, mountaineer, lover of the wilderness, he specialized in the interpretation of the natural scene. -Like Strand, and in the tradition of Emerson, Stieglitz, and Coburn, he learned the complexities of photomechanical reproduction. -He produces prints specifically for the platemaker's camera and checks proofs on the printing press itself, so that the results will be as close to his original concept as possible. -This Is the American Earth ( 1960) is a magnificent poem by Nancy Newhall of the land and man's relation to it, with photographs by Adams and others. -Adams uses all types of cameras and constantly experiments with new techniques. -With his "zone system" he has worked out a highly ingenious and practical rationale for determining exposure and development, based upon sensitometric principles, which gives the photographer precise control over his materials. -Adams first teaches the photographer to master the characteristic of the photographic emulsion by determining-not by laboratory test, but with the photographer's own working equipment-the interrelation of the four principal variables: sensitivity of the negative material, amount of exposure, subject luminances ( i.e. brightness), and development -From this data he can obtain in his negative any one tone and will know exactly the tones that other subject luminances will produce. -The infinite gradation of light and shade found in nature Adams divides into ten zones. Zone O is black, Zone IX is white. Between these extremes are eight tones of gray, Zone V being the "middle" tone-not by objective measurement, but by subjective judgment-and next to it, marked VI, the value that conveys to the photographer the feeling of the tone of average, well-lighted skin. -Using a photoelectric exposure meter Adams measures the luminances of the various parts of the scene he is photographing. These measurements are correlated with exposure and development procedures, so that the photographer can visualize the entire gamut of values that will appear in the final print. - The control is comparable to that which a musician has over his instrument. -Guesswork is eliminated, and the photographer can concentrate upon aesthetic problems, secure in the knowledge that his results will not only be of technical excellence, but will embody his subjective interpretation of the scene. -With this mastery of technique, coupled with his lifelong deep spiritual resonance with the wilderness areas of the earth, Adams has produced magnificent landscapes of the American West and Alaska. -Perhaps one of the best-known individuals associated. F64. Is the photographer Ansel Adams who made his name primarilyas a landscape photographer we see hear one of his many images.Taken from Yosemite National Park. -He.Through a number of these. cArries out. About a new sort of very clear. Straight photograph. Cut of approach to landscape. - I should mention that f64 itself was a group thatwas founded on the west coast in California. And they. Basically that was the center of activity was out onthe west. For the. If you look at an image like this by ad. You'll notice how very carefully composed the landscape is withinthe frame of the photo.Very sensitive to the play. Dark and Light. - In the image here again because it's a straight photographit's not.. Using you do handwork or Frito kind of fan.Printer printing techniques as you would see in pictorialism butfor Adams it's very important to kind of size up understand the interview be there might be a filter onthe lens to help can sharpen that sky for him to see how you see the clouds there but there'sa tremendous amount of kind of sad. And waiting until the atmospheric conditions and the way thelight is falling you see the that shadow that falls ...on the right hand side towards the bottom of thefoot. -And I kind of plays that value of that thatDark Shadows or thing kind of pops in and out. The rest of the view that we have here it'sa very patient kind of a thing making landscape photograph.He basically sort of find you or your general subjectbut then you have to kind of wait for that moment. - Everything aligns because you can't control the clouds and youcan't control necessarily all the light where the coordination of all of these things so. Does a great example of one of adams. Landscape photographs. - And so we'll start with the image on the leftby an salon. It perhaps Rings a few belts with you you mayrecall this. Quite similar because the subject is the same as theone that we saw previous. Width of the image made by Timothy O'Sullivan when hewas on the expedition. Out to New Mexico where he photographed the Canyon DeChelly so those are the the the abandoned Adobe structure. In the cleft of that Cliff face that we sawa solvent had photographed originally in 1870. - Ansel Adams made a point of making a pilgrimage tothis location so he could photograph the same. And it's because Adams and his generation of straight photography. Very much prized Tim O'Sullivan's photographs that have been mademe 1870s of the American way. They looked at them and thought oh my here thisis the predecessor of our great. Straight photographic approach of the 20th. - To their eyes somebody like O'Sullivan even though he Sullivanwas not making his landscape. 4 really is. He called them mechanical photographs as you may recall he'sjust trying to document the geology of a place or you know something that you know the territory that theywere passing through or various points of interest so they were intended as basically just documents.The final report of the expedition. With a government Expedition he was were. - But to these 20 Century street photography. They seemed like very precious. And beautiful.Straight forward The photograph.And so they were very much praised very much lauded.These. - So Adams Lake place it made a pilgrimage to theCanyon De Chelly so he could. His fur. Of O'Sullivan's photograph.Vince O'Sullivan's foot. On the right we have another Photograph by Adams thisimage of Aspen's from. Late. -this demonstrates Berger's weakness of intentionality argument since O'Sullivan called it documentation/mechanical photo while new generation saw it as art

Imogen Cunningham

ƒ/64 Group

-In 1932 a number of younger photographers, greatly impressed by Edward Weston and his work, formed a society to which they gave the name "Group f / 64." -f64 itself was a group thatwas founded on the west coast in California. -They chose an optical term because they habitually set their lenses to that aperture to secure maximum image sharpness of both foreground and distance. -The charter members-Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Van Dyke, and Edward Weston-formulated an aesthetic that in retrospect now appears dogmatic in its strict specifications: any photograph not sharply focused in every detail, not printed by contact on glossy black-and-white paper, not mounted on a white card, and betraying any handwork or avoidance of reality in choice of subject was "impure." -It was a violent reaction to the weak, sentimental style then popular with pictorial photographers in California, as seen particularly in the anecdotal, highly sentimental, mildly erotic hand-colored prints of William Mortensen. -The M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco presented the group's inaugural exhibition in 1932. -For a few years the informal society was the most progressive in America. -Even after they disbanded, their influence persisted; "f / 64" came to be a convenient label for straight photography, and was applied to photographers who had nothing to do with the original group. -The name of 64 which dimension comes from the nameof an f-stop on a. Other kind of camera that they face. If 64 was the smallest possible app. On the lens and when you shoot an image usinga very small.perture like it have 64 as opposed to a verylarge aperture. - Two word whatever when you have a very small stopdown aperture of the lens it creates the most sharp possible in. -most had been photographing for awhile, so older members went through a pictorialist phase -f/64 group founded in 1932 by Edward Weston (group came late to party of straight photography which was 1910s/20s); Weston didn't organize, but inspired by: Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, etc. -many of them had pictorialist phase of their career and then transformed into straight photographers -about clear focus throughout image as well as interest in form and way it manifests with selection by photographer of how to locate framing edge of image; unique to photography, not trying to make like painting -popularized if shoot straight, get in focus, and must use full negative instead of cropping; comes from Weston's seeing photographically concept (seeing final image before take; don't mess with in darkroom -classic modernist very formalist form of photography -eastlake thought no color was a deficiency, but they loved black and white photos in f/64

Edward Weston

-In California, around 1920, Edward Weston, who had been honored by election to the London Salon of Photography ( successor to The Linked Ring) , began a critical reexamination of his work, which up to that time had been soft in focus, but always done with a sense of light and form. -He experimented with semiabstractions: R.S. -A Portrait is a bold, unconventional placing of the upper half of the sitter's head at the very bottom of a composition of triangles and diagonals. A detail of a nude woman-circle of breast and diagonal of arm-was equally abstract. -On a trip to New York in 1921 he met Alfred Stieglitz, who received him courteously, but without the affirmation he had hoped for. -From 1922 to 1926 Weston lived in Mexico and became a friend of many of the artists of the Mexican Renaissance. It was for him a period of transition, of self-analysis and self-discipline, which he recorded with unusual frankness in his Daybooks. -He wrote that of the two directions he saw in his most recent work-abstraction and realism-the latter was the stronger and offered the greatest potential for creative expression, and commented: The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh . . . I shall let no chance pass to record interesting abstraction, but I feel definite in my belief that the approach to photography is through realism. -His technique and aesthetic became one: "Unless I pull a technically fine negative, the emotional or intellectual value of the photograph is for me almost negated." -He simplified his working method, preferring contact prints to enlargements, gelatin-silver paper to the softer platinotype. -He replaced his expensive soft-focus lens with an inexpensive, sharply cutting rapid rectilinear lens. "The shutter stops down to 256," he noted. "This should satisfy my craving for depth of focus.'' -The most important part of Edward Weston's approach was his insistence that the photographer should previsualize the final result. -Weston developed this approach to the point of virtuosity. He demanded clarity of form, he wanted every area of his picture clear-cut, with the substances and textures of things appreciable to the point of illusion. -The fact that the camera can see more than the unaided eye he long regarded as one of the great miracles of photography. -In a Weston landscape, everything is sharp from the immediate foreground to the extreme distance -In 1909 Willi Warstat, in his Allgemeine Asthetik de photographischen Kunst, a book that is perhaps the earliest systematic examination of photographic aesthetics from the standpoint of modern psychological and physiological theories of vision, succinctly analyzed this aspect of the mechanics of seeing. He found that the compression of all-over detail was something to be avoided by the photographer in his "battle with realism." -Weston had no quarrel with realism. His vision led him to a straight, often brutally direct approach that made use of the phenomenon with powerful effects. -It must be noted, however, that the rendering of detail alone was not his criterion; it was governed by his taste, imagination, and feeling for form. -In 1937 Edward Weston was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship--the first photographer to be so honored. His style expanded, the variety of subject matter increased, and a rich human quality pervaded his later work. -Brett Weston began to photograph in 1925, when he was thirteen years old and living with his father in Mexico. Even his early photographs had an individual style, one marked by a strong appreciation of shadow forms and textures, as in his Tin Roof of 1926. -His more recent work is on a larger scale, with bolder compositions producing powerful abstraction, yet always with recognizable subjects. -In 1932 a number of younger photographers, greatly impressed by Edward Weston and his work, formed a society to which they gave the name "Group f / 64." The approach that Edward Weston discusses in the reading thatwe have assigned for from the.Classic essays textbook on seeing photographically will be talking aboutWeston's aesthetic much more in our class on 3rd. And what was going on in that essay but basicallyit's about trying to understand and maintain a kind of absolute control over the material of your photograph. -That what the photographer has to do is to lookat their subject And to be able to. Detail translate in your mind's eye what you see withyour human eye into the way in which your camera ... and the the film that you're using in the wayit's being developed as well. How ultimately that will read. A black and white. --Weston tried to show old pictorialist work to Stieglitz who rejected him, and then Weston shifted to straight approach -important aesthetic position is seeing photographically/pre-visualization *** relationship of human being to photography -weston's formalism; kind of objectifies forms; certain way of seeing only part of a thing (pepper, shell, nude, etc.) -Examples of Weston sort of absolute aesthetic that he adopts is something I've been usingthis term formalist following it for a kind of formal Which we see demonstrated on this Slide by two imagesmade by Westin not terribly far apart for me. - On the left is an image of clouds. Mexico in 1912. - On the right is. A nude from 1920. - And if you look at the two images side-by-side youmay notice that they see. Very similar in form despite the fact that one thingis a cloud and one thing is a human. -This sort of kind of Trance absolute translation. Kind of thing into another thing but I'm purely visualterms. A fundamental property of formal. -Objectification is going on. Is there a kind of dehumanize.Of the figure on the right friends.Yeah I was kind of zero in.Torso.Inside of the thigh that we see here as it'scut off by the edges of the frame so we don't see. A person we just see sort of shapes and four. -Was so extreme You can see some of the products. -The image of the right than dude this is actuallya human being. Who is posing nude for Weston but he's taking theimage from such an angle That she abandoned she doesn't seem to have any limbsthere's no.She looks almost like a pear. Piece of fruit. - So that's what I've been interested again that question ofobjectification kind of rears. -The image of the left of the pepper was oneof the very famous series of still life images by.These are very experimental images.He walked he picked up these pep. In a market is again he was in Mexico thisis from his second stay in.At the end of the twenties and early. And he noticed in the marketplace that they would bethese you know interesting kind of Twisted forms of Peppers Are really kind of amazing and that I mean whenyou look at this pepper on the left it almost ... appears like it's made out of metal or something veryhigh. Doesn't seem like it's a. Vegetable.And that arises from.That this is an image that says.In the studio. Under very very low light conditions so he would setup a.With very little light in it you know just thebit of light that you see cleansing off the top ... of the path. - And then leave.Lens.Very long periods of. - There's a thing when you're a photographer if you're workingis too low light and you're using a. Double the amount of light you have to reduce theexposure time.Right there's a mathematical relationship between those two things ispretty direct and pretty clear but when you're shooting in these very kind of low-light situations the property that isa property of.Photographic materials they kick sand is called reciprocity which meansthat instead of having to kind of exposure for twice ... as long because you have half as much light itwhy. - On the scale being kind of a lot more sohe would do such some of these and we know ...from the day books that some of these exposures wereseveral hours law. Worried set a thing up and he talked about howhe'd set it up and it was being near the shutter was on. During the extended. Of time but a truck wrote droveby the house and shook things and so we had to start all over. - And what results from this is rather interesting because it'sa photograph that literally the human I could never see -It can only be seen. Buy a camera and buy via VIA photographic material.The end result of these is the subjects themselves.Amazing luminous. -This famous image of a nautilus shell by Weston isanother in this Siri.Lowlights.And again that the nautilus shell itself is rendered.Immaculately so. Using this. Attic really kind of seems to kind of glow fromwithin. -also photo of toilet called Excusado with much the same form/technique

Paul Strand

-In the last two issues of Camera Work, dated 1916 and 1917, Stieglitz reproduced photographs by a newcomer, Paul Strand. -They included a forceful series of portraits taken unawares in the streets with a Graflex camera, and pictures in which form and design were emphasized-a semi abstraction of bowls, a view looking down from a viaduct, an architectural scene dominated by the vertical accents of a white picket fence. As Stieglitz wrote, the work was "brutally direct, pure and devoid of trickery." -was in striking contrast ro much of the work produced by members of the Photo-Secession. It was prophetic of the reorientation in phorographic aesthetics and of the return to the traditions of straight phorography, which was ro gain strength in the years after the war. -Strand wrote in 1917: The photographer's problem is to see clearly the limitations and at the same time the potential qualities of his medium, for it is precisely here that honesty no less than intensity of vision is the prequisite of a living expression. This means a real respect for the thing in front of him expressed in terms of chiaroscuro ... through a range of almost infinite tonal values which lie beyond the skill of human hand. The fullest realization of this is accomplished without tricks of process or manipulation through the use of straight photographic methods. -Strand was among the first to discover the photographic beauty of precision machines. - He made a series of extreme close-ups of his Akeley motion picture camera and of power lathes. On a trip to Maine he discovered the beauty of large-scale details of driftwood, cobwebs, plants, and other natural objects. -In 1923, lecturing to the students of the Clarence H. White School of Photography, he made a strong plea for the revival of craftsmanship and told them of the need to free photography from the domination of painting, and ro recognize that the camera had its own aesthetic. -Strand's negatives were seen with intensity and sureness; his work has a quality rarely found in photography, a quality that can only be described as lyrical. -he photographed people and the landscape, seeking always the feeling of place, the land, and the inhabitants. -He did a series of books beginning with Time in New England ( 1950), edited by Nancy Newhall, who selected New England writings from the seventeenth century to the present to accompany the photographs. Words and pictures reinforce and illuminate one another with synergistic effect -Strand's later books explore a wide range of countries, from the Hebrides to Egypt and Ghana. Paul Strand was a significant photographer in the first half of the 20th centuryhe started his career initially as a young man studying at the ethical culture school with Louis Hine. - And then when he was still a teenager he wasdiscovered by Alfred Stieglitz who guided him into the realm of straight photography Out of what had been initially his experimentations in avery pictorialist kind of style. -As you can see from this image of abstractions porchshadows in Connecticut by 1916 he had completely adopted this much more modernist straight aesthetic. - Strand is a really interesting photographer as I mentioned having had in a very early on theinfluence of Lewis Hine he was somebody who while he adopted what might look like a very formalist abstract kind of photographic style especially in the earlier phases ofhis career was also someone who was innately interested in people the effects of various economic and social arrangements on the lives of people. -He was a very committed lifelong socialist and that comes out a lot in his writings, including his essay Photography and the New God -A few years later opening a new gallery and somewhatin the twenties. Anyway Paul Strand as you can see from this photograph of Wall Street had a really interesting eye for abstract detail. And formal relations between elements of his subject. - This is an image that sort of speaks volumes about the The monolith of capital in the United States. - Puny people in the bottom of the Photograph seem to almost be struggling to Walk into the headwind of the light that striking them It's a beautiful image and it's very evocative And also touches on social concerns which was one ofStrand's ongoing Interests. - 1 series of experimental images that Strand made in the teens, in 1915 he started going around New York Citytaking candid photographs of people out in the street in the park since I'm on using a kind of ingeniouslydesigned false lens on his camera so it would look as though he was photographing something directly in front ofhim but there was a sort of right angle lens thing attached Devised for his camera so he was actually photographing somebodyoff to the side and that was a way he had of capturing his subjects without them realizing thatthey were being photographed. - And it's a really interesting series of photographs there's akind of honesty about them and they also express his deep interest in People and in Kind of expressions and attitudes of everyday people out onthe. -This was again one of the strands could have deeppersonal interest That is expressed quite frequently in his photography -What we're looking at here. Are some very beautiful. Closely cropped abstract Images. Of a lathe, a metal lathe. Which come from the Akely shop. - In the early twenties Strand branched out a bit fromhis photography and bought himself a movie camera And this was the brand of the movie camera wasbuilt by this Akeley Company - And he went to their shop and took these photographsof the metal lathes and the machines that were used in the manufacture of That movie camera -So basically what we're looking at are. beautiful photographs of machines that make another kind of machine. And not just any kind of machine, a movie film camera. -With Strand this interest in machines was really pitched inthe 1920s. The essay that's assigned alongside this from classic ...essays in particular the piece that's called Photography and theNew God which Strand wrote in 1922 around the time he was making these photographs. He's very very interested in this relationship between the machine.And. Human beings again this kind of sociological and serve socialistinterest in. People and the lives that they lead and how they'reimpacted by these kind of technological changes in society is really very strong. -made Manhatta film with Charles Sheeler; quotes from Walt Whitman poems; non-narrative kind of poem to modern city with crowds, skyscrapers, etc; shows modernity of city and everyday life of "the now"

Zone system

-essentially a way of quantifying Weston's pre-visualization -how color world transforms into black and white -With his "zone system" he has worked out a highly ingenious and practical rationale for determining exposure and development, based upon sensitometric principles, which gives the photographer precise control over his materials. -Adams first teaches the photographer to master the characteristic of the photographic emulsion by determining-not by laboratory test, but with the photographer's own working equipment-the interrelation of the four principal variables: sensitivity of the negative material, amount of exposure, subject luminances ( i.e. brightness), and development -From this data he can obtain in his negative any one tone and will know exactly the tones that other subject luminances will produce. -The infinite gradation of light and shade found in nature Adams divides into ten zones. Zone O is black, Zone IX is white. Between these extremes are eight tones of gray, Zone V being the "middle" tone-not by objective measurement, but by subjective judgment-and next to it, marked VI, the value that conveys to the photographer the feeling of the tone of average, well-lighted skin. -Using a photoelectric exposure meter Adams measures the luminances of the various parts of the scene he is photographing. These measurements are correlated with exposure and development procedures, so that the photographer can visualize the entire gamut of values that will appear in the final print. - The control is comparable to that which a musician has over his instrument. -Guesswork is eliminated, and the photographer can concentrate upon aesthetic problems, secure in the knowledge that his results will not only be of technical excellence, but will embody his subjective interpretation of the scene. -With this mastery of technique, coupled with his lifelong deep spiritual resonance with the wilderness areas of the earth, Adams has produced magnificent landscapes of the American West and Alaska.

Edward Weston Essay "Seeing Photographically"

-pre-visualization=seeing photographically -visualize final result of image beforehand since no longer correct with handwork like the Pictorialists did -see subject matter in terms of the camera **** (unlike Emerson's making the camera function like the human eye and see like a human) -must becoming intuitive knowledge; know process and camera, what will print with, etc. beforehand and like the back of your hand -all about control -it's grounded in. A set of ideas about. That were served five circulating in terms of modernist art.At the time and not just photography. -These kind of General Notions of Mid Twentieth Century modernism like to talk about particular. Of you do if your time at a particular mediumthe goal of that Medium is supposed to be. Manifesting the qualities that are unique to the medium As in you shouldn't be trying to imitate other thingsso in the realm of painting -Basically the idea of pre-visualization is that the job ofthe photographer is to understand absolutely and completely Everything about the materials that there were The camera the quality of the lens Of what kind of photographic Emulsion you're shooting onto what'sthe film like was the sensitivity in the latitude of the film. - Basically again adopting this modernist stance -In the essay he's talking about photography as being afairly instantaneous kind of a thing when you snap the shutter - Basically there's the image on the film you don't getto do a whole lot with it and again in the using the Straight photographic approach you're not going tobe messing around with it in the dark room or using all kind of elaborate printing techniques. -Make a kind of work of art out of ityou did it then there's no such thing as hand In a straight photographic Basically dedicated Looking at the whole thing. -You have to do that because the The Taking ofthe images so instantaneous in the process West in claims the only way the photographer gets control over it isby pre visualizing me about having the fit Photograph basic. In your head before you snap. It has to be. -So and that I mean for him that meant tremendouslevels of control and detail down to the point of ... where they are at before I knowing not just thebasic capacities of your camera, lens and film and so on but down tothe point of like okay so what temperature is the ... developer bath going to be when I die. Right at what kind of paper am I going tobe printing.And understanding the.Qualities of those things that for Weston is how aphotographer Act.

Paul Strand Essay - "Photography and the New God"

-wrote in the 20s, or the Machine Age -photography can humanize the machine or else it will destroy them -also fetishization of the machine; huge cultural shift Strand is responding to -sees photography as an art (creative control; human control of the machine) -new way of seeing*** -dehumanizing potential of machine age -maintaining humanity is with creative use of the camera -humanize machine -art vs. science resolved by camera Add the rise of Science and empirical thought made itso empiricism empirical thought that's the kind of scientific approach that's based on Direct observation. - A phenomenal and attempting to analyze and account for them in the ways that modern science does. And so he.Guy deposits the fact that now we've got to.Where the world has exploded we have Age of the machine. Out of wooden metals and quoting from page 145 inthe text out of wooden Metals he made hands that could do the work of a thousand men he madebacks that could carry the burden of a thousand beasts and change the power which was in the earth andwater is to make them work through him men consummated a new creative act a new Trinity so he's erectinga new kind of religious image. New Trinity. Got the machine materialistic empiricism the Sun and science theHoly Ghost. So that those Photography in the new God the newGod is God the machine. -And he's very interested in pursuing what's going on withthis new guy. He's he thinks it's a means by which lots ofpeople's lives can be vastly improved obviously there's there are these new modern Innovations people can communicate with one anotherin new ways people can. -Tibetan you're significantly improved living conditions and so on andthen he gets interested if he starts talking about how.Photography figures into this because if you think about itphotography. Is. For him and Hispanic medium among other things it's aCommunications medium it is a medium that comes from a machine. -Camera is a machine.And so he's very interested in the particular role thatseems to be present. Two photographers as they. Are undertaking their work because what what's a photographer photographeris a creative person. In control of a machine. - He's a bit worried about what goes on. With with this.The situation of the the kind of Rise of themachine the audio in America the Supreme altar of the new God he calls it singular lack of perception respectfor the basic nature of the photographic machine. - He takes his turn kind of dissing pictorialism in thisessay. But he's very interested in the fact that there aredangers inherent in this world of the machine. Near the end of the essay on 151 at thetop of the page. Not only the God but the whole Trinity must behumanized lest it intern dehumanize us. - We are beginning perhaps to perceive. He's worried about being ground literally ground under the heelof the machine that machines and machine visit was kind of Technologies and.Just going to machine mode of living.Would be something that would dehumanize people radical. And which as result we need to have. Some kind of. Way-o. Controlling that And the the door he sees open the key figurehe sees in this discussion. - Is in fact the photographer the creative person in controlof a machine. Who can help humanize the machine human eyes Vision he'stalking about using the machine. Disconscious use. Of the machine looking at page 146 of the essay. - In the middle of the page and significantly one mightalmost say ironically enough not among the least important is the emerging demonstration on the part of the artist ofthe immense possibilities in the creative control of one form of the machine the camera. - For it is he Who despite his social maladjustment has taken to himself withlove a dead thing unwittingly contributed by the scientist and through is conscious use is revealing a New and LivingActivision. - So it's the creative engagement of the photographer with thismachine the camera.That will enable us to generate this New and LivingActivision it's a new way. To look at itself and to see the future.Add to understand the world in a way that hehopes ultimately will not be dehumanized by the machine nature of everything. But in turn will be humanized by the photographer

Formalism/formalist modernism

Form at all cost -Weston's Cloud v. Nude taken in much the same way; so was his Pepper #30 and the Nude as well as the Nautilus Shell and Excusado (toilet) -he isolates the form of both and sees in same way -level of objectification since look at form -images are pure product of photography; see how human eye never could -most pronounced in Weston, but seen in all of f/64 artists -seen in criticism of photography in America; loved to look at and pay attention to forms -formal beauty -seen in purely visual terms -Examples of Weston sort of absolute aesthetic that he adopts is something I've been usingthis term formalist following it for a kind of formal Which we see demonstrated on this Slide by two imagesmade by Westin not terribly far apart for me. - On the left is an image of clouds. Mexico in 1912. - On the right is. A nude from 1920. - And if you look at the two images side-by-side youmay notice that they see. Very similar in form despite the fact that one thingis a cloud and one thing is a human. -This sort of kind of Trance absolute translation. Kind of thing into another thing but I'm purely visualterms. A fundamental property of formal. -Objectification is going on. Is there a kind of dehumanize.Of the figure on the right friends.Yeah I was kind of zero in.Torso.Inside of the thigh that we see here as it'scut off by the edges of the frame so we don't see. A person we just see sort of shapes and forms

Berger Essay, "Paul Strand"

n this essay Berger describes the work of Paul Strand and makes the point that in Strands photographs of people he presents us with the visible evidence, not just their presence, but of their life. He goes on to say that Strand consistently takes a political position, but at a different level, such evidence serves to suggest visually the totality of another lived life, from within which we ourselves are no more than a sight. Berger provides a clear insight into the method Strand used as a photographer which makes him unusual. His work is the antithesis to Henri Cartier-Bresson whose approach was that the photographic moment is an instant, a fraction of a second, and he stalks that instant as through it were a wild animal. By contrast the photographic moment for Strand is a biographical or historic moment, whose duration is ideally measured not by a second but by its relation to a lifetime. Strand does not pursue an instant, but encourages a moment to arise as one might encourage a story to be told. In practical terms Strand decides what he wants before he takes the picture, never plays with the accidental, works slowly, hardly ever crops a picture, often still uses a plate camera, formally asked people to pose for him. His portraits are very frontal, the subject is looking at us; we are looking at the subject; it has been arranged like that. His camera is not free roaming; he chooses where to place it. Where he places the camera is not where something is about to happen, but where a number of happenings will be related. Thus, without any use of anecdote, he turns his subjects into narrators. In each case Strand, the photographer has chosen the place, to put his camera as listener. The approach: neo-realist, the method: deliberate, frontal, formal, with every surface thoroughly scanned. Berger goes on to analyse three pictures: Portrait of Mr Bennett, a Mexican woman and Rumanian Peasants. He remarks about their density they are filled with an unusual amount of substance per square inch. And all this substance becomes the stuff of the life of the subject. The subject is willing to say - I am as you see me. The photographs suggest his sitters trust him to see their life story.

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