Photo Exam 2 Study Guide

Aura

Aura is described by Benjamin as" that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction." A painting's aura is its uniqueness, authenticity, and permanence. An aura creates a sense of distance between the work and the viewer. In Benjamin's essay, he describes aura as the uniqueness and originality of pre-mechanical reproduced art. He also refers aura as some type of intersubjectivity experience of the viewer and the object that holds certain kinds of cultural connotation.

Historical Testimony

Before the idea of reproducibility made its way into the art world, art objects could be always viewed as being part of a larger history. Because there could only be one of its kind, the object's role in history could be viewed as dependable and authentic. The object was created in a specific time and context, and it's authenticity to being a part of this history was never questioned before the age of mechanical reproduction. When objects started being reproduced, their historical testimony could no longer be taken as objective, since there could now be an original and copies of an original.

Perceptions

Perceptions of subjects became prevalent once realistic portraiture became wildly replicated. Perceptions of the people depicted in images either enhances the ideas expressed in the images or works against the ideas depicted. For example, famed founder of Eugenics, Galton, employs preconceived notions of Jewish people in his work, The Jewish Type. These preconceived stereotypes of the "Jewish type" aids to the enhancement Galton's work.

"Emmett Till in his Casket"

Was the 1955 photograph of Till's open casket published in numerous black newspapers and hardly any white publications, showing white newspapers' unwillingness to show atrocities white people committed against black people.

Stereotypes

"Scientific" experiments performed during the mid to late 1800's involving photography and eugenics, like that of Zealy and Galton, used photography as a medium through which eugenicists could prove certain racist stereotypes. The photographic series that were created during the process depicted subjects who exhibited the preconceived stereotypes, or fit the mould created by the "scientist," rather than an assorted sample of subjects, such as those depicted in DuBois' project. Photography by Hutton also used photography to confirm certain stereotypes about Native Americans as a justification for white supremacy.

Lewis Hine

(1874-1940) Lewis Hine was a proponent of social photography, seeing the art and dissemination of photography as a means to educate the masses about social injustice. He also famously photographed child laborers as a part of the National Child Labor Committee, which sparked national outrage about the working conditions of these children in factories. Often associated with Jacob Riis because of his subject matter, however, Hine specifically chose to photograph working people in their own environments espousing a "detached and objective manner" (109). He viewed social photography as an "educational process," or evidence of injustice rather than a way to "shock a passive audience into fear" (109). He seemed to want to photograph his subjects with dignity and respect for the hardships they had faced thus offering a certain humanizing and sympathetic framework for social documentary photography.

Dorothea Lange

(1895-1965) is an American photographer who famously participated in the FSA/RA's project documenting difficulties of farmers in the 1930s. One of her photographs from that project, Migrant Mother (1936) is perhaps her most well-known work.

Archive

(an extensive record or collection of data) The inventorial form of an archive endowed the consisting individual images with a specific tone of regularity and occurrence. By depicting all of his Civil War photographs as an archive, Matthew Brady crafted a cultivated set of expectations\understandings of the events of the war communicated by the, "much-diminished role for the individual image, no more than a single variable within a set of categorical regularities," (Trachtenberg, 5). Through the deprivation of the traditional powers of the image, each is able to work like a statistic/data point in a series--marking the usual and common occurrences-- thereby influencing the viewer's perception and understanding of the normal and mundane aspects of the war.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

A French Humanist photographer known especially as a master of the "candid camera" (the Leica) and for his idea of the intuitive nature of capturing an image at "the decisive moment"--"the instant when action and composition resolve themselves in the most telling, most revealing arrangement" (the "one moment at which the elements in motion are in balance") (384-5). This concept of the decisive moment inspired a subsequent generation of photographers and their methods of/approach to capturing an image (including Raghubir Singh!).

Walter Benjamin

A German literary critic, translator and author who wrote about the impact of technology on branches of the arts, of photography in a political context, and developed a personal version of Marxism. One of the ideas his essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", examines is that contemporary masses covet holding objects through obtaining their reproductions.

Universality

A common theme throughout the artistic medium, universality stands as many artists' major aim. Dana Schutz claimed to appeal to the universal experience of motherhood, while Walter Benjamin references the goal of a "simultaneous collective experience" in artistic expression. Universality, in the context of these readings, references the importance of considering positionality; Schutz failed to embody universality in her Open Casket, while Benjamin equates the concept with a successful piece of artwork.

Stereoscope

A device used for viewing 2 images that combined to create a three-dimensional image. Early stereoscopes were used by bougie elite's in the place of their parlor to share in the wonder of the "exotic" landscape and people of the American West. This viewing devise allowed people to feel as if they were more a part of an image and a place -- it brought viewers in, rather than creating a distinct separation between viewer and photograph as the image exists in 2 dimensional space and the viewer in 3 dimensional space. The stereoscope allowed for a blurring of that separation.

Jacob Riis

A forerunner to Lewis Hine, Riis was another social photographer who worked mainly in the 1880s. His influential book "How the Other Half Lives" chronicled the lives of tenement dwellers in New York City and helped to show the horrible living conditions poor people faced at the time. However, there is some criticism of his work for sometimes being posed or constructed, and not truly showing reality the way he claims it does.

Combination Printing

A method that allows the photographer to manipulate a photograph by dividing sections of different photographs and blending them together. This was a breakthrough for the artistic side of photography as it allowed for more creativity and surpassed previous limitations, such as finally being able to combine a good representation of a sky with a good representation of a landscape in one image. Photographers were able to incorporate more of their own imagination and creativity into the photographs instead of just creating a representation of what was in front of the camera.

Gelatin dry plate

A process first invented in 1871, the gelatin dry plate process allowed exposure time to be reduced, as well as eliminating the need for portable darkrooms, as with the wet collodion process. This process involved a plate covered in a hardened sensitive gelatin emulsion and was a forerunner to rolls of film. It contributed to the increase in accessibility to photography after its invention.

Innate Honesty

A property of the camera, explicated by Edward Weston. The innate honesty of the camera means its capacity to depict only that which was placed in front of it. He said that the innate honesty of the camera allowed it to look beyond the superficial and capture the essence of the subject. However, this is a much more complicated idea than it seems on the surface, because photographs can be manipulated, even if that was not Weston's particular practice.

Madonna of the Fields

A trope of depicting impoverished rural women during the Great Depression along the same iconographic lines as the Virgin Mary, but in a rural/farm setting, to help cast them in a very specific role that de-emphasized their sexuality and emphasized their roles as mothers and their purity and goodness, in order to help garner sympathy and support for these disadvantaged people.

"Unexplored Potential of Photography"

According to Moholy-Nagy photography had become boring, he described, nothing had happened in photography —to him photography was an "unexplored potential". I wonder if the unexplored potential that Moholy-Nagy envisioned has begun. It is hard to identify exactly what he meant by the potential of photography that had yet to be expressed in the time he wrote. However, I believe that photography began gravitating towards a new way of expression. In many of Moholy-Nagy's photographs we can see the beginning of such an exploration, as he begins to gravitate towards the abstract. In his work as well as other artists who moved away from literal representations of reality, the subject didn't necessarily change but the objects did and the way they were captured also dramatically changed. Objects had become the new sitter, and the camera began capturing things in the world that the eye cannot see. The unexplored potential I believe is referred to photography finding the freedom that the canvas had at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Nagy yearned for a similar exploration through the lens, that indeed soon caught on. However, there will always be an unexplored potential in photography, as in any other art form, as we continue to evolve and change, so will our art around us, to better represent our existence through the expression of art.

Purity

After the popularization of combination photography, many purists argued that true photography was not something that should be edited, tampered with, or altered in any way. These men believed in the sanctity of raw negatives and therefore pure resulting prints. Henry Peach Robinson wrote, "Would it be a departure from the truth as it is in photographic purity to reduce or intensify, or to varnish the negative, and, if the negative is weak, may a little colour be introduced..." (83). While he saw merit in the representation of the truth in pure photographs, he was not in support of the totality of never "editing" an image or its negative.

Patience

Alfred Stieglitz thought that patience was key for producing good photographs with the hand camera. His philosophy was that after deciding on a subject, one should wait, hours or however long it took, for "the moment in which everything is in balance" (216). He notes the fact that most users of hand cameras took pictures far too quickly and without enough thought or patience, and attributes any photographic successes produced by these people largely to chance. He believed that no matter the subject, patience was needed in order to wait for the right moment to produce a successful photo of it, effectively waiting for such moments of chance.

Fad

Alfred Stieglitz, who had committed his life to legitimizing photography as art, had strong opinions of the burgeoning kodakers movement and proliferation photographic practice. Until the release of the Kodak Brownie, photography as a practice was economically isolated. All of a sudden, at the turn of the century, anyone could be a photographer. The Brownie, costing only a dollar, could easily find its way into the hands of an average middle class person. Stieglitz was very critical of this having committed so much of his labor to the craft. He summed up kodakers as just a fad likening it to the contemporary bicycle trend. He figured people's curiosity would eventually run out and their attention would be draw elsewhere. Though he was critical of the photographers, he did stipulate that there was potential for strong images to come out of this trend. He sighted that one's patience with their camera and craft would ultimately result in photographs of worth.

Amateur Photography

Amateur photography was defined as any photography taken by someone who was a "professional" photographer. Alfred Stieglitz rejects the idea that anyone who is not a professional cannot take real photography and argues that the best and most interesting photographs are taken by people who do it for the love of the hobby and not for financial gain. The most artfully skilled photographs were taken by photographers who combined patience with a natural "artistic instinct" (Stieglitz, 118).

New Document

An exhibit by John Szarkowski in the Spring of 1967 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The show featured works by Diane Arbus, Lee Friendlander and Garry Winogrand and emphasized a shift in documentary photography and the ideologies of these three photographers. Previously, documentary work had been largely "in service of social causes" in attempts to demonstrate the problems in our world and to call viewers to take action against this harm. However, these three photographers pointed their cameras to the banal, the everyday, and worked under the belief that this type of work too was meaningful and worth looking at.

Legislation

As Mensel discusses, there were many efforts to legislate the way photography could be used, including a proposed bill to make it illegal to publish a photo of a woman without her permission. This was highly important given the craze around photography at the time, and the way it was so new. People were finding new ways to use photography all the time, and many thought that was inappropriate and needed regulation.

Conceptualization

As Photography begins, whether photography is an art is heavily debated, and the idea of a photographer being considered an artist seems is thought to be a false or exaggerated statement. A photographer is merely the operator of a device that simply records an image from Nature herself. However, Robinson comes along with a revolutionizing idea. H.P. Robinson claims that the photographer becomes an artists by conceptualizing the scene he wants to capture. The art of creatively imaging an idea, a scene, a subject, that is what creates the artist.

Moral Equivalence

As a result of the demystification movement of photography, more kinds of people and objects were being photographed. This lead to a "moral equivalence" in subject matter because anything could be photographed and were therefore more equally valued in relation to each other (Sontag 31).

facial expressions

As discussed in the Mensel article, a common notion around the turn of the century was that "the face was the window of sincere sentiment" (31). Upper class New Yorkers in particular were obsessed with guarding their expressions, so the advent of the hand held camera produced anxiety about being captured in candid moments. At the same time, many amateur photographers wanted to photograph people without their knowledge to capture the "true" feelings in their expressions.

Ritual Function

Benjamin discusses how the uniqueness of objects before the age of mechanical reproduction had a ritual function which was inseparable from its uniqueness. Objects with a ritual function were made to be viewed in very specific spaces by specific people for reasons tied to larger historical traditions. The inability to reproduce these objects is what maintained their ritual function, as the value of these objects within these specific contexts could be heavily controlled and maintained.

Exhibition value

Benjamin observes, the general public's relationship to art is changed. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," with this change, is to capture the attention and sensibilities of the general public.

Intentionality

Both Weston and Cartier-Bresson have philosophies about photography that involves intentionality. For Cartier-Bresson, the intentionality of photography is manifest through the photographer's ability to detect the "decisive moment." This decisive moment has to be seen seconds before it occurs, so that the elements of the photo are perfectly in balance and an artistic photo is taken. Deciding to take the photo at the decisive moment is an act of intentionality; the artist intends to take a balanced photo that captures a specific moment. For Weston, photography is less about the decisive moment than it is about seeing the photograph before it is taken. Lighting, angle, background, and subject are all things that can be controlled and positioned, all according to the artist's intentions. The photographer chooses everything before the photo is taken, so that the photo is complete before the shutter even clicks.

Carolyn Bryant

Carolyn Bryant is the white woman in Mississippi who accused Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago, of verbally harassing and being sexually crude towards her which lead to his kidnapping, torture, and murder in 1955. The murder of Emmett Till remains one of the most notorious lynching crimes in the nation's history and stands as an event that propelled the Civil Rights movement. Recently, Bryant broke her silence in the media by claiming that her allegations against Till were not true, which finally implies a rejection to the false narrative set forth in 1955 after decades of being accused of lying in court.

Geometry of Composition

Cartier-Bresson believed that the composition of a photograph, taken at the decisive moment, would have an "instinctively fixed...geometric pattern without which the photograph would have been both formless and lifeless" (385). This geometric pattern is described as the "correct interplay of proportions" (of the composition) which is achieved only when the photograph is in its original state--without cutting, cropping, or enlarging to manipulate the size of the image. The geometric angles can only be analyzed/reduced to a schema after the photograph has been taken, therefore, the power in capturing compositions that are geometrically harmonious/balanced is in the photographer's eyes and intuition.

Wake Work

Christina Sharpe defines it as "a powerful analytic and literary concept that connects the experience of enslavement to contemporary violence, mourning, survival, and joy," (1). It is a way for black people to persevere in the face of "Black death" and overcome it.

Class

Collections of mass-produced photography often employed unskilled laborers in the process to prepare and create the prints, however, they were never credited for their work. Instead, the upper class photographer or composer of the collection would get credit. In addition, only the upper class, who could afford to own such a collection, would have access to viewing the prints, further contributing to classicism in the medium.

Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus was a photographer featured in John Szarkowski's exhibit, New Documents, at the Museum of Modern Art. Her portraits were significant because they directly opposed the ideas and meanings behind The Family of Man. She rejected humanist messages and suggested "a world in which everybody is an alien, hopelessly isolated, immobilized in mechanical, crippled identities and relationships," but from a skewed, upper-middle class perspective (Sontag, 33).

Documentary photography

Documentary photography, such as "How the Other Half Lives" by Jacob Riis, aimed to capture images of life in an authentic, truthful way. Riis' photography was focused on life in the tenements, and was formatted in a way that highlighted the poor living conditions of the working class, an attempt to garner sympathetic interpretation for these people.

Inner Compulsion

Dorothea Lange describes the event of capturing one of the most famous images representing the the plight of displaced agricultural workers in the 1930s--"Migrant Mother": In her process of driving home to her family after being on assignment, Lange felt an instinct to turn her car around and go to the Pea-Pickers camp that she had passed on the road earlier. She credits her deep involvement and commitment to the cause she was photographing as the reason why she stopped (and achieved this success)--saying, "I believe this inner compulsion to be the vital ingredient of our work; that if our work is to carry force and meaning to our view we must be willing to go all-out (Lange, 264). Lange advises other photographers that in order to produce photographs that are moving and significant, one must be absolutely devoted to it--these instincts only come when one feels care and involvement for the cause they are capturing.

Full-Frame

Dorothea Lange recounts her vague memory of how her iconic photograph "Migrant Mother" was created, and emphasizes how this photograph nearly did not happen. She describes how it all happened very quickly, as to imply that very little thought went into the capturing of this iconic moment. By emphasizing the ephemerality of that moment she suggests that the photograph was not staged, rather it was a truthful depiction of that moment in time. In her photographs we see her use the full-frame of the image —this full-frame implies their truthfulness. By using the entire frame, Lange provides the proof that this image was not cropped or manipulated which gives her subject and the cause more validity. Lange shows that the pain and the struggle of this Mother is real, tangible, truthful, by keeping the full-frame of the picture hence, gives more power to both the her cause and her photograph.

Slavery

Douglass's portraits on the XIXth century showed the real condition of slavery. It is an opposite reaction to the caricatures of Black men, as minstrels performers with and without black face. Douglass is represented like a human being, very elegant, well-dressed. He was creating his own image, looking pensive and contemplative.

Mimicry

Early photographers struggled to conceptualize the function of their medium. Some artists, including Peter Henry Emerson, chose to mimic the eye and adjusted their cameras to create 'fuzzy edges'. Critics of Emerson concluded that the camera should not mimic the faulty, unfocused attempts of the eye in favor of a fully-focused, often unnatural print.

Mechanical photography

Early photography and its critics believed the process of creating photos to be one of purely technological skill. By the turn of the century, more weight began to be placed on the artistic side of photography as a result of the spread of and access to photography for the general population and the innovations of photographers who worked to capture and develop images not purely realistic but edging more towards an idealism that suited their artistic visions. As Stieglitz wrote in 1899, "In the infancy of photography, as applied to the making of pictures, it was generally supposed that after the selection of the subjects, the posing, lighting, exposure, and development, every succeeding step was purely mechanical, requiring little or no thought" (118). It was because of the separation of pictorial photography from general photography that allowed for the artistic qualities of photography to be recognized and treated as such.

Seeing Photographically

Edward Weston describes the photographer's most important and difficult task as seeing photographically: "learning to see his subject matter in the capacities of his tools and processes, so that he can instantly translate the elements and values in a scene before him into the photograph he wants to make" (Weston, 173). Weston argues that due to the two distinct factors in the photographic process that set it apart from the other graphic arts: the instantaneous recording process and the nature of the image ("such that it cannot survive corrective handiwork"), "the finished print must be created in full before the film is exposed" (172). In other words, the photographer must be able to visualize the final, exposed image while they are taking the photograph, while also simultaneously planning/knowing the exact photographic procedures needed to bring the vision to life. He argues that this ability is something that takes time and patience to develop, and is made easier by "selecting the simplest possible equipment and procedures and staying with them" until the process becomes intuitive (173). After the release of the economic Kodak brownie, and cameras were available to everyone who wanted one, there was a cultural shift in the way people saw and perceived the world. Rather than just passing through the world, people actively looked for things that merited being captured in a photograph, and the range of this worth expanded with the democratization of photography. This new type of seeing was revolutionary.

Grain

Edward Weston writes that the grain of the photograph is one of its intrinsic qualities that sets it apart from other forms of art. He says that the fine particles that make up a photo give it "a special tension" (172) and that any intrusion upon this, such as over-enlargement, destroys the integrity of the photograph.

Intuition

Edward Weston, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Dorothea Lange all believed in the power of a photographer's intuition in contributing to successful photos. Weston based his ideologies around photographers' artistry via instinctive pre-visualization (seeing photographically), Cartier-Bresson's idea of "The Decisive Moment" revolved around the artist's instinct and ability to capture such a moment, and Lange attributes her most successful photograph to following her instinct in visiting a location. These artists all rejected editing and alterations to photos, and instead thought that truly artistic photos were captured based on the instinct of the photographer in various ways, and thought it was "the vital ingredient" (Lange 264) of artistic photography

Walker Evans

Evans was another FSA photographer, like Dorothea Lange, who worked in rural areas during the Great Depression to help document the human condition in that time. However, many of his images are notable in the way they go beyond simply documentary to also artistic. While the readings did not talk much about Walker specifically, his is an important name to be able to recognize when talking about the history of FSA photography.

Intermediary

For Benjamin, however, as he examines the spread of photography and what the process of mechanical reproduction in photography has entailed in society, he argues that radically new relationships have already been realized through the advent of photography, film, and mechanical reproduction. Benjamin's conceptions of possibilities for new relationships and how they are being informed through photography and related media is based on assessment of shifts in historical processes. Benjamin examines ultimately the condition of new relationships at two levels. First, Benjamin, like Moholy-Nagy, is awed by the potential of photography to act as an intermediary to make what is not readily visible to our so-called naked-eye visible. He notes how the camera can intervene (Benjamin 332) to open spaces previously explored unconsciously to conscious exploration, or to the level of optical consciousness. In this extent, he alludes to Muybridge's photographs of Human and Animal Locomotion and possibilities in film as he considers how the fractional second of a stride and other supernatural motions can be made visible through film and photography. Yet, in his assessment of historical processes, and as the second level of new relationships, apart from considering the formation of new relationships in the technical interaction of human physiology with mechanical invention, he argues that other, perhaps more critical, new relationships are already being formed in society through the advent of photography.

George Eastman

George Eastman was an inventor and photographer. He invented the Kodak camera, the first handheld camera, in 1888 he began selling his cameras, with the tagline, "You press the button, and we do the rest."

Hannah Black

Hannah Black is a British artist who wrote an open letter in response to the inclusion of American artist Dana Schutz's painting "Open Casket" in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. The painting is an abstract, oil on canvas recreation of the photos of 14-year-old Emmett Till's disfigured body lying in a casket after he was wrongly accused of whistling at a white woman which lead to his kidnapping and brutal murder. The exhibition of the painting sparked a widespread controversy and lead Hannah Black to write an open letter to the Whitney Biennial curators in protest. The letter was signed by a coalition of artists and scholars of color and called for the removal and destruction of the work.

Realism

He argued that photography was a "perfect specimen of realism" in the early days but then as photography developed, man naturally strayed from realism because it presented no mystery. In other words, looking at Nature as it exactly was stopped being as riveting. In Henry Peach Robinson's "Idealism, Realism, and Impressionism" he discusses how realism was a popular trend in art and literature at the time (the late nineteenth century). He defines this style as attempting to be true to nature, even its negative aspects, rather than striving for an idealized beauty. Robinson is critical of the direction this trend has taken, saying that the word has lost its meaning and "it has now become a revolt against beauty, nobility, and grandeur of style" (67). When photography was first introduced, it was highly criticized by many for not having any artistic value, as it was the closest rendering of reality that had been invented. In the piece "The Elements of a Pictorial Photograph", Robinson explains why no art can truly achieve realism. Even photography, which can be described as capturing what is seen by the human eye, is altered by the photographer's style and what exactly they choose to leave in the frame. Because of this, there are always elements that will be left out, which means that even photography will never truly achieve realism.

Mechanical Accidents

Henri Cartier-Bresson rather harshly coined photographs as both lucky and unlucky "mechanical accidents" when the photographer failed to visualize his final result beforehand. So, for example, kodakers who managed to take a decent photo were considered to have produced a mechanical accident due to wildly clicking away. He believed planning beforehand for the recording of an image was also a crucial component to the photographer's approach.

Humanism

Humanism is the idea that all of humanity shares common characteristics that unifies the world. It highlights common characteristics humanity and shows that we are the same in some ways. It was the main theme of The Family of Man photo exhibition in 1955.

Conceptual image

Images, argued by Moholy-Nagy, are only truly conceptual through the view of the eye alone, as our intellectual experience is an appendage to our perception of the image. In image captured in a photographic camera are "faulty images," as they are solely optical images, ridding the distortions or perceptions of a "true image" (one viewed by the eye). Due the cameras inability to produce a genuine conceptual image, it is regarded as the beginning of "objective vision."

The Performing Self

In "Kodakers Lying in Wait," Robert E. Mensel discusses the role public presentation of personality played in the chaos that ensued when 'kodakers' began to snap candid photos of people around New York City. "The Performing Self," a term coined by Susman was a careful and deliberate "packaging" of qualities like "charm" and "beauty" in order to put forth a popular image that would be well-respected and well-received (26). "Kodakers" threatened the "performing self" because a person cannot perform if they do not know they are on stage. It resulted in what people believed were the "true feelings" expressed in the faces of people who did not know they were being photographed.

Facilitator

In Dorothea Lange's reflections on her photograph, "The Migrant Mother," she described herself more as a facilitator of the image rather than the creator of the photograph. Rather, she wrote that the woman herself was what "made" the photograph, and that Lange was only responsible as the person behind the camera.

Abstraction

In the case of the work of Dana Schutz and the discussions of Open Casket through pieces by Sadie Smith, Christina Sharpe and Hannah Black, abstraction refers to both an artistic style and the abstraction of information/content. In Open Casket, Schutz takes up her brush and paints in an abstract style, such that one may not even recognize the work as a human form, but perhaps more of a combining of geometric forms and bright colors. Abstraction of content is also something to be considered. Schutz has taken this image out of its original context and pulled it from the narrative where it belongs. The photograph of Emmet Till in his coffin was not meant for white audiences, it was circulated in black news publications and his funeral and the viewing of his body too were meant for black viewers. Schutz has neglected to consider this information and the context of the original circulation of the image of Till which she has appropriated.

"My First Success"

Julia Margaret Cameron, a photographer in the late 1800s, created an image of a young girl named Annie, which she dubbed as her first success. The image was very unique in that she wasn't seeking to portray the young girl in a classical portraiture sense. Instead of creating a highly stylized and sharp image, which was the style of portraiture that most photographers were using, the portrait of Annie was very close-cropped, soft, and filled with mystery and emotion. She calls this image her first success, as she was seeking for a more authentic and artful way to portray her subjects. The image does not give much visual information about the sitter, and Annie's features are not rendered in exactitude. Her face is out of focus, yet we are nevertheless intrigued by the young girl's mysterious, contemplative expression. This is an iconic image, because it presents the viewer with the complex, inner-soul of this young girl, as opposed to providing a mere likeness.

Lee Friedlander

Lee Friedlander is an American photographer who worked primarily during the latter half of the 20th century. He is well known for his images of American life. Like other photographers of this new documentary movement, he focused on everyday scenes and the "social landscape" at the time, photographing store fronts, signage and urban scenery to explain and document modern life. He worked with light, shadows, and a layering of silhouettes to achieve his unique style. He often intervened in the scene he was photographing. While some could view his injection of self into his photographs as narcissistic, others might argue that this made him a more honest photographer, who fully acknowledged his own intrusion in the scene, as opposed to hiding it. In stark contrast to social reform work, Friedlander's work celebrated and documented his own unique perspectives.

Frontal pose

Many of subjects in Diane Arbus's photographs are captured in a straight-on, frontal pose while gazing directly at the camera. This type of pose recalls the formal portraiture of the 19th century, giving the subjects a sense of dignity and implying their consent to be photographed. Susan Sontag notes that this also makes them look self-aware and sometimes awkward. She writes that this type of pose is associated with solemnity and disclosure of one's essence, and that the types of people that Arbus photographs are not often portrayed in this way.

Western Expansion

Martha Sandweiss writes about the impact of imperialist and colonialist endeavors in the United States in the 19th century. As a burgeoning medium, photography struggled to adjust to the harsh conditions of Western expansionists with outdated methods. Thus, innovative forms of photographic mediums, including the wet plate process, were employed to further the project, and public knowledge creation, of American imperialism in the West.

Julia Margaret Cameron

Mrs. Cameron was an amateur (in the sense of Steiglitz's definition) British photographer whose unique way of taking photos-- with large lenses and purposeful lack of definition and focus--was aimed to capture the impression/"soul" of the sitter. ln Annals of My Glass House (1974) she discusses how her signature out-of-focus pictures were actually a fluke. She failed to screw on her lens for a more definite focus which was an almost mandatory part of taking a photograph at the time. This fluke represents the changing landscape of photography because we see more and more photographers experimenting with their cameras and also the scenes they choose. After taking up the practice late in life after being gifted a camera as a present, Cameron made many connections and circulated her photos around the world, earning support from famous figures such as Sir John Hershel. Cameron describes her purpose as, "my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards [my sitters] in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man" and equates the photograph, as a result of her process, with "almost the embodiment of a prayer" (Cameron, 186).

Role of the Museum

One of the major issues that arose from the Dana Schutz and Whitney Biennial controversy questions the role of the museum in social justice movements. After Schutz appropriated an image of Emmett Till for her abstract painting, intellectual and physical protests against the Whitney accused the institution of not considering the historical significance or racism that the appropriation of the image ignored. But, as many artists, art collectives (ex. Guerrilla Girls), and social commentators have noted, the museum as an institution has not historically promoted social justice initiatives. Although obviously the museum and other archival spaces should have the responsibility of rejecting racism, it has not historically done so. Modern writers, activists, and artists alike have attempts to hold museums accountable in a tradition of active racist policies.

Overexposure

Overexposure is when the film is exposed to too much light. As a result, the photo is too bright, and creates a strong contrast between the lights and darks of the photo. It also requires a longer printing time.

Purist

Photographic purists were extremely against the manipulation and alteration of photographs. They saw any "doctoring" of pictures as untruthful representations of nature and felt that photographs should be preserved in their natural state.

Vernacular photography

Photography grew at an exponential rate with Kodak's mass production of cameras. As cameras became more accessible to people —as photography became more "democratic" more people were able to capture their life experiences— a more candid way of photographing life became increasingly popular. People wanted to capture their lives; scenes of their everyday, subjects they appreciated such as family, friends, the self, and objects that were central to everyday life. Vernacular photography became an essential aspect of life to the life and to this day continues to be an enormous aspect of life —everyday moments.

Artifact

Photos from expeditions of the West, whether in printed paper form or made for stereoscopic view, serving beyond just illustrations for an exhibition guide, and functioning as "collectible artifacts of an alluring place, bits of parlor entertainment that could stand independent of a long descriptive report" (Smith, 140). Having a piece of the West, an exotic place that one has never visited, in the tangible, scientific form of a photo (similar to a souvenir) coupled with the authenticity/exclusivity of being manually, carefully produced (in fixed quantities) caused the popularity of these photos to soar and develop a commodity culture around them.

Black death spectacle

Refers most closely to the work of Dana Schutz, a painting depicting the open casket of Emmett Till entitled, Open Casket. Schutz received much reprisal, as Schutz, being a white woman depicting black death, was considered "white shame" (Black), and to be removed from the Whitney, where it was installed. Many protests and essays, most notable being Black's, commenced, in hopes to motivate the Whitney in the removal and destruction of the artwork. "Black Death Spectacle" was a common phrase associated with this, many times printed on shirts, signs, etc.

Oscar Gustave Rejlander

Rejlander was a Swedish photographer, who created many composite photographs in the late 1800s. He desired to raise photography to the level of art. In his work he would often use models to stage scenes that were reminiscent of classical art. He is often called "The Father of Art Photography" and his work was one of the first to blur the line between art and photography.

Abigail Roberson

Roberson was a teenager from Rochester, NY who was involved in a landmark case about the right to privacy. Her image was used in a Franklin Mills Company advertisement without her consent, and she sued the company for emotional damage. The court ruled that they had no power to address injury to feelings, but they faced so much criticism from the New York Times that the New York legislature adopted a right to privacy act in 1903.

Zadie Smith

Smith is an English writer whose commentary on Get Out and Dana Schutz's painting calls into question the absolutism people often use when discussing race. She is biracial, and has children with a white man, so she was concerned with the idea of "how black" is enough for one to engage in those conversations.

Anti-humanism

Sontag believes that Arbus's work reflects an anti-humanist ideology that was prevalent in the 1970s. She defines this as a negative world view in which everyone is inherently different and we are not able to understand each other. She thinks that Arbus's photographs present "...a world in which everybody is an alien, hopelessly isolated, immobilized in mechanical, crippled identities and relationships" (33). This contrasts with Edward Steichen's Family of Man exhibit, which presented a humanist viewpoint of the universal experience and essence of humanity.

Demystifying

Susan Sontag claims that the American arts' ultimate goal is to demystify American life. In the 1910s and 1920s, photographers started moving away from subjects that were inherently valued as beautiful and began to focus on more mundane, everyday subjects. Sontag cites Edward Steichen and his photograph of a milk bottle on a fire escape as one of the first photographic example of this movement.

Black vs. white publication

The Berger essay highlights the historical differences between black and white publications, in particular how these publications cropped images to elicit different responses from their different audiences. The photograph depicting the arrest of Ethel Witherspoon was closely cropped in the black periodicals covering the story, but in white media, the image was uncropped. The closely cropped image removes the context of the situation and focuses more on the violence and lack of agency on Witherspoon's behalf as a call to action, but the uncopped image is more removed from the situation, encouraging the white audience to be the same.

Civil War

The Civil War was the first significant crisis that was able to be recorded via photography. It was the first opportunity to use photographs as a memorialization of history, which at the time were considered an objective depiction of events, or, as Trachtenberg writes, "equivalent of having been there." However, it is clear through many of the most popular presentations of these photographs (for example in the very different presentations of Barnard and Gardner's photographs) the that they were not entirely objective, and that in fact, the subjective ideologies of the photographer were crucial to how any given photograph was understood by the viewer.

Kodak Brownie

The Kodak Brownie was a hand held camera introduced in 1900. It was the first commercial mass produce handheld camera. It was originally marketed towards children, but soon became widely used by adults. What made the Brownie different from previous Kodak cameras is that it cost only $1 and held 100 negatives, compared to the previous $25 cameras which the average person could not afford. It served the purpose of making photography truly accessible to everyone, and increased the population of amateur photographers. Negatives would be sent back to kodak still in the camera, developed in Rochester, NY, and sent back to the user.

Kodakers

The Kodakers were amateur photographers in the late 1800's (the camera was introduced in 1888) who used small and inexpensive Kodak hand cameras to photograph the world around them. These amateur photographers were not well regarded by the general population and were seen as "'camera fiends,' or 'kodak fiends,' and were said 'to be in league with some evil spirit'" (Mensel 29). Often they would take photographs of strangers and passerby in the street, and sell them to companies to use in their advertisements. Photographs of celebrities of the time would often sell for more, and became collectors items. The Kodakers were generally looked down upon as being of the lower classes, tying back to earlier commentary by Beaudelaire and others, who looked down upon these "Sun worshippers" with disdain. The term "kodak fiends" is distinct from "Kodakers" because of the way it emphasizes the negative qualities of these photographers, and shows how invested in the art they really were. That people would go so far as to call amateur photographers "fiends" is telling of the heights the craze had truly reached.

Candid

The common theme of the photographs of amateur kodak photographers were of subjects that were not obviously posed for the taking of the picture. These images often captured informal scenes of their daily lives and of other people. These kodakers were learning photography through trial and error for the first time, so there was not only knowledge missing on behalf of the photographer for directing the subjects, but also the knowledge missing for the subjects for ideas in posing or creating an interesting subject for the photographer to capture. Another place candid photography is referenced is in the "detective" or spy cameras (Stieglitz, 214). These cameras were disguised as many hilarious objects (such as pens, purses, binoculars and and books) in order to take truly off-guard, unposed, and honest pictures.

Fuzzy-Graham

This was a derogatory term given to Emerson's controversial "soft-focus" photographs. People were shocked that a photographer would purposefully set his camera out of focus, especially after the photographic community had toiled away for so long, just trying to get a crisp, clear image. What critics failed to understand, however, was that Emerson was trying to create a more democratic, subjective image that represented what the eye actually saw, as opposed to presenting the viewer with a stylized photograph.

Social Reform Photography

Using the photographic medium to implement social change, was at the heart of old documentary photography, otherwise known as the "social reform" style of photography. For example, Dorothea Lange's iconic image Migrant Mother could be placed in the category of documentary/social reform photography, because in her depiction of a Madonna like mother with her two children, she shed light on the horrific living conditions in the Dust Bowl, and garnered sympathy from viewers. Yet it is also important to keep in mind that this image was commissioned by the FSA, and produced for a middle-class audience. Thus, certain realities (such as mothers taking on the role of the man in the nuclear family, or images of male desperation) may have been photographically ignored for the sake of the viewer's comfort.

Veracity

Veracity in photography has always been a debated issue. Photographers such as Peter Henry Emerson challenged early photographic convention in attempts to follow their own vision of photographic veracity. For Emerson, this meant blurring the edges of his photographs, leaving the center in sharp focus, and thereby simulating the way the human eye sees.

Optical unconscious

Walter Benjamins concept of things which are present but not seen. The photograph reveals the optical unconscious by its ability to capture these unseen moments. For example, Eadward Muybridges movement sequences which allow us to break down human locomotion into many discrete steps which can be individually examined. Slow motion film is another example, in which we can see and examine the minutia of physical interaction with less mental interference. In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), Walter Benjamin claimed that a different view of nature presents itself to the camera in film and photography compared to what we view with the naked eye. He argues that the camera has the technical capabilities needed to reveal aspects of reality that only register in our subconscious. The camera as a mechanism allows a slowing of time in a fast paced industrializing world, highlighting what we do not consciously see as it may be too fleeting or small. Thus, film has the potential to change what we think the limit of knowledge is by providing a stop in time and ability to intensify an image through high definition or magnification. The camera also changes how we view the minutiae of reality serving as an optical unconscious. Benjamin asserts the film camera "introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses" (331).

Albert Bierstadt

Was a painter and photographer of people indigenous to Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming who took photos without the subjects' consent. He said, "The best [photographs] we have taken have been obtained without the knowledge of the parties" (Sandweiss 138). His Catalogue of Photographs included a section called "Views in the 'Far West'", which featured Western landscapes and images of "Shoshone, Sioux, and Cheyenne subjects" (Sandweiss 139). These images were some of the first Western photographs to be mass-marketed, and were successful because (according to Sandweiss) of their "familiar genre scenes" and portrayals of "safe, if exotic, aspects of Indian life."

Mamie Bradley

Was the mother of Emmett Till who pushed to have an open-casket funeral to show "what they did to my boy" (quoted in Berger 127). She said that the public "would not be able to visualize what had happened unless they were allowed to see the results... The whole nation had to bear witness" (quoted in Berger 133).

Unification

We have seen photography's power to unify in advancements such as the composite photograph and the stereograph. Smith's class of 1886 felt deeply unified by the nondescript yet accurate composite of each of their faces, so much so that they used it as a mascot of sorts, and proudly displayed it at reunions many years after it was made. The stereograph also gave people a sense of unity, because the exciting technology brought people together into the living room, where they shared their thoughts and feelings on the fascinating 3-D images.

Democratization

With the release of the Kodak, the practice of photography expanded to the masses. Recording everyday life, which subsequently resulted in extremely amateur photography, became a possibility for those who previously did not have access to such technology. Thus, a sort of democratization of archiving and photographic value ensued and set the standard for the conceptualization of value in the photographic medium. Today, with virtually endless access to photographic documentation for those who own phones, cameras, computers, and other technology, the creation of images does not necessarily rely on social status like photography's early days.

Secessionists

a group of photographers from Munich that started a movement to have pictorial photography judged purely as a piece of artwork and not as a photograph. It was an important step in changing the general public's perspective and causing them to appreciate and respect the art form. As a result, these artworks began to appear in more art collections and received an increase in monetary value.

Open Casket

a painting by Dana Schutz that was on view at the 2017 Whitney Biennial. The painting is a highly abstract adaptation of a 1955 photograph of 14 year old Emmet Till's bloated, unrecognizable body. He was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955. The fact that Schutz created this piece as a white woman who does not share the African American experience, sparked impassioned debate surrounding race relations, cultural appropriation, and freedom of speech.

Thomas E. Askew

a photographer who worked with W.E.B. DuBois on his Types of American Negroes and The Health and Physique of the Negro American. He photographed black Americans in formal dress. These images showed more of the subjects' bodies than did the images in W.E.B. DuBois' collections, and the respectability of the subjects is very clear in these photos. In his photos of children, he juxtaposes his well-dressed, serious African-American subjects with a statuette of a white boy in creased clothing that "[emblematizes] carefree or careless youth" (Smith 72). According to Smith, the other statuette that would appear in his pictures of children was a (perhaps) bronze figure of "a warrior of Western antiquity"; these two statues were "meant to suggest the paths that might define the future of Askew's subjects", and the elegant-looking children in his photographs were clearly more aligned with the "classical ideals of the warrior." He, along with W.E.B. DuBois and Frederick Douglas, was acting in response to popular images of African Americans, either as minstrel shows portrayed them (lazy and carefree) or the images by Joseph T. Zealy of enslaved people meant to highlight their inferiority to white people.

Attraction

at this time in the history of photography the attractiveness of images was highly valued. With the advent of retouching, the beginnings of the recognition of the artistic abilities of photography, and the spread of photography to the masses/amateurs. Beauty and appeal were valued more than realism or the naturalism of the past. As Stieglitz wrote, "Pictures, even extremely poor ones, have invariably some measure of attraction" (Stieglitz 117). Photography became inundated with depictions of idealism: of ideal landscapes, perfect portraits, and photographs that were both technically and superficially attractive to the viewer.

Edward Steichen

curated a wildly successful photography exhibition in 1955, called The Family of Man. The exhibit displayed images from across the globe, which photographically highlighted basic human milestones, such as birth, love, and death. Although the intent of the exhibit was to unify mankind, critics such as Susan Sontag have called this attempt for unity both reductive and forced. For example, the inclusion of non western individuals being forced into western modes of portraiture, and the lack of context in the exhibition, proved to be problematic. In Sontag's essay, the idea of what makes a beautiful subject is carefully picked apart and worked through. She brings up Steichen's photograph of a milk bottle on a fire escape of a tenement building taken in 1915 as one of the earliest instances of what can be considered a worthy or beautiful subject matter challenged. Steichen was working at a time where beauty was found in wealthier neighborhoods and classically beautiful women. Turning his camera on a scene which symbolized the opposite of what was generally considered beautiful at the time could be viewed as quite radical.

Consent

in photography is relevant as it concerns the subject's consent to be photographed, particularly with the case study of Joseph T. Zealy. Whether or not the subject gives permission to be depicted in the way that they are can affect the final outcome of the photograph, and the ethics therein. Because Zealy's subjects were not able to consent to having their pictures taken, the images show that, and we can read them as inherently cruel or unethical, because of the way those people were forced into sitting naked in front of the camera. However, this issue applies beyond Zealy, and can also be seen, for example, in the images of Albert Bierstadt.

Photo-painting

is Edward Weston's word for photography that aims to emulate painting. He believes this movement was based in "the fixed idea that a straight photograph was purely the product of a machine and therefore not art" (Weston 171). Photo-painting includes the manipulation of negatives, unfocusing the lens, using rough printing surfaces, and choosing subjects unsuitable for photography because of its "innate honesty" as a medium (Weston 174). Weston argues that no one questions whether instrumentalists are truly artists just because they use instruments (i.e. machines) to produce their music, nor are they expected to emulate the sound of the human voice (i.e. a non-mechanical instrument) to be taken seriously.

Dana Schutz

is a white artist whose painting, Open Casket (2017), sparked a debate in the American art world: as Zadie Smith describes it, "Who owns black pain?" It depicted Emmett Till's swollen, mutilated face and mimicked the photograph, "Emmett Till in his Casket" (1955). Numerous artists spoke out against the painting; most notably, Hannah Black wrote an open letter to the Whitney biennial (the museum where Open Casket was displayed) calling for the removal and destruction of the painting, calling the work an example of "capitalist appropriation of the lives and bodies of Black people" (Black 2). Nearly fifty other artists cosigned, and many more published their own opinions on the painting.

Eugenics

is defined as "the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. Francis Galton is thought of as the father of the field and used it "as a method of improving the human race, it fell into disfavor only after the perversion of its doctrines by the Nazis." Within the field of photography Eugenics has played large roles in photography which works to create "types" and "categories" of human beings. For example, eugenic principles and motives were used in Joseph T. Zealy's projects as well as in other white supremacist photographic processes.

Posture

the posture of the subject represents a huge element of composition. For example, Frederick Douglass's posture is very important in the historical context. On an Ambrotype of 1858, It is possible to see him crossing his hands, suggesting an intellectual and a very dignified posture. He did not look at the camera, making his gaze deeper. Douglass's postures showed a message during this period.

Retouching

the process was believed by some to be anti-art and counter to the work of photography as a whole, while others saw the merit in reworking images to better suit the ideologies of the time. Henry Peach Robinson wrote in 1896, "It is not, however, retouching in itself that is condemnable, but the bad retouching..." (72). It thus appears, that photographic critics could not come to a consensus about whether the benefits outweighed the negatives of retouching images. Common retouching processes included tampering with and "editing" negatives to change some aspect for the eventual print, varying exposure times, but most popular was the process of combination photography (combining images into one picture or overlapping images to form one).

Joseph T. Zealy

was a photographer who took daguerreotypes for Louis Agassiz, a Harvard scientist who believed in polygenesis (the idea that different races are different species and are not equal to each other). These daguerreotypes featured enslaved people stripped nude and photographed without their consent. Each subject is photographed in profile and in front view. Smith says that these photos "demonstrate how quickly photography became harnessed to the sciences of biological racism in efforts to provide 'evidence' of racial difference and inferiority." Each daguerreotype is named with the first name of the enslaved person, their ethnicity, their owner, and their plantation. The power dynamic present in this image is quite obvious, in part because of the stripping of the subjects, which recalls "the physical torture and sexual exposure of enslaved men and women" (Smith 47).

Francis Galton

was a white supremacist, the founder of eugenics, and "strongly believed in the scientific value of photographic records" (Smith 51). To that end, he attempted to popularize The Life History Album, a photographic baby book. With these records, he hoped to define "biological [racial] types" and use his findings to further the eugenics movement. W.E.B. DuBois based his portraits in Types of American Negroes on Galton's "standard photographs" (closely cropped front and profile views of a person). He also made composite portraits of people of each of the nine types, claiming to capture "the central physiognomical type of any race or group" (Smith 53).

W.E.B. DuBois

was an African-American activist who believed in the power of photography to help affect social change. His album "Types of American Negroes, Georgia, USA" showed a variety of African-Americans, to try to dismantle the commonly held notions of what an African American looked like. He showed people with many tones of skin, but all who had at least 1/32 African-American blood, the accepted line of delineation for an African-American at the time. Some of his subjects looked white, which fought against the idea that there was a specific point at which someone can be counted as one race or another. He was also fighting against the dehumanizing images and ideas of people like Zealy, who wanted to use photography to prove non-white people to be a different species from white people. He worked with photographer Thomas E. Askew to produce the images.

Humphrey Lloyd Hime

was another early photographer in the North American west. He was originally from Toronto, and was more successful at using the wet plate process further south than many of his contemporaries. His images were also engraved to be put into publications, like J.D. Hutton, to similar effect. He created the image "The Prairie Looking West," which was manipulated in the chromoxylograph process (a type of woodblock print) to add clouds and birds to an otherwise extremely stark image, which included a skull and other bones. The image the original portrayed of the prairie was relatively negative, so the manipulations hoped to affect that.

The Farm Security Administration/Resettlement Administration (FSA/RA)

A New Deal agency that used photography to convince Americans of the value and necessity of relief programs. "Through a rhetoric of accidental poverty," it depicted poor farmers as "proud Americans victimized by disasters beyond their control" instead of as drifters or loafers (Kozol 1). Many Americans, especially those in the middle class, were apprehensive about government intervention, but the FSA/RA's archive of more than 270,000 photographs was extremely effective in persuading them. The FSA project was an initiative during the depression to combat rural poverty. Both writers and photographers were hired at the time to document the lives of these farmers. The photography and writing aspects attempted to education people about the issue at hand. Many very famous photographs by photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange came out of this project and are now recalled as some of the most famous depression era works. The photographic style of Lewis Hine helped shape the style and photographic sympathy visible in the works of photographers working for this project.

Composita

A composite image of the 49-members of the Smith College class of 1886. Portraits were taken of each of the 49 students and the negatives merged to create a portrait of the entire class in one photograph. For the class of 1886 this image was a way of documenting/solidifying the collective identity of the class and it was cherished by all until the last died in 1964. The composite image worked to create a collective portrait and was not a widely used method until after the 1890s. The composite image was also used "as a tool to assist in identifying traits shared between family members, criminals, inmates of asylums, and members of different ethnic 'racial' groups." (p4, Young)

Visual average

A form of composite photography employed by eugenicist Francis Galton to create information and study of racial types. To affirm his own racist ideology, Galton created composite images of similarly looking people that resulted from his theory of information creation.

Photographic-integrity

A photograph, as Weston says, is "entirely made up of tiny particles." He claims that the extreme fineness of these particles gives images a special tension, which is destroyed by a variety of techniques such as overenlargement, or printing on a rough surface. We see then, that Westons idea of photographic-integrity acts as a limitation to what falls under the medium of photography. An artist like Daido Moriyama could be thought of as the antithesis to Westons idea of the integrity of a photograph.

Platinum print

A platinum print captures an image in a range of grey tones with a fuzzier, softer quality and a matte surface appearance. This effect is achieved through the contact printing process as the platinum chemistry absorbs into the paper (it does not sit on top of the paper like the gelatin emulsion of a gelatin silver print or an albumen print with the egg white coating), creating the fuzzier quality of the image and a matte surface texture. Platinotypes/ platinum prints became one of the favored mediums of the pictorialists like Emerson for the fuzzier, more muted image quality and the atmospheric/low-contrast effect it created. An example of a platinum print we viewed at the museum is Emerson's "Polling the Marsh Hay."

Invisible Labor

A topic covered by Holmes in his essay "The Doings of the Sunbeam." Holmes remarks on visiting a factory that manufactured photographs. He noticed how each step of the process of photography was performed by a different worker, and how each worker only got to see the product of their own work, rather than the final product of the finished photograph. However, despite literally witnessing the labor involved in the process of photography, Holmes goes on to discuss "'mysterious forces' and 'that miracle' of photographic reproduction," completely erasing the labor behind the process of photography by assigning the labor to the mysterious and miraculous forces of nature (Trachtenberg 12). Gardner also grapples with the issue of invisible labor in his book; he often represents the labor itself (or the final product of the labor) as the subject of the photograph, rather than the laborers. His treatment of African American subjects is similarly problematic, as he refers in the caption for "A Burial Party" to an unnamed group of "native dwellers" who are burying the dead left behind in a battle. These "native dwellers" are of course African Americans, and their labor is seen to be natural process, one to be ignored and made invisible.

Vantage Point

A vantage point is a position or place from which something is viewed. Specifically in photography, a vantage point is a viewpoint or a perspective in a photographic composition that allows a wider, more expansive view. Changes in vantage point have the potential to alter a viewer's understanding of the relationships between objects or subjects in the photo and also the viewer's experience of the photograph. This is evident in the cases of black vs. white publications of photographs depicting the arrest of Ethel Witherspoon in Birmingham, Alabama (May 6, 1963). According to Martin Berger in his article, "Lost Images of Civil Rights" (2011), white publications (specifically Time) "abstracted and depersonalized the violence of the arrest" by reproducing the photo from a distant vantage point, excluding textual and visual details and distancing the viewer from the violence (115). Contrastingly, black publications such as Ebony and Jet reproduced the image of the arrest with a closer cropping and intimate vantage point, directly confronting the viewer with the social dynamics and violence of the scene.

Migrant Mother

A widely-reproduced 1936 photograph by Dorothea Lange taken as a part of an FSA/RA project to document "the plight of agricultural workers" in the 1930s (Lange 263). It has become "a major iconic symbol of 1930s Depression families struggling to survive (Kozol 19). According to Kozol, Migrant Mother is representative of many of the FSA/RA photographs in its focus on maternity and poverty. Roy Styker, the head of the FSA/RA project, says this mother "has all the suffering of mankind in her but all of the perseverance too. A restraint and a strange courage" (quoted in Kozol 20).

Sequence

Although, Mathew Brady did not take most of the Civil War photographs attributed to him, he was credited with creating a comprehensive and narrative driven photographic documentation of The Civil War through albums/photobooks and the sequencing of photos. When two photographs are presented in combination, there will be a dialogue between them as both pictures will allude to something that will inevitably be compared. Thus, through the deliberate sequencing of Civil War photographs, Mathew Brady controlled what his viewers saw and implied a narrative. As stated by Alan Trachtenberg in "Albums of War: On Reading Civil War Photographs" (1985), "Most important, he placed the images in distinct context, a structured discourse that has sealed them indelibly as "Civil War photographs." Although priority in this matter is minor, Brady does seem to have been the earliest to conceive of a form for the presentation of the pictures, a structure to contain and articulate them as a whole entity, a totality-and to enunciate them one by one as parts of that totality" (3).

Matthew Brady

An entrepreneur and gallery owner in the 1860's who collected, commissioned, and archived photographs of the American Civil War. His book, Brady's Photographic Views of the War, was conceived of as a means to document and encompass the war as a historic event. People could buy these photo books and look over the photos to get a sense of the "realities" of war. However, because the photographs were arranged and organized into an archive by Brady, he was able to control what people saw. He gave context and structure to a concept as abstract and emotional as war, placing the death and destruction into a harmless and digestible book. By creating a uniform narrative of the Civil War using photography, Brady was able to control the information consumers would receive, as well as decide what parts of the narrative to exclude and which to highlight. Brady is also significant in the discussion of authorship; because many of the photos he put in his book and labeled as his own were in fact not taken by Brady himself, the question arises as to who can be considered the artist of a photograph.

Intimacy

As artistic decisions begin to filter into photography, we see photographer's such as Julia Margaret Cameron freely infusing her individuality onto her photographic technique. In the closely cropped portraits, "Annie" and "Sir John Hershel..." she fantastically shares with the viewer a poetic intimacy of those individuals and herself. She captures a still moment in a child, but in her stillness there is movement, we see it in her hair, her mouth, and even can imagine her thoughts moving in the air. Sir John Herschel is depicted in a most intimate way, he expresses a vulnerability his eyes, a kindness in his demeanor, and an all encompassing humanness than speaks of the closeness between the photographer and the subject. Christina Sharpe argues that the Dana Schutz controversy should be framed as an issue of intimacy. The painting "Open Casket" puts the (white) audience in a neutral position that erases the original intent of the open casket photo of Emmett Till. There was meant to be an intimacy of seeing the graphic details of senseless violence against a young, black boy. Dana Schutz abstracts the original image to a point where the pathos (and subsequently the intimacy) of the image disappears. Further, Sharpe points out that no white people actually attended Till's funeral. By painting a black body, Schutz claims an intimate relationship to it. However, Schutz claims to feel intimacy through the shared experience of motherhood, complicating the matter further.

Labor of Photography

As photographers —amateurs, and professionals alike—became an increasingly familiar aspect of life, they continued to argue that the photographer was in deed more than just an "operator". The photographer was as much an actor in the taking of the photograph than just the instrument used in capturing the image. Alfred Stieglitz endeavored in explaining the role of the photographer. He argued that through patience, time, and effort the photographer too labors in the art of photo taking.

Alexander Gardner

Created a book of Civil War photographs, entitled Gardner's Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War. Like Brady, his album attempted to make sense of the war as a whole. What is significant about Gardner's contribution to the documentation of the Civil War through photography is his use of text to assist with the narrative of the album. His captions for each photo are extremely detailed and subjective, placing value judgements on whatever is happening in the photograph. By providing his own opinion on what the photograph depicts, Gardner sets up the viewer to approach the photo from a specific viewpoint, and enter with an existing bias. Instead of presenting the photos as a blank slate onto which each viewer can project their own opinion, Gardner infuses the images with meaning and judgements, so that the reader can easily digest the information and place it within the greater context of the war.

Plasticity

Critics of the photographic medium often describe it as un-plastic--or unable to easily manipulate, create, or be imaginative with. Steiglitz refutes this claim, arguing that the developing process is truly artistic and not mechanical--the photographer has many different tools ,such as developing solutions, restrainers, forcing baths, and the local development process, at their disposal to achieve many different desired effects. He goes on to say that every photograph is one-of-a kind because each photographer's perception/impression of nature is different: "with the actual beauties of the original scene, and its tonal values ever before the mind's eye during the development, the print is so developed as to render all these as they impressed the maker of the print; and as no two people are ever impressed in quite the same way, no two interpretations will ever be alike" (Steiglitz, 120). Every step of the photographic process is open to manipulation, input, and action by the photographer and is in turn, a truly plastic medium.

Emotional distance

Diane Arbus's work documented various people she had met and encountered in her life that would be considered--by the very questionable standards of "societal normalcy"-- to be outsiders by mainstream society. She photographed circus performers, people with disabilities, non-gender conforming individuals, drag queens, and even just people who were unique or surprising. Her intimacy with the subjects allows her to remove the emotional distance that the viewer might normally have to a subject like a circus performer; by bringing the strange and not normal into the space of high-art, she invites the viewer to connect emotionally to her subjects, gaining empathy.

Documentation

Documentation, which also ties into post-war images, rose to great popularity by photographers such as Hutton and Bierstadt. Hutton used documentation of Native peoples before destruction by white culture. Bierstadt captured a candidness when photographing, his voyeuristic point of view aids to viewing Natives as subjects to be studied.

Manipulation

Due to the physical form of the Daguerreotype metal plate, Daguerreian views could not be accompanied by text or sequentially arranged in an album and therefore lacked a narrative. But, the development of the wet-plate paper process allowed for engravings or inscriptions to accompany images in order to clarify and develop their intended meanings. Along with the element of reproducibility that popularized the wet-plate paper process came the ability to manipulate images. In her essay, "The Attempt Has Not Met with Distinguished Success: Early Wet-Plate Photography and Western Exploration"(2002), Martha Sandweiss wrote, "Paper, however, was easy to manipulate, and paper photographs were quickly integrated into more familiar forms of literary and artistic reproduction" (126). This process allowed for the further recognition of the artistic qualities of photography. Manipulation was seen in various other ways. Francis Galton in his studies of eugenics, directly manipulated his composite results by selecting individuals within the studied group that looked alike, and thus making his theory of the ability to create a "type" have a better result. With the invention of composites, we also see a technical variation of the term "manipulation", because composites are the process of manipulating various negatives to create one individual merged photograph.

Subjectivity

During and after the Civil War, images showing the horrors of the battlefield were collected and paired with text in an album. While these albums helped to organize and distribute the photographs, they also removed objectivity from the viewing experience. Captions and titles provided a bias, and the arrangement of the photographs within the album gave a false notion of context between the photographs, making the hand of the photographer the creator of a subjective narrative.

Open Letter

During the Schutz controversy, open letters served to inform the public on a major concern of activists like Hannah Black and Zadie Smith. Historically, open letters allow activists without direct connections to the institution they are protesting air grievances publicly. Often, open letters start conversations that other forms of protests fail to do, including engaging intellectuals and social commentators.

Media Bias

During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, white, southern publications censored or hid almost all images of black life, particularly any positive ones. Northern white publications did include images of black people, but still censored "unappealing" narratives of black life. This phenomenon reveals the specific values of both sides of white America at the time, emphasized by the fact that some of the most widely reproduced photos from black publications were largely absent from white ones of either side. For example, different variations of a scene with police officers holding down Ethel Witherspoon appeared in different publications. Southern white publications chose to publish photos that minimized the importance/pain of the situation, northern white publications chose photos that made her seem helpless and worthy of sympathy, and black publications chose photos that made her look more powerful, and unfairly brutalized. These publications also all used captions to influence the messages that they wanted these photographs to get across.

Victim of Circumstance

During the great depression, FSA and RA photographers traveled across the country to document the devastating effects brought on by the dismal economic environment. Thousands of photographs were produced during this time, yet they all underwent scrupulous selection before being release. The goals of these programs were largely for the purpose of propaganda. The photos that were released to the public took macro views of individuals who were experiencing the hardship of the Great Depression in an attempt to garner sympath from their fellow citizens. The goal was make the subjects appear like victims of circumstance rather than deserving of their realities. The photos ultimately pushed very narrow narratives that re-enforced societal gender norms while also blurring the responsibility of the government for causing the economic climate. In her article "Madonnas of the Fields" Wendy Kozol describes how photographers for the Farm Security Administration portrayed their subjects as deserving victims as a way of creating sympathy in viewers. However, they portrayed them as victims of natural disasters and the environment, rather than addressing the systems of oppression that made them vulnerable to these things in the first place. Susan Sontag criticizes Diane Arbus's work for portraying people who Sontag believes to be victims, but (in her opinion) without compassion.

Gender roles

Dust Bowl photography, discussed in "Madonnas of the Field," was aimed at a middle class urban audience to garner sympathy and social reform for the victims of the drought. In order to appeal to the intended audience, published photos often focused on the women and children, and there was an overall absence of male figures present in these photographs. To preserve gender roles and the middle class' sympathy, men weren't shown due to the threat of the audience thinking that the men were victims of their own laziness because they did not have jobs.

Artistic vs. Mechanical

Early photography could be divided into two categories: photos that were considered artistic, and photos that were considered mechanical. As Weston points out, photography was for a long time seen as artistic only if it mimicked painting, and mechanical if it instead was simply documentary. In the age of Weston and Cartier-Bresson, however, viewpoints were changing around these distinctions. These artists believed in the artistic value of "pure" unaltered photos, and the idea of using mechanical aspects of photography specifically for artistic gain eliminates such a need for distinction.

Peter Henry Emerson

Emerson based his photographs on the ideology that photography should mimic the way the human eye views the world, focusing on one area with the periphery blurred. This was highly controversial, and was criticized because the eye does this anyway when viewing photographs. He eventually denounced his theory in the wake of this criticism.

Voyeurism

Fraught throughout the history of the medium, voyeurism plays a central role in the development of the commodifying of photography. Driving from the concept of 'pleasure in the witnessing the pain of others,' it is acutely present in the distribution and fascination surrounding photography in the civil war. Images of death and destruction would be proliferated into the consumer market to be digested in the safety and peace of parlor rooms across the country where the morbidity of war could be witnessed without direct harm to the viewer.

Gustave le Grey

Gustave le Grey was a photographer, though mostly credited as a teacher, who was known for carefully manipulated ocean-scapes that portrayed the sky and the sea in equal detail through the use of two different negatives to create accurate portrayals of both. One of the first notable uses of photographic manipulation.

The Decisive Moment

Henri Cartier-Bresson's idea of "the instant when action and composition resolve themselves into the most telling, most revealing arrangement" (Cartier-Bresson 384). Cartier-Bresson says that a photograph "must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it" in order to be successful as a work (Cartier-Bresson 385). Putting this concept into practice can require long periods of waiting in front of a scene that is nearly perfect, but seems to be missing just one thing, until that one missing piece comes into the frame. According to the editorial note at the beginning of the excerpt, the concept of the decisive moment influenced an entire generation of photographers.

Henry Peach Robinson

Henry Peach (H.P.) Robinson was an English photographer who is most notable for his innovation in combination print photography. His prints combined multiple negatives which he masked and arranged to create a fabricated scene. Using this method, Robinson was able to present a symbolically rich rendering, rather than strictly faithful presentation, in which all objects in both the foreground and background were just as in focus as the subjects.

Impressionism

Henry Peach Robinson defines impressionism in photography as: "unity and order of impression gained by focussing a subject," (68). It further solidified photography as an art form and allowed for more artistic interpretation of a scene. Photographers could portray a location or person in a way that focused on plane or subject in a way that more closely represented the way people view their surroundings and gave more meaning and intention behind the subject of a photograph.

The Perfect Negative

In "Seeing Photographically" Edward Weston states that the photographer should not be concerned with achieving the "right exposure" or the "perfect negative" "rather he must learn the kind of negative necessary to produce a given kind of print, and then the kind of exposure and development necessary to produce that negative" (pg.174). Weston emphasizes that in order to break free from the "photo-painting" standard, a photographer must learn to regard the photographic process as a whole and only long experience and mastery of the medium will enable the photographer to "subordinate technical considerations to pictorial aims" (173).

Counter-archive

In "The Art of Scientific Propaganda," Shawn Michelle Smith explains how Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A., a book commissioned by W.E.B. DuBois with photographs by Thomas E. Askew, presented a counter-archive to the eugenicist archives of the time. These eugenics studies, by people such as Francis Galton and Joseph Zealy, attempted to portray a racial "type" of African Americans and to prove their inferiority. DuBois and Askew destabilized these ideas by showing a large variety of African American people and representing their subjects with dignity.

George Barnard

In 1866, George Barnard created one of the most popular albums of Civil War photographs, called Photographic Views of Sherman's Camp. Barnard displayed his images in a way that made them appear factual and objective. His captions for the photos were strictly descriptive, and did not much allow for an emotional response or reading of the image. In this way he used images to supplement the text of his album, which differentiated his album from Gardner's, for example, which used the text to supplement the images, and was meant to provoke more emotion and present more of a narrative.

Paul Valery

In Alan Trachtenberg's Albums of War: On Reading Civil War Photographs, he mentions Valery's "simple question" which implied that photographs are an equivalent to "having been there", that they represent reality. This, of course, creates an odd juxtaposition between the people who safely viewed these photographs from their parlors and the soldiers who were 'actually there'. This is also an especially important idea because Trachtenberg goes on to discuss the ways in which photographs from the Civil War were not 'neutral' but rather coded with biases and history that were tainted by the photographer's perspective.

Exoticization

In Barthes description of the exhibition The Great Family of Man, he points out the false equivalencies being made between the different people documented by this exhibition. He notes how, while claiming that "we are all one," the exhibition also played into stereotypes of how certain peoples look and live. In particular, it documented their "exoticness" and their difference from the norms of Western society and civilization. Some might also argue that Diane Arbus's photographs of "freaks" could be considered exotization or fetishization of these people and their living situations.

Agency

In Shawn Michelle Smith's essay, "The Art of Scientific Propaganda," she explains the difference between the subjects photographed in Joseph T. Zealy's daguerreotypes (1850) and the subjects in Eadweard Muybridge's "Animal Locomotion" (1887). Both sets of images include nude bodies and claimed to use photography to further scientific knowledge, but there is a clear visual discrepancy between the subjects' agency. The men and women of color photographed by Zealy have no capacity to act individually. This is explicitly exhibited by the way in which their clothing is stripped down, "In the seated poses, rolled shirts at waistlines highlight the process of stripping, recalling the repeated scenes of stripping and beating and whipping recounted in slave narratives" (47). The standardized frontal and hard profile poses also suggest the eugenicist comparison of scientific race photography and enforce the visual expression of extreme differences in agency and "power between photographer and subjects" (47). Whereas in Muybridge's "Animal Locomotion", the white body is observed as neutral and its actions are studied. "In Muybridge's archive, the white body walks, runs, jumps, crawls, works, and plays- the white bodies actions come under scrutiny, but the white body itself is simply assumed" (49). The white body is given the capacity to act and its actions are studied, it is not the body itself or the body as a type that is studied.

Aestheticism

In Zadie Smith's essay, she highlights the theme of white people's aestheticism of black people and their culture in "Get Out." She talks about how they want to appropriate the "trendy" parts of the black experience but leave behind black pain and history. Critics of "Open Casket" argue that Schutz aestheticizes the black experience when she abstracts the painting in a way that makes the violence virtually unrecognizable and romanticizes the image.

Subject Worthiness

In age of the Kodakers, everybody who could spare one dollar was a photographer. The kodak brownie proliferated the possibility for average people to become photographers which, until its release, was a privilege only accessible to the few who could afford the equipment. The kodak brownie changed many established features of photography. Until that point, photo creation was an acutely intentional act. The Brownie offered one hundred preloaded frames in the camera which for many photographers was far too many subjects and scenes to plan. If, for instance, a parent bought a brownie to photograph their children but only took twenty to thirty shots of them, that would leave up to seventy more shots for them to go through before they had the chance to develop the whole roll. This resulted in photos of essentially nothing: candid photos of people, poorly composed images of place or scenery etc. However, when getting these photos back, the photographer may look at the latter two thirds of their roll and actually find images that they liked. It was this that caused a shift in photographic aesthetic and what would be considered a worthy subject would broaden.

Daguerreotypes vs. paper photographs

In early photography of the Western United States: The wet-collodion process was extremely labor intensive, and many expeditions struggled with its use: it required darkrooms, various chemicals, heavy equipment, and appropriate lighting, all of which were challenging to deal with while traveling. However, the wet-collodion process did eventually win out over daguerreotypes for many reasons, one of which being the reproducibility of images. Countless different paper photographs could be produced from one wet-collodion negative, making their mass-marketability easy and their sale very profitable.

Censorship

In her letter to the Whitney Museum, British artist Hannah Black advocated for the complete destruction of Dana Schutz's "Open Casket". This language appears to be problematic, because "destroying" works of art is ultimately the censorship of creative freedom and speech. Historian Christina Sharpe stated that "the artwork itself is a kind of argument that people then engage with", and if a work is censored like Black suggests, there can be no constructive dialogue surrounding the piece.

Profit

In her letter, Black argues that the painting is evidence of white insensitivity, appropriation, and profits from the spectacle of black pain, trauma, and death. In her interview with Siddhartha Mitter, when asked about why she has lended her support to Hannah Black's open letter, scholar and author Christina Sharpe states that within the letter, "The points that Hannah Black makes about the circulation of Black death are right on the mark. The hashtag #FreeDanaSchutz didn't get off the ground, and I'm glad. But I reject the idea that somehow the central question is that the artist needs protecting, as opposed to the issue that Hannah is centering, which is how images of Black suffering circulate for a certain kind of enjoyment and profit. We've seen that circulation over and over, in the history of the Whitney Biennial and the history of this country" (pg. 1-2). She also argues that the destruction of the work may be necessary because it prevents the artist or others from profiting over time through circulation and inheritance.

Representation

In his album, "Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A.", W.E.B. Du Bois uses photographic portraits to destabilize racist representations of people of color. Du Bois sought to challenge images of blackness historically painted or photographed by white American photographers or novelists, "as the archive lurking behind the African American portrait was a scientific catalogue calling on the photograph as "evidence" of African American inferiority" (Smith, 44). Du Bois replicated the photographic types modeled by eugenicist Francis Galton (1884), in order to counteract and destabilize eugenicist views through presenting portraits of African American men and women as well as biracial individuals as having "physical attributes, moral tendencies, and intellectual capacities" (Smith, 55). In the context of the controversy surrounding "Open Casket," there was much contention on the "ownership" of representation and who is allowed to represent black pain and suffering in artwork. On one side of the argument, Hannah Black and others believe that white artists should not be allowed to use these themes because it perpetuates the white profit off of violence against black people and the suffering that it causes. On the other side, Zadie Smith and others bring into the impossibility of creating a racial dividing line when biracial identity exists.

Rangefinder

In his essay, Henri Cartier-Bresson describes the value of what creates good photography, as he expresses in his essay, a photograph is to capture a its "subject in all its intensity". He believes that there is a 'decisive moment' in which the photograph must be taken, this moment will become evident to the photographer and when it does the photographer will be able to capture the moment in its purest sense. Cartier-Bresson captured his 'decisive moments' with the Rangefinder camera. This camera allowed Cartier-Bresson the opportunity to come as close as one could get to the 'decisive moment' itself. Because the Rangefinder never blacks out when it snaps the the photograph, the person taking the photograph is able to continuously look at what they are capturing. This is unlike the SLR which goes completely dark at the time of the 'decisive moment' because the cameras mirrors flip up and obscure the moment you are actually capturing.

Frame

In his writing, "Seeing Photographically", 20th century American photographer Edward Weston defines frame as the limitations imposed upon the artist by each medium of expression; whether this be due to tools, materials, or processes. He also states that, "In the older art forms these natural confines are so well established they are taken for granted" (pg.170). Therefore, weston claims that since photography is a relatively new medium, it began with no frame of its own Early photographers thus borrowed the frame of painting leading to a long tradition of "photo-painters". In John Szarkowski's essay, he details the five characteristics intrinsic to photography, one of which is the frame. The nature of photography is that it is inherently limited, and must crop out some aspect of the scene. The photographer must choose what they find to be the most important, and include that material within the frame, but in doing so they are excluding a great deal from their photograph as well. The frame becomes a way of editing before the photo is even taken; the photographer edits out the parts of the scene that are unimportant and documents only what is within the frame. The frame also has a great deal to do with composition, or how different shapes within the photograph fit and interact with one another within the frame's boundaries.

White neutral

In nineteenth century photography (and often still today) the white body was viewed as a neutral subject, meaning that it was seen as the norm and that race was never the subject of photographs of white people. An example of this is Eadweard Muybridge's series "Animal Locomotion," in which nude white bodies are present, but their actions are the subject rather than the bodies themselves. This contrasts with photographs of black people at the time, in which race was always the subject of the photographs because their race was seen as non-normative to a white audience.

Collective experience

In the Benjamin text, Benjamin describes the way in which mechanical reproduction shifts the public reception of art. While photography is easily reproduced and distributed by means such as newspapers, the photographs can be widely spread, however singular works of art, such as paintings, can only be enjoyed by a few people at a time. Benjamin writes that, "painting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience" (330) while photography is able to be received by a mass audience.

Appropriation

In the context of discussions around Dana Schutz's "Open Casket", the concept of appropriation, specifically cultural appropriation, deals with ownership, or lack thereof. The original photograph of Emmett Till that Schutz's painting is based on was published in many papers, but hardly any white publications, and as such white people were not its intended audience. These photos were symbols to the African American community of violent racism. Therefore, many have accused Schutz of appropriating an image of black suffering, using it as her own regardless of the fact that she does not share and cannot experience this form of suffering.

"History Photograph"

It seems only logical that in the history of photography there too was a version of the "History Painting". In the work "The Two Ways of Life", Rejlander makes a perfect rendition of this classical style from painting. Although the photograph was made with over thirty negatives, comes together and is perceived as one scene. The "History Photograph" opens the door to a new genre in which dramatic scenes, and individual conceptualizations of the photographer, echo those seen in earlier periods of Art History, that with Rejlander are now captured by a lens.

Condensed

Lewis Hine explores how a picture can evoke sympathetic interpretations and how the image then has the power to cause "social uplift" (111). This power of the picture is brought on by the compactness of the image. Hine explains, "the picture continues to tell a story packed into the most condensed and vital form. In fact, it is often more effective than the reality would have been, because, in the picture, the non-essential and conflicting interests have been eliminated. The picture is the language of all nationalities and all ages" (Hine, 111). This compactness is essentially the condensation of time--the image is able to provide the before and the potential after actions occurring in the image. This characteristic includes the full force of assumptions and interpretations read into the work, emphasizing the more-detailed description of a moment photography captures versus a text/linguistic counterpoint. Technical decisions made by photographers can emphasize this (reading of) condensation of information and time such as utilizing flash to render all of the objects seen in the photo in the same level of detail.

Photogram

Moholy-Nagy argued that the contemporary photography of his time (1920's-30s) back to its conception had failed to blossom into its own artistic medium, and that its true potential had yet to be recognized. He sites that photography and its practice, particularly in the context of photography as art, had lived under the shadow of the medium's predecessors such as painting. Nagy insisted that the potential of photography was to capture the optical unconscious: elements of the world that could not be seen by the human eye. He sites certain scientific uses of photography such as muybridge's animal locomotion for its systematic segmenting of time to reveal the subtleties of movement. Nagy attempted to tap into this potential of optical unconscious through his use of photograms. A photogram is when a photosensitive piece of paper has objects placed on it before being exposed to white light and subsequently developed. His resulting images were abstract clusters of semi-recognizable shapes and objects that interplayed in ways that were unrecognizable on the print.

Painterly sensitivity

Moholy-Nagy expressed, "Nothing essentially new has been discovered in the Principle or technique of photography since it was invented". Photography had become boring to him, because photography hadn't grown out of its beginnings into something truly unique and expressive. Photography in many regards, continued to imitate painting. The refusal to consider Photography as an art gave rise to the idea that only photographs that displayed painterly qualities could be considered as art. As Eastlakes described her appreciation of Hill and Adamson's artistic touch, or her praise for the Calotype, which produced more a more pictorial and softer image, as opposed to the sharpness of Daguerrotypes. However it seemed that her conviction would continue with the soft focuses of Maragaret Cameron's subjects, and Kasebier's pictorial effect in his photographed scenes. This disposition to imitate painting continued with the photographs of Stieglitz, although he used sharper focus most times than the photographers previously mentioned, he sought to capture an impression of day to day life, such as the steam of a horse in a snowy Manhattan train station. The influence of painterly sensitivity in photographs was far and wide. It seems to me that one of the things Moholy-Nagy attempted to express, was that the immense potentiality of photography had yet to be explored, because photography as an art had never been seen outside of painterly associations —and this was no longer able to capture modern reality, modern thought, and modern expression.

Naked Eye

Moholy-Nagy is unimpressed by what he contends is the slow rate of realization of photography's potential to re-shape how human-beings view their physical world, or interact with metaphysical layers. For Moholy-Nagy, there is crucial potential in photography to make what was previously invisible to the so-termed naked eye visible. Once this potential is recognized, Moholy-Nagy contends, there is the capacity to surpass the limitations of our physical eyes as optical instruments.

Moholy-Nagy

Moholy-Nagy was a photographer who experimented with abstraction in his work. He believed that nothing interesting had developed in photography since its invention, claiming that people's ideas of photography as an art form were limited. But he also believed that photography had potential as an art, and should be explored.

Sky

One of the limitations of early photography was that it was unable to capture a detailed image of the sky, so any element in the sky, such as the clouds, would be indistinguishable, bleached white, and flat in the photograph. Gustave Le Gray's seascape photographs, such as "Solar Effect in the Clouds- Ocean" and "The Brig," accomplished showing clouds in sharp focus by using two different negatives, one of the water and one of the sky, to create a combination print.

Symbolism

Photographers like Rejlander used the composita technique to create symbolic, conceptual images, as opposed to the more "accurate" images that presented the world as the eye saw it. His creations, such as Two Ways of Life and Fading Away are highly symbolic, and look more like intricate paintings than snapshots of everyday life. In these images, Rejlander uses impossibly high-contrast, and dramatic figures to guide the viewer through his own imaginative process.

Wax paper negatives

Photographers would use wax to finish their salted paper prints. The wax was applied to the paper after the exposure was made and then blotted very thin. The nature of wax on a paper surface is such that it makes the paper look more translucent and therefore more sunlight was able to go through the image. This created a much sharper looking final image. This process was begun by Henry Fox Talbot. It is significant as it significantly changed the quality of calotype images and salted paper prints. It allowed for so much more detail and the fuzzy quality often attributed to paper negatives was largely lost.

Exploration

Photographies use for exploration, particularly in the American west, was slow to develop. Resistant to photographic views, and questioning of their informational value, the American exploratory establishment considered carefully drawn topographical views, sketches, and watercolors of greater informational value. Economic uses of these exploration photographs were eventually developed. Photographers were able to sell a vicarious adventure, or feeling of the exotic unknown of the western regions to middle class Americans in the form of stereographic views, and albums.

Haupt-Russell

Photographs Illustrative of Operations in Construction and Transportation was a lesser-known album of Civil War photographs, published in 1863. It was an instruction manual by military engineer Herman Haupt, with photographs by A.J. Russell. It differs from other Civil War albums in that it doesn't present an overt ideology, but provides documentation of the war's modernity and technological advances, of which the camera was an important tool. Another way it is different from other albums is that it shows the free black labor used by the Union, although it is not central to the album's message.

Protest

Photographs are integral to raising awareness about protests and also affecting how the protests are viewed by the public. In the Berger article, he discussed different photographs of civil rights protests and the reactions they provoked from viewers. For example, photographs of black women resisting arrest were positioned as assertive in black newspapers and aggressive in whit newspapers. The famous photograph of Tommie Smith and John Carlos protesting at the 1968 Olympic games also illustrates the controversy that protest images generate, as well as their endurance.

Positionality

Positionality relates to the concept of identity, representation, and appropriation. Art is seen by many as an expression of the self that ultimately aims to present a common human experience or feeling. An artist's positionality, then, marks the experiences of the maker into an abstract piece. Issues arise when artists, like Dana Schutz and other white art makers, appropriate a specific experience or feeling that they could not possibly feel. Furthermore, power dynamics in the practice of art making overstates the importance of considering one's own positionality.

Post-War

Post war images became prevalent because they provided viewers with a sense of place. Many of these images were manipulated to the liking of the photographer. Exactitude was missing, however, some photographers, such as Timothy H. Sullivan, sought to present gory detail without eliminating the impact, or rawness of the image.

Social photography

Social photography was one of the outcomes of the photography boom during the turn of the century. As America continued to become increasingly industrialized, various social concerns arose in the general public, and photography became a way by which these concerns could be exposed and documented. "Yellow Journalism" and "Yellow photography" as it was called at the time aimed to reveal the unseemly nature of progress. Jacob Riis, one such journalist, used photography to document New York slums (Hine 109). Because photography was trusted as true and un-forgable, it had a unique power to affect the hearts and minds of viewers, gaining sympathy in a way that writing couldn't. Seeing injustice is different than reading about it. Social photography did not end with the turn of the century, but continued to be used in the 20th and 21st century to document injustices like Jim Crow in the 50's and 60's, and police brutality today.

Authorship

Specifically relating to Civil War photography, but not necessarily unique to it, the publishers of the images in Civil War albums were not concerned with receiving credit, rather they were focused on communication and distribution of the images. For example, Matthew B. Brady, whose name is linked forever with Civil War photography, most likely did not take the photographs that he "authorized" and published under his name. His influence on the dispersal of Civil War photographs is not to be reduced, he was incredibly important in the organization and presentation of these photographs into a whole entity. While Brady may not have taken the images he put his name on, his participation cannot be diminished or retracted now that scholars are aware he was not the actual photographer. The continued discussion of authorship of an image has shifted with Lange and the Migrant Mother. Lange claims a sort of magnetism to the subject of the image, and claims the subsequent images are the subjects entirely. Lange also recounts the fact the image was almost never happened, and uses this as the basis as to why the image is given entirely to the woman subject. Documentary work of Diane Arbus put into question the authorship of the photos. Arbus was often criticized for her work, claiming her upbringing shrouded her perceptions of "different types of people." Many stated her portraits were appropriative, and the lack of eye contact in some of her images removes the compassion of the subjects. Are the images Arbus', as she brought about "exposure" to the under represented or those depicted in the images, as their depiction is the essence of self.

Alfred Stieglitz

Stieglitz was a photographer of the late 1800s and early 1900s who pioneered the use of hand-held cameras for "serious" photography. In his paper "The Hand Camera - Its Present Importance", from 1897, he admitted to at first buying into the perception that hand-cameras were not a good method of photography, due to incorrect information about the necessary conditions for exposure. There was also a general thought amongst professional photographers that the photographs produced by hand-cameras were inherently bad, as they were so easy to use by even the general public. He was against the amateur use of photographer and thinks it's merely a fad like bicycles. Stieglitz directly combatted this sentiment, and advocated for the hand-camera as a perfect tool for "serious" photography, especially when used with patience and deliberate choices of subject. Stieglitz photographed many different subjects including New York City street scenes. He initially opposed the hand camera, but eventually grew to accept its use and began to favor it for his own photography. His works are labors of time and patience, as he would wait (sometimes for hours) for the moment when he considered everything to be balance.

Superimpose

Superimposition of photographic negatives was the method in which late 19th and early 20th Century photographers created composition photographs. The overlaying of one [image] over another so both can be seen in combination. This allowed people to combine images and have more control over subjects, contrast and the image in general. It allowed people to craft images and narratives. People and things could be photographed in separate scenes and then combined to have the proper exposure of each of his subjects. Composition photographs had varying purposes, from pseudo-scientific statistical uses, in attempts to affirm concepts of racial superiority, to the affirmation of brother and sisterhood between students. Henry Peach Robinson's "Fading Away" (1858) is a great example of a photo where the photographer has done all this work to create an image.

Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was an influential writer (specifically on photo theory) and activist. She wrote such books as On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others and essay collections such as Against Interpretation. She wrote veraciously about photography, sometimes charting large moments in its exhibition history and pinning them against one another as she does with the work of Steichen and Arbus in On Photography. Sontag also speaks of the difficulties of the medium of photography, of what it means to photograph victims or war or pain and speak about issues of privilege and viewership.

Photogravure

Technically, a coper plate bound in gelatin tissue which creates an etched plate to be inked and printed. This process allows a photograph to be reproduced as a print, using ink and printed on paper. The continual tonal process of photogravure was also favorable. This technical process was utilized by art photographers, both Pictorialists and photo secessionists alike. This process as very good at reproducing the subtleties of images and were thought to be equivalent in value and quality to original prints.

Didacticism

Text and photos have had many relationships throughout the history of photography. One such important role was to provide specificity to a photographic narrative. For instance, during the civil war, captions would be utilized to provide a context and clarity to the scene which they were attributed to. This could be a utilized as a tool of the photographer to steer the viewer to a desired concept and to educate them of the photograph's content.

Two Ways of Life

The "Two Ways of Life" is a composite photograph created by Oscar Gustave Rejlander in 1857. It was made with over 30 different negatives. It depicts two youths, viewing the paths of life. The left side of the photograph depicts the sins of life, while the right side of the photo depicts life's virtues.

The Family of Man

The (Great) Family of Man was an exhibit curated by Edward Steichen in 1955. It framed the human race from a humanist perspective as full of diversity, but ultimately connected through birth, death and work. It was somewhat problematic in the ways that it erased the hardships and inequality faced by people of different backgrounds.

Stereograph

The 19th century saw a massive proliferation of stereograph Photographs. One early critique of photography was its flatness in presentation. The stereograph changed the experience of viewing images by utilizing two photos to create a three dimensional effect. It could only be used by one person at a time, who, when viewing the image, created a performance. It was as if the view were transported to the location depicted in the image itself. These sensationalizing objects were massively popular and help to shape narratives of contemporary events like the civil war and the subsequent westward expansion

New Deal

The New Deal was a Depression-era piece of legislation that created numerous programs, bureaus, projects, and reforms to try to lift the country out of financial hardship. One of the bureaus created was the Farm Service Administration, which produced many great photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. Those photographers would not have been given the audience and the voice they were without the help of this legislation.

Privacy

The advent of the hand camera began to bring into question the issue of privacy. While before, subjects would have to sit down in a portrait setting in order to be photographed, now anyone with a camera could photograph strangers on the street. This thought was particularly unsettling to the Victorian bourgeoisie, whose views about identity and sincerity were greatly wrapped up in outward appearances. To be captured in a photograph without knowing was to have one's true self revealed without permission. Various court cases arose during this time period surrounding the issue of privacy and whether or not individuals had the rights to their own photographic image, and whether or not others could profit off images taken without consent. At first, the general sentiment was that individuals on the street had no right to complain about being photographed. However, following the case of Abigail Robertson, whose image was used in advertising without her knowing, the sentiment began to change, and eventually laws were passed to protect the privacy of people and to prevent the use of photographs without the subjects consent. The right to privacy was established in New York in 1903, and is contained in part of an act which prevents the unauthorized use of the name or picture of any person for the purposes of trade.

Album

The album was a new creation during the time of the Civil War, and, alongside the stereograph, was one of the most popular ways to view Civil War photos. Albums were able to showcase many photographs at once alongside text, an advantage that was used differently by different photographers in showcasing their work (such as the differences between how Brady, Gardner, and Barnard presented the relationships between photographs and text in their respective albums). The album was highly reproducible, and meant to be viewed in the home. Some, like Brady's, even had slots that permitted photos to be taken out and rearranged by the viewer. Therefore, this form of photographic archive was easily accessible to the viewer in multiple ways.

Context

The amount of context, both visual and situational, greatly affects the way in which a photograph can be interpreted. This becomes clear through the different photographs of the same moment of Ethel Witherspoon's struggle with police. In one version of the photo, the faces of her and the officers are all in close-up view, and the viewer is inserted into the action, forced to consider its cause and effects. In a zoomed-out version, the action is physically smaller, taking away importance from the scene and adding extra details (such as two more officers standing by, unconcerned) that again minimize its impact. In addition to these different visuals, captions can be added to further contextualize scenes and images. Differences in this written context can also serve to frame the same subject in completely different ways.

New Relationships

The assertion of how new relationships (Moholy-Nagy 166) can be established through the advent of photography and its related extensions in film and other media is unique to consider from the perspectives of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Walter Benjamin. Both Moholy-Nagy and Benjamin assert ultimately that it is desirable for new relationships to be established through the use and expansion of the photographic medium. Yet, how either man conceives of this essence of new relationships and when it is brought about is significantly different. For Moholy-Nagy, as he argues that nothing new has happened since the advent of photography in the ways in which principle and technique is used, he implies stagnancy in society's capacity to 'imagine' radically new ends in the use of photography.

Audience

The audience of the images of Emmett Till have a major significance in the intent of the image. The intended audience of the original photograph of Emmett Till in the open casket was a black audience. It was originally published in Jet, a black magazine, in 1955 and was not originally seen by white people at all. Christina Sharpe recognizes this as one of the problematic aspects of Dana Schutz's painting, especially since it neutralizes the viewer's emotional position to the image itself. Also, Emmett Till's mother made her dead son's mutilated body "available to Black people as an inspiration and warning" (Berger). As explained by Christina Sharpe in her interview with Siddhartha Mitter (2017), "Mamie Till Mobley makes the decision, against much advice, to have those photographs of her son published. It was not mainstream media — or white media — that published those images. It was Jet magazine. And those images had nothing to do with white consciousness. They were for Black people, because Jet was a Black publication. They weren't meant to create empathy or shame or awareness from white viewers. They were meant to speak to and to move a Black audience" (pg. 3).

Oliver Holmes

The author of "The Doings of the Sunbeam," an essay written during the Civil War about Civil War photography. In a part of his essay, Holmes discusses the horror he felt upon looking at the photographs of the carnage of the war, and his need to hide the images away after seeing them. This moment speaks to the power of photography to document, in unforgiving detail, that which may have been otherwise invisible to those who were not on the battlefield. The discomfort of seeing death while in one's living room was an uncomfortable intrusion and a contradictory conundrum; the grotesque images were simultaneously intruding into ones home, but also comfortably distant. While viewers were looking at the images, they were safe and sound in their own homes, untouched by the war.

Narrative

The creation of albums, specifically in their ability to present several images together, allowed for the communication of narrative via photos. Different photographers of Civil War photographs, however, had different approaches as to how to create narrative. Gardner's album, for example, uses text to add a narrative around each photo, whereas Barnard's album presents its photos as visual facts to supplement a separate written narrative. Though photography is often seen as objective in its depiction of images, the act of using photographs to create narrative directly showcases how photographers bias the perception of their photos by influencing how their audience reads their context, meaning, etc. With the invention of combination printing, many photographers realized that they could now construct more stylized images with a specific narrative in mind. This made it so that they were able to input specific intention and messages into their work by piecing every portion of the image together carefully. Like painting, photography could also be used as a way to tell distinctive stories and send specific messages. Martin A. Berger discusses the potential for narrative in photographs, specifically in the context of civil rights images, and how they were presented by different publications. Every small detail of an image affects the potential narrative that will be read by the viewer. Using the two images depicting the violent arrest of Ethel Witherspoon, it is clear how something as simple as the composition of a photograph can drastically affect the story that is read by the viewer of the image. In the photograph published by many black publications, the brutality is explicit and zeroed in on; there is nothing to look at besides the violence of the arrest. In the photograph published by a few white publications, two other officers who aren't involved in the incident are included. They appear very casual and non-responsive when viewing this violent scene, potentially indicating that the viewer should respond in the same way. The narrative qualities of both of these images, which in fact depict almost the exact same moment, are drastically different simply as a result of composition.

Captions

The dawn of paper-based photography meshed the worlds of image and text. Captions were seen as didactic, with the text acting as a framing device with the goal to specifically direct the viewer to one conclusion or another (the "right" conclusion, however, relies on the opinions of the author). Captions also introduce an archival goal; one must document and write about the "right" things.

Gelatin Silver Print

The development and use of Gelatin Silver Prints was of great importance in the history of photography because it allowed Photographers such as Cartier-Bresson, Weston, and Adams (among others) to fully develop their views on what photography should look like. Bresson and Weston's opinions such as the 'decisive moment', and 'seeing photographically' was a direct response earlier photographers who employed a more pictorial photograph, such as Le Grey, and Julia Margaret Cameron who produced a "fuzzier" image that resembled painting, and not the furthered the potential of the camera as an artistic tool itself. With the use of gelatin silver, the photographer was able to capture the most minute detail within a photograph by the perfect smooth surface of the process itself. It was that smoothness only available through this process that abled the photographer to capture the subject in the closest rendering of the truth and the nature of its reality.

Weapon of Aggression

The dichotomous perspectives derived from Kozol's understanding of the ideology of Madonnas in the Field and the framing of gender and class norms and Lange's evaluation of her endeavor in the creation of "Migrant Mother" brings to bear Susan Sontag's On Photography. In the excerpt of "America Seen Through Photographs, Darkly," Sontag critiques the work and legacy of Diane Arbus in Arbus' creation of one hundred and twelve photographs of eccentric figures whom, Sontag argues, society might view as grotesque and exotic figures. According to Sontag, Arbus's photographs and their exhibition particularly for the audience of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was an anti-humanistic (32) and exploitative venture, a showing of the exotic "other," or specifically subjects on the fringes of society made to be objects for the dark-amusement and viewing pleasure of mainstream society. For Sontag, Arbus' aim to photograph unconventional people, (whom Sontag remarks as being "freaks" (45) and speculates that this is the reason for Arbus' selection of them), shows the use of photography as a weapon of aggression (39) against those weak and powerless in society. Through Sontag's projection then, the unconventional figures whom Arbus photographed were those "strange, odd, and askew (37)" of society being exploited. Yet, on a different level, the direct gaze of subjects Arbus photographed, their seeming self-acceptance and what Sontag admits as the lack of emotional distress (36) implies the mutual understanding between Arbus and the subjects whom she photographed. In this, one wonders what Arbus might have written in her defense against Sontag's critiques of exploitation, and perhaps something commiserate to Lange's recollection of her micro-level engagement with the migrant mother.

Ownership

The early photographic process required division of labor, which often blurred the lines of ownership of a negative. Essential practices, including the cleaning of wet plates, clouded the idea of ownership. Furthermore, photography relies on the outer world to create a negative, whereas other mediums are more reliant on the artists' personal expression. The issue of ownership is one of great contention. This is tied to "Black Death Spectacle," as many where pondering who truly owned black death, and blackness depicted across all mediums. The basis of this debate considers whether the subject or the artist is the true owner of a work. For the case of Nussenzweig, a man photographed without volition, or agency, sued the photographer once the image was installed in a gallery. DiCorcia, the photographer responsible, claimed his ownership to the image because of his freedom of expression as an artist. As it was, DiCorcia won the case, and the ownership of Nussenzweig's photographic depiction.

The hand camera

The hand camera played greatly into these concerns about privacy. These "detective cameras" were small enough that they could be concealed within a hat, thus leading to general paranoia about being photographed without knowing. The language surrounding these cameras was one of fear and disgust; there was seen to be something amoral about photographing strangers, particularly women, for personal or commercial use. Stieglitz, however, saw their use as being towards the pursuit of more artistic goals, and used himself a hand camera to capture many of his famous images. He argued that the hand camera allowed for more mobility and ease of use, and that being more portable allowed for more diverse photos to be taken. Additionally, these small cameras could also be used for socially progressive goals, like exposé-type photography, revealing the dark side of American industry.

Idealism

The idea of adding idealistic elements to art was very popular in painting at the time when photography was first introduced. In a painting, the artist has full control over how people and things are represented, which is from an idealistic view of a situation or a person. When photography was first introduced some artists attempted to achieve idealism in their work by using combination printing. This allowed artists to have more control over how each element of their image was portrayed, as they photographed each subject/object separately, and put them all together after.

Image honesty

The idea that an image can be "too honest" is articulated by Edward Weston in his essay, Seeing Photographically. In the essay, Weston speaks to photo painting, and how its elements may be considered too honest. The dizzying out of focus, blurring the photos in an element Weston speaks to most often. The idea behind this process is attempting painterly strokes with the depth of field. Weston is worried by this process, as it has strayed too far from the definition of photography, and how this delays the recognition of photography as a creative field. Weston and fellow F/64 members were famous in their opposition to these new pictorial movement.

Living Room

The living room acts as a private social space in which there is a shared political and moral ideology. With the introduction of photography in the home, one must consider the implications of photos of war in social entertaining/domestic space in comparison to reading about events in a newspaper. Viewing these civil war photographs in an intimate space tended to present a false narrative of the war as a unifying experience in common heritage, and added to the removal from controversy and threat by bringing it into a personal space. One must also consider the material conditions — there is an element of voyeurism in the act of viewing war photography

Mass Reproduction

The mass production of images changed photography, just as the mass production of anything does. The commercialization of photographs caused concern as well as intrigued the minds of many because of the possibilities such universality might bring. A primary fear of the mass production of images was the fear of loosing the quality of uniqueness. As Walter Benjamin explores this characteristic, he expresses the qualities of "cult value" —how sometimes the sole fact that an object is unique is what causes a particular affinity to it— is what gives meaning to whatever that unrepeated object might be. The mass production of images meant loosing to some extent an essence of authenticity, because it implicates that images stop being a singularity. Nevertheless, there was something that mass producing a photograph allowed, and that was universality. More specifically, the universality of a new language, as Benjamin describes, the universality of a new medium that would allow the world to better understand modern society. Because photographs have the ability to train our visual perception, its mass production inherently signifies the potential for universality, because it brings a similar visual perception to a mass scale. As he suggests, the mass production of images has the potential of creating universal "optical-unconsciousness".

Limitation

The notion of movement is very important to understand the limitations of photography. While a movie can show a scene with movements and represents time (for example in a Zoo, with animals), photography remains an immobile art, which stops on a fragment of time and concentrates on the details that compose it.

Documentary Expression

The photos taken under the instruction of New Deal agencies during the Great Depression were meant to justify the necessity of liberal welfare programs for those Americans who needed relief. Although documentary photography was thought to be reflective of reality, Kozol counters that documentary expression was a "cultural response based on a political understanding of society and social problems that legitimated liberal reform intervention" (4). What this essentially means is that there is no objective truth to these documentary photographs because the photographers were attempting strategies of reform through their documentation of people and conditions. The audience for many of these photographs were middle-class people with social and political power and the goal was to earn their sympathy. With this goal in mind, these photos were constructed realities as well as a documentary of real issues.

Pictorial effect

The pictorial effect as communicated by Henry Peach Robinson and Alfred Stieglitz is an important term, since it re-engages the debate of the legitimacy of photography as an art form. What Robinson and Stieglitz ultimately communicate in their respective writings is a defense of photography and its capacity to be evaluated on its own merit. Alternately, Robinson writes for an audience of photographers with the attempt to leverage the possible artistic repertoire of photography --- while challenging or attempting to persuade critics of photography of the legitimacy and versatility of the medium. He introduces elements of composition and combination printing to counterbalance possible limitations of photographic processes. Stieglitz, in turn, emphasizes the dynamism or plasticity of photography and photographic processes alongside what he argues as a unique photographic language (117) through its capacity for visual and textual narration.

Power

The play between power and agency is foundational to the practice of photography. Photography is a taking of one's likeness, which garners questions on the relationships of subject and photographer. Agency and power are at place from both parties, but the balance can be drastically swayed with the dynamic of consent. One's likeness can empower, yet also demean and dehumanize; this power is most often in the hand of the photographer and the choices that lead to the shutter being released.

Fetishization

The topic of fetishization is important to bring up in relation to white artists portraying black subjects and black pain, as in Dana Schutz's painting of Emmett Till. In her open letter, Hannah Black says that "it is possible that this inclusion means no more than that blackness is hot right now" (2). In her discussion of the painting and the film Get Out, Zadie Smith explains how many black characteristics have become desirable to white people, while black people are still oppressed. In her painting, Schutz could be viewed as fetishizing black pain by placing herself within a situation that she remains safe from.

Ideology

The underlying structures of power that guide the way we interact with one another, the way we move about the world, and even the way we read images like photographs. In the context of our class specifically, it is important to consider the governing ideology of the time in which the photograph was produced, which would change the way viewers at the time would react to the image, and the relationship they might have to the photograph, and to photography more generally. Ideology exists within every relationship, whether that is interpersonal or the relationship between a photograph and a viewer, or a photographic object and a viewer. It is the rules that subliminally guide the way we approach images, and our interpretations of those same images.

Photo Secessionists

This group of 20th century photographers included such men as Edward Steichen and Alfred Steiglitz who were among the second wave of art photographers and attempted to make photographic works that were indisputable art. Previously, many photographers had attempted to recreated the effect of painting and drawing (artists media) through photography. These photographers however, did not attempt to do that and instead embraced the medium of photography and what it had to offer.

Alienated labor

This sense of realization or the full imaging of the commercial value of photography through its changes from the period of Western exploration to the Civil War period leads, perhaps logically, to what Trachtenberg communicates as the emergent process of alienated labor (11) or the division of labor in the making of images. With the commercialization of the photographic process thus (as something interesting to study alongside Julia Cameron's scorning of this aim), we further see that ways in which early photography was incorporated into the politics of industrialization, war, and the concept of social equity whether in the colonies or elsewhere. (Albums of War)

The Unhappy Consciousness

This term is used by Sontag in reference to Diane Arbus's images. The term was originally used by German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and refers to a contradiction inherent in human consciousness. Sontag used the term to explain the nature of the subjects Arbus photographs. Arbus choses her subjects carefully, choosing only those who are unaware of their misfortunes, not those know they are suffering and in this way, the horror of her images is limited while they still leave questions about not only Arbus's own authority, but also how the subjects feel about themselves.

[photographic] entrepreneurs

Trachtenberg articulates the key concept of commercial photographers or [photographic] entrepreneurs of the Civil War period, connecting this phenomena most directly to Matthew B. Brady. Trachtenberg communicates that Brady, as the name most widely associated with photographs of the American Civil War, was more of an entrepreneur than a photographer (3). With proprietorship of galleries in Washington and New York, his dubious claiming of credit or authorship (through the signing of his name) for appropriated stereographs, album cards, or large mounted prints of the Civil War, and his subsequent cataloguing and marketing of these images, Brady was a commercial photographer or photographic entrepreneur. Moreover, Brady perhaps serves as a prominent example of the ways in which photographic processes (from the Daguerreotype to the wet-plate and other evolutions) became cemented into commercial or industrial processes of American society; and in this case, the commercialization of the photographic process was facilitated through curiosity related to the visualization of war. Alternately, Trachtenberg's characterization of Brady and the phenomena of commercial photographers evokes what Sandweis articulates as the slowness of early photographic explorers of the Western frontier, particularly men of the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, to imagine the full scope of the wet-plate process, although they realized the potential to profit from the innovation. Connecting Trachtenberg's characterization of Matthew Brady and commercial photography and Sandweiss' remarks ultimately, it seems that during the Civil War period the market-value and other commercial potential of photography was now fully imagined and realized.

Incontrovertibility

Trachtenberg introduces the key term of incontrovertibility in his essay. This term connects to earlier ideas in the social politics of photography, particularly those of photographic accuracy and permanence. First, the concept of incontrovertibility connects to the idea of "fixing" an image or rendering it as a form of permanent and truthful representation, for as Trachtenberg notes, early photographs of the Civil War were often viewed as communicating the absolute "reality" and "truth" of the war (2), having greater fidelity to truth than oral narratives and other forms of historical documentation. Yet, this concept of incontrovertibility significantly contrasts with the idea of reproducibility which Martha Sandweiss describes in her essay, and the general evolution of photographic processes. Here, as Sandweiss notes how the introduction of the wet-plate revolutionized the capacity to reproduce images and the ability to add inscriptions to photographs through the medium of paper further shifted the prospects for photographic framing, it becomes evident that during the Civil War period--- as Trachtenberg notes ----and during the debates of Western expansion, the sense of photographic "incontrovertibility" or fidelity to accuracy, permanence, and truthful representation was a myth. The capacity to broadly reproduce photographs lent itself to the capacity to revise, edit or manipulate the narrative of images. Moreover, this process of photographic revision was combined now with the capacity to frame images through captions and other textual information. In turn, by the time of the Civil War, the combined impact of reproducibility and textual framing in photography meant that although photographs were still "fixed" or "made permanent" (in one way or another), they were hardly incontrovertible. Rather, they were made malleable or subject to changes in the production of knowledge regarding war and society.

Maternity

Wendy Kozol explains that "maternity was repeatedly depicted in RA/FSA pictures of young women along with their infants" because of its "universal timelessness" and ability to appeal to the viewers charitable concerns (11). In many of the photos, the mother became a mythic force that symbolized a woman's role in upholding the family and ensuring its survival. As a result, many of the photographs focus on mothers with their very young children. Older children were rarely seen in photos because they could not project vulnerability the way younger children could.

Iconography

Wendy Kozol explores the meanings of the iconic photographs taken during the 1930s in the period of Westward expansion. In particular she analyzes the iconic image of Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" as well as other images of women that were taken during that time that were commissioned by the RA/FSA with the intention of creating social reform. However, Kozol suggests that these images share an iconography that clearly represents the patriarchal ideologies of the time. She calls these images "the Madonnas of the Field", as she describes how the only portraits used by the RA/FSA of the thousands that were taken, were those of mothers, who were portrayed as victims of circumstance and were pictured mostly as caretakers; trying to maintain the traditional family bonds that emphasized and preserved the convictions of gender roles during those times. The immigrant mother, Kozol suggests, is a symbol to something more that just a struggling mother from the devastated dustbowl during the depression, the immigrant mother symbolizes the ideas that were upheld during those times of what womanhood should be.

Salon Psychology

Weston defines Salon Psychology as, "a force that is exercising the same restraint over photographic progress by establishing false standards and discouraging any symptoms of original creative vision" (175). Here, Weston references Salon Psychology as a contemporary replacement the previous impediment of creativity in photography--the photo-painting standard. Salon Psychology constructed standards such as "the rules of composition"--re-creating/using formulaic, previously awarded compositional arrangements/styles in an attempt for one's photographs to be celebrated as art (175). Weston describes the debilitating result of following these 'false' rules as impeding the "freshness of vision" and leading to "a tedious repetition of pictorial clichés" (175). He even points out how these rules were not held in the minds of the artists when creating the celebrated images these standards are based off of:"[the standards] are products of reflection and after-examination, and are in no way a part of the creative impetus" (175).

Edward Weston

Weston was a 20th century photographer who placed great value on "seeing photographically", a term he used to describe what he believed to be the photographer's most important task. He believed that "the finished print must be created in full before the film is exposed" (Weston 127), placing emphasis on his thought that pre-visualizing photographs was what made good photos, and therefore good photographers. He did not see art in editing photographs or simply treating them like a new form of painting, but did pose his subjects and give himself full control over the scene, contrasting the ideologies of Cartier-Bresson and his "decisive moment" idea that involved little or no manipulation of the subject, and Stieglitz and his similar beliefs of necessary patience. Weston (1886-1958) also commented on the concept of time in photography. In conflict with Cartier-Bresson's conceptualization of the decisive moment, Weston believed in the power of the photographer's intuition, specifically in relation to the recent advent of editing, manipulation, and changing of photographs. Weston, with an arguably essentialist view of the artist, placed the accountability of art upon the maker which in turn reveals his broader motives within the medium: perfection. Some argue that a "perfect photograph" does not exist, and the imperfections within an artwork makes the piece unique in and of itself.

Raw subject matter

What is acceptable subject matter for an artist to draw from? Can a white artist photograph a black subject? And if so, what power dynamic is created from doing this? This is an increasing concern for contemporary photographers attempting to grapple with issues of race, nationality, privilege etc.

Medium Specificity

What one medium can do better than another. This was a large part of the conversation/learning surrounding early photography. In early photography, the limitations of photography were not entirely understood -- peoples expectations led them to be disappointed with images and how they compared to other representations of the same thing. Medium specificity depends not only on the thing you are documenting but also the way in which you want to represent the thing. This is where artistic intent/imagination comes into play.

Exaggerated Importance

When photography was first invented, many people disregarded the medium as being artistic because it was too close to reality, thus taking no creativity or imagination into account. This idea however, isn't true at all, as every choice the photographer makes alters reality in some way. Szarkowski outlines this idea using the term "exaggerated importance." Any object that is focused on in an image is a signifier of its importance to the photographer. The focus of an image takes the object itself out of its original context, and turns it into something of "exaggerated importance."

Novelty

When studying Photography's early history, the term "novelty" is one that reoccurs again, and again. One form of newer technology was constantly replacing older versions of the technology. We can see this with the calotype in comparison to the Daguerrotype with its ability to reproduce images, we again see how the innovation of the collodion process completely took over with the ability to mass produce that older versions did not have, and again we witness the decline of the collodion process with the invention of the dry plate technology. Most of these changes however, we can see as affecting the photographer more directly and not the viewer. For this reason the invention of the stereoscope was unlike any previous "advances", for it was directly aimed at the user. The novelty of this object provided something beyond a viewing experience —it gave the user of the stereoscope an unfamiliar experience, it brought them into the scene that was photographed from the comfort and intimacy of their home. This three-dimensional instrument brought novelty to a completely new level —it arguably introduced a version of sensationalism, that has never gone out of "fashion".

Spectator

When viewing works that revolve around history and race, the spectator encounters the moral dilemma of ownership. Who has the right to depict and become intimate with certain histories? As a spectator, should it be your responsibility to familiarize yourself with the context and history around the piece you are viewing? The viewing position of the spectator must be taking into account when asking these questions, because viewers are not always approaching the art with a shared perspective or closeness.

Cropping

While early photographers (and even later ones like Stieglitz) cropped photographs to improve them, photographers like Weston and Cartier-Bresson opposed any alteration. With their ideologies of "seeing photographically" and "the decisive moment," these photographers placed importance on the "purity" of the composition of photographs. They believed that it was important to the art form that the composition of a photo be captured in full by the artist without need for any further changes. They thought that this ability to compose photographs without the need for cropping was a marker of skill and artistic authenticity.

Entrepreneur

With the creation of albums as a medium to showcase and reproduce collections of photographs, many photographers became entrepreneurs as well in order to achieve widespread reception of their photos and albums. Most notably was Matthew Brady, who did not even take but merely collected and signed most of the Civil War photographs that featured in his albums and galleries. The size and prevalence of his photographic archive made him the most recognized name in Civil War photography, regardless of his minimal role in the actual process. This ability to reach such notoriety with so little artistic work on his part speaks to the growing importance of the entrepreneurial aspect of photography during this time.

Dry Plate

With the invention of the dry plate process, photography became even more accessible, as it eliminated the labor of preparing a plate with chemicals right before its exposure, which was necessary in the wet plate process. Szarkowski emphasizes how important the invention of the dry plate process was because photography could now be used very casually by just about everyone. When purchasing the dry plate, there was no extra preparation involved before exposing the plate, which allowed the medium to be a lot more casual.

J.D. Hutton

was an early photographer in the American West using the wet plate process. While his photographs were not necessarily the most technically skilled, they are significant because a great many of them were made into lithographs and published/publicized that way. His images often showed native people, which was one of the early advantages of photography in the west.

Edward Muybridge

was interested in the way humans and other animals moved through a variety of common motions, and he set up a system of cameras to photograph his subjects as they moved through those motions, including a horse galloping and a man running at full speed. His subjects are usually depicted in front of a gridded wall, to give an idea of the scale of the subject. Like Zealy, he was interested in using photography to further scientific knowledge, and showed nude subjects, but he used white subjects to show a neutral subject, because for him white equated to most basic. His subjects also gave consent to be photographed in the ways that they were. The focus is less on the specific person used as the subject, and more on the action they are doing, which further separates him and people like Zealy.

Ethel Witherspoon

was the woman whose struggle against police was documented in several photographs, namely "Arrest of Ethel Witherspoon, Birmingham, Alabama" (1963) and "Police Use Force: Three Policemen Restrain a Negro Woman on the Ground after She Failed to Move On as Ordered, Birmingham, Alabama" (1963). The former was published in many black publications and shows Witherspoon's strength as she resists three police officers, and it is cropped close to the action, which removes context from the image. The latter photograph was published in Time, the only major white American periodical to publish an image of this event; "Police Use Force" provides a wider view of the scene, and reveals two other police officers are nearby, waiting to assist if necessary. The image also does not depict Witherspoon as threatening or even resisting -- the photographer was too far away to capture her active struggle. In the black newspapers, she was shown to be powerful, but in the image white Americans saw, she was subdued. Each is a message appealing to the ideals of each audience.