An interesting academic essay on post modern surrealism

Surrealism and Self-Representation in the Photography of Francesca Woodman

Eva Rus      May 2004

 

“What happens…when woman serves as the looking-glass held up to women?”1

    
    What happens when woman finds herself in the empty space between the signs symbolized by the gaze and her objectified image? How are the conditions of her visibility produced, then? Following a path through eccentric subjectivity, gender theory, semiotics and psychoanalysis, I’d like to argue about the several repercussions of the collusion between Surrealist practices and the negotiation of theoretical models of female subjectivity in the work of Francesca Woodman, a photographer whose largest body of work was produced in the late Seventies. Working with self-portraits, fantastical representations of the body, and even depictions of the absence of the body, Woodman expanded the exploration begun during Surrealism to express female subjectivity through hybridization, fetishization, and displacement of self.

    
    Throughout art history, the woman has been fetishized by the male creative subject: both revered and feared as “Other”, admired for the formal aspects of the female body, and cast in a passive role as object of the (male) gaze. The concepts and principles that focused Andre Breton and other male Surrealists of the 1930s and 1940s on the female, also limited their capacity to view women as independent, active subjects. They conceived of woman as man’s mediator with nature and the unconscious, femme-enfant, muse, source and object of man’s desire, embodiment of mad love, emblem of revolution2. The male objectification of woman responded to their need to employ a body charged with otherness in order to ensure their access to sur-reality3. That is to say that, at the same time that Surrealism attacked some bourgeois concepts, it ended up in the reinforcement of others. As Jean Baudrillard affirmed in a 1976 essay, Surrealism remained within the purview of the realism it contested and redoubled, through its rupture with the Imaginary; while what he called “hyperrealism”, or the meticulous reduplication of the real, represented a much more advanced stage as it managed to eradicate this contradiction between the real and the real’s hallucinatory resemblance to itself .  That is to say that in “hyperrealism”, the objectivity of the pure gaze went beyond the power of simulacra4. Within this essential paradox women were eventually doubly negated as subjects: first, because they were defined as mediums of men’s communication; second, because woman’s sexuality came to be reduced to its “natural” biological functions5. Woman functioned at best as an idealized “Other”, at worst as an object for the projection of unresolved anxieties: male subjects sought transformation through a female representational object, which paradoxically reinforced the subject-object split that Surrealism was committed to overcoming6.

 

     The work of female writers and artists inside Surrealism often subtly subverted the male dialogue; or it reversed the male and female positions within the dialogue, often realizing interesting dialectical exchanges based on women’s own psychology and experiences7. Following the influence of Freud and anticipating Lacan’s re-reading of Freud, women were believed to be closer to the unconscious than men, because they had not entirely entered the symbolic order8. However, Surrealist techniques and strategies that provided means for getting at repressed areas of the psyche were also helpful to women attempting to assert aspects of the self unacceptable within their traditionally prescribed roles. Surrealist principles were therefore employed to breaking down the binary oppositions of mind/body, rational/irrational, art/nature that had functioned to identify woman with the rejected term – body, irrationality, nature – and situate her on an inferior position9. As a result, in response to an attempt to resolve the Surrealist polarities of inner and outer reality, many women Surrealists found in the self-portrait the suitable metaphor.

     In their many self-portraits, women Surrealists like Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Frieda Kahlo revealed their rejection of the idea of women as an abstract principle, and a substitution of the image in the mirror as a focal point in their quest for greater self-awareness and knowledge10. The mirror became thus the icon for the process of self-representation which involved the identification of the subject with the object of the gaze, and then became, as De Beauvoir affirmed in The Second Sex (1949),  the key image to the feminine condition. The use of the mirror as a tool of the artist eventually affirmed the duality of being, the self as observer and observed, at the same time spectator and object of spectacle, body and sign, image and representation11. To perform the terms of the production of woman as text and image finally led out of the mirror trap, and served as a demonstration of the non-coincidence of woman and women12.

     A radical shift from the category of the Surrealist woman to that of Surrealist women, intended as a heterogeneous group of individuals for whom Surrealism had played a significant role in their attempt to shape an autonomous feminine subject13, had finally taken place. The starting point for women’s personal quest took on the identification of the body as the main signifier of its own cultural politics as established by Surrealism, and led to the negotiation of a relationship between the female body and female identity. For the women artists influenced by Surrealism in the decades after WWII, the artist’s own body was still a starting point in collapsing perceptions of the feminine self. The radical re-inventions of self-representation that had occurred in the 1930s and 1940s resonated in later artistic practices and articulated how the body was marked by femininity as lived experience14.

     Surrealism continued to attract newer generations of artists (male and female) who were seeking to explore the unconscious as site of meaning and to challenge the essentialism of rationalist binary distinctions. Surrealism’s appeal was nevertheless still created by its originary challenge of the bourgeois – therefore patriarchal – social institutions of church, state, and family; and by its insistence on the centrality of the artist’s psychic life in the service of revolutionary politics15.  Consequently, many women artists who were looking for a support and promise of social liberation from feminine traditional roles, as well as for a legitimation of the expression of female imaginary, perceived the appeal of Surrealist tropes. Generally speaking, the works of women associated with the words surrealist and surrealism in contemporary art, present a common engagement with issues of representation of structures of fabulist narrative, a concern with constructions of femininity through surface and image, a tendency towards the oneiric and the phantasmatic, a preoccupation with the psychic powers assigned to the feminine, and an interest in doubling, masking, and/or masquerade16.

     In the late 1960s, a dramatic shift in European and American visual art practices began to emerge as a consequence of the drastic changes in popular consciousness. The very concept of high art established for visual culture was suddenly no longer unaffected. In the aftermath of WWII the success of American abstract expressionist painting had legitimated the passage of the monopoly of the concept of ‘modern art’ from Paris to New York. But after the United States had finally convinced Europe of its rightful place in the continuum of high culture, a new art began to emerge. The new concerns that were introduced and that still inform the art of the present, sought primarily to break from the ideological and material frame of traditional European aesthetics, calling for a new art that recognized the primacy of individual experience, and that consciously accepted the political terms within which human experience was produced and maintained, through a more direct engagement with life17. In this respect, new ‘lower’ art forms emerged in the shape of photography, video, installation, and performance.

     Given that women’s representations of women in 1970s visual art practices were mitigated by the cultural awareness of woman as object, they generally contained a certain self-consciousness of the social construction of the feminine as surface and image. Through the very act of re-presenting oneselves as subjects, 1970s women’s self-representational narratives reclaimed the right to authorship, to authority and agency in the world. Moreover, many of the artistic processes that openly incorporated the artist’s body were really about transcending it, getting outside of the corporal limitations of the human frame18, they were about the power of experience and the value of memory acquired through bodily physical gestures intended to enter into art dialogue19.

     Grown up in the atmosphere of the Sixties’ and Seventies’ debates, during the nearly 23 years of her life, Francesca Woodman produced a body of approximately five hundred photographs that, re-discovered only in the late Eighties, have eventually raised her work to a quasi-cult status. Daughter of artists20, she grew up in the studios of her parents both in Colorado and Italy, and often spent her summer vacations in the family house of Antella, near Florence. She studied at Rhode Island School of Design between 1975 and 1979 and spent a year in Rome on a scholarship. This was an extraordinarily creative period in which she was influenced by the classicism, sensuality and decay of Rome and she exhibited her photographs for the first time in the basement of the Maldoror bookshop-gallery. On her return to America she moved to New York. Some Disordered Interior Geometries, the only book of her work to be published in her lifetime appeared in January 1981.

     During her early days Woodman not only developed an understanding of art making as a way of life, but mostly as a mode of thought. One of her first self-portraits, taken in 1972 when she was thirteen (Fig.1), is an early example of the characteristics that will then develop in her later photographs and that stress Woodman’s preoccupation with herself as a subject of art. For instance, the investigation of space and the staging of the subject in a sort of hide-and-seek game of light and shade, the dematerialization of a body which seems to be associated with no face. How strong the similarities with a portrait of Joseph Cornell taken by Duane Michals that same year in New York, especially in the way in which the body is at the same time carved and hidden by light (www.pdngallery.com/legends3/michals/art/photos_large/joseph_cornell.jpg). In fact the narrative portraits of Duane Michals, as well as Aaron Siskind’s modernist teaching of photography at RISD, Man Ray’s techniques, Francis Bacon’s study of space in relation to the individual, and the evocative power of Italian Transavanguardia, sensibly influenced Woodman’s later work.

     At age 14 Woodman found her guide to photography in a gifted teacher she met at Abbot Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. Wendy MacNeil, unusually for her time, focussed her teaching on the importance of ideas over technical preoccupations, which encountered Woodman’s predilections. Woodman was indeed intensely fascinated by the work of contemporary photographers, such as Clarence John Laughlin and his gothic Southern Surrealism among others. However, the most profound sources of Woodman’s work are not to be found in a relationship to contemporary mainstream photography of the 1970s, neither in the formalist modes privileged in art schools such as RISD, nor in the photographic work now designated as postmodernist, since Woodman’s work contains no reference to mass culture, even if it regularly stresses the status of the photograph as representation21. The body of work that mostly seems to be recalled by Woodman’s art, is Surrealist photography. However, what is really crucial in Woodman is her re-interpretation of it together with other complex interactions she matured during her year in Rome. Woodman improves Surrealist photographic techniques in order to reproduce their power in the oneiric representation of the self but meanwhile she tries to stage her own reading of woman’s privileged place in the negotiation of desire.  

     If the juxtaposition of Surrealism and photography had seemed nothing but a paradox to Breton, this is because the revolution in values promoted from the 1930s, conceived of a reorganization of the very concept of the so-called photographic real versus a reification of unconscious activities. However, with the employment of techniques such as Ubac’s brûlages22, Man Ray’s rayographs23 and solarization24, and then negative printing, multiple exposure, photomontage, and photo collage, Surrealist photography allowed the possibility of a discursive re-interpretation of its more “straight” outcomes resulting from the instantaneous recording of events. One of the most interesting photographic strategies was that of photographic doubling. The appeal of the technique mainly resided in the very act of addition of a copy to its original, which created a sense of failing uniqueness of subject as well as a perception of difference. In this guise presence becomes seriality, and contributes to the spatial marking of the first element as a signifying simulacrum. Since repetition itself stresses the deliberate intentionality of the act of representation, we could argue that the production of meaning through doubling denotes doubling itself as the “signifier of signification”25. Spatial marking at the same time deals with the boundaries established by the camera frame, which mainly indicates the dichotomy between the experience of the real and the experience of representation that Surrealist photography deliberately marks in order to stress the act of artistic creation.

     And doubling, as well as the serial multiplication of the image as principles and techniques, is widely spread in the photographs of Woodman, either in the guise of the use of mirror devices as in the Self-Deceit Roman series (1977-78), or in the form of addition of other models resembling her features in the  portrayal of her own image (Fig. 2, 3). In Fig. 3 for instance we can see a portrait of three young girls, among whom Woodman has made herself recognizable (notice her black Mary Jane shoes), hiding their faces behind a drawing of Woodman’s own face, a copy of which is also on the wall. The doubled image in Surrealism has often assumed a determination to break with unitary meaning or a deliberate attempt towards the simultaneous representation of the real and the unreal and/or the illusory ( Fig. 2)26. At the same time the doubled image that provided women artists with a tool for a critique of otherness, also provided them with a means to argue about otherness by its reproduction as sameness; in other words, the woman made Other to herself, engaged in a dialogue with the very self that produced her life as narrative27.

    Discussing women’s autobiography, Sheila Rowbothan states that a woman cannot experience herself as an entirely unique entity because she is always aware of how she is being defined as ‘woman’, that is, as a member of a group whose identity has been circumscribed by the dominant culture (male)28. Not recognizing themselves in the reflections of cultural representation, women develop a dual consciousness: the self as culturally defined and the self as different from cultural prescription. In taking the power of representation, women consequently project onto history an identity that is not purely individualistic, nor purely collective29. De Lauretis herself, expanding on Althusser’s concept of the subject in ideology30,  theorizes a subject that is at the same time “inside and outside the ideology of gender, and conscious of being so, conscious of that twofold pull, of that division, that doubled vision”31.

     It’s difficult to avoid any reference to Lacan’s concept of “mirror stage”32 (or of “misrecognition”) when referring to the process of photographic doubling. Discussing the child’s first encounter with its image in a mirror as the source of a fictional self-projection that influences subsequent identity formation, Lacan offered an interpretation of doubling as the replication of a conscious subject that becomes significant within a persistent exploration of the double as a structural principle of optical power. Lacan’s theory of the subject, derived from Freud’s concept of narcissism and the “specular ego”33, relegated woman to the position of signifier for the male other, her subjectivity determined by the discourse of patriarchy. If we agree to see the camera as being itself a mirror,  we can observe Woodman’s mirror photographs (Fig.2, 4) as an attempt for the renegotiation of bodily, temporal, spiritual boundaries during the enactment of her self/body through a registering of its traces and through images that suggest its absence. In particular, Woodman created a series of self-portraits entitled Self-Deceit (Fig. 2) in which she seems to be playing a game of hide-and-seek with the aid of a large mirror. Her nude figure crawls in front of the glass as if she were afraid to acknowledge her sense of otherness, and the mirror becomes a barrier that conceals rather than reveal identity. In a following series of self-portraits emblematically called A Woman/A Mirror/A Woman is a Mirror for a Man (1978) Woodman represents herself trapped in between a mirror and a transparent glass, as if hidden and confined within the boundaries of femininity.

     In connection to the mirror image, in his 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’34, Freud ties the uncanniness generated by the idea of doubling to the primitive fear of mirrors: he reads the double as a first  narcissistic projection that translates both the shadows cast by the body and the body’s mirrored reflections. According to Otto Rank’s study35, superstitious beliefs interpret the double as shadow as the earliest form through which the soul is imagined, or even as the form in which the souls of the dead return to haunt or take possession of the living, and the polished surfaces of mirrors themselves are believed to be a medium for the return of the dead36. Of course one has to consider the apotropaic potential of these creations of the mind that,  while expressing the attempt to protect oneselves from a feared object, actually end up representing it through the strategy of doubling; and all this, if seen through Roland Barthes’s eyes, could just validate photography’s connection with death through its process of objectification of the subject37. In particular, Fig.4 associates the question of mirror doubling with another recurrent issue in Woodman’s photographs: that of her seemingly dead or sleeping body.

     Common features of Surrealism had been the belief in dream, in free association, in hypnotic states, in automatism, in ecstasy or delirium38; the concept of bassesse39 as developed by Georges Bataille, which had contributed to the theorization of horizontality as the pure expression of the instinctive animal nature; and the consideration of woman as a central, obsessional subject , especially in the guise of femme-enfant40, the so-called woman child who was believed to be an enchanting clairvoyant creature who through her youth, naiveté, and purity possessed enough direct connection with her own unconscious to allow her to be a guide for man. Therefore, if we just put side by side the belief in dream, the aesthetic theory of horizontality, and the idealization of the woman child as a medium for the access to the unconscious, we will see why the history of Surrealist art seems to be literally covered with bodies of sleeping or seemingly-dead young women (Fig. 4, 5).

     Furthermore, this aspect in Woodman seems to be linked to the deliberate choice of denoting her own limp, lying, motionless body with common props of femininity such as dress, flowers and underwear, instead of leaving it nude as she mostly does in the majority of her self-portraits. The use and over-use of accessories41 is in fact a typical feature of Woodman’s self-portraits that has been variously associated to fetishism42, in that they simultaneously provide an appropriation of the Surrealist fetish and an ironic critique of Surrealist fetishism. Garter belts, high-heeled shoes, jewellery, black Mary Jane shoes43, gloves, stockings, Easter lilies, Calla lilies, are all there to reveal “both her burgeoning womanhood and her understanding and deliberate assertion of ‘the fetish status of the woman’s body’ as defined by Western art in general and the Surrealist photographs of Man Ray and André Kertész in particular”44.

     Woodman’s photographs are always characterized by an almost bare or basic setting in which her body and few other objects are displayed. Occasionally she portrays herself in the company of other people or in outdoor natural settings that, anyway, reveal little about the actual location, and practically nothing about the historical or social contemporary realities. Since 1972 Woodman started to transform her own environment adopting unusual dress, behaviour and inhabiting unique surroundings, which constantly amazed and charmed all those who fell under her fairy-like influence45. Her environments, often densely installed with different collections of objects, are always very important to Woodman and frequently appear as the settings of her photographs. Woodman seems to prefer indoor, domestic derelict uninhabited interiors, which she uses as a stage to enact her personal mise-en-scene where the props of her choice suddenly lose their own intrinsical predictability and finally rise to a new existence in a totally new relationship with the feminine subject. Fig. 6 is a particularly meaningful example of this process. Woodman portrays herself nude and kneeling; with a hand she’s hiding her pubis. In the foreground a white Calla lily has been put standing against a wall. The Calla lily is a symbol for pure, virginal love that here is instead positioned in order to resemble a phallic object, or rather a deadly one, since the Calla is also a poisonous flower and Woodman seems to be trying to protect herself from an unknown fate.

     In Horizontale (Fig.7) Woodman adopts the same hiding gesture of the hand that, in this case, is doubly represented by a glove as a fetish and by the hand of the artist at the same time. What really looks amazing in this picture however, is the way in which Woodman’s legs, bound by a ribbon forming a regular pattern on her flesh, create a contrast that plays against the geometric pattern of the rug below. In this way, if fetishism is the substitution of the unnatural for the natural, Woodman creates her own aesthetic object, a fetish of herself. A Surrealist precursor of Horizontale is Hans Bellmer’s Unica (1958)46, featuring the artist Unica Zürn wound tightly with a string that crops her body like a piece of meat, therefore eliciting questions about sadomasochism and its relation to art. We know by the way that the male Surrealists of the 1930s and 1940s celebrated the Marquis de Sade as the incarnation of the free erotic desire capable of transforming human consciousness47; in short, Surrealism can be said to have explored the possibility of a sexuality that is grounded in the idea of the informe, in fantasy and representation, rather than on ‘human nature’48.

     A process of transformation of Woodman’s body into an aesthetic object takes place in many of her self-portraits where, as in Fig. 8 and 9, her body is positioned and cropped to resemble something other, and it does so ironically, as if to confront and problematize her feminine identity. In both photographs her body is denatured, first into an embellished, mockingly feminine  reproduction of Brassaï’s phallic Nude49 (1933), then into a torso-face which ironically refers to Magritte’s body-face in Le Viol (1934). But Woodman’s attempted transformations of her body led her also further toward the accomplishment of proper physical metamorphoses, like in the three series Angels (1977-78), House (1975-76), Space² (1975-78).

     Woodman always felt fascinated with the ways in which the human body could be made to seem an apparition. As a young teenager she photographed a naked person crawling through a large, cross-shaped gap in a tombstone. By using a slow exposure speed, she turned that person’s body into a blur, even as she rendered the world around it bright and clear. Woodman used this technique throughout her life, photographing herself jumping, bending, waving, and stretching, usually in near-empty rooms. In 1977 she started the series On Being an Angel while still in Providence, and then subsequently completed the Angel Series in Rome in 1978 (Fig. 10, 11). Rosalind Krauss has hypothesized that some of Woodman’s series might have originated from the framework of  student assignments, and that the Angel Series might have stemmed from the need to respond to the task of photographing “a non-existent being”50. However true or not, Woodman’s emphasis on distortions within structuring elements of physical and representational space, results here in the development of an ineffable, impossible attempt to experience something: Woodman’s angel rises out of the bottom frame of the field, her breasts open out into the image, her wings float into light, her scream fills space.

    During her year in Rome, the beauty of Baroque fountains had inspired Woodman’s Angel Series, which she photographed partly in the premises of a spaghetti factory, but echoes of Italy pervaded Woodman’s work in various changing forms also through the Self-Deceit and Eel Series, (both accomplished in Rome) and would have haunted her work even back in New York, in her Temple Project. In retrospect Woodman’s experience in Rome seems to have been essential for her to develop core aspects of her later work in a way that goes from her profound appreciation of Italian architecture, to her fascination with the eclectic Symbolist, Surrealist, and Futurist range of books, catalogues and journals she found in the Maldoror bookshop, as well as to the lasting friendship relationships she established with the bookshop’s owners and other artists who in Rome, in 1978, were in a transition from Minimalism and Conceptual art to the later called Transavanguardia.

     Deeply engaged in exploring the extreme limits of bodily experience, Woodman gives shape to a strongly performative work that unveils her fascination with margins and boundaries. In the Angel, House, and Space² series her body dissolves, mutates, merges with the environment, and just like the Surrealists themselves had anticipated, she breaks with the notion of the unitary self and embraces a defamiliarized and at times threatening body of fragmentation and incoherence. Woodman’s work in the House and Space² series, both accomplished in Providence, offers images of the body that border on the unfamiliar,  the uncanny, the transitional, and the grotesque. In the House series (Fig. 13, 14) Woodman explores issues of hybridity  and transforms them into a self-reflexive project that owes much to Surrealism’s concern with the collapse of interior and exterior reality, and finally leaves the body as a signifier of absence and deformity.

     Distortions, faceless bodies, cropped bodies, dissolving bodies, all contribute to the idea of a constant transitionality and mutability of being. Woodman engages her body in a subtle and at times strongly dynamic physical exchange with the built environment, thus achieving the goal of both revealing and concealing her body and identity. She is the girl hidden under the detached mantel of the old fireplace, she is the woman in the wallpaper of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, imprisoned in the overlaying pattern, creeping around the circumference of the room, who is unnamed because the experience she is undergoing robs her of her identity. She is the presence haunting those decrepit surroundings, and like one of H.P. Lovecraft’s gothic creatures,  that in the writer’s imagination had really haunted the houses of Providence, Woodman is the ghost inhabiting the unhealthy, damp, sinister atmosphere of that dilapidated house51.   

     The Surrealist desire to dissolve any difference by blending the bodies with furnishings, architecture, or nature, responded to their belief in the possibility for dualities to coexist in a state of disunity; in fact for Breton, even the ultimate polarity between life and death could potentially coexist52. This desire in Woodman produces a strain of melancholy that most notably in the series Space² (Fig. 15) and From Space² (Fig. 16) succeeds in the accomplishment of a gloomy atmosphere of entrapment. While in some of the photographs she seems to be testing the potential of a dimly lit empty space in order to define it through the inscription of her freely moving body, in the ‘cage’ pictures the exploration of the geometries is taken to extreme effect. The ‘cage’ pictures expose Woodman’s nude body entrapped in a glass and wood display case she had found in the storerooms of a museum. In this cage her body presses against the glass panes, it shines as if caught by a blurring blaze of light, or it appears like a shadow of claustrophobic imprisonment. What mostly emerges from this series is first of all the way in which a three-dimensional space is made to fit the square frame of a picture and, secondly, the significant choice of a cage as an object of study.

     A characteristic of Woodman is her fondness for the square photographic format. A horizontal format is a widely accepted way to make photographs, particularly if working with a figure in a landscape. By using a square format, Woodman creates a constricted space instead, in which a viewer is made aware of how the body is flattened and framed and, considering that many of her photographs address the representation of space, the square format seems a deliberate choice. The choice of the display cage, on the other hand, is strongly indebted to the conceptual interpretation of the idea of ‘display’, which renders Woodman’s body at least doubly objectified by a gaze that pins her twice as an object. Barthes has eloquently made clear that any choice to photograph a subject inevitably transforms that subject in a spectacle, and that photography has the power to transform a subject in an object, literally into “a museum object”53. At the same time the museum glass display case intensifies the impression of ‘being on display’, eternally at the center of the gaze. Images of women trapped in cages have often been taken by the Surrealists to convey disturbing ideas of a female exoticized other, and of masculine control54. Namely, if one function of the cage is that of the display, another is that of preventing the escape of what is considered to be threatening and monstrous.

     In a famous essay, Julia Kristeva identified the feminine space, and more precisely the metamorphosed maternal body, with the monstrosity of the abject55. That which crosses or threatens to cross the ‘border’ is considered abject; of course the concept of ‘border’ may change, but the function of what’s considered monstrous is the same. Woman, being herself a sign of ‘otherness’ is therefore deemed as monstrous, as an exotic monster to catch, tame and exploit in order to gain access to hermetic knowledge. The Surrealist assault on Western assumptions of bodily wholeness and integrity, and obsessively on female bodily wholeness and integrity, follows the dissolution of the natural and the assumption that woman, being herself the fetish par excellence, is nowhere in nature. Woman and photograph become then “figures for each other’s condition: ambivalent, blurred, indistinct, and lacking in…authority”56. In fact, part of Woodman’s artistic aspiration seems to rely on the use of the photographic means to reflect on photography itself, and to reflect on how the entrapped feminine fetish is disfigured in order to disavow the accomplishment of female subjectivity.   

    

     To conclude this journey across Woodman’s photographs and Surrealist imagination, I’d like to focus on two last pictures, both taken in Rome, that I see as emblematically linked to the issue of othering and otherness. The first picture (Fig. 17) shows Woodman sitting on a chair (only her arms and legs are visible) and a dark human shape marked on the floor. The second picture, called Yet Another Leaden Sky (www.palazzoesposizioni.it/schede/woodman_foto2.htm), shows Woodman heavily clothed in a dark frock hiding her face behind a round white object while confronting a giant tortoise that is crossing the room. The ‘tortoise’ picture is particularly striking because of its intrinsic absurdity, absurdity we only find in dreams. Here Woodman seems afraid of the exotic animal and hides her face as if seeking solace by choosing ‘not to look’. The refusal to acknowledge the existence of the exotic in the realm of the everyday, domestic, cultural and urban interior, reflects the fear of the other as abject. The tortoise could be there as a symbol for the exotic objectification of the female self, for a threat of castrating female sexuality, or just as a metaphor for all the uncanny feelings people are afraid of, a metaphor for the need to shelter from the realities of life. Like Freud’s ‘uncanny’ and like the mechanisms of dreamwork that so much fascinated the Surrealists, anything we find unidentifiable in terms of ‘real world logic’ belongs to the category of the marvelous. The marvelous, the exotic, the abject, all unite here in the creation of the uncanny other.

     In the ‘shadow’ picture a human shape (presumably Woodman’s) is lying at the feet of the sitting person whose fetish shoes mark as being Woodman herself. The issue of doubling as discussed earlier in this paper is self-evident; however there is more to it. I imagine that mark as being a water mark that Woodman made by simply lying on the floor. But water marks tend to dry and then fade, they are ephemeral, just like shadows, and phantoms. Freud sees the ‘double’ as an insurance against destruction to the ego, a denial of the power of death. In psychoanalytic terms, this double is the first narcissistic projection, the earliest form through which the soul is imagined. The double as shadow can be a self-projection, a locus of collapse of interior and exterior reality, a shield against limiting boundaries. And, in this self-representation in space, space itself is for Woodman like a “devouring force…[where] The body desolidifies with [her] thoughts, the individual breaks the boundary of [her] skin and occupies the other side of [her] senses…[Where she] feels [herself] becoming space”57.

     As a woman of the 1970s, Woodman gets outside of the corporal limitations of her female human frame through the very act of incorporating herself as subject of her own art. Applying strategies of doubling, fetishization, and metamorphosis, Woodman renegotiates bodily, temporal, and spiritual boundaries. Her body, as the main signifier for feminine identity, symbolizes a margin that not only delimits the morphology of her imaginary self, but also allows the access to the unfamiliar, the social, the symbolic. Her body is an open boundary between the outer reality, the social institutions, the unconscious, the “Other”. In brief, following Freud, Woodman affirms that we can become subjects only to the extent to which we also are bodies. So, if again we wanted to ask, What happens when woman finds herself in the empty space between the gaze and her objectified image?  In Woodman’s own words, woman would multiply her image and, in the midst of so many illusory ghosts of herself, she would conceal the true herself, who makes them move.58

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1  Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t. Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (London and Basingstroke: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 6-

    7 (italics mine).

2  Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, Gwen Raaberg, eds., Surrealism and Women (Cambridge, Massachusetts;

   London: MIT Press, 1991), p. 2.

3  Ibid., p. 6.

4  Jean Baudrillard, ‘Symbolic Exchange and Death’ in Mark Poster ed., Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings

    (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988) pp. 119-148: 145.

5  Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, p. 20.

6  Ibid., p. 8.

7  Ibid., pp. 5-6.

8  Ibid., p. 19.

9  Ibid., p. 8.

10  Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), p. 4.

11  Ibid., p. 92.

12 De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, p. 36.

13  Whitney Chadwick, ed., Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation (Cambridge, Massachusetts;

    London: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 3-4.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., p. 5.

16 Ibid., p. 6.

17 Laura Cottingham, ed., Seeing Through the Seventies: Essays on Feminism and Art (Singapore: G+B Arts

    International, 2000), p. 119.

18 Ibid., p. 121.

19 See for instance Adrian Piper’s performances in the streets of New York with balloons stuffed under her clothes,

    bubble gum stuck over her face, wet paint on the front of her shirt; Eleanor Antin’s self-imposed weight loss; Carolee

    Schneemann’s trapeze-style performance while suspended nude from a ceiling; Linda Montano’s positioning in

    public dressed like a chicken.

20 George Woodman was primarily a painter from the 1950s until 1987, when he turned to photography full-time. For

    nearly 40 years he has divided his time between the U.S. and Italy, and he has visited the Pitti collection regularly

    (the exhibition included work from the last eight years). His photographic images are highly constructed, with

    elements often double exposed or reversed, and layered over other images of objects, people or nature. Betty

    Woodman is a well-known ceramist.

21  Abigail Salomon-Godeau, ‘Just Like A Woman’, in Francesca Woodman: Photographic Work (Providence:

    Wellesley College and Hunter College Art Gallery, 1986) pp. 11-37: 18.

22 Photographs in which the image is modified by melting the negative emulsion before printing. Ubac describes the

    procedure as a system of placing the glass plate of an exposed negative over a heated pan of water in order to melt the

    emulsion (Rosalind Krauss, Jane Livingston. L’Amour Fou. Photography and Surrealism. New York: Cross River

    Press: p.42).

23 Cameraless “photograms” produced by placing objects directly on photographic paper, subsequently exposed to light

    (Ibid. p. 24)

24 Photographic paper is briefly exposed to light during the printing process, thereby altering in varying degrees the

    relationship of dark and light tones, introducing elements of the photographic negative into the positive print (Ibid., p.

    28).

25 Expression borrowed from, Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. J. and D. Weightman (New York:

    Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 339-40.

26 As argued also in ‘Corpus Delicti’ by Rosalind Krauss, L’Amour Fou, p. 78.

27 Whitney Chadwick discusses this point in her introductory chapter to Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation, p.

    29.

28 Discussed in Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice’, in Sidonie Smith

    and Julia Watson, eds., Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of

    Wisconsin Press, 1998), pp. 72-82: 75.

29 Ibid., p. 76.

30 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses )Notes Toward an Investigation)’, in Lenin and

    Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971)

31 Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender. Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (London: Macmillan Press, 1987),

     p. 10.

32 Jacques Lacan, ‘Le Stade du Miroir Comme Formateur de la Fonction du Je’, Ecrits (Paris : Seuil, 1966) ; in English

    as ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I’, Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1982).

33 The formation of the subject around a dynamic of seeing/not-seeing that initiates the castration anxiety around which

    male sexuality is formed. In Whitney Chadwick, Mirror Images, p. 8.

34 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. And ed. James

    Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-73), vol. 17, pp. 234-35.

35 Otto Rank, The Double, trans. Harry Tucker, Jr. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1971).

36 Ibid., pp. 62-3.

37 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 14.

38 Just think about Breton’s fascination with Charcot’s study on hysteria and Dalì’s famous 1933 photo collage in which

    he identified hysteria with the phenomenon of ecstasy.

39 An axial rotation from vertical to horizontal of the subject of representation, which apparently allowed the

    achievement of the informe – or rather of the shapelessness of meaning –Georges Bataille, ‘Informe’, Documents 1,

    no. 7 (December 1929) : 382.

40 This image of ecstatic inspiration was at the same time one of innocence and sexual ambiguity, at once erotic and

     irrational.

41 Notice how in Fig.5 Woodman appears as wearing 4 garter belts, surrounded by 2 pairs of stockings, looking herself

   like a garment left there lying on the sofa. If underwear garments have been commonly associated to fetish objects

   and therefore to phallic power, then Woodman’s body in this picture has to be interpreted as a strong symbol of

    phallic power.

42 Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘Dialogue and Double Allegiance. Some Contemporary Women Artists and the Historical

    Avant-Garde’, in Whitney Chadwick, Mirror Images, pp. 128-154: 146-7.

43 See for example the use of the same type of ‘schoolgirl’ shoes in the Poupées series (1935) by Hans Bellmer.

44 Posner, ‘The Self and the World. Negotiating Boundaries in the Art of Yayoi Kusama, Ana Mendieta, and Francesca

    Woodman’, in Mirror Images, pp. 156-171: 167.

45   While at Abbot, sleeping in her closet, Woodman turned her room into a photography studio. It was when she filled

    the room with feathers that she provoked the house authorities, and her parents were advised that she was “too

    extreme”. (Ann Gabhart. ‘Francesca Woodman 1958-1981’, in Francesca Woodman:Photographic Work, Wellesley

    College Museum and Hunter College Art Gallery ed., 1986: 53-58, 53).

46 Bellmer’s photos of Unica had appeared on the cover of the Surrealist journal Le Surréalisme, même, no.4 (Spring

    1958) – not hard to find for Woodman during her period at the RISD (1976-77). Furthermore, a number of books and

    articles about Surrealist eroticism appeared in the 1970s, with discussion and illustration of Bellmer’s work. During

    Woodman’s stay in Rome (1977-78), she surely saw Surrealist photographic work in the avant-garde bookstore

    Maldoror; and also subsequently in New York (1979-80) when she met the art collector Timothy Baum, who also

    owns some Bellmer photographs.

47 See for instance Mary Ann Caws, et al., Surrealism and Women, pp. 19-20.

48 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Corpus Delicti’, in Rosalind Krauss, L’Amour Fou, pp. 55-112: 95.

49 Brassaï, Nude (1933); in this famous photograph, the female body and the male organ have each become the sign for

    the other. Another interpretation of this photograph by Woodman (Fig.13) is given by Susan Rubin Suleiman in her

    essay ‘Dialogue and Double Allegiance’, in which she argues that Woodman might have found her inspiration again

    from one of Bellmer’s Unica photographs.

50 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Francesca Woodman: Problem Sets’, in Rosalind Krauss, Bachelors (Cambridge, Massachusetts:

    The MIT Press, 1999), pp.161-177: 173.

51 “The small-paned windows were largely broken, and a nameless air of desolation hung round the precarious panel

    ling, shaky interior shutters, peeling wallpaper, falling plaster, rickety staircases, and such fragments of battered

    furniture as still remained. The dust and cobwebs added their touch of the fearful”, H.P. Lovecraft, ‘The Shunned

    House’ (1924), http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/theshunnedhouse.htm,

    The Complete Works of H.P Lovecraft, visited on 28 April 2004.

52 Posner, ‘Negotiating Boundaries in the Art of Kusama, Mendieta, and Woodman’, in MirrorImages, 156-171: 158.

53 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 13.

54 See for example Man Ray’s Mannequin, 1938.

55 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia

    University Press, 1982), pp. 53-55.

56 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Corpus Delicti’, p. 95.

57 Roger Caillois, ‘Mimetisme et Psychasténye Legéndaire’, Minotaure, no. 7 (1935), pp. 8-9. Quoted in Rosalind

    Krauss, L’Amour Fou, p. 74.

58 Francesca Woodman, Some Disordered Interior Geometries (Philadelphia: Synapse Press, 1981)

 

Art Photography

This is a pice I started and did not finish, but it kick started my first lecture on ‘Photography as contemporary art’

Fine art photography. 

In this module we will explore both the concept of photography as art, as well as examine the work of key protagonists and specific ‘Art’ movements. The remit of this particular course of study asks that we confine ourselves to work from the 1960’s to date, but I feel that it is impossible to engage fully with the subject unless we examine the following questions –

 

·    What is Art?

·    Is photography a valid art medium

 

( sample student views)

 

If we accept that photography is valid medium for artistic expression, at what point did the maker/photographer become artist.

 

The birth of pictorialism. 1851

 

. The aim of such techniques was to achieve what the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica termed, in discussing Pictorialism, “personal artistic expression”

Pictorialism largely subscribed to the idea that art photography needed to emulate the painting and etching of the time. Most of these pictures made were black & white or sepia-toned. Among the methods used were soft focus, special filters and lens coatings, heavy manipulation in the darkroom, and exotic printing processes. From 1898 rough-surface printing papers were added to the repertoire, to further break up a picture’s sharpness. Some artists “etched” the surface of their prints using fine needlesSuccessful attempts to make self-consciously “art” photography can be traced to Victorian era practitioners such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and Oscar Gustave Rejlander among others.Despite the aim of artistic expression, the best of such photographs paralleled the impressionist style then current in painting. Looking back from the present day, we can also see close parallel between the composition and picturesque subject of genre paintings and the bulk of pictorialist photography.As a distinct movement pictorial photography is essentially of British origin, although in its later phases there was a strong influence on American photography. The Linked Ring and The New American School were notable organised U.S. tendencies in Pictorialism around 1900. An American circle of photographers later renounced pictorialism altogether and went on to found Group f/64, which espoused the ideal of unmanipulated, or straight photography.The contemporary American portraitist Sally Mann revisited the pictorialist style in her 2003 book What Remains.One of the most important publications that promoted Pictorialism was Alfred Stieglitz’s “Camera Work” 1903 – 1917. Each publication had up to 12 plates that were reproduced in Photogravure,Halftone or Collotype. This plates are now collected and very sought after in the art world. Most of the photographers that made up the issues were “Photo – Succession” members, a group that promoted photography as art.Alfred Stieglitz is also know as the the grandfather of “Pictorialism”Stieglitz also brought Picasso, Matisse, Rodan and other important painters at the time to the forefront of the American art scene. Pictorialism was a popular movement in the early years of the twentieth century, that strove to make the photography as a much like a painting as possible. It produced little that is now deemed of lasting value in the art world, and its styles and approaches are now seen as outmoded.During the twentieth century, art photography became accepted by the English-speaking art world and the gallery system. In the USA, a small handful of curators spent their lives struggling to put it there; Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and John Szarkowski, and Hugh Edwards.Since the 1970s, many galleries have accepted that the best of documentary photography and photojournalism is worthy of being shown in the gallery situation alongside art photography. From around 1975 many new galleries were opened to show only photography. These too, generally, were happy to show both fine-art and documentary pictures.Traditionally, until the late 1970s genre styles predominated; nudes, portraits, natural landscapes (exemplified by Ansel Adams). Breakthrough ’star’ artists in the 1970s and 80s, such as Sally Mann and Robert Mapplethorpe, still leant heavily on such genres, although seeing them with fresh eyes. Others investigated a snapshot aesthetic approach.Throughout the twentieth century, there was a noticeable increase in the size of prints. Small delicate prints in thin frames are now a rarity, and hi-gloss wall-sized prints are common. There is now a tendency to dispense with a frame and glass altogether and instead to print onto blocked canvas.Color photography is now preferred over black & white, and its validation was strongly aided by curator John Szarkowski. Historians generally point to the Szarkowski-curated William Eggleston show at MoMA in 1976 as the “breakthrough of color”. In England, the early work of Gilbert & George is cited as validating color in art photography.American organizations, such as the Aperture Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art, have done much to keep photography at the forefront of the fine arts.

Current trends

There is now a trend toward a careful staging and lighting of the picture, rather than hoping to “discover” it ready-made. Photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Gregory Crewdson, among others, are noted for the quality of their staged pictures.Medium-format and large-format cameras have been preferred by art photographers over 35mm but, with the rapid improvements in the high-end of digital photography, this is now changing.Since the 1990s there have been some internal art-world tensions between fine art photographers and what might be termed “artists with cameras”.With the advent of digital photography and Photoshop, montage art photography has once again become popular; it is notably seen in the work of artists such as John Goto and Anyes Galleani. Purely computer-generated digital art (fractals, etc) is usually clearly distinguished from fine-art photography.No concerted attempt has been made to popularize fine art photography, beyond the limited market for book reproductions. It is generally considered that one has to have an ‘educated eye’ to really appreciate fine art photography. Since art photography is simply not on the agenda of schools and educationalists, the chance of developing a popular mass market remains limited. Numerous online “web magazines” have appeared since 1995, offering a new form of outlet for viewing fine art photography, but even this remain a niche and sales figures remain poor. Attempts by online art retailers to sell photography alongside prints of paintings have had mixed results, with strong sales coming only from the traditional “big names” of photography such as Ansel Adams.According to Art Market Trends 2004 (PDF link) 7,000 photographs were sold in auction rooms in 2004, and photographs averaged a 7.6 percent annual price rise from 1994 and 2004. Around 80 percent were sold in the USA. Of course, auction sales only record a fraction of total private sales.As printing technologies have improved since around 1980, a photographer’s art prints reproduced in a finely-printed limited-edition book have now become an area of strong interest to collectors. This is because books usually have high production values, a short print run, and their limited market means they are almost never reprinted. The collector’s market in photography books by individual photographers is developing rapidly.The prestige of the label ‘art photography’ has led many to try to apply the label to a host of inferior products – such as calendars and cheap posters.   

Thoughts on the role of the photograph and perception of Identity

Thoughts on perceptions of identity and the role of the photograph. 

Laurie Haynes:  4 January  2006 (revised 30 sept 07)

 In terms of viewing an image, there is a social and cultural matrix that will exert an influence on the creation of connotation. This signified ‘reading’ is located in what Sartre termed the psychology of the imagination. How does a two dimensional simulacra of a three dimensional actuality (although this actuality can be further challenged in the context of ‘truth to appearances’) become absorbed and referenced by the psychosocial motor functions of the brain? Is such a complex construct achievable unless the viewer has an understanding of the notion of ‘inner viewing’ as defined by Roland Barthes as ‘The act of viewing reflects the tensions of a relationship which cannot be defined through the image as external or the thought as internal’. Contextually if the image is the central point of focus of a context-dependent interpretation of the relationship between seeing and understanding, then images lack ‘The specific’ they are subject to a continuous process of reinterpretation which is referenced from either experiential exposure to similar ‘events’ or via  exposure to similar images or visual abstractions.  Significance is implied/referenced out of the historical context of presentation and performance. The ensuing multiple positioning of the image is central to the postmodernist debate on the variability of meaning and brands notions of specific identity as unstable, creating, rightly,  a dissolution/rejection of the notion of photographic truth. An interesting intellectual position from within which to examine truth to appearance in photographic images is the context of finality. In terms of experiencing what are essentially ephemeral events, length of exposure to that which is fixed as psychologically significant has a bearing on our ability to recall the point of that exposure. Our ability to examine the detail, in terms of social role-play, political context, key protagonists etc, will depend on our prior knowledge or exposure to similar social role-play, and our understanding of the dominant culture or cultural iconography. The real details of what has occurred has a finality in terms of truth to appearance that occupies the same time frame as the event. Binocular vision and the ability to use differential focus helps us fill in the missing information as does the physical scanning of the scene and its attendant peripheral motion, but real detailed investigation is essentially limited to the exact time and place of exposure.  The photograph does not have that sense of finality.  We can, to all intents and purposes, re-examine the point of interaction over and over again. This of course is as flawed as the functions of memory and falls prey to the particular traits of mono-ocular eccentrism, in that the frame is set with specific boundaries that do not allow for reading of associated events that occur outside that frame of reference. The photograph has no real value as a cultural signpost as we may be viewing events that exist outside of our direct cultural knowledge. Therefore, to create meaning we will imbibe or install an alien cultural reading on the depicted scene or event.The objectivity of the lens falls foul of the subjectivism of the maker and is in any case fundamentally flawed in that it serves only to convey a narrative sign that has essentially no real meaning; it is a simulacra of a reality that is not real, but a shifting chimera of multiple identities and readings. This absence of ‘finality’ allows for an endless proliferation of ‘readings’ and by association, ‘meanings’ It therefore follows that to resolve those differences we have to enter into a discourse that will seek for a defining metaphor with which to fix meaning. The frame on the photograph does not fix the image in time, place or social significance, but serves to abduct the ‘real’ from the conveyed reality and leave in its stead a chasm that begs to  be filled with the rhetoric of the image. The image ceases to be the signified and becomes part of the process of signification, a mere trigger. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes position is that meaning is “more” than text (written or photographic), more than words (spoken or heard) and it is only through an exploration of the gap between self-image and photograph, that is between identity and comprehension, that one can begin to understand the interpretive flexibility which needs to be used in discussing a photograph. This presents us with a lack of objectiveness that disrupts any attempt at either classifying or talking about the photography in a meaningful sense, That the identity or significance portrayed by and in the photograph is a movable feast produces a visual object without content, and although as much as we would like to believe that the camera see’s, Intellectual seeing is a sub-conscious psychological  activity that is associated with contextualsing events, thoughts, experience, something the camera can never do.When we consider the content of photographic images it is important to separate ‘the photograph’ from ‘the image’  The photograph as an icon is contextualise  by questions of sight, object verification, and ultimately truth, whilst any realisation of ‘The Image’ is an act of Conscious will and subject to different intellectual parameters. As an Icon the photograph will always have a sense of autonomy. A facsimile existing outside of the casual relationships of the moment of making; context removed, politically impotent, simply an object, albeit one that can have an attached significance. That significance is the province of subjective vision, a mental interface between the photograph and the viewer born out of a desire to ‘understand’. A  construct of perception and thought, a conscious and unconscious continuous process of revision and re-positioningBut the Photograph has become important as a tool for the classification of objects and events. People subscribe, albeit unwittingly, to the notion of photographic truth and the phrase, ‘the camera never lies’ has become a part of everyday speech. The strength of this position has allowed the photograph to exert an influence over social role-play and cultural identity. Central to this is the topic of implied reality and the photographs unique classification. ‘Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way a photograph does’ Berger John: “Uses of Photography”, in About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980).In this quote Berger is paraphrasing Susan Sontag, and essentially this serves to underline the sense of uniqueness, recognised by both individuals as central to the imbedding of implied truth and reality within the photograph. The fact that it represents some form of actuality gives the photograph a superiority as a ‘sign’ without equal in the mind of the ‘mass’. To deconstruct or challenge that implied truth the viewer needs to be either aware of,  or engaged in the critical debates surrounding the photograph and be complicit with the rejection of ‘implied truth’; if not, then it follows that the viewer enters into a relationship with the photograph that accepts the notion on some subconscious level that the ‘camera never lies’ and will read the abstracted information contain within the photograph as ‘significant’ ,as a social sign This hypothesis, which is a central one in all discussions about photography, is one to which I will return in this essay. It is the idea of possession which interests me – the notion that there is a reality outside of the photograph for which the print becomes the representation. Berger extends his argument with the assertion that a photograph ‘fixes the appearance’ of an event. In the cut and thrust of everyday life, the photograph made in an instant preserves what the eye might otherwise not capture. This is the point at which image and photograph must be seen as dramatically different. For although the photograph has an existence separate from both the viewer and the event of making, it can never be removed from the process of interpretation. The idea that a photo can capture a moment in time happens to be a specific ideological statement born out of, and sustained by Western cultural conceptions of representation. This has as much to do with notions of the observer and the observed as it does with the presumed relationship of an apparatus to reality.The question I am asking here is not what the difference is between the real and the photographic but to what degree, if any, the photograph initiates a temporal and spatial break between consciousness and the process of depiction. Clearly what is of interest to an observer of a photograph is the way in which he/she can manipulate time, not simply look at a moment torn from a continuum. Control is the key here and unlike Sontag or Berger one must approach the way a viewer marks out the aesthetic boundaries of the photograph in order to deal with the consequences of “taking”. This must be carefully linked to the desire to manipulate memory or hold detailBarthes categorised the photograph as signs without meaning, yet Images are seen as “sources” for meaning, their ever present cultural role constituted not by a reversible process of exchange but by a set of intrinsic characteristics to which viewers supposedly respond – the idea of effect. At one and the same time then, the image “leads” by example, refining its control as it presumably gains more power, whilst also representing the culture within which it operates. Suggestions about effect must be seen for what they are, interpretive responses to both the experience of viewing and to the institutions of image creation and distribution.  This must be viewed as the kind of contradiction which provides our culture with the ideological framework for the production of meaning in an image and in this lies the interface between the visual language of Art and the purely representative simulacra that is the photograph. The question of effect however, generates an even greater confusion in which the image becomes the “object” whose visible properties are equated in a literal sense to “the furniture of the world”. The presumption of this argument is that the image converts what it has appropriated into pictures, leaving intact those properties of the world of “things” automatically retrieved by the camera. Thus in the simplest sense the name of an object is not transformed as it mutates into an image. This would then suggest that there be no conflict between its classification in language and the manner of its usage as a photographic print. The image as a result, is defined as an amalgam of the real and the representational, as a kind of bricolage between different modes of signification. But what are the criteria which can be used to compare the image and the object? Can one make sense of those criteria by privileging the meaning of the object upon which it is then assumed the image relies? And if the image and object are always to some degree “representational” then at which point does the image intervene to confirm that a process of signification has taken place? If the image merely translates the already given set of representations which have been conferred upon the object, then does that exhaust the possible range of meanings which can be attributed to the image? Images are seen as carriers of meaning and as such there is an assumption of reality which is often equated to a powerful effect. This implied truth is then used as an argument to explain the referential power of the image. For without reference the image would not have meaning. Any object or artefact recognised by the viewer is dramatically different in terms of substance or spatial actuality from an image of the same object. The naming, the classification, is not the same in both instances. For example, The iconographic cowboy with all his associated semiotic significance dominates a whole genre of film media. In the film Shane, the unknown man with an unknown past takes on almost mythical significance which is far removed from the cultural symbol that is ‘Cowboy’  But the dominant visual form ‘The Cowboy’  creates more than a simple equation between reference and the language of interpretation. The Cowboy, his role,  context, and purpose, all questions that are addressed in this film have all been raised and this in a rather simplistic discursive field seeks  transforms, or reposition The cowboy in a connotative form. It is this discursive field which makes the connections between object and image arbitrary. There is no pure moment of ‘The Cowboy’ as image which escapes its placement and the use to which it has been put. In this sense there need be no synonymity between image, language and object. If there were, the actual work of interpretation would simply rely on a presumed unity of reference, discourse and representation. An objection could be made here that a cowboy is just a cowboy. But it is precisely the desire to negate the significance of discursivity, of enunciation, which leads to the conflation of representation, language, and the image. Images cannot exist outside of their context of use. The context may dramatically alter the way in which an image fits into a referential category established through natural language, and may upset the criteria used to establish reference in the first place. The contrast then between object and image is a fundamental one. The Cowboy as image must be validated, whereas the Cowboy as object doesn’t have to be. The photograph is vaguely constituted as an object, and the persons who figure there are certainly constituted as persons, but only because of their resemblance to human beings, without any special intention. They drift between the shores of perception, between sign and image, without ever approaching either. (Sartre in Barthes 20) To be Continued: Laurie Haynes   

Defining Modernism and Post-Modernism

Defining Modernism and Post Modernism

 

Modernism

 

This progressive movement of society is associated with what has been described as modernity or modernism. It is essentially a historical period in Western culture and has its origins in the Enlightenment at the end of the 18^th century(1890) and for academic purposes can be seen to be over by 1940.

 The Enlightenment, and the historical period that it brought in,  can be argued, as characterised by three major tenets.

 

• Intellectually, there was the power of reason over ignorance

 

• There was the power of order over disorder

 

• There was the power of science over superstition

  These three statements were regarded by many as universal truths. It was believed by the left wing intellectual elite, that by accepting these fundamental changes in social control/behaviour, that the old ruling classes  predominantly supporting the outmoded hegemony of rule by church and state  could be defeated. Modernity was ‘revolutionary’ and in many respects the French Revolution of 1789 was the personification of these features. They heralded the advent of capitalism as a new mode of production and a transformation of the social order. These basic beliefs provided the basis upon which humanity was to be able to achieve progress. Instead of looking backwards to a Golden Age, enlightenment was now seen as possible in the present through the application of reason. It was through reason that enlightenment, the conceiving of infinite possibilities, would enable the emancipation of humanity to take place: emancipation from ignorance, poverty, insecurity and violence. 

Until quite recently, there was a common belief that despite all the trials and tribulations suffered throughout the world, there was a general movement towards human emancipation. This was especially true in western civilisation, and from 1850 onward there was the ability to examine this progress via the mechanism of the photographic image. Social disorder quietened, and it was truly felt that society was making progress. There were blips in this movement, it was not smooth: wars, famine, natural and man-made disasters took place, but in the main these were resolved and the forward motion continued. In art terms the socio-political advances that were manifest during the modernist era, had less to with social order, than with an overturning of any notion of romanticism, or pictorialism. The modern was defined as being the age of man and machines. Function mediated with form- simplicity in ascendance over the ornate. Art, in context reflecting the utopian ideal of man at the centre of rational thought, shedding the shackles of superstition, and building a brand new age; The age of the machine.

Europe was once again at the forefront of this vanguard. In particular Northern Europe. Bauhaus in Germany-Structuralism in Russia- linguistics in France- Science in Britain. Art reflected this brave new world, Buildings adopted a new aesthetic, industrial design (a new concept born in the Modernist era) furnishing these building and Art, Print-Photography-and sculpture in particular winning out over painting. Dada, Surrealism, cubism and finally the expressionists, all finding a new way of working to express this modern age.

Moving forward to the late 1950’s, a movement began amongst French intellectuals, that questioned this view of society as moving onwards and upwards, and that there was some unseen driving force within society. It rejected any notion that we were still within the modern era brought in by the Enlightenment two hundred years earlier. The modern world according to these new thinkers had clearly brought in the era of industrial capitalism and scientific thinking but it had also brought in the world of Auschwitz, of the possibility of nuclear war, the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, of neo-colonialism, Euro centrism, racism and Third World hunger. If this was the legacy of modernism, it wasn’t very pleasant. Had the ideas of the Enlightenment brought us to this? If it had, they thought, to what extent had it been justified by grand theories of society? Wasn’t it more appropriate to see these theories as quite dangerous? They also felt that if modernism had brought in the type of society loosely described as modern industrial society then surely we had now gone beyond it? Had we not now entered a new age, and age that would not be truly resolved until the late 1970’s – the age of post-modernism?

 

It is against this climate that we must examine the concept of post modernism.

 So what is post-modernism? 

A major problem we have is trying to find a useful definition of post-modernism. Most definitions are hopelessly vague and often inconsistent with each other. There is a considerable amount of confusion about the terms: modernity, modernism, post-modernity and post-modernism. Modernism and post-modernism have tended to be associated with aesthetic ad intellectual movements such as that in architecture and literature; modernity and post-modernity have tended to be used to refer to changes in social and economic institutions However, this is not a hard and fast distinction. Much of the talk of post-modernism has been concerned with social and economic change.

To get any further we need to examine distinct trends.

 Art 

Firstly, there is post-modern art – not just painting and sculpture but also architecture, music, literature, drama etc. It’s main features are a lack of depth and of meaning. There is a diversity of forms and content. The art critic Suzy Gablik gave a talk in Los Angeles where she spoke about the

… ‘multidimensional and slippery space of post-modernism [where] anything goes with anything, like a game without rules. Floating images … maintain no relationship with anything at all, and meaning becomes detachable like the keys on a key ring. Dissociated and decontextualized, they slide past one another failing to link up into a coherent sequence. Their fluctuating but not reciprocal interactions are unable to fix meaning.”

While this may sound strange, you do not have to go to Los Angeles to see what she was talking about. Throughout the UK, for example, new buildings have been going up over the last decade or so that seem completely out of keeping with anything that has gone before. Many of our cities have been ‘rejuvenated’ by architects who have been given free reign to satisfy their professional fantasies. London Docklands is a good example here. Take the Docklands Light Railway through what used to be one of the world’s busiest ports and you will see post-modern architecture in all its glory. Similarly, adverts and pop videos are good examples of post-modern art. Using operatic arias to promote football matches, classical music to persuade us to fly a particular airline, watching Pavarotti in the Park – there is no longer a distinction between high and popular culture (‘anything goes with anything, like a game without rules’).

Culturally, the growth and influence of the media whether it is the advertising industry, television or film has also led to tremendous changes in how people see the world. Many post-modernists would argue that image is everything, image is reality. Disneyland, MTV, MacDonald’s is real life. Real life is what we see on television, television becomes real life. Krishan Kumar maintains that post-modernists see the media in a quite different way to those who regard it as merely a method of communication.

For them the media today do not so much communicate as construct. In their sheer scale and ubiquity they are building a new environment for us, one which demands a new social epistemology and a new form of response. The media have created a new ‘electronic reality’, suffused with images and symbols, which has obliterated any sense of an objective reality behind the symbols … In hyperreality it is no longer possible to distinguish the imaginary from the real …” krishan kumar

 

The second trend within post-modernism is a philosophical one. In the 1970s, the group of French philosophers, I have already mentioned, mainly on the Left, had become disillusioned with the heady days of the late 1960s when Western Europe and the United States were in political turmoil. For a short period in 1968, there seemed a strong possibility that major political changes could take place throughout the Western world as a result of action by students, trade unionists, anti-Vietnam war protesters, liberal Communists and militant Socialists. This was not to be and in France where the struggle was arguably the most intense, this led to a waning of the huge influence previously wielded by the large Communist Party (to which most of these intellectuals owed allegiance). This disillusionment led to their disengagement with politics and their distrust of grand theories, such as Marxism, which they felt attempted but failed to explain the reality of social life and began to form ideas that slotted in to the themes explored by contemporary artists. Despite their many disagreements, they stressed the fragmentary and plural character of reality. They denied human thought the ability to arrive at any objective account of that reality. Any ideology or social theory that justified human action as a means to progress or order was condemned as meaningless. The grand social theory or narrative that justified human activity, whether it was Marxism, liberalism or Fascism is no longer credible, they argued. There are no universal truths. All they have done in the past is legitimate the power of those who know and deny power to those who do not know.

 

New Times

 

Thirdly, these two trends, in art and philosophy, seemed to reflect what was going on in the social world. It was felt by many, particularly on the British Left, that we were actually living in what they called ‘New Times’. At the heart of these ‘New Times’ was the shift from the old mass-production Fordist economy to a new, more flexible, post-Fordist order based on computers, information technology and robotics. Marxism Today, wrote (in 1988) that our world is being remade.

Mass production, the mass consumer, the big city, big-brother state, the sprawling housing estate, and the nation-state are in decline: flexibility, diversity, differentiation, mobility, communication, decentralization and internationalisation are in the ascendant In the process our own identities, our sense of self, our own subjectivities are being transformed. We are in transition to a new era.

Many people accept that we do live in a different kind of society today to that of a relatively few years ago. However, what type of society is it that we now live in? A number of theories have already been put forward, some of which you may be familiar with.

   

Introduction to Photography as Contemporary Art

Photography as contemporary art

 Laurie Haynes   

From the point of inception the key debate surrounding photography is its position in the lexicon of Art practice. 

The writer/ philosopher Baudelaire conceded photography only one legitimate function: recording what might otherwise be lost to the human eye due to the ephemeral moment of viewing. Photography’s ability to hold that moment in detail that could be revisited after the event, serves the sciences and not Art. The direct quote is: if only you will lie down and behave dear photography. ‘If you will act as handmaiden to the arts and science, you will deserve our thanks and applause’.

Of course photography could not be restrained in this way, instead of ‘keeping its place’ photography has gone forward to literally reshape and reinvent, if not the world in which we live , at least our perception of it.

Our exposure to photography either as subject or maker has conditioned us to the point that at virtually any point in time or place we turn our rehearsed faces to the lens; the apparent objectification giving validity to our existence. This validity, this rendering, is of course under critical scrutiny, as much an abstraction as a cubist portrait. Context removed, little more than a brief moment of ‘performance’, (what the erotic photographer Bob Carlos Clark termed ‘a smug little trick’)

yet the fact that that moment is located in a real time and place serves to imbed some notion of truth to the photograph.

 Now Photographic truth is a subject that is constantly debated, and will be examined in this lecture  series. On some level of either conscious or sub-conscious thought each one of us has the echo of ‘the camera never lies’ resonating within us; which in turn can serve to transform the banal sometimes into the significant. Here lies the unshakable strength of the photographic image.

The photograph shares a birth right with the realist school of painting. The nineteenth century was also the century in which the realist painters Carot and Courbet strove to capture the exact reproduction of what the eye recollected.

Their preoccupation-to focus on the exact instant or sight-was  abducted forever by the instantaneous contingencies captured so easily by the camera. Fox Talbot, coined the term ‘Photogenic drawing’ and his first published volume of images was title ‘ The pencil of nature’  and was derived almost entirely (in subject matter and style) on established painterly conventions, but in terms of contingent realism that no painter could ever replicate.

Art photography was born.

I have to move forward quickly now stopping on my way to note significant changes in practice.  1857 saw the birth of the pictorialist school and this statement by Henry peach Robinson serves to illustrate the narrowing of the division between artist and photographer.

  ‘Any dodge, trick, any configuration of any kind is open to the photographers use… It is the photographers duty to avoid the mean, the bare, and the ugly, and aim to…. Correct the unpicturesque…. A great deal can be done and very beautiful pictures made, by a mixture of the real and the artificial’ Pictorial effect in Photography- Henry peach Robinson. 

The construction of images, unreal, but playing on the real, an artist positioning of the ‘vision’ of the maker, replicating the skill of painter.. Robinson worked in a time when the prevailing style of the arts was essentially romantic. A Polish critic announced

‘Photographers do not copy nature now, they interpret it’  

collectively they positioned themselves on higher ground’ than the realist painters, becoming more refined; their interpretation becoming more academic than Delacrois or Ingres. The first real breakthrough came at the hand and eye of an English eccentric. Julia Margaret Cameron. Obsessed with portraying the ‘inner man’ she ignored the techniques that where currently ‘a la mode’ and returned to long exposures (20 Minutes) that where agonising for the sitter; but served to strip away the artifice of performance. Techniques used sixty years later by Both Penn and Avedon to ‘get inside’ the subject.

From these beginnings Art Photography was born. Art by its very nature is contextualised by the economic-social-political climate of making, photography shares this heritage, but perhaps is more overtly effected by the ever shifting social climate.

The fundamental mechanism for viewing a photograph is ‘truth to appearance’. The viewer, that is you and I, bring to the photograph a pre-history of actual and a priori experience that conditions our response to the image. It is this factor above all else that enables the ‘Art photograph’ to play with visual and emotional perception.

 Alfred Stieglitz, who I consider to be the Father of ‘Modern Art photography’ came to Europe From America to study engineering, and whilst there bought a hand held camera, and set about capturing the ‘Life’ on the streets. On his return to the States

(1917) he embarked on a deliberate series of un-pictorial studies of a city in the midst of, snowstorms. Driving rain, bad light and shadows. He tracked the marks of man, and took these ‘impressions’ to a public unused to images of this type.

 He founded a magazine, and Gallery, the legendary ‘219’( its address on fifth avenue) and  set photography on the map as Fine, high Art, the brother of both cubism and surrealism.

(expand) For thirty years Stieglitz led a growing brotherhood of Art Photographers. The American school fundamentally different from its European counterpart( explain why), but also indelibly linked by a strand of enquiry that first and foremost examined the human condition. By the outbreak of the second world war Photography occupied an unassailable position as a medium of artistic expression, But the almost exponentional change of social status between 1836 and 1936, was nothing compared with what was to come over the next ten years.

The global nature of WW2 changed forever the strict delineation of class and status as two generation of men went to war, leaving a vacuum in the home nations that had to be filled. Women left the home and rose to the challenge forever undoing a social status quo. Life became focussed on mortality, and in so doing served to loosen moral ties and boundaries. In the midst of war and death people became aware of a new freedom, a resilience, a joy d’Vivre, that caused them to celebrate life. Photography went through a process of division, a tool of propaganda, that served to inform and misinform in the same breath. But above all render the horrific details of modern warfare forever indelible for the surviving generations.

This breaking of the final taboo, the pictorial rendition of the arena of death and destruction starting a process of de-sensitisation that continues unabated to this day. Gloves off, photography, became the key mode of representation. In the post war era virtually every aspect of life in western society became the focus for the lens. Advertising was born, and the pre-war fascination with the moving image, scaled new heights.

Now in ascendance as the dominant mode of representation, The lens strategically ate away at the spoken and written word; film and photography were central as the visual signposts of a new prosperous society, where everything and anything was achievable.

European and American photography and film making developed in tandem, like fraternal twins, sharing the same linage, but being markedly different in appearance. Europe the first born, being on the surface the quieter of the two, intellectual, reasoned, self-questioning, somehow reflecting the trauma of the war years, containing embedded within the myth of peace.

America the second born, brash, confident, but essentially a society isolated from the reality of both the horror of war and the agony of rebuilding a shattered society. Adopting the role of hedonist. From this re-birth this new beginning, the language of representation became in some ways almost diametrically opposed. The more commercially advanced America, already embracing a burgeoning commercial use of the ‘Image’ began to explore the yet as unnamed mechanisms of ‘Popular culture’.

The booming economy of post-war America still with the wraith like twin spectres, of the depression years and the War still indelibly fixed in the consciousness of the nation, dived headlong into the waters of hedonism. The pursuit of ‘leisure time’ becoming almost a national obsession (in the states above the Mason–Dixon line). The camera in turn was focused on these events, on a society freed from economic shackles, celebrating life.

Europe by contrast was still reeling from the impact of war…The economy in tatters, struggling with massive rebuilding and subsequent debt. A collective society still in mourning with a misdirected people of traumatised and displaced individuals was forced to look inward. Yes there were celebrations at the succession of hostilities, yes people danced in the streets, hugging strangers. But this euphoria was soon replaced with the stark reality of loss-poverty-the daily grind. As a post war baby I cannot comment on the reality of the situation, but life in black & white, with the colour stripped away by adverse circumstance, was mirrored in the imagery of the moment. The gritty ‘realist’ images of nations coming to terms with the loss of a generation. The contrast with post war America could not be more stark. But in that dark hour the camera turned unwaveringly toward recording the human condition. Apparently free of the strings of political motive it moved unfettered amongst the people of Europe and did find small flames of hope, love, and charity.

The post war photography of Robert Doisneau perhaps best captures the almost hidden beauty of these times.

More To Come….

How to write an academic essay

This is something for all you undergrads out there. Writing an essay at University level is completely different from the essays you created at school, there are very strict rules that must be followed. This document gives you a detailed overview of what is required. Warning!!! You need to check with your own academic staff on the preferred system for referencing material. Hope this helps

A guide to writing academic essays

Notes for guidance:  

It is essential to read this guide carefully before you select an essay topic or begin your research. Most students find it difficult to write essays and this guide is designed to help plan your research and structure your essay. Even if you are experienced in writing essays, this guide is still indispensable, since it outlines the formal requirements for art theory essays. Different University subjects, courses or disciplines do not necessarily follow the same bibliographic format or requirements for citation of sources.

If you did well with your school essay writing do not assume that you will automatically succeed with tertiary writing. Some students find that the gap between school essays and academic essays is more like a chasm: since the emphasis in tertiary writing shifts substantially from the simple presentation of facts to interpretation and critical analysis. Also, it is not uncommon to read student essays from secondary school level in which material is taken unacknowledged, directly from text books-the Internet or teacher notes. Such practice is unacceptable in tertiary writing and is regarded as plagiarism which is a serious transgression in academic writing. There will be more on plagiarism later in this guide.

An essay is a written exposition or elaboration of your view on a particular topic, subject or issue. Within a stipulated length, usually 1200 to 3500 words, your essay will consist of a clear statement of what you think about a particular issue or topic followed by a logical argument supported by strong, well documented evidence. The essay is also an important learning process and assessment instrument, since when you begin your research on a selected topic you often have no idea of what your view or argument will be. The process of research, planning and writing of your essay helps you shape, clarify and finally expound your thinking or analysis. Many notes and several drafts of your essay might have to be written before your argument or perspective on a particular topic falls into place. This is why it is imperative to allocate enough time in your study programme for writing preliminary drafts.

Students often lament that they discovered what they really wanted to say at the end of a hastily written essay, when they had no time for a rewrite (in my experience about 70% of level one students experience this problem).

The information and evidence used in formulating an argument, in essay form, will come from texts (mostly books and journals), electronic sources and actual works of art. When writing about art the most important focus of your analysis should be original art objects or exhibits; but any judgements you make about works of art should be informed by what has been written about them, and your interpretation should be measured against the existing research in your field of interest. Therefore wide reading is essential in any art theory essay. However, choose your source material intelligently, many “coffee-table” style art books contain misleading generalisations and factual information that is dated or incorrect. Also, ‘A’ Level textbooks are poor source material for most tertiary writing.  Encyclopaedia articles (in particular that student’s favourite ‘Wikepedia’ may be useful in initially surveying a topic but you will need to consult more specific secondary (and better informed) sources.

Most of the information you access on the Internet using generic search engines and sites such as Google will fall into the encyclopaedic category. Only very refined searching of specialist databases will allow you to access high quality and primary material. There will be more later on how to access this material via the Internet

The diagram and description below should help explain the difference between primary, secondary and tertiary sources of information.

 Most Internet sources
Encyclopaedia entries
Art survey books

Art Objects
Catalogues
Letters
Documents

Monographs on artists
Stylistic Analysis
Journal article 

If for instance, you are researching an essay on Rembrandt, one of the most up to date forums would be ‘The Rembrandt Research Project’, this would be an example of primary research. The information contained in this inner circle is constantly changing and expanding with continuing research, while the outer circle (secondary research)  changes more slowly. This is exemplified in the results of the Rembrandt Research Project.

Select a topic most relevant to your studio interests. Usually topics or questions are of equal difficulty, however sometimes lecturers set one or two more demanding or challenging questions to extend experienced students. Check with your lecturer if you have any doubts about the compatibility of your selection to your educational background and interests.

Stages in essay writing

Step 1

Compile a working bibliography of books, articles, catalogues, videos, films and any other sources you think will be relevant to your chosen topic. To do this, use the subject index catalogue in the library and consult the Art Index, and other periodical indices, that are also held in the Library. If you are reading this on a computer connected to the University of Derby intranet network, you may be able to go directly to the library index for books, catalogues videos and films. The Bibliographie de l’Histoire d’Art,established in 1991, is the international scholarly reference database in art history that incorporates the older indexes, the RAA (Repertoire d’Art et d’Archeologie) from 1973 to 1989 and the once primary index the RILA (International Repertory of the Literature of Art) from 1975 to 1989. The focus is European and American art with abstracts in both French and English.

The following are the most useful. Expanded ASAP Int’l Ed. which has over three million articles (from 1980 – 2003) and includes journals such as Art News, Art in America, Art forum, the Art Bulletin. Unfortunately, the original illustrations or images are often omitted or degraded in the Expanded Academic online versions, although more recently this seems to be improving. This is not the case with the Project Muse (John Hopkins Press) database which includes good quality black and white images and also contains several electronic journals which are exclusively published on the Web.

Another source is  Britannica Online- which is of course the definitive encyclopaedic source for general information. It is also worth checking if the Library subscribes to The  Oxford Reference Online. This not only includes the Oxford Dictionary but most importantly gives access to Oxford Dictionary of Art, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms as well as A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art. A word or phrase query will automatically search across all these and many other Oxford reference works. What is more, a full-citation is shown below each entry ready to be clipped and pasted into your notes.

You may find links to the above and many more databases on the Library Journal and Reference Database site. Your lecturer will generally direct you to others, if they are relevant to your topic.

For general Internet searches take care using generic search sites such as Google, Yahoo, etc. Instead, first go to the Art Theory Resources site and use the links that are included there, as these have been checked for quality. (The exception to this is the case where you may be searching for a reproduction of a particular painting or print. The search engine Google now has an image search feature which is very powerful or comprehensive and certainly the quickest way to find a reproduction.)

Particularly useful under the Art Theory Resources listings are links to electronic journals and home sites for print journals – which often have the contents of the latest edition.
When you access Internet sites take great care to carefully document the address and full particulars for correct citation of any information you collect. Always record the date of any connection you make as this must be included in your citation. The Internet is now a major resource but still a supplement to print sources and the most up-to-date relevant art information is still to be found in text based journals or periodicals. For this reason, it would be expected to find at least four or five references to art magazine or journal articles, as well as references to books and other sources, in a successful first-year essay. At this stage, when you have completed your working bibliography, ask your lecturer if he or she will check if you have missed any major source on your topic.

STEP 2

Read/view the sources you have chosen and make notes to use in the formulation of your essay. When making notes, or photocopies of information you might use in your assignment, always add the bibliographical details of the source, including page numbers. You will need this if you decide to quote the information in your essay. When taking notes from books and articles be sure to distinguish between your own musings/words and material you transcribe as this will avoid any possible problems with inadvertent plagiarism when you come to write the essay. When reading articles online or material from Web sites be sure to record all the relevant source information you will later need for citation, including the date of access. While searching for information, avoid clipping blocks of text from screen and pasting it into your word-processor unless you add all details of the source including the URL. Otherwise, this material will be useless when it comes to writing your essay. It is always safest to save the entire file you are reading in a directory on your computer for later access when formulating your argument. Also note, that if a site has no designated author, be it institution, corporation, individual or magazine title, do not use the material.

It is usual to spend about 60% of your allocated time on Steps 1 and 2. 

STEP 3

When you are familiar with all the major facts and issues that are pertinent to your topic, decide what argument you will adopt in your essay. Next draft a plan of your essay by writing short notes on the content and order of each paragraph. Usually this is followed by the writing of a full first draft.

Your first paragraph will state your main argument regarding the topic. The body of the essay will expand and defend the argument stated in the opening paragraph. Information you have collected will be used to support your arguments and your final paragraph will round off your discussion with a suitable conclusion.

STEP 4

Write your final draft, add your bibliography, check all footnotes and re-read. Most important of all, carefully proofread before submission. Be sure your presentation follows the stipulated format. Make and retain a copy of your essay. A clean copy may be needed later for reassessment by another marker in cases of appeal or disputed results.

Plagiarism is the unacknowledged copying of the ideas or words of other writers or authors. Plagiarism in essays will make them unacceptable for assessment. This refers to both direct transcription and paraphrasing other material (putting it into your own words).

Most students understand that to copy another student’s assignment and present it as your own work is fraudulent behaviour and such practice is the most obvious and serious breach of academic integrity. When this form of plagiarism is detected it results in automatic failure of the subject for the student involved and possible disciplinary action by the Faculty or University.

You may be aware that there are now many so called “Cheat” sites on the Internet offering (usually at a price) completed essays on countless topics. It is unlikely you will find an example that precisely answers a given question, but if you find a similar topic and access to read it is free, by all means do so. You may pick up some tips on structure or useful pointers to sources. However, never clip any of the information to paste into your essay. Not only is this plagiarism but it is relatively easy to detect through a Web search using your text as a search string.

However, most breaches of plagiarism occur because: firstly, students have not developed the writing skills to sufficiently wean themselves from the phrases, style and words used in the sources found in their Library research and, secondly, they present the ideas and information taken from Library sources without acknowledging the original author.

There are art historical facts, which are generally known and agreed upon. That the Museum of Modern Art in New York was founded by Alfred Barr in 1929, is an example and would not need acknowledgement in an essay. However, it should be obvious that you would not write in an essay that Monet earned 24,800 francs in 1873  from the sale of his paintings without telling the reader how you came by such precise and little known information. We might assume you had access to Monet’s account books and that you spent considerable time tabulating this figure. Equally so, if you claim that Monet earned ten times the average annual income for Paris in 1873, you would need to show the origin of this calculation.

When you present any precise or contentious evidence in your essay you must add a full reference or citation that will accurately take the reader to your source so that they can check the veracity of your information or judge the quality of your source. Both Monet examples above are taken from the same source (Paul Tucker Monet at Argenteuil, New Haven, 1982, n33, pp. 194/5) and by citing this book in your footnotes and adding it to your bibliography you also acknowledge that your work is dependent on the intellectual effort of others. In this case, Paul Tucker. ( I in turn used and referenced the information on Monet for an academic essay in 1999).

Presumably, if you used the factual evidence or data on Monet’s income in an essay it would be to draw some conclusion about his attitude to selling his art or his relationship to dealers and buyers; or, to put Monet’s work in the context of the developing economic and social forces associated with modernity. This is where problems can occur with plagiarism since Tucker has explored these issues in his book. Any direct quotes or phrases taken from Tucker would naturally be referenced. In addition, if your conclusions are in any way dependent on, or, in any way parallel, the views or ideas of Tucker you must acknowledge this in footnotes. To give a specific example, here is a direct quote from Tucker’s book:

  ‘Monet was no economist, but the subjects he painted were drawn from the progressive world. And the people we know who bought his paintings, like the opera singer Faure, the banker Hecht, or the department store owner Hoschede, were immersed in it. Monet was able to profit from many people’s patronage, for he made a considerable amount of money during these years, far more than earlier historians ever imagined. He was doing so well that two years after he left Paris for Argenteuil – a flight to the suburbs that was typical of his time – he was able to move to a bigger, more expensive house’. 

After reading your notes you might write a sentence in your essay such as:

 ” Monet was part of the modern world in the sense that he was not the mythological artist starving in a garret but very much a comfortable member of the middle-class, living in the suburbs.”

Clearly, this is dependent on the above quotation and the source would need to be acknowledged. You would do this by adding a number at the end of the sentence which would refer to a footnote which might look like this:

This has been demonstrated by Paul Tucker, in Monet at Argenteuil, New Haven, 1982 

Alternatively, you may remodel the sentence to read:

 “As Tucker has shown, Monet was part of the modern world in the sense that he was not the mythological artist starving in a garret but very much a comfortable member of the middle-class, living in the suburbs.” In which case, the footnote would take this format: Paul Tucker, Monet at Argenteuil, New Haven, 1982,

It is a relatively easy process to learn and follow the formats for citation of references, which are listed later in this guide, although it takes some experience to understand the degree of referencing or acknowledgement necessary in academic writing. To help you understand the requirements, the first essay you write in first-year Art Theory is treated, in part, as a diagnostic test of your understanding of the rigorous requirements of academic writing and research. Your lecturer will carefully highlight any unacceptable examples of plagiarism in your semester one first-year essay and detail remedial strategies. Put bluntly, this means that this is the only essay you submit in which breaches of minor plagiarism will not make the essay inadmissible for a passing grade. Second-year and third-year essays which contain any form of plagiarism will be unacceptable for assessment. This will be regardless of whether you completed first-year studies in this University or not. Lecturers are very familiar with the primary and secondary sources that relate to their specialist  subject and can generally detect plagiarised passages quite easily. However, sometimes dramatic variation in style, vocabulary or expression might suggest plagiarism, even though the source may not be precisely locatable. In detecting plagiarism, a lecturer may use their professional judgement to question the construction of a particular essay so all students are advised to retain their working notes and drafts for every essay they write. These offer some evidential proof that your essay is of your own making and should only be discarded after the marked essay has been returned.

 1.  It is in order to use short, relevant, direct quotations from other authors to expand or support points you make. However these should be used sparingly, and of course must be acknowledged. Remember your essay or argument should present a clear structure not a compilation of quotations you have collected. Generally, no more than two or three brief quotations would be used in an essay of average length (2000 words). 

2.  Direct quotations are indented or enclosed in quotation marks [" "] and the footnote added at the end of the quote. If a direct quotation is longer than three sentences it must be indented. When a quotation is indented, the quotation marks are not necessary and should not be used and the citation note number is added at the end. Do not bracket the source or page numbers of the quote, simply add the footnote number. To acknowledge the source of a phrase, add the footnote at the end of the sentence in which it occurs. If you paraphrase a passage of material, again just add a footnote at the end of the last sentence. It may sometimes be necessary to make it clear as to the extent of your borrowing. For example, your footnote might begin with: “Much of the content of this paragraph is taken from….” or “This phrase is used by….” or “These few sentences summarise the view put forward by…” or “I have developed this idea from…”. As a general rule there is no need for such additions; just cite the source.

3.  Do not use note form. An essay should be a coherent, logical piece of analytical prose.

4.  Avoid the use of personal pronouns such as “I feel…..” or, “in my opinion”. They are not necessary, since it is understood that the essay is an expression of your views.

5.  Do not use vague or ill-informed generalisations such as “all art is about beauty”. Take care with the use of art historical terms such as Impressionism, Realism or Postmodernism. When such terms are capitalised this generally signifies a reference to their art historical meaning. For example, an Impressionist painting would refer to a work by Monet or one of his contemporaries, whereas an impressionistic painting might refer to any painting in the Impressionist manner or style. It is safest to always define what the terms mean in the context of your essay.

6.  Generally colloquialisms have no place in formal writing. Words and expressions such as dodgy, daggy, nerd, nerdy, do-gooder, ratbag or con-artist would not normally be used, except for dramatic effect.

7.  Your essay must be written as near as possible to the stipulated length. Plus or minus divergence of over 200 words may be penalised.

8.  Footnotes or endnotes are not added to the word count in the length of your essay. [note: some word-processing programs, such as WordPerfect, include footnotes and endnotes when listing word count, others, such as Word, do not.]

9.  In formal essay writing, the convention is to refer to artists by their surname; although use the full name when you first mention an artist in your essay. It is also usual to add birth/death dates in brackets after the first full name reference. However do this only for artists not generally known or those who may be confused with another, with a similar name. If you are uncertain, add the dates.

10. Use italics or bold for the titles of paintings and other   

works of art you mention in your essay (alternatively, you may underline for titles, but be consistent). Also take particular care to give enough information to identify the particular work by adding location or collection and date. Adding the date is the minimum requirement. Check with your lecturer if additional information is required as for some studies, such as Museology, you may be required to add all details on medium and dimensions. Titles of works of art are also given maximal capitalisation, e.g.: The Endless Enigma.

11. Discussion between students working on the same topic is useful but do not exchange notes or bibliography with another student. Such collaboration will make both essays unacceptable for assessment, as an essay must be the expression of your own ideas and effort.12.Non-sexist or gender-inclusive language should be used in all your writing and while still accepted, the generic “he” should be avoided. Sexist language is language that discriminates against women, usually by exclusion. All writers should avoid sexist language since many readers find it offensive if not insidiously disempowering.

 

Sexism in published texts

When you need to quote from a published text, especially from another era, and you encounter sexist language there are a number of approaches you can take.
The words in question can be paraphrased, not quoted directly, thus avoiding the sexist expression.

The word sic, enclosed in square brackets, can be inserted immediately after the sexist expression. (sic meaning “thus used”)

In some cases where it is clear that the language is not the work of the author the expression can be left intact.

Avoid the use of man in the generic sense
The word man should be limited to reference to male human beings. When man is used in a generic sense to refer to male and female human beings it not only creates confusion but implies the absence or invisibility of women. In the interests of clarity and equality replace the generic man with one of the following:
humans, humanity, human beings, humankind, man and woman, women and men, people, individuals, human race

  

For compound words where man is used as a prefix or suffix here are alternative words and phrases:

mankind manhood (generic sense) spokesman chairman	humanity, humankind, people adulthood spokesperson, advocate, intermediary chair
draftsman (generic) craftsman	draftsperson craftsperson, artisan, craft worker, technician

Man as a verb

to man the desk

to staff the desk

In idioms and phrases

the man in the street one-man show

the average person, ordinary people solo exhibition, one-person show

  

This document is intended as a guide only, if you are unsure vis-à-vis the suitability of what you are writing you should raise your concerns during a group tutorial, you may well find that you are not the only person experiencing similar problems.

Laurie Haynes  September 2007

     

Ist Year history of photography

Hello everyone,

If you have been directed to this blog by me, then you are one of my students and already know what this is about. If you have stumbled across it by accident, and have an interest in photography then you may find lots of information that may be of interest.

In the first instance the content is about ‘The history of photography’ – ‘how to write an academic essay’- and an exploration of ‘Photography as contemporary art’, but will be expanded to include a veritable feast of photographic ephemera, Images-critical commentary-and academic essays. I welcome your comments, and would like you to view this blog as your own, and help me to develop the site as something all students of photography can use. Laurie Haynes

A chronological history of the major events in photographic history  

11^thC Ð 16^thCThe Camera obscura was developed allowing artists to

                  trace the images it projected by hand 

1558               Giovanni Battista Della Porta illustrated camera

                   principles in his book “Natural Magic” Which

                   theoretically proposed the use of light in ‘automatic

                   drawing’

  1568         Daniello Barbarofitted the camera obscura with

                a  lens and a changeable opening to sharpen the image.  1666         Issac Newton Demonstrated that light is the source of colour. He used a prism to split sunlight into its constituent colours and another to recombine them to make white light. 

 1725         Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered that the change in colour of a mixture of silver nitrate and chalk, in sunlight, was caused by light, not heat. 

1758         Dolland Developed the Achromatic telescope lens. This improved the camera obscura image.  

1801         Thomas Young suggested that the retina at the back of the eye contains three types of colour sensitive receptor, one sensitive to blue light, one to green and one to red. The brain interprets various combinations of these colours to form any other colour in the visible spectrum. 

1802       Thomas Wedgewood is the first person to attempt to record the camera image by means of the action of light  (he is successful in recording the image in organic substances such as the darkening silver nitrate on white leather or paper when exposed however he is unable to find a way to make these images permanent or stop the darkening permanently) 

1816         Joseph Nicephore Niepce made a crude photographic camera from a jewel box and a simple lens and succeeded in making a negative image(from written records, no image survives)  

1817 (approx)       Niepce is the first to successfully fix the camera’s image (based on evidence in letters written by him at that time) interested in improving the process used for lithography (to replace the heavy, cumbersome stones used with metal plates). He was weak at drawing his own pictures he hoped inventing a process to fix camera obscura images would alleviate this need and free him to create images to use for his lithographic device invention work.  He designed his cameras hoping to create an ‘artificial eye’. 

1819         Sir John F Herschel, an astronomer and scientist noticed that the hyposulphite of soda dissolved in silver salts (at this time as a mere observation of the properties of these substances, and although he had not formulated any ideas on how this discovery could be used, he new it was significant)

  1827       Date creation the only example of Niepce’s photographic work, ‘heliography’ as he called it still in existence today (an eight hour exposure of a view of a building and the landscape surrounding it).Niepce visited the painter Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre who was also trying to figure out how to capture the camera image ‘by the spontaneous action of light’.  (As a scenic painter, he was already very familiar with the camera obscura) 

1829       Niepce and Daguerre sign a ten-year agreement to work in partnership developing their new recording medium 

1833       Niepce dies and Daguerre continues his work alone (although Niepce’s heirs are still legally connected to Daguerre as partners they contribute nothing to Daguerre’s research and development)    William Henry Fox Talbot almost accidentally discovers a photographic system working independently in England (he too was frustrated by his inability to draw well and used the camera obscura.  As he imagined how nice it would be if the camera obscura’s images could be ‘imprinted durably and remain fixed on the paper’.  He experiments and creates a negative image using sodium chloride and silver nitrate).   

1835         Talbot describes in his notebook how a positive image might be made from a negative if the ‘paper’ the negative was recorded on was transparent and as fixed (so it was rendered insensitive to the further action of light) 

1837       First Daguerreotypeshared with the world (still exists today, signed and dated in the collection of the Societe Francaise de Photographie in Paris).  These pictures were described as ‘images that paint themselves’ and ‘beautiful drawings’ with a high range of highlights, shadows, and half tones.  ‘A dead spider, taken through the solar microscope, has such fine detail in the drawing that you could study its anatomy with or without a magnifying glass, as in nature Travellers, you will son be able, perhaps at the cost of some hundreds of francs, to acquire the apparatus invented by M. Daguerre and be able to bring back to France the most beautiful monuments and scenes of the whole world…’ (Gazette de France January 6 1839).  The Daguerreotype process is kept secret.  Talbot is astonished to hear about the Daguerreotype process created for the same purpose as his during approximately the same time period. 

1839         Talbot shared samples of his work with the Royal Institute in London (pushed to do so at this time because of the Daguerreotypes), and he too keeps his process secret. 

1840         First lens designed specifically for photographic purposes by Petzval  

 January    Herschel (while trying to figure out what Talbot and Daguerre’s secret processes might be, knowing they required sensitive paper, a perfect camera, and a ‘means of arresting the further action’ successfully fixes sensitised paper using his 1819 discovery of hyposulphite of soda dissolved in silver salts.  (This chemical is still used today called sodium thiosulfate or ‘hypo’) 

February   Herschel shares this technique with Talbot.  Once published, Daguerre began using it too, and almost all subsequent photographic processes rely on this discovery. Herschel coins the term ‘photography’ (replacing Talbot’s ‘photogenic drawing) and ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ (replacing Talbot’s ‘reversed copy’ and ‘re-reversed copy’). 

April        Ackerman & Co., (the leading print seller and purveyor of ‘Colours and Requisites for Drawing’ advertised a ‘Photogenic Drawing Box’ (was not called a camera) complete with chemicals for sensitising paper and an instruction booklet for making prints.                Magazine of Science published copies of 3 ‘photogenic drawings made on wood blocks using Talbot’s process and then carved out by hand (this technique that eliminated the need for a skilled draftsman to draw on the blocks did not go into wide use until the 1860Õs). 

 May         Mungo Ponton(Scottish) demonstrated how he used potassium bichromate to sensitise his papers (instead of silver salt which was more expensive) and the ability to control the sensitivity of the paper according to how much of the chemical was mixed with water before being spread on the paper. 

August      A bill was passed in France to make the technical details of Daguerre’s process public in France.  Official, genuine ‘Daguerreotype apparatuses’ went on sale internationally (but Daguerre applied for and got a patent for his process in England.                Other claimants (from countries around the world) scrambled to prove they too had made independent photographic discoveries, saying theirs pre-dated Daguerre’s and Talbot’s:               

Hercules Florence (a Frenchman living in Brazil) claimed he had made photographics with a camera and by contact printing as early as 1832 and provided notebooks from 1833 to 1837, which clearly documented his technique and had independently used the word ‘photographie’ to describe what he had done.               

Hans Thoger Winther (a Norwegian lawyer, proprietor of a lithographic printing shop, and book publisher) claimed he had the idea of fixing camera images as early as 1826 and had succeeded in making direct positives before the disclosure of Daguerre’s process  

 Hippolyte Bayard exhibited 30 photos in Paris on July 14 1839 (using silver chloride paper, light, potassium iodide, and camera exposure) but his exhibition was completely overlooked as everyone was only paying attention to the work of Daguerre, and Bayard received no government support or fame as Daguerre had.  The length of exposure was too long for natural portraits, and the eyes of the subject had to be kept closed in order for them to be still enough for ten to twenty minutes in bright sunlight (the time and amount of light needed for exposure. Or bright sunlight was reflected into the faces of the subjects for eight minutes, blinding them and causing tears to trickle down their cheeks ‘heroics were demanded’ of the subject of portraits.  By the end of 1840 a lens 22x faster than the original was created (f 3.6 instead of f 16), the light sensitivity of the plates was increased dramatically (4 minute exposures became 25 second exposures), the tones of of the daguerreotype were enriched by gilding the plate.  Portrait studios opened everywhere following these developments. Almost anyone could learn how to take daguerreotypes and set up a business within two weeks of technical training and practice.  In America, many of the tedious preparation rituals were mechanized using machines to speed up and make the process more convenient 

1841         Talbot announced an improvement in his photogenic drawing process: the Calotype (beautiful picture), which developed a latent image (instead of waiting for the image to appear on the sensitised surface during exposure). It created negatives which were then used to make positives. He patented this on Feb 8 1841  The first stereographs (stereo vision photographs) were exhibited at the Royal Academy of Science in Brussels 

1843         Talbot set up a photo-finishing lab for Calotype negatives in Reading, England   

David Octavious Hill used the Calotype to aid in his portrait painting

1840-1844     114 Travel views were issued in Paris.  Daguerreotypes taken across Europe, the Middle East, and America were traced and transferred to copper plates for printing (with figures of people drawn in as the process took needed so much time for exposure that people did not appear in street scenes and this distressed the public looking at the pictures). 

1850         Levi L. Hill publicly announced his success in fixing the colours of nature on daguerreotype plates, however he would not release his secret to the public, not even for $100,000.  Later, it was discovered he had not properly figured out how to achieve colour, and from time to time, other daguerreotypists would find they had accidentally somehow recorded colour images as well, but most faded. 

 1851         Frederick Scott Archer invented a new process (unpatented thus making it free for anyone to take photographs) allowed negatives to be made using glass coated with silver salts and collodion.                  These plates could be prepared up to months ahead of shooting (unlike earlier processes which had to be prepared on the spot and used immediately), however they were not very ‘fast’ (light sensitive) and required 3 hour exposures in bright light at f 72 until Felice Beato reduced the time to four seconds using gallic acid on the plates. 

1852       Talbot relaxed his controlling grip on the Calotype (re: both amateur and professional photographers having to pay him £100- £150 a year license fee to use his process).  From then on, he only retained control over professionals taking photos for profit                Talbot filed a lawsuit re: the collodion process being an infringement of his process (the same development chemical was used) against a professional photographer who had not paid him a license fee.  He lost the lawsuit although he was awarded the status as the first and true inventor of the Calotype process 

1853         The Photographic Society of London (later the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain) was founded for amateur and professional photographers who were interested in shooting fine art images.  Most of these images were meant to be allegories, and photographers found inspiration in paintings (while some painters used photographs of models for their paintings).  Large format prints were made when the image was printed from many negatives carefully masked together.   Landscapes were very hard to do because the latitude of the film was so limited and the film itself was only sensitive to the blue part of the spectrum (orthochromatic). 

1854         ‘Ambrotype’ prints (name coined), ‘tin type’ wet plate processes gain popularity (paralleling the daguerreotypes),   Carte-de-visite technique (3^rdgeneration) collodion photo deals death blow to daguerreotype images, leads to the birth of the family photo album (these prints were quite small, full figure, and not much attention was paid to aesthetics, lighting, posing, etc.).    The more serious photographers worked in large format photography while the amateurs used very small formats 

1855         People of almost all social classes could afford to have their daguerreotype portraits recorded ‘ not just the rich.  State of Massachusetts’s statistic: 403,626 daguerreotypes had been taken in that year (June 1 1854 – June 1 1855).  Daguerreotypes were much more popular overall in the U.S. than Europe and declined in use later.

New York Gallery (studio) boasted a daily production of 300-1000 daguerreotype portraits (assembly line type factories were set up where the photographers never left the cameras, and a steady stream of people would sit down, be recorded, and then collect their photo 15 minutes later)  In America, as competition increased with more and more daguerreotype ‘galleries’ or studios opening up, the price of having one’s daguerreotype taken dropped dramatically in a very short time e.g. from $2.50 for a small one to as low as $0.12 each or converted to 2005 values, from approx $60.00 for a 1/8 size print to $2.50) although most of these were cheap and unsatisfactory in quality and customers were frequently disappointed                Photography was the ‘mirror with a memory’ by Oliver Wendell Holmes (American Physician, man of letters and amateur daguerreotype photographer)  Family photos were especially in demand due to the very high mortality rate of children, and many photos were taken of people just after they died to immortalize them. ‘Secure the shadow ere the substance fade/Let Nature imitate what Nature made’ was the couplet used extensively to advertise this service  The controversy over image retouching begins when Franz Hanfstaengle (leading portrait photographer of Germany) showed a re-touched negative with a print made from it before re-touching.  Roger Fenton shot the Crimean war, the world’s first ever war photographs 

1856         The decline of the Daguerreotype: 606 images were displayed in the annual Photographic Society of London exhibition, but only 3 were Daguerreotypes.  (They were too expensive, fragile, could not be readily duplicated)               

Adolphe Louis Poitevin won Honore d’Albert, Duc de Luyes contests re: processes to create a permanent photographic print that wouldn’t fade (carbon print) and a way to print photographs using printer’s ink (collotype print)               

Nadar (a leading large format portraitist who previously a second rate painter who was one of the first to use electric light to illuminate his portraits and became one of the most important photographers of his day) wrote: ‘Photography is’ as science that attracted the greatest intellects, an art that excites the most astute minds and one that can be practiced by an imbecile’’ photographic theory can be taught in an hour, the basic technique in a day.  But what cannot be taught is the feeling for light nor can one be taught how to grasp the personality of the sitter (re: producing an intimate likeness as opposed to a banal portrait).The top portrait photographs were produced by teams (who worked under the umbrella name of the studio), not individuals.  The name of the studio became the trademark of the photo. The photographer was more like a film director or modern art director of commercial photos leading the team with his vision while a cameraman operated the camera (strictly as a technician?), and others were responsible for painting the backdrops, dressing the set, processing the negative, making the prints, re-touching them, etc. 

1857         600 photographic prints displayed at the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester, affirming photography’s growing importance in the art world 

1858         Fading Away by Henry Peach Robinson a very controversial fine art photo, an acted out scene depicting a girl who was made to look ‘near death’ surrounded by her family was deemed to be in poor taste.  The scene was felt to be in poor taste because it was a photograph and thus assumed to be literally depicting reality (it would not have been read this way as a painting)               

First Aerial photograph recorded by Nadar from a balloon 

1859         The French Society of Photography finally succeeded in convincing the Ministry of Fine Arts to allow them to have an exhibition at the Palace of the Champs Elysees at the time of the annual painting Salon. It was still seen by art critics however as the ‘servant’ of the sciences and arts like printing or short-hand. The First photographs in which natural action (e.g. strollers on a street) was captured with regular assurance (meaning easily on a regular basis instead of rarely to never) 

1861         Brady began shooting his famous Civil War photos (at much personal risk), which inspired many others to start shooting this war (and subsequent wars)                J

ames Clerk Maxwell reproduced a colored ribbon by the three colour additive process. 

1863       Previous theories of man’s stride and positioning while walking used in drawing and painting and science turned upside down by photographic evidence of how things really were when Oliver Wendell Holmes examined streetscapes with frozen figures mid-stride (all in various stages of walking) in them             

1864       The profession ‘daguerreotypist’ no longer appeared in the San Francisco business directories.  The best photographers in America were former daguerreotypists.               

Technology advanced to allow for shooting of dry plates.  They also no longer needed to be shot immediately on the spot.  This allowed them to be manufactured (photographers no longer needed to make their own plates) and sold.Ready-sensitised printing papers released almost simultaneously with manufactured dry plates.  1866         Hugo Adolph Steinheil (Munich) and John Henry Dallmeyer (London) independently and simultaneously developed almost identical lenses with corrected spherical aberration (a problem all previous lenses had throwing the corners out focus, loss of definition), and less astigmatism. Dallmeyer’s ‘Rapid Rectilinear’ lens became a generic name for all lenses of this type until the anastigmatic replaced it in 1893               

 Antony Samuel Adam-Salomon (sculpture turned top portrait photographer) who’s work inspires Alphonese de Lamartine  (who once called photography ‘a plagiarism of nature’) confessed:                After admiring the portraits caught in a burst of sunlight by Adam Salomon, the sensitive sculptor who has given up painting, we no longer claim that photography is a trade, it is an art, it is more than an art, it is a solar phenomenon, where the artist collaborates with the sun.Retouching becomes more and more common as sitters in portraits want blemishes hidden, features softened, wrinkles smoothed away etc. Specialists in publicity portraits of actors emerged as the demand for this type of image increased, and actors posed ‘in character’ and ‘on set’ for these images. Exposures were previously done by removing a lens cap from in front of the camera. Shorter exposures meant the need for very precise shutters that could expose for fractions of a second.  

 1871         Paris police begin using photographs as a way to record evidence at crime scenes Eadweard Muybridge’s famous photographs showing how a horse really galloped further proves the inadequacy of the human vision when it comes to analysing moving things 

1876       Vero Charles Driffield and Ferdinand Hurter work to do away with ‘rules of thumb’ re: plate sensitivity for light and exposure times, and develop a means scientifically rating the density of the plate (how much sensitive emulsion was on it) and in-turn what the ideal exposures would be (previously one had to guess and hope for the best).  

1854         ‘Ambrotype’ prints (name coined), ‘tin type’ wet plate processes gain popularity (paralleling the daguerreotypes),   Carte-de-visite technique (3^rdgeneration) collodion photo deals deathblow to daguerreotype images, leads to the birth of the family photo album (these prints were quite small, full figure, and not much attention was paid to aesthetics, lighting, posing, etc.).    The more serious photographers worked in large format photography while the amateurs used very small formats 

1869         Charles Piazzi Smyth exhibited prints (enlargements from negatives) taken over the past decade to the Edinburgh Photographic Society: 8X10 prints using ‘poor man’s negatives.  His prints retained an amazing clarity and amount of detail.  They also enabled cropping both to recompose the subject and to not be restricted to the standard sizes and shapes of negatives etc.  Beginners could also easily improve the composition of their prints (previously it was unthinkable to mask off any part of the image) 

1878         Animated photos start to be viewed in the zoetrope and similar devices (animations using successive images or drawings based on or inspired by Muybridge’s work)                Photographs (animals and especially the human figure in motion doing various things) taken for artists (painters etc.) to use as reference. Many of these photos shocked the world (artists in particular). 

1879         Gelatin emulsions went into widespread use -no smell, plates did not have to be made by the photographers- no longer a need for a portable darkroom in the field- plates held their light sensitivity for months and no longer had to be developed immediately.                Paper sensitive enough to be exposed successfully using an electric light bulb were created which in-turn allowed for enlargement of negatives and bulk printing of negatives in quantities never before realized 

1880’s      Hand cameras (that did not require a tripod) became widely available. They were mass- produced and there was a bewildering variety to choose from.  They dramatically increased the potential output of images of photographers. The halftone plate was invented and made possible and revolutionized the pictorial magazines.  Photographs could be reproduced very economically   Dry plates and flexible film sensitive to all colours of the spectrum (panchromatic instead of must orthochromatic) were becoming available.  Photography was ‘fast’, speedy compared to the illustrative techniques of the past.  The old techniques are surpassed as much by todays as the stagecoach by the railroad. 

1888         The most famous early hand camera, the ‘Kodak’ is invented and manufactured by George Eastman (a box camera that used roll film long enough for 100 circular exposures.  Initially paper coated in light sensitive gelatin, the paper stripped from the base after processing) ‘You click the button we do the rest’. (The cameras were sold for $25 including processing and printing of all good photos)                Casual use of cameras by untrained photographers became widespread.  Photography was brought into the reach of all human beings, and its power to share one’s travels even years after the fact and experiences was incomparable to anything that had previously existed. The term ‘Snapshots’ was born (from an expression used by hunters to describe shooting a firearm from the hip without taking careful aim)                 

Jacob A. Riis’s photos of the Lower East Side published in the New York Sun exposed the poverty and misery there. He was one of the first photographers to use a ‘flash’ technology to illuminate his subjects.               

First issue of National Geographic published and sent to 200 charter members of the society 

1889         Documentary photography (as a conscious photographic pursuit) can be said to have been born when The British Journal of Photography urged the formation of a vast archive of photographs ‘containing a record as complete as could be made’. Of the present state of the world 

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1890’s      Alfred Stieglitz’s pictorial photography started up the American pictorial movement and his influence as the vice president of the newly formed Camera Club of New York (working to push photography in America to artistic heights etc. like in Europe) 

 1890         Illustrated Americanthe first picture magazine deliberately planned to use photographs goes to press in February. This is possible because of the perfection of the halftone printing process in the latter 1880Õs 

1891         Transparent film on a clear base of nitrocellulose was introduced (eliminated the need for paper negatives, and eventually, glass negatives) Gabriel Lippmann discovers a way to make direct positive colour photographs, however the process was not very practical and is now obsolete.             

1892         Julies Carpentier (who built the Cinematographe for the Lumieres) designed the Photo-Jumelle twin lens reflex camera.  It was a precision camera with fixed focus lenses, built to exacting specs.  It had a tolerance of 1/100mm (a degree of precision unheard of in the camera industry of the day).  This camera was widely imitated and became a classic camera type.                This was the first hand camera made for artists who wanted more creative control over their pictures (the consumer box camera allowed almost none).    Photographers were now free to take ‘action shots’ previously impossible with view cameras.     Parallax issues prompted the invention of the single lens reflex camera in the latter part of the decade. Halftone printing processes evolved enabling photojournalism to be born (previously, photos printed via handmade wood engravings of their content; the actual photos could not be reproduced) 

1895         Lumiere Brothers successfully project the first motion picture film as a ‘magic lantern’ type presentation (followed by Edison in America and the explosion of the motion picture film medium)

  1896         The first X-Ray photo is taken when Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen noticed that a bit of barium platinocyanide emitted a fluorescent glow. He then laid a photographic plate behind his wife’s hand. Previously, physicians were unable to look inside a person’s body without making an incision. Roentgen was the recipient of the first Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901 

 1900’s     Painters were freed from the need to produce representational pictures (thus cubism and abstract art were born), and now ‘straight photography’ was being born (photographs meant to look like photographs and not emulate paintings or drawings, that are not re-touched etc. going back to the early daguerreotype days).  Acceptance of ‘straight’ photography as an art form was a huge step. Stieglitz moved on to create ‘straight photographs’

Lewis W. Hine begins working on his remarkable series of photographs of immigrants arriving in New York’s Elllis Island and into the tenements and sweatshops where they lived and worked.  As a sociologist, the camera was a powerful tool for his research and communication with others.  He essentially followed in Riis’s footsteps, and realized the power of the subjectivity of his photographs.                He photographed children working in factories showing their size relative to the machines.  These images were the first to be labelled a photo story where the photographs were not secondary to or illustrative of the writer’s text; they were of equal importance. 

1900         The Browning (Brownie) is the first mass marketed camera             

1903         The American Graflex SLR camera (followed by the British Soho Reflex in 1906) became the standard hand camera of pictorial photographers for the first two decades of the century. 

1907         Stieglitz’s The Steerage (famous photo) created not by waiting endlessly for the right moment, but by recognizing a moment and grabbing it (the beginnings of what later became ‘decisive moment’ photography).  The subjects were able to show themselves in their own substance or personality as revealed by the play of light and shade around them (i.e. not presented in a contrived ‘interpretation’ on the part of the photographer) 

1910’s     Scientific photography influences painting e.g. Duchamp’s famous Nude Descending a Staircasewas inspired by the multiple exposure high speed photographs taken by Etienne Jules Marey for his physiological studies.  Futurists were also very influenced by this type of photography. 

1910         August Sander (a German professional portrait photographer) began photographing people of all social classes and professions (a beginning of documentary portraiture) with the aim of creating a ‘social atlas’. 

1911         Edward Steichen began taking fashion photographs for Art et Decoration 

1913         Stieglitz waxed his prints for a ‘glossy surface’, something that was earlier considered to be ‘unartistic’. 

Alvin Langdon Coburn starts shooting abstract photos (strange perspectives used e.g. bird’s eye views looking straight down from many feet up), and then created an optical devise based on the kaleidoscope to create his images               

Vogue magazine began publishing fashion photographs by Baron  Andolphe de Meyer.  He founded a style in which the elegance of fashions is displayed with photographic feeling for textures. 

 1915         Andrew Kertesz was one of the first photographers to start taking sensitive, un-posed photographs of people in their surroundings 

1916       Pictorial Photographers of America founded 

1918         Christian Schad’s Dadaist abstractions made photographically without a camera 

1920Õs     Stieglitz’s ‘equivalent’s are the first photographic abstraction photos (mostly of the sky and clouds, also a meadow glistening with raindrops, a woman’s hands pressed palm to palm between her knees).  The camera is able to ‘seize’ upon the familiar’ and endow it with new meanings, with special significance, with the imprint of a personality.  Photographers began to experiment with ‘canted angles’ and playing with perspective looking up and down at buildings or using strange angles in general to record scenes (ones we would normally never view the world from)Double exposures also experimented with (e.g. Alexander Rodchenko’s Portrait of Alexander 1924) Experimentation with the negative image (printed using ‘solarization’ to create an ‘edge reversal’ effect.  The unreality of the negative throws emphasis upon shapes and contours not usually seen. Texture is created in the normally transparent gelatin emulsion of the film but subjecting it to rapid temperature changes causing reticulation, a net like structure, or the gelatin is melted so the image droops and sags.  Photographs are pasted together to form striking collages (coined from the French verb coller meaning ‘to glue’.).  During the Third Reich, Heartfield used collage (photomontage) to make biting political statements. Photographs and text started being used together extensively in magazines (especially initially in Germany).  In this decade and the 1930Õs, the way photographs and text were integrated with each other came to be called photojournalism. The miniature cameras with high-speed lenses were designed to create images that brought the viewer into the scene. 

1921       Man Ray (an American Painter in Paris) and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (a Hungarian painter working in Berlin) begin to create their rayographs and photograms 

1923         Edward Steichen joined the staff of Conde Naste.  He shot fashion photographs and portraits of celebrities that were published regularly in Vogue and Vanity Fair. 

1924         The Ernox(the Ermanox) camera with an incredibly fast lens of f.2 came onto the market allowing widespread ‘existing light’ photography.  Lens speeds soon increased to f 1.5 and shutter speeds on these cameras were as fast as 1/1000 of a second   First Leica put on the market with a 50mm f3.5 lens.  Shortly afterward a model that allowed the lens to be easily changed while shooting 

1925         The flashbulbis patented by Paul Vierkotter to replace flash powder (noisy and smoky stuff) 

1926         National Geographic staff photographer Charles Martin and scientist W.H. Longley make first natural-colour underwater pictures. 

 1928         Erich Salomon (of Berlin) is the first to capitalize on this ‘miraculous’ camera (the Leica) by using it to capture natural, un-posed candid photographs (the term coined by an English editor) of important dignitaries and statesmen without the distraction and inconvenience of a blinding flash and acrid smoke.  Previously, all portraits of this type had been posed. 

1929        Rollieflex introduced.  It used larger film than the Leica with 12 2.25Ó square exposures on each roll.  It was a smaller and more compact revival of the twin lens reflex camera of the 1890Õs

  The flashbulb is perfected by J. Ostermeier.  It is almost immediately adopted by photojournalists 

1930’s     Ansel Adams (arguably the greatest ‘straight photographer’ of all time, or at least its greatest pioneer) begins to devote all his time to photography. His prints were made to be reproduced using the halftone process  Adams invents the ‘zone system’ for calculating exposures, and to master the photographic medium through the interrelation of the sensitivity of the negative material, the amount of exposure, the brightness of the subject, and development variables chosen. This (combined with the use of a light meter) eliminates guesswork on the part of the photographer re: exposures. 

Weegee (New York news photographer) used flash photography to create images that reach into the field of social caricature.               

Bernice Abbot begins setting out to capture portraits of New York City (its spirit, its essence). The ‘darkness’ of the Depression greatly influenced the work of artists. ‘Documentary’ motion picture filmmaking became common: contrasting entertainment productions, these films were rooted in real problems and real situations with real participants.  It was vehemently defended as ‘not art’ because art was thought to be something beautiful. Documentary was ‘anti-aesthetic’                Photographers started using their still cameras to record the world in a similar way. 

Stefan Lorant pioneered the photo essay in European picture magazines, and later in America   ‘A sign photographed as an object carries more impact than the literal transcription of the words it bears‘. Ð Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography on the topic of Documentary photography.

The portrait studio (in a fixed location) becomes obsolete and photographers (including Yosef Karsh) travel with their lights and large format cameras to shoot portraits on location in the homes and offices etc. of their subjects.

  1930         Melville Bell Grosvenor makes first published natural-colour aerial photographs for National Geographic 

1931 Hine photographed the construction of the Empire State Building risking his own life, documenting the workers risking their lives.

 

1932 Zeiss Ikon released the Contaxcamera to compete with the Leica. It was a rangefinder with through the viewfinder focusing. 

  Photojournalists were the first to widely use these cameras.  They freed the photographer even further re: recording strange angles and segments of the flow of life  The first photoelectric cell light meter is introduced Henri Cartier-Bressonbuys his first Leica 

1933         Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work was first shown in the Julien Levy Gallery in NYC. It was initially called ‘antigraphic photography’.  They were so spontaneous they seemed accidental.  He showed the ‘unreality of reality’.  He was able to capture the split second when the subject revealed itself most fleetingly but deeply  The great early period of European photojournalism collapsed under Hitler.   

1934       Fuji Photo Film founded. 

1935         The U.S. government turned to documentary photographers for help fighting the Depression.  The Farm Security Administration enlisted photographers to document their activities and the lives and situations of the dust bowl farmers. 

 Walker Evans is one of the first photographers to be hired for this purpose. 

Dorothea Lange followed, moved by the poverty and breadlines she saw outside her San Francisco studio.  These images alerted the FSA to her skills and landed her an invitation to join the project. 

 1936       The first issue of  Life Magazine appears on newsstands (a publication designed to ‘harness the optical consciousness of our time’). This magazine differed from past photography magazines in how the photos were carefully chosen and sequenced by the editors it was about the ‘mind guided camera’.  Issues are published weekly The most dramatic and telling photographs of World War II were made by magazine photographers or under their influence. 

Life  ran a school for army photographers and sent its own photographers to the front.               

Kodachrome, the first multi-layered colour film is developed by Kodak 

 1937         Margaret Bourek-White of time magazine is one of the first photographers to make use of the multiple sync flash technique.  Photographers had true and complete control over the lighting in their shots for the first time (to sculpt their subjects or only illuminate certain things or generate enough light for comfortable, posed photographs).                 

The first major disaster was captured by photography as it happened: The Hindenberg Zeppelin was photographed as it burst into flames, photos that are still very moving and memorable today.  

Chester Carlson invents “electron photography,” which later comes to be known as xerography, or simply photocopying. 

1938         Electronic flash technology is born (replacing flashbulbs that can only be used once) when Harold E. Edgerton of MIT invented the gas filled tube.  Images recorded with these ‘strobes’ forever fixed image forms never detected by unaided human eye (e.g. Edgerton’s A Drum Majorette at the Belmont, Massachusetts, High School Twirling a Baton 1948) Fuji is manufacturing cameras and lenses (in addition to film) 

1941         Kodacolor negative film introduced 

1945       Nikon FSLR introduced followed by the Contax S SLR                First photo of an atomic mushroom cloud released to the public by the US Air Force. Nothing like it had ever been seen before.  It was shocking because of the broader perspective of the damage inflicted by the war. 

1946         Zoomar introduces the zoom lens, the invention of American Frank Back. 

1947         Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and David Seymour start the photographer-owned Magnum picture agency 

1948         Hasselblad offers the first medium format SLR camera                Pentax in Japan introduces the automatic diaphragm                (Post WWII)  

1949         East German Zeiss develops the Contax S, first SLR with an unreversed image in a pentaprism viewfinder 

1950’s     Richard Avedon shoots his trademark portraits of people with stark white backgrounds   

Television changes the way information is transmitted. Documentary (films & photography) begins to lose its impetus in an organizational sense and becomes muddled and merged with photojournalism, especially the factual reports broadcast by television.  ‘Realistic’, ‘historical’ and ‘factual’ are terms used to substitute for documentary, but doc is about a deeply subjective & respectful interpretation. 

1951         David Douglas Duncan’s book this is War! Containing images of the Korean War was published. 

1953       (December) First issue of Playboymagazine published (undated because Heffner never believed he’d be allowed to publish another). Never before had nude pictures been successfully sent through the mail as a mainstream commercial venture. The Marilyn Monroe photos, which appeared in playboy’s first issue, had existed long before Heffner got his hands on them, but nobody had dared challenge the powerful U.S. post office and its anti-obscenity regulations. 

1954         Eastman introduces the first high speed Tri-X film                First issue of Sports Illustrated appears on news-stands in August 

1955         Robert Frank travels the US on a Guggenheim scholarship to photograph post-war America and Americans.  With a 35mm camera he documents outings, parades, automobiles, filling stations, billboards, roadside bars, the lonely desert highway. The images are bleak, showing very little to celebrate.  They are loose and contrast with the balanced and elegant images of Cartier-Bresson. Frank wanted to create images that reflected stark realism however unpleasant or uncommon. 

1957         Lennart Nilsson begins using an endoscope to photograph the inside of the human body.  His most provocative image was the first ever photograph of a human foetus in the womb. At first, no one was able to believe this image was a real photograph.  Once proven and published in life magazine it becomes the image of choice for ‘pro-lifers’ in the abortion debate. 

1959         Nikon F introduced- Colour photographs begin to regularly appear on the cover of National Geographic

 © Laurence Haynes 2007- This work may be reproduced  for research or other academic purposes on the proviso that the author is refererenced/ credited. All other usage is restricted under the terms of the 1987 copywrite act   

Level Two

 

Photography as contemporary art

 Laurie Haynes   

From the point of inception the key debate surrounding photography is its position in the lexicon of Art practice. 

The writer/ philosopher Baudelaire conceded photography only one legitimate function: recording what might otherwise be lost to the human eye due to the ephemeral moment of viewing. Photography’s ability to hold that moment in detail that could be revisited after the event, serves the sciences and not Art. The direct quote is: if only you will lie down and behave dear photography. ‘If you will act as handmaiden to the arts and science, you will deserve our thanks and applause’.

Of course photography could not be restrained in this way, instead of ‘keeping its place’ photography has gone forward to literally reshape and reinvent, if not the world in which we live , at least our perception of it.

Our exposure to photography either as subject or maker has conditioned us to the point that at virtually any point in time or place we turn our rehearsed faces to the lens; the apparent objectification giving validity to our existence. This validity, this rendering, is of course under critical scrutiny, as much an abstraction as a cubist portrait. Context removed, little more than a brief moment of ‘performance’, (what the erotic photographer Bob Carlos Clark termed ‘a smug little trick’)

yet the fact that that moment is located in a real time and place serves to imbed some notion of truth to the photograph.

 Now Photographic truth is a subject that is constantly debated, and will be examined in this lecture  series. On some level of either conscious or sub-conscious thought each one of us has the echo of ‘the camera never lies’ resonating within us; which in turn can serve to transform the banal sometimes into the significant. Here lies the unshakable strength of the photographic image.

The photograph shares a birth right with the realist school of painting. The nineteenth century was also the century in which the realist painters Carot And Courbet strived to capture the exact reproduction of what the eye recollected.

Their preoccupation-to focus on the exact instant or sight-was  abducted forever by the instantaneous contingencies captured so easily by the camera. Fox Talbot, coined the term ‘Photogenic drawing’ and his first published volume of images was title ‘ The pencil of nature’  and was derived almost entirely (in subject matter and style) on established painterly conventions, but in terms of contingent realism that no painter could ever replicate.

Art photography was born.

I have to move forward quickly now stopping on my way to note significant changes in practice.  1857 saw the birth of the pictorialist school and this statement by Henry peach Robinson serves to illustrate the narrowing of the division between artist and photographer.

  ‘Any dodge, trick, any configuration of any kind is open to the photographers use… It is the photographers duty to avoid the mean, the bare, and the ugly, and aim to…. Correct the unpicturesque…. A great deal can be done and very beautiful pictures made, by a mixture of the real and the artificial’ Pictorial effect in Photography- Henry peach Robinson. 

The construction of images, unreal, but playing on the real, an artist positioning of the ‘vision’ of the maker, replicating the skill of painter.. Robinson worked in a time when the prevailing style of the arts was essentially romantic. A Polish critic announced

‘Photographers do not copy nature now, they interpret it’  

collectively they positioned themselves on higher ground’ than the realist painters, becoming more refined; their interpretation becoming more academic than Delacrois or Ingres. The first real breakthrough came at the hand and eye of an English eccentric. Julia Margaret Cameron. Obsessed with portraying the ‘inner man’ she ignored the techniques that where currently ‘a la mode’ and returned to long exposures (20 Minutes) that where agonising for the sitter; but served to strip away the artifice of performance. Techniques used sixty years later by Both Penn and Avedon to ‘get inside’ the subject.

From these beginnings Art Photography was born. Art by its very nature is contextualised by the economic-social-political climate of making, photography shares this heritage, but perhaps is more overtly effected by the ever shifting social climate.

The fundamental mechanism for viewing a photograph is ‘truth to appearance’. The viewer, that is you and I, bring to the photograph a pre-history of actual and a priori experience that conditions our response to the image. It is this factor above all else that enables the ‘Art photograph’ to play with visual and emotional perception.

 Alfred Stieglitz, who I consider to be the Father of ‘Modern Art photography’ came to Europe From America to study engineering, and whilst there bought a hand held camera, and set about capturing the ‘Life’ on the streets. On his return to the States

(1917) he embarked on a deliberate series of un-pictorial studies of a city in the midst of, snowstorms. Driving rain, bad light and shadows. He tracked the marks of man, and took these ‘impressions’ to a public unused to images of this type.

 He founded a magazine, and Gallery, the legendary ‘219’( its address on fifth avenue) and  set photography on the map as Fine, high Art, the brother of both cubism and surrealism.

(expand) For thirty years Stieglitz led a growing brotherhood of Art Photographers. The American school fundamentally different from its European counterpart( explain why), but also indelibly linked by a strand of enquiry that first and foremost examined the human condition. By the outbreak of the second world war Photography occupied an unassailable position as a medium of artistic expression, But the almost exponentional change of social status between 1836 and 1936, was nothing compared with what was to come over the next ten years.

The global nature of WW2 changed forever the strict delineation of class and status as two generation of men went to war, leaving a vacuum in the home nations that had to be filled. Women left the home and rose to the challenge forever undoing a social status quo. Life became focussed on mortality, and in so doing served to loosen moral ties and boundaries. In the midst of war and death people became aware of a new freedom, a resilience, a joy d’Vivre, that caused them to celebrate life. Photography went through a process of division, a tool of propaganda, that served to inform and misinform in the same breath. But above all render the horrific details of modern warfare forever indelible for the surviving generations.

This breaking of the final taboo, the pictorial rendition of the arena of death and destruction starting a process of de-sensitisation that continues unabated to this day. Gloves off, photography, became the key mode of representation. In the post war era virtually every aspect of life in western society became the focus for the lens. Advertising was born, and the pre-war fascination with the moving image, scaled new heights.

Now in ascendance as the dominant mode of representation, The lens strategically ate away at the spoken and written word; film and photography were central as the visual signposts of a new prosperous society, where everything and anything was achievable.

European and American photography and film making developed in tandem, like fraternal twins, sharing the same linage, but being markedly different in appearance. Europe the first born, being on the surface the quieter of the two, intellectual, reasoned, self-questioning, somehow reflecting the trauma of the war years, containing imbedded within the myth of peace.

America the second born, brash, confident, but essentially a society isolated from the reality of both the horror of war and the agony of rebuilding a shattered society. Adopting the role of hedonist. From this re-birth this new beginning, the language of representation became in some ways almost diametrically opposed. The more commercially advanced America, already embracing a burgeoning commercial use of the ‘Image’ began to explore the yet as unnamed mechanisms of ‘Popular culture’.

The booming economy of post-war America is still haunted with the wraith like twin spectres of the depression years and the War which remain on some level indelibly fixed in the consciousness of the nation, that said images show apeople diving headlong into the waters of hedonism. The pursuit of ‘leisure time’ becoming almost a national obsession (in the states above the Mason–Dixon line). The camera in turn was focussed on these events, on a society freed from economic shackles, celebrating life. One man does not shair this view, Robert Frank, His essays show an America of desolate highways, and broken lives, as if echoing the work of his European counterparts. Europe by contrast was still reeling from the impact of war…The economy in tatters, struggling with massive rebuilding and subsequent debt. A collective society still in mourning with a misdirected society of traumatised and displaced individuals forced to look inward. Yes there were celebrations at the end of hostilities, yes people danced in the streets, hugging strangers. But this euphoria was soon replaced with the stark reality of loss-poverty-the daily grind. As a post war baby I cannot comment on the reality of the situation, but life in black & white, with the colour stripped away by adverse circumstance, was mirrored in the imagery of the moment. The gritty ‘realist’ images of nations coming to terms with the loss of a generation. The contrast with post war America could not be more stark. But in that dark hour the camera turned unwaveringly toward recording the human condition. Apparently free of the strings of political motive it moved unfettered amongst the people of Europe and did find small flames of hope, love, and charity.

The post war photography of Robert Doisneau perhaps best captures the almost hidden beauty of these times.

 

 © Laurence Haynes 2007- This work may be reproduced  for research or other academic purposes on the proviso that the author is refererenced/ credited. Al other usage is restricted under the terms of the 1987 copywrite act   

More To Come…