Photography as Contemporary Art – Tutorial Times

Apologies for late posting – problems with internet access…

Photography as Contemporary Art: Laurie Haynes

Tutorial Times for Tuesday October 30th

4.00pm

Laura Bull  

Lisa Barnett

Nick Buxton

Judith Cliff

Vicky Edmondson

Will Farnsworth

Emma Hamilton

4.40pm

Gemma Haslop

Jenna Hassell

Bernard Hunt

Zoe James

Dulcy Lott

Debra Moss

Lee Northam

5.20pm

Jack Oliver

Faye Parker

Sharon Parker

Charles Perham

Ben Phillips

Steffanie Richardson

6pm

Katie Rist

Annie Smith

Laura Smith

Tom Stephenson

Katie Sutton

Helen Wills

                                                                                                       

         

Essay Topics: Yr 1- Essay & Review topics: Yr 2

Year one History of Photography: You essay topics are as follows:

Essay One: Social documentary Photography: 1500 words.

Using the lecture as a foundation for continuing exploration, write 1500 words on the importance of the photographic image as a point of reference in  social documentary. I am interested in reading ‘First person essays that position your personal viewpoint. Where possible your this viewpoint should be compared/contrasted with similar or opposing opinion that is referenced academically. There is no right or wrong in this exercise, it is primarily aimed at establishing effective teaching has taken place, and that you are now equipped to give an ‘informed’ opinion.   You have a nominal word count of 1500 words within which to complete this cast, you may neither over or under-run by more than 75 words. The hand-in time and date are as follows: 13.00 hours on 12/12/07

Essay Two: This  is a similar exercise, but allows you to choose from any topic we have discussed during the lecture series. I would like you to take a more holistic overview in this essay and examine critical and contextual opinion from a variety of sources. I envisage that this will be more problematic, but don’t worry you will be supported by the tutorial process. The word count in this instance will be 2000 plus or minus 100 words. substantial under or over runs will be marked down. The point of setting prescriptive word counts is to hone your ability to get your opinions/facts over in a concise and well argued  manner. Any problems then contact me by e-mail lolart-51@supanet.com….

Year Two Essay and Review Topics

As discussed, this module is assessed by assessment of two written assignments.

• Review- This is a 500 word written review of a current or past exhibition that you have actually viewed. Alternatively you may also review  book (old or new) that deals with contemporary photography in the genre of ’Art’ .I am specifically looking for evidence that shows your ability to ‘locate’ the work within a specific style or genre , and uses an original voice ( not something re-hashed)
• Essay-This will be 2000 word essay that will critically look at the work of a specific Artist, Movement or Genre. It will demonstrate your engagement with the current debate’s that surround the photographic image as ‘Art’, and will further be referenced academically from a variety of sources. The purpose of this essay is to test learning and allow you to build on the skills learned in year one. It is envisiged that this essay will show forward development in the skills needed to write a well researched academic essay. full support will given to you through the tutorial process on  the discipline of writing pertinent factual essays

Hand in time and date will be 4pm on the 13/12/07. Word count will be plus or minus 50 words

The european response: Laurie Haynes

Photography as Contemporary Art

The European response.

(contrasting the emergent Art Photography movement in Europe with that of The United States)

 In many respects the title of this essay is a misnomer, as there was not an actual intellectual response to the American school of Art Photography, but rather a continuation of a pre-war mindset that located photography firmly in the camp of the social documentary. The war in Europe had essentially deconstructed social order. The fundamental need to survive, rebuild, and re-discover the threads of social connection taking precedence,over the language of Art. But Art is indestructible, or rather the need to create Art. So from the ruins of Europe a damaged, but reborn child emerged. The image of American society portrayed in the post war years was, when compared to life in the major cities of Europe, the stuff of fantasy, a lifestyle, a society economically so advanced, that it was almost unrecognisable to the European audience. But the indomitable human spirit shone through, and in so doing provided a liet motif for the camera.

Robert Doisneau, a young photographer, before the war, returned to the streets of Paris with an objective lens and Eye. Specialising in an almost photo-journalistic style that celebrated the humour that enabled the people of France to battle through. Historically Doisneau’s work was seemingly etched with an heroic optimism that simply recorded those intimate moments that show a triumph of hope over adversity. Franks ability to record the frank and often humorous depictions of Parisian street life has secured him a prominent place in photographies hall of fame, and whilst his images sit uneasily amongst the ‘Art’ of the American period, his work is in many modern Art collections. During the 1970’s many of franks images were re-presented to the public as works of Art by the art poster company ‘Athena’ Among his most recognizable work is Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville(“Kiss by the Hotel de Ville”), a photo of a couple kissing in the busy streets of Paris. Who the couple were was a mystery until in 1993, when Denise and Jean-Louis Lavergne took him to court for taking the picture without their knowledge. This action forced Doisneau to admit that he actually ‘posed’ the shot in 1950 using actor/models Françoise Bornet and her then boyfriend Jacques Carteaud. Françoise was given an original print as part of her payment. In April 2005 she sold the print for 155,000 € at an auction.

  Doisneau’s work gives unusual prominence and dignity to the culture of the streets, in particular the activities of children; returning again and again to the theme of children at play in the city, unfettered by parents. His work treats their play with seriousness and respect. In terms of his artistic heritage Frank was very much the Art apprentice gathering the skill of Lithographer and sculptor on his journey to becoming a photographer. It is interesting to note the Frank served as a soldier in the army of ‘La resistance’ during the war as photographer and printer. His first hand knowledge of the horror of both war and occupation perhaps leading him to celebrate the french spirit in later years. 1912 Born in Gentilly, Val-de-Marne 1929 Graduated from lithography school l’Ecole Estienne in Chantilly 1930 Camera assistant to sculptor André Vigneau 1932 First photo story in Excelsior (French magazine) 1934-39 Publicity photographer for Renault; fired for truancy 1939 Drafted into the French army (“la Résistance“) during World War II, where he acted as a soldier, photographer and printer 1946 Joined the Rapho photo agency 1949-52 Photographer for French Vogue 1992 Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford 1994 Died in Montrouge  Another photographer who rose to prominence during the post war period is willi Ronis. Born in Paris, Ronis’ father was a Jewish refugee from Odessa who opened a photography studio in Montmartre and his mother was a refugee from Lithuania who gave piano lessons. Ronis’ early interest was music and he hoped to become a composer. Returning from compulsory military service in 1932, his violin studies were put on hold because his father’s cancerrequired Ronis to take over the family portrait business. The work of photographers, Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adamsinspired Ronis to begin exploring photography. After his father’s death, in 1949, Ronis closed the studio and joined the photo agency, Rapho, with Ergy Landau, Brassaï, and Robert Doisneau.Ronis became the first French photographer to work for LIFE Magazine. In 1953, Edward Steichenincluded Ronis, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Izis, and Brassaï in an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art entitled Five French Photographers. In 1955, Ronis was included in the The Family of Man exhibit. The Venice Biennale awarded Ronis the Gold Medal in 1957. Ronis began teaching in the 1950s, and taught at the School of Fine Arts in Avignon, Aix-en-Provenceand Saint Charles, Marseilles. In 1979 he was awarded the Grand Prix des Arts et Lettres for Photography by the Minister for Culture. Ronis won the Prix Nadarin 1981 for his photobook, Le fil du hasard.Ronis’ wife, Anne Marie was the subject of his well-known, [1949] photo, Provencal Nude. The photo, showing Anne Marie washing at a basin with a water pitcher on the floor and an open window through which the viewer can see a garden, is noted for its ability to convey an easy feeling of provencal life. Late in her life, Ronis photographed Anne Marie suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, sitting alone in a hospital yard. Anne Marie died in 1991.Ronis continues to live and work in Paris, although he stopped photography in 2001, since he required a cane to walk and could not move around with his camera, and now works on books for the Taschen publishing company.

On the other side of the channel another photographer with a unique vision was coming to the fore. Contrary to legend, Bill Brandt was born not in London, but in Hamburg, Germany, on May 3, 1904. The asthmatic son of a banking family, he came to his own country for the first time in 1931, having lived in a sanatorium in Davos and in Vienna and Paris, where he was Man Ray’s assistant.

His ambition was to become an independent professional photographer. His first book, The English at Home, appeared in 1936. Based on the portrayal of types and stereotypes, this was a kind of manifesto of British society, through which Brandt undertook to show the British their real faces. The complete opposite of the ideal motherland of his dreams, he discovered a divided people, a stratified society with a well-defined caste system, in the grip of economic crisis. Two years later he published A Night in London; in the same way as his friend Brassaï, Brandt enjoyed the uncertain, magical lighting effects of the night. Prowling around almost invisibly, he recorded London, revealing social inequality. He did not hesitate to ask his close friends to pose for him for certain situations.

In 1937 Bill Brandt travelled north, where he undertook at his own expense a photo reportage on the economic and social situation in the great cities of the Midlands and Tyneside. There he took his most memorable instantaneous photographs, such as the one of the emblematic figure of a scavenger for coal returning home, a modern myth of Sisyphus.

During the war Brandt was employed by the Home Office to show how well Londoners taking refuge in air-raid shelters were coping with air raids. He was also commissioned to produce a major photographic inventory of the capital’s important buildings. The work was carried out during the black-out, without flash, rather in the style of Atget. This reportage, notable for its use of light and shade, was published in Picture Post and emphasized Brandt’s interest in social documentation.

During the second half of his career Bill Brandt devoted himself to portraiture, landscapes, and nude photography. It was his revolutionary treatment of the last category which brought him notoriety. His first nudes were photographed with an old wooden plate camera which the police had formerly used, lacking a shutter and equipped with a wide-angle lens. These photos seemed inspired by Balthus, Hitchcock, and Orson Wells. Their dramatic atmosphere is enhanced by the unusual viewpoints of the architectural backgrounds, imbuing them with a menacing atmosphere of murder or suffocation, perhaps connected with the asthma from which Brandt suffered all his life. These unnatural perspectives, which shocked people at the time, based on the enlargement of volumes and close-up treatment of details, may be compared with the experiments of Picasso, the forms of Henry Moore, and, of course, the distorted work of Andre Kertész. Increasingly turning to abstract photography, from 1951 to 1960, when he gave up nude work, Brandt undertook exterior views (on the beaches of East Sussex, Normandy, and the south of France), in which he brought together the eternal themes of women and the sea, birthplace and symbol of creation.

At the same time, Brandt was taking portraits for Lilliput, Picture Post, and Harper’s Bazaar of the artists, intellectuals, and writers whom he admired. He detested naturalism. Rather he sought to decipher enigmas, and in his work portraiture is combined with a quasi-judicial chronicle of events. Going beyond external appearances, he tried to decode the mysteries concealed behind a face, as in his intriguing portrait of Francis Bacon (1963), far from a straightforward rendering of the subject.

His passion for literature led him to illustrate Literary Britain(1951), which unfurls naturally with romantic, tortured scenes evoking Wuthering Heights. At Stonehenge, or on Skye, Brandt demonstrated his fascination for untamed sites, those providing a sense of majesty, the sublime, the infinite. The cult of nature fostered the attraction that open spaces had for him, allowing him to bring out the emotional appeal of the landscape. This aspect of his work reached its high point when he chose 200 twentieth-century photographs for “The Land”, a project completed shortly before his death in London on December 20, 1983.

In the context of the art of his time, whose aesthetic experiments are reflected in his work, Bill Brandt was one of the first photographers to have created an individual style. While allowing the vocabulary of his art to evolve, he consciously worked at creating a personal photographic language. Based on the alliance between form and content, the fruit of experiment, exploration of the imaginary and an ever deeper investigation of the same themes, his work is notable for its splendid use of strong contrasts and densely printed images.

 

As legitimate subject for the European Photo-Artist the almost sub-cultural hinterland of the inner cities and its attendant nefarious night-life has been a source of inspiration and fascination. In continental Europe and the United states of America there were artists at work who seemed most comfortable when working at night. E.J Bellocq  reverently photographed the prostitutes of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, in an almost magical parallel with the paintings of Henri Toulouse Latrec. Both drawn to the darkness because their miss-shapen appearance was essentially masked, both men found both comfort and inspiration from the ladies of the night. When viewed side by side there is a familiarity and sense of belonging that was in part due to the acceptance by the models of their particular difference. Another photographer who seemed at home on the streets was Gyula Brassai. born Transylvania, 1899-1984

Brassai took his name from the town of his birth, Brasso, in Transylvania, then part of Hungary, later of Roumania, and famous as the home of Count Dracula. He studied Art at the academies of Budapest and Berlin before coming to Paris in the mid-twenties. He was completely disinterested in photography, if not scornful of it, until he saw the work being done by his acquaintance André Kertész, which inspired him to take up the medium himself. In the early thirties he set about photographing the night life of Paris, especially at its more colourful and more disreputable levels. The result of this project – a fascinatingly tawdry collection of prostitutes, pimps, madams, transvestites, apaches, and assorted cold-eyed pleasure-seekers – was published in 1933 as Paris de Nuit, one of the most remarkable of all photographic books.

Making photographs in the dark bistros and darker streetspresented a difficult technical problem. Brassai’s solution was direct, primitive, and perfect. He focused his small plate camera on a tripod, opened the shutter when ready, and fired a flashbulb. If the quality of his light did not match that of the places where he worked, it was, for Brassai, better: straighter, more merciless, more descriptive of fact, and more in keeping with Brassai’s own vision, which was as straightforward as a hammer.

When Paris de Nuit was published, the great photographer and theorist Dr. Peter Henry Emerson, then approaching eighty, wrote Brassai in care of his publisher, asking Brassai to please send his proper address, so that Emerson could send him the medal that had been awarded to him for his splendid book. It is an interesting comment on the chaotic incoherence of photographic history that Brassai had never even heard of Emerson, but Emerson act of kindness and respect acknowledges Brassai as a ‘matre’.

 

If one had to classify the fundamental skill or objective of the European photographers, it would be the ability to suggest or imply that there is a nobility in almost every strata of society.

The collective genre, shows that cohesive strand that humanity that is fundamental to the function of society. At its core is a rhythm, first of all, the rhythm of the organism, ruled by the heartbeat and circulation of blood. As we live in a pulsating, vibrating world, we respond to it and in turn are bound to its rhythm. Without giving much thought to our dependence on the systoles and diastoles of flowing time we move through sunrises and sunsets, through the sequences of four seasons. Repetition enables us to form habits and to accept the world as familiar. Perhaps the need of a routine is deeply rooted in the very structure of our bodies.

In a city or a village which we have known well since our childhood we move in a tamed space, our occupations finding everywhere expected landmarks that favour routine. Transplanted into alien surroundings we are oppressed by the anxiety of indefiniteness, by insecurity There are too many new shapes and they remain fluid, because the principle of their order through routine cannot be discovered. What I am saying is perhaps just a generalization of my own experience but I hope to be understood as that experience has been shared by many especially in this century.

Among the misfortunes of exile, anxiety of the unfamiliar holds a prominent place. Whoever has found himself as an immigrant in a big foreign city had to cope with a kind of envy at the sight of its inhabitants engaged in purposeful occupations, confidently going to definite, known to them, shops or offices, in a world weaving together a huge fabric of everyday bustle. It is possible that such an observer from the outside would have recourse to special strategies in order to diminish his feeling of alienation.

 

I offer this direct quotation from Brassai, that explains ‘reason d’etr’ for the Photographer Artist

 

‘Living in Paris, I was for a long time drawing a line around a few streets in the Latin Quarter, so that I could call a certain area mine.” A restaurant at the corner, a small bookstore, a laundry, a cafe succeeded each other when I was taking a walk and would give me some assurance through their presence at the points expected in advance.

To be lost in a foreign city. Perhaps something more is involved here than a mere inability to find one’s way. It once happened to me, also in Paris, a city of my many joyous moments and many misfortunes, when I stepped out of the Métro in a part of the town with which I was acquainted, but not too well. I started to walk and suddenly I noticed that there was not even one spot to serve me as a guide mark and I was seized by a sort of fear of height. The houses seemed to turn around and threaten to fall. I lost orientation. And I was quite aware that my indecision of which street to take reflected my loss of orientation in a deeper sense. Exile deprives one of the points of reference that helped us to make projects, choose our goals, to organize our activities. In our native countries we maintained a peculiar relationship with our predecessors, with writers if we were writers, with painters if we were painters, etc., and that was a relationship of both respect and opposition; our driving force was to better them in one or another manner and to add our name to the roster of names remembered by our village, our city, or country Here, abroad, nothing of that is left, we have been catapulted out of history, which is always the history of a specific area on the map, and we have to cope with, to use an expression of an exile writer, “the unbearable lightness of being.”

The recovery is slow and never complete. There is a period when we refuse to recognize that our displacement is irrevocable and no political or economic changes in the country of our origin can bring about our return. Then slowly we come to the realization that exile is not just a physical phenomenon of crossing state borders, for it grows on us, transforms us from within, and becomes our fate. The undifferentiated mass of human types, streets, monuments, fashions, trends acquires some distinct features and gradually the strange transforms itself into the familiar At the same time, however, the memory preserves a topography of our past, and this dual observance keeps us apart from our fellow citizens’. As a cultural signpost the photograph is without parallel, presenting the viewer with an infinite opportunity to appraise, and re-appraise the scene set before.

The work of the photographers mentioned here share a heritage and a legacy. The ability to mark that moment in time and place.

 

watching the detectives: The emmergence of popular culture

Watching the detectives

The emergence of American ‘Art’ photography and the impact of popular culture. Having briefly touched on the influence of Alfred Stieglitz in founding a school of Fine Art Photography, it is worth examining the contextual climate of ‘Fine Art’ in more general terms. The Post war period witnessed a change of direction in art practice which in The United States is best categorised by the movement termed ‘Abstract expressionism’ This title whilst not hard to define in terms of the key protagonists,  has a wide ranging definition in terms of creative output. Technically, an important predecessor is surrealism, which, as we have discussed has its emphasis on the spontaneous, automatic or subconscious act of creation. Jackson Pollock’s dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the floor is a technique that in turn had its roots in the work of Max Ernst, which in turn can trace a direct lineage to European expressionism. Another important early manifestation of what came to be abstract expressionism is the work of American Northwest artist Mark Tobey, especially his “white writing” canvases, which, though generally not large in scale, anticipate the “all over” look of Pollock’s drip paintings.The movement’s name is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus and Synthetic Cubism. Additionally, it has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, rather nihilistic. In practice, the term is applied to any number of artists working (mostly) in New York who had quite different styles, and is even applied to work which is not especially abstract or expressionist. Pollock’s energetic “action paintings“, with their “busy” feel, are different both technically and aesthetically, to the violent and grotesque Women series of Willem de Kooning (which are figurative paintings) and to the serenely shimmering blocks of color common to Mark Rothko’s work (not  usually called expressionist but which Rothko denied was abstract), yet all three are classified as abstract expressionists.Abstract Expressionism has many stylistic similarities to the Russian artists of the early twentieth century such as Wassily Kandinsky. Although it is true that spontaneity or the impression of spontaneity characterized many of the abstract expressionists works (and what could be more spontaneous than photography)  most of these paintings involved careful planning, especially since their large size demanded it; An exception might be the drip paintings of Pollock.Why this style gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s is a matter of debate. American social realism had been the mainstream in the 1930s. It had been influenced not only by the Great Depression but also by the Social Realists of Mexico such as David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera.  The political climate after World War II did not long tolerate the social protests of such painters. Abstract expressionism arose during World War II and began to be showcased during the early forties at galleries in New York like The Art of This Century Gallery.  The Political repression ‘The McCarthy era’ after World War II was a time of extreme artistic censorship in the United States, but since the subject matter was often totally abstracted, it became a safe strategy for artists to pursue this style. Abstract Art could be seen as apolitical, or if the art was political, the message was largely for the Art insider.Although the abstract expressionist school spread quickly throughout the United States, the major centers of this style were New York City and California, especially the San Francisco Bay area. To me the period is characterised as being socially unsettled.A time when the previous status quo both politically and artistically were being if not overturned, then re-examined. Individually the remnants of an older art establishment were rejecting their previous artistic position/heritage, while collectively a new generation was searching for a voice. A vacuum begs to be filled, and filled it was with a new language of art that in the United States in particular was entirely more demographic; serving as a mirror for a deconstructed society. The language of the visual now in ascendant, the great American painting now sharing the limelight with the Great American novel.But where was photography in this new beginning? The Answer is sharing a language and source of inspiration with the elder sibling. In post war America  the scatter gun objectification of the lens capturing the imagination of  the new consumer society. What was fruit for the mass, Cinema-Television-Advertising serving  as a palette of inspiration for the artist. The camera became draftsman, holding fixed forever that ephemeral moment of Artist and subject. The photographic image, abstract at its point of birth, yet denoting a ghost of the real, becoming in its connotative form growing in  inference and influence. The progeny of this state of flux was popular culture. No more apt term could conjure up the essential zeitgeist of the moment. The post-modern society with its disconected social and artistic tissue on display, replicating the flicker of the moving image with its ever present re- positioning of the flavour of the moment.The purely popular reigning supreme over the intellectual, the academic. Popular culture and it’s offspring, Pop Art, serving to represent a new society. But Photography in the post war era was not all primarily focused on the ephemeral here and now. Photographers like Robert Frank essentially turning the lens inward in a more reflective way, seeking to record the emotional pulse of an America largely forgotten. The post war generation (or those who survived the war) did not all relocate to the large commercial cities. Many returned to the homestead, to a lifestyle in many ways deposed by the mechanics of war. Trying to desperately pick up the threads of neglected relationships. Fathering small children often for the first time and trying to rebuild a sharecropper economy if not killed by the great depression now often terminally sick. Frank traveled in the  hinterland of abandoned homesteads and empty highways, his work a marked contrast to the images of towering cities, cocktail parties and a burgeoning economy.

Watch this space, to be continued: 5/10/07