The History of Photography Part Two

We left off with a shift from Pictorialism to an era of Modern art, with help from Stieglitz. Stieglitz organizes the Armory Show in 1913, introducing American audiences to Modern art. The Armory Show predominantly features European artists. Also the First World War sounds off a general disbelief in the good of technology and the heroism of war. Many Modern art movements begin in this period with manifestos to match.

After the creation of photo-secession groups in the late 19^th century, photographers started to conceive of photography as its own artistic medium not in service to science or painting. These photographers attempt to define a “modern photographic” fine art movement. Stieglitz showcases and advocates for many of the photographers of this era in his publication, “Camera Work.” Simultaneously, photography and film are having major impacts on the medium of painting. Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) and other modern art movements like Cubism show the world as manifold. Locomotion photography told us not to trust our naked eye and film tells us that there is always more than one view of the world as opposed to the Renaissance one-point perspective.

At this time, a lot of modern photographers and filmmakers think of the natural world and humanity in general as inherently and completely flawed. (We cause wars and suffering after all.) So some modern art movements really start to worship machines and industry (hello futurism), even fetishizing it. This period is the beginning of photographers asking, “Why not make images as crisp as possible because that is what a camera does and what machines are for. They show us how the world really looks. Also, lets photograph some steel, because steel rules!”

1910s

Alvin Langdon Coburn is one of the major hitters to dump Pictorialism. He creates alternate views of common places, for instance looking directly down onto a fountain in a park and calling it an “octopus” because what a thing is, is not as interesting as what a thing may become. Make sense?

Paul Strand. His Wall Street image shows the grandeur of Wall Street before the big crash. Humans in the image are anonymous; they are not important for their individuality but that they contribute to the rhythm and movement of economic exchange. Also during this decade Strand makes close ups of every day items, showing us, like with Coburn, that with a new perspective items can transform into something else.

One of my favorite photographers is the mysterious E. J. Bellocq, whose Storyville New Orleans portraits of anonymous sex workers often have scratched out faces. And nobody really knows why.

Carlo Leonetti photographed the stars of stage and later film in beautiful dramatic portraiture

National Geographic, its first magazine published in 1888, is making a point of sending photographers on expeditions with archeologists, scientists, and researchers. Photographers like David E. Ford show us unknown parts of the world in beautiful images of places we don't belong, digging up dead people. This further opens up the world for a western audience and photography continues to go hand-in-hand with our history as colonizers.

People still want to photograph the world in color but it's tricky. I found this amazing survey of the Russian people by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. Prokudin-Gorskii used a three-lensed camera and took black and white images through three different color filters, Red, Green and Blue. Later he projected the combined color layers to realize a full color image. Stunning.

Eugène Atget. He walks the streets of Paris photographing storefronts. Surrealists about a decade later adopt the photographs as a sign of a neurotic civilization.

Edward Steichen is promoted by and partnered with Stieglitz. I like his fashion work. I found on the Wikipedia he was dared to prove that fashion photography is art so he photographed dresses by Paul Poiret, a couture designer and today this shoot is called the “First modern fashion shoot.”

Gertrude Käsebier photographs families and does some interesting portraiture work that is much more dynamic than your average JC Penny portrait studio. Unfortunately, family life is still considered women appropriate subject matter, ala the female impressionists. Don’t worry, women bust out later.

Moving on.

1920s

Man Ray is also a filmmaker and partnered with many famous Surrealists of the time. His Ray-o-graphs (narcissist) consist of every day objects exposed on light sensitive photo paper. The reversal makes those every day objects take on a new life, association, and idea. Very Surreal.

Dadists are starting to use photo collage and photomontage and appropriating photographs from mass culture for political ends. Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, and Aleksandr Rodchenko are important photographers of this movement.

Charles Sheeler shows industry as a beautiful, organized set of shapes, patterns, and rhythms. The scorched earth photographs of Gursky will counter the hope of industry later. Margaret Bourke-White and Paul Outerbridge do the same as Sheeler.

Edward Weston goes to Mexico and writes in his journals about “Pre-visualization.” The idea is photographers should be able to know exactly what the resulting photograph will look like well before tripping the shutter. They should govern and control every aspect of the camera machine. As a result Weston produces very formal, still, and balanced imagery that suggests all things on this earth are connected. Blech.

Ansel Adams and the F64 group want really sharp “straight” images now, with a deep depth of field. Also Adams invents the zone system, (a core part of my photographic education in thee olden days), where by understanding how chemistry, temperatures, film speeds, and agitations work, you get complete control of your black and white, (ideally full tonal range) images. All I can say is: film base plus fog.

Imogen Cunningham

Lázló Moholy-Nagy counters the control of the Americans with the experimentation of the era in Europe by putting items with seemingly no relationship together in his collages to make surrealistic imagery.

Florence Henri also breaks up spaces by inserting mirrors into composition.

Tina Modotti is hanging out with Weston and photographs the proletariat of Mexico.

August Sander creates a survey of the German people. A decade later, the Nazis do what they can to eliminate the photographs because it shows that there is a diversity of people living in Germany instead of the general, “we’re all superior, Assyrian race” stuff.

André Kertész creates some wonderful Surrealist portraits in Paris.

1930s

The Great Depression comes to the US and the Farm Security Administration sends out a bunch of photographers to document the hardships of agrarian laborers. The plight of the poor is shown by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Eudora Welty, Arthur Rothstein. The era also ushers in the question that with government patronage (aka propaganda), shouldn’t we question the intrinsic truthiness, the realism of the photographic medium?

Brassaï’s work of the bohemian underworld of Paris is, to this day, one of my favorite photographic portfolios.

Horst P. Horst makes an iconic fashion photograph of a corset that Madonna rips off for her Vogue music video. I still like Madonna of course.

Manuel  Alvarez Bravo

Berenice Abbot

Roman Vishniac photographed Jewish ghettos. Surviving images become really important as humans show their continued propensity for genocide in an age after enlightenment.

The surrealists are still making some interesting and bizarre photographs to examine the irrational and unknown parts of our psyche. Any list of this movement would be incomplete without the doll pictures by Hans Bellmer. Yikes.

Bauhaus photographer Herbert Bayer

Raoul Ubac tries different dark room techniques, like solarization, to invert images and create experimental compositions.

Robert Capa, famous war photographer but also photographed events throughout the world including a Trotsky speech!

1940s

Henri Cartier-Bresson and his “decisive moment” add another approach and theory to the act of photographing

Helen Levitt’s work is part of the decisive moment movement

My favorite photography always comes with a bit of satire and wit. Lisette Model photographed us Americans with the eyes of an alien who found us quite strange and resistant to self-reflection. She also influenced the quirky work of Diane Arbus

Wright Morris

Alfred Eisenstaedt made the famous picture of the sailor forcing a kiss on a woman that everyone is nostalgic about

Weegee! This guy was a crazy good news photographer. He embodied the term, “F8 and be there.” An ambulance chaser, Weegee went to crimes scenes and developed film in his car.

Lee Miller

Clarence John Laughlin showed the death and destruction of WWII and ushered us into the existential Atomic Age

Frederick Sommer

Minor White offers more existential uncertainty and angst. White, a gay man, tries to depict his world through a Modernist lens sans nude women, revealing that Modern art movements, like all art movements, seems to necessitate unclothed female bodies as a way to express “universal” desire and beauty. Arguably, White shows an oppositional identity pre Robert Mapplethorpe.

1950s

Robert Frank creates a scathing look at American life post WWII in The Americans

William Klein

In contradiction to the despair of the age, The Family of Man photographic survey features work by Wynn Bullock and many, many photographers across the world, to make the point that the human race is all good and all connected.

Harry Callahan looks inward, photographing his family and life in Chicago. His work is amazing

Aaron Siskind

Richard Hamilton follows the Dadists by making collages of imagery showing our post war consumption and family life

With Kodak dye transfer, color image printing is possible with luscious vibrancy: see Eliot Porter

Bruce Davidson shows a new movement in society that all the ad agents are wild about: Youth culture.

Roy Decavara is the first African American to receive the Guggenheim and photographs life in Harlem for a project, “The Sweet Flypaper of Life” with author Langton Hughes

Mario Giacomelli shows a loss of faith with his distorted imagery

All this self-expression is depressing. I’ll start with the 1960s and finish this list soon!

The History of Photography, part one

The start of the semester is right around the corner for many of my academic friends. Previously, I taught semester long courses on topics ranging from curatorial practice to the history of photography. My friend and former colleague is teaching a new media course and I offered to provide a list of the 10 most important photographers per decade since the inception of photography. What was I thinking? As I type this I know this is a difficult task. Also, it will yield a very long post because I’m long winded about the topic. 

Names seem to be the way to approach the history of photography because photography (as a distinct medium) really does not take part in artistic movements until the mid to late 20^th century. Rather, various chemists, inventors, and photographers represent benchmarks in how our vision and ideas changed before, during and after the industrial revolution. In short, I find that photography reflects and shapes social history, which all art can claim to do, but I think photo’s hand in science, advertising, historic preservation, social science, and now social media really makes it a part of society more than any other medium.  

This is the first part. I might even have to break it up into three different posts.

The dawn of time to the 18^th century

I want to make it known that many painters, while not officially photographers, used the camera obscura. To illustrate this point I often show this clip from the girl with the pearl earring when Johannes Vermeer shows Scarlett Johansson (aka the anonymous girl in the painting) a camera obscura. I also show Abelardo Morrell’s contemporary work. He turns entire rooms into camera obscuras and it is magical.

1820s and 30s

At this point, so many people in the world are attempting to fix an image; it is probably impossible to identify all those who made attempts. The major players instrumental to the birth of photography are Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, who is credited for the earliest surviving photograph roughly dated 1826-1826, John Herschel, who discovered sodium thiosulphate was a solvent of light sensitive silver salts, William Henry Fox Talbot, the progenitor of the negative-positive form of photography we are familiar with and use today (Multiples for everyone!), and Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, the democratizer of photography and the reason we all don’t have to pay a patent fee to take pictures (unlike Talbot who was a crank and wanted to charge people for taking photos)

At this point, I make students debate the most important person responsible for the birth of photography and it usually becomes a predictable battle of England vs. France.

1840s

Anna Atkins, a botanist created cyanotypes by pressing algae to sensitized paper

Hippolyte Bayard pretended to be dead in a photograph and people were certain it was real

John Plumbe Jr.

All the daguerreotype portrait studios spread across the US, which usually listed the studio name rather than the individual photographer (because photographers were not artists, they were craftspeople!)

Jules Lion, started a daguerreotype studio in New Orleans. First African American studio owner

Augustus Washington, African American daguerreotype studio owner

David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson

Carl Ferdinand Stelzner

Thomas Easterly

1850s

Maxime Du Camp. As soon as photographing became viable, people started to travel with the camera to document as many important places as possible, like the Egyptian monuments.

Gustave Le Gray, I am a fan of his mystical landscape photographs

Charles Négre

John Whipple, who photographed the moon, which is still difficult

Platte D. Babbit, took tourists to Niagara Falls. Enter the creation of the vacation picture convention in which we all take part. We want to stand in front of a place and claim, “I was there.”

Roger Fenton, one of the first war photographers, documenting the Crimean war-no battle scenes yet, just aftermath, because shutter speeds were too slow and Fenton was instructed to show that war was heroic. War still looked disturbing nonetheless, more disturbing than a painting of Napoleon anyway.

Felice Beato, another conflict documenter showing the aftermath of uprisings in China, India and more

William Lake Price

Oscar G. Rejlander. His Two Ways of Life, 1957 is one of the first photomontages that truly illustrate a photographer’s potential artistry. Other than that the photograph is incredibly sanctimonious, it does propose photography’s potential as an artistic medium rather than existing in the service of science or as studies for paintings.

Henry Peach Robinson

1860s

Julia Margaret Cameron, beautiful work by this pre-Raphaelite, wet plate photographer. She photographed children nude but didn't receive the label as bad mother/grandmother, unlike Sally Mann in the 1990s.

Lewis Carroll, another pre-Raphaelite and the writer of Alice in Wonderland also took photographs of younger girls that are not only taboo but may even be a little illegal these days. Keep in mind at this point there were no child labor laws and child pornography did not exist as a litigable offense. There was also no such thing as ethics in photography. Here in the lecture is when I mention that this is not a new phenomena where humans need to play catch up in determining what is and is not okay to photograph because we have yet to establish a “common sense” at the outset of new technology. We tend to want to capture our activity, however nefarious, because it’s fun, only to later realize that said documentation becomes damning proof in a court of law. For instance these guys.

Lady Clementina Hawarden. While photography may have been for the ladies too, you still had to be pretty rich with lots of free time on your hands. Enter in the British aristocracy

Alexander Gardner. Civil war photographer and creator of Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War, which no one wanted to look at because it was a bunch of dead guys and it was, well, upsetting. Home of the Rebel Sharp shooter is probably the most famous image. Gardner also broke free of Brady’s tutelage and began the practice of crediting individual photographers for their shots.

Timothy O’Sullivan, civil war photographer and a manifest destiny photographer. I think his images of the civil war are the most jarring war photographs.

Auguste-Rosalie Bisson (Bisson Bros.), amazing travel photographers, who created one of my favorite photographs of climbers ascending Mont-Blanc. The climbers look like ants

Francis Frith, another travel photographer documenting the pyramids-so we all don’t have to physically see them, making us a lazy. Or it made us want to travel more, you decide.

Thomas Annan, a street and urban life photographer showing how bad cramped industrial life was in Scotland. This is the beginning of social justice photography.

Nadar and his Studio portrait photographs

Mathew Brady photographed Abraham Lincoln, which is awesome and the beginning of politicians realizing that photographs can help you win elections if you are tall and studious looking. Nixon didn’t take the cue for his television debate with Kennedy.

1870s

William Henry Jackson, another manifest destiny photographer. The upsetting thing is you can see how global warming has in fact changed the western American landscape since these photographs were made. Jackson's famous mountain of the holy cross barely has snow apparently

Eadweard J Muybridge is an important guy. Not only did he get away with murdering his wife’s lover, he was a western landscape photographer and he is the creator of locomotion photography. He proved that all four hooves come off the ground when horses gallop, something we cannot see with our naked eyes. At this point humans have to accept that our eyes deceive us. We cannot see everything and trust our own senses to know what is absolutely, empirically true. Finally, Positivism gets thrown out the window.

There are more locomotion photographers that follow in Muybridge’s footsteps: Thomas Eakins, Étienne Jules Marey

John Thomson photographed the poor in London

Other studio portrait photographers like Antoine Samuel Adam-Salomon and Napoleon Sarony

Okay, I guess this is somewhat of an empty decade so I’m just moving on

1880s

What an exciting decade with the introduction of the Kodak camera, a preloaded film camera with a circular composition. Also introducing the snap shot with R.K. Albright and all the other anonymous snap shot photographers. Later in contemporary photography, this approach is actively used and referenced by fine art photographers William Eggleston and Nan Goldin

Also, we have the introduction of our own photography artistic movement called Pictorialism with P.H. Emerson, George Davison, Edward Steichen, early Alfred Stieglitz, Alice Boughton, Robert Demachy, Frederick H. Evans, and more who worked through the end of the century.

1890s

Important for American social justice photography was the publication of How the Other Half Lives by Jacob A. Riis. Riis was kinda funny because he would not consult with the people before photographing them in the New York tenements. He would light a spark, shoot, and run. Sometimes his sparks (pre flash era of photography) would catch the buildings on fire. His photographs show the ugly side of industrialization and the despicable quality of life for the growing populations in New York. But yay self-sustaining capitalism!?

Francis Benjamin Johnston

F. Holland Day

Also the Lumière brothers’ first films show and according to rumor (not fact) people ran out of the theatre as the train came into the station.

I’m moving on to the 1900s because this is tiring

1900s

Phew, we made it to the century I am more familiar with.

Okay, late Alfred Stieglitz after he dumps Pictorialism starts to bloom by becoming an advocate for Modernism, particularly European Modernism. He continues his quest advocating for modern art and non fuzzy photography in North America for the next 30 years and makes a beautiful life long portrait of his wife/artist, Georgia O’Keefe

A lot of ethnographic photography happening in this period with Adam Clark Vroman photographing indigenous groups in the US. Also Edward S. Curtis started his long project of photographing tribes for the creation of the publication, The North American Indian. My photography professor said, “Bad Curtis is better than no Curtis.” Curtis edited photos, pre Photoshop, by burnishing out modern machinery, like clocks, on his photogravure plates. Still many are glad the photographs exist at all so that images of ancestors are preserved in perpetuity.

Jacques-Henri Lartigue made snapshots during La Belle Époque

Lewis Hine also starts to photograph children in their work places in major US cities (which was not welcomed by industry). He depicts the hardships of an incredibly vulnerable group of laborers pre child labor laws

This is also when many of the Pictorialists are still working in their Pictorialist approach including the fashion photo work of Baron De Meyer, one of my favorites

Frank Eugene, a Pictorialist, does the unthinkable of scratching negatives (a modernist, photo purist no-no)

Clarence H. White, another Pictorialist

Also, color film is invented in this decade but it’s tricky to use. We continue to document the world in black and white.

I'll start with the 1910s next time.

wasp fabric design (in progress)

Below is a new fabric pattern I am designing. It has been years since I’ve worked on my lamp project (the reason I make fabric patterns in the first place). The lamp project idea started in 2008 when I lost access to a darkroom. I was working at a gallery in an entry-level position and I was somewhat annoyed by my prospects as I entered the work force with an advanced degree in the fine arts. In short, I wanted to make lamps out of empty booze bottles, which I already did before, but I wanted to turn it into an art project about my disgruntled state.

Then when I moved to Indiana, I met artist Laura FosterNicholson. Nicholson, a textile artist, introduced me to the wonders of Spoonflower, a company that will print your designs on fabric! You also can purchase other people’s fabrics and you will see most of the designs are VERY cute. I design fabrics with guns and wasps, in case you are interested.

With spoonflower, I am able to produce my own lampshades with fabrics of my own design. To create fabrics, I must think about colors and patterns more so than with other art projects. So, to reintroduce myself to color theory, I started using the software Adobe Kuler to generate color schemes.

Here are some of my wasp drawing color combos and sketches for patterns. The end result will be some low-budge, boozy lamps that serve a function AND look fabulous. 

Midweek post: work schedules

Been working. Finished another drawing (below). Working on some fabric designs. Started making a book! I just need to start photographing already, which has taken me longer than I like.

 And, I am excited to announce I will collaborate with Bad Kitty Productions, an institution based out of Illinois (website coming soon). I will be writing and designing for their books, upholstery, and even clothing. This is all pro bono of course, but it is still an exciting collaboration. Bad Kitty Productions is a feminist art collective of like-minded folks.

Back to work schedules. My partner sent me this link today. À la française, here is a look at famous artist/writer’s work schedules, with a neat illustration.

 I like this. I am always worried I am not working hard enough. It seems it must be stressful or painful in order for the work to feel legit. For creative types, it’s not always about the quantity of time working, but how well you use the time you do have. For instance, my favorite writer Flannery O’Connor worked very little compared to other writers due to being sick most of her life. But her life’s work, however short, is rich and feels bountiful.

I see Picasso and I shared a similar work schedule back when I didn’t have to work 9-5. Now, my work schedule resembles Franklin’s, maybe even Freud’s. I am still a night owl. I do not envy Voltaire.

Q & A session with artist Kristina Estell

Today’s post is very special. I present to you a Q&A session with artist, Kristina Estell. Estell is an artist living and working in Minnesota. I first worked with Estell when I invited her to exhibit her work for a solo show, “Generalizing From Rare Examples,” at the University of South Dakota. Below are photographs from that installation.

Kristina Estell has a MFA in sculpture from University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. When I worked with her, I was inspired by her investigative use of materials and that her site-specific installations encouraged audience activation (rather than passivity). She is doing exceptionally well as a practicing artist, so I felt any ideas and answers from her would be inspiring for us all. Thanks so much Kristina.

Q: Tell us about a project that you are working on now.

A: As we speak, I am installing a show in Lincoln, Nebraska where I am part of a two-person exhibition at Darger HQ Gallery. Devised Province will be a mix of some recent sculpture work and the 2D work of Roswitha Weingrill, a great Austrian artist. I am really excited to see how it all comes together and work in the new gallery space of Darger HQ.  Joining this gallery has been the start of turning my focus back to creating more sculptural work after having a past year of large, intensely laborious installation projects. 

Q: I think a lot of your work is about experimenting with materials. And, I think it is safe to say you do quite well working both two-dimensionally and three-dimensionally. Can you describe how you decide on certain approaches and materials over others for any given project?

A: More and more I think about proximity and accessibility, in practical and conceptual terms. Whatever the subject I am working with, I have to consider how to accentuate or amplify the quality in which I am most interested and how that quality is accessible to the viewer. You are right, I rely on experimentation with materials, colors and textures quite a lot.  I feel, though, that the specific materials I use are recognizable and familiar to most of us in some form but because I use materials in an unfamiliar way, I rely on the audience to be able to understand the texture, weight, etc. of various materials to lend to the overall experience of the work.

In the two-dimensional bubble wrap works I make, I feel that the fragility and delicacy of the little pieces of plastic needed to be enlarged and made graphic to enable the sense of the material to be something more than a piece of discarded bubble wrap. I feel these paintings, in watercolor especially, enrich the material with a sense of romanticism and require the viewer to look at the plastic removed from its low, transparent reality in an isolated, revealing white space.

An installation shot of Estell's work in the John A. Day Gallery (minus the chairs from the artist talk).

Q: You have done quite well as an exhibiting artist in the upper Midwest. Your work references the local landscape but you show all over the country. Can you give any suggestions for artists looking to show their work in both big cities and at local venues?

A: I really don’t discriminate too much between calls for opportunities to exhibit or attend residencies. As long as the program sounds interesting and I feel like it would be somewhat feasible financially and time-wise… I apply. I think it is sometimes easy to talk yourself out of making applications due to doubt of the possibility of being selected or to overly scrutinize the details of it working out…but you never know! Certainly, my pile of rejections is enormous but I try to just set the latest notification aside and move on to what is next. I think it is very important to keep an active resume whether you are approaching urban or local or international venues.

Estell's tulle hanging installation

Q: Of all the exhibitions you took part in, which are some of your favorites and why?

A: A couple shows in 2013 were significant for me in a few ways. Last fall I was honored to be part of the ,,, (comma comma comma) Minnesota biennial at the Soap Factory. It was great to be a part of such a strong and diverse group of MN artists and performers, to be given a lot of freedom to create an installation in the historic Soap Factory gallery and to work with the curators David Petersen and John Marks again.

Being selected to exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in the Minnesota Artist Exhibition Program was another highlight for sure. This solo exhibition, Posture is Everything, was a materially indulgent project that I had been designing for some time. This exhibition allowed me to create the large-scale (experimental!) installation in a great institution with a dynamic audience and really formed a network of new connections with many Twin Cities artists and art professionals.

Q: Any galleries you recommend that are putting together particularly good shows of contemporary art?

A: In Minneapolis, I enjoy the programming of a newer gallery to the city, Public Functionary as well as the Soo Visual Art Center.

One of Estell's hand printed rocks

Q: Where do you see yourself by early 2015? Any plans for some new art projects?

Early 2015, I am very excited to be a visiting artist at Illinois State University in Normal. It will be a great opportunity to meet a new community, make work in the studio and teach a short seminar to the students in the fine arts department. The seminar is titled ‘Carefully Cavalier: the working life’ and will be an examination of the expectations and the many roles an artist plays in the complex and dynamic creative professional’s world. I look forward to exchanging ideas and instigating lively discussions with the students in this course and hope to learn a few things from them too…