After reading through the lectures discuss Conceptual art in terms of how conten

After reading through the lectures discuss Conceptual art in terms of how content is represented and how contextual meaning is interpreted. Be sure to provide two photographic examples of Conceptual Art in a two paragraph essay. Each paragraph should consist of 5 to 6 sentences. Examples from lecture and supplemental readings should be made to demonstrate understanding. Answers that appear to meet the length requirement but do not say something of substance as in the example of short sentences meant to meet the quota will lose points.
Use Parenthetical References
First and foremost, please do not perform outside research. You have everything you need in the lectures. As this is a Zero Text Cost class, you should not have to seek information outside of the contents of this course. All essays must contain parenthetical references at the end of each sentence explaining where the information was found (Baudelaire, 99). It is not necessary to create endnotes or a works cited section. Examples of what to do:
These examples come from an upcoming essay written by Susan Sontag. This is how a direct quote should be handled from an external reading or from the module lecture:
According to Sontag, “to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and, therefore, like power” (Sontag 1). Sontag hints at the notion that one no longer needs to travel to visit exotic places. All one need do is buy a picture of the place instead (DeAngelis Module 7).
When you paraphrase or take the info and write it in your own words, you still need to cite. This is how paraphrasing should be handled:
Many believe that when one takes a picture, they are collecting pieces of the world (Sontag 1).
15. Lecture
Cover of Beaumont Newhall’s Text, The History of Photography: From 1839-Present
This is the first history of photography book.
The Atomic Era and Making Photographs in the New “Light” Recap: After the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrendered and the war ended. Despite the forming of the United Nations Charter (1945), world peace proved elusive. Initial postwar exhilaration rapidly gave way to apprehension and tension as the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic weapon in 1949. Americans realized that “the bomb” could now be used against them. As test blasts escalated, the arms race of the Cold War commenced. This Deeply Affected the Photographers and Artists
The threat of atomic annihilation changed the world as the symbolic Doomsday Clock ticked off the minutes left before the midnight apocalypse, and post-World War II artists started to reflect its terrifying and destabilizing consequences. The physical and psychological fallout from these scientific events altered the American transcendental belief in nature. A small group of American photographers shifted their modern, naturalistic, optimistic outlook to a more abstract, surreal, and pessimistic stance.
Until World War II the modernist concept of the naturalistic/documentary photograph, the previsualized, fixed, full-frame aesthetic of the individual photographer, reigned supreme. Magazines such as Popular Photography and U.S. Camera reinforced it and gave national exposure to work produced by the FSA and the Photo League. The modernist agenda was advanced by Beaumont Newhall, the curator of the freshly established Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, the first such department at a major art museum. Newhall’s book The History of Photography: 1839 to the Present Day, originally published as a catalog accompanying the MoMA exhibition of the same name in 1937, defined the modernist approach and introduced its artists to the public.
George Eastman House Museum of Photography
Another watershed event was the establishment of the George Eastman House Museum of Photography (renamed the George Eastman Museum in 2015), which opened in 1949, and the appointment of Newhall as its first curator and, later, its director, 1958–71. By taking actively engaged positions, often ably assisted by his wife, Nancy Parker Newhall, 1908–1974, Newhall championed a select group of photographers, many of whom were personal friends. Through exhibitions, publications, and lectures, Newhall made photographic history instead of following and reporting on well-established trends. Credit: Direct Quote Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light, pg. 349
Ansel Adams, Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California, 1944
Ansel Adams and the New “Light”
Before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the images of Ansel Adams such as Mt. Williamson embodied Beaumont Newhall’s modern natural vision. The works of Ansel Adams were the visual essence of nineteenth century transcendentalism, which was based on the ethereal light illuminating our enduring home, the earth. When describing the works of Ansel Adams, the phrases “sharp focus” and “timeless beauty of nature” often come to mind.
Ansel Adams 1902 – 1984 Adams produced shrewd images that encouraged people to scrutinize the mountains and heavens for a higher moral authority to replace the one that seemed to be crumbling in wartime. After the detonation of the first test bomb at Trinity Site in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, the earth and the heavens no longer seemed to possess the same degree of lasting spiritual strength that Adams’s photographs personified. Even the light seemed different now. I. I. Rabi, a Nobel laureate physicist who observed the explosion, reported it was:
“The brightest light I have ever seen or that I think anyone has ever seen. It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right
through you. It was a vision which was seen with more than the eye. It was seen to last forever. You
would wish it would stop; altogether it lasted about two seconds.”
Ansel Adams, Moon Over Half Dome, 1960
Ansel Adams, and Wonder Lake, Denali National Park, Alaska, 1947-48 The Camera: No Longer the Eye of Nature
This new world order could no longer be contained by the old transcendental ways that considered the camera as the eye of nature. This new light demanded fresh methods of representing the visions of the world that went beyond what the human eyes could see. Credit: Direct Quote Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light, 349
Photographers Practice Abstract Expressionism and Self Expression
The increase in war-enforced emigration of artists gave European cultural and intellectual theories wider currency in America and provided photographers with alternative approaches to Newhall’s modernist agenda. The American painters adopted the surrealist ideas of Max Ernst and André Breton into paintings devoid of rational intent or utilitarian representation, forming the basis of Abstract Expressionism. Representative of an attitude of intense allegiance to psychic self-expression, Abstract Expressionism paralleled post-World War II’s atomic and existential philosophy’s belief in individual action as the key to salvation. Surrealism also gave expressionist photographers who did not fit the modernist mode the means to rebel against the empirical, realistic outlook that dominated American artistic practice. The infusion of new ideas helped break the domination of the assignment-driven photo-reportage of the literal moment, allowing photographers to make more timeless and intangible representations of the allegorical, the psychological, and the spiritual, indicating that an “anti-decisive moment” (see Henri Cartier-Bresson) era had begun.
Commercial Practice
Commercial magazines did not believe that private symbolic imagery was suitable for a popular, public audience. This left expressive practitioners to face solitary lives of offering images to tiny audiences with little hope of financial compensation. Still, some artists found straight realism too restrictive, and they wanted more mental space for cerebral interpretation and personal enlightenment. The search for alternatives to social realism, representational images with a social purpose, became urgent. Photographers sought to extend their practice beyond the commercial and functional realms and to explore internal intellectual and philosophical quests. Their search for a new form of spiritualism in an atomic age shifted from the modernist approach that favored strongly defined, tangible subject matter and the structuring role of light, to compositions that embraced the subjectivity of inner self-expression, the metaphor, and the manipulation of materials and processes. In a world now controlled by invisible atoms, there was a growing interest by photographers in psychoanalytic theory and surrealist dream imagery that promoted the speculative and imaginary aspects of being. Credit: Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light, pg. 369
Manzanar Internment Camp
Nearby Mount Williamson was Manzanar, the internment camp set up by the War Relocation Center. The Manzanar, California, internment camp held in captivity more than 10,000 West Coast Japanese Americans. These Japanese Americans were imprisoned by U.S. Government during World War II. (Ansel Adams book of photos was published eventually under the title As Born Free and Equal in 1944). Again, Adams made works that encouraged people to scrutinize the mountains and heavens for high moral authority and to replace the one that seemed to be crumbling.
After detonating the first test bomb at Trinity site on July 16, 1945, the earth and heaven no longer seemed to possess the same degree of lasting spiritual strength that Adams photograph’s personified. It seemed that the earth proved to be as fragile as humans are. This caused a move to creating less rational photos. New Views Toward Psychic Expression
The focus was now on how we look to psychic self expression and a new way to rebel against the realist outlook that once dominated American photographic practice. It’s no longer about repeating the literal movement. Now photography can be made more timeless and intangible as viewed in the representations of the allegorical, the psychological and the spiritual.
“You don’t make a photography just with a camera. You bring to the act of photographing all the pictures
you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”
Ansel Adams
Minor White: The Photograph as Spirit
Minor White converted to Catholicism, explored mysticism, and studied Zen Buddhism during this time. Upon his return from active military duty in the Philippines during World War II, Minor White looked for visual metaphors because he wanted to find and capture the hidden mythical nature within reality. His initial work was a sequence titled, Amputations, 1947. It contained soldier portraits juxtaposed with other pictures of nature and with poetic verse as stated below:
“If battle gives me time, it is my will to cut away all dear insanities I get in war. Or, if I live to amputate the pain I’ve seen endured.”
Minor White
He spent years editing and altering the sequences of images to find an order that makes sense. During the Cold War era of Communist witch hunts, most artists turned away from actual social encounters and searched inward using suffering for transcendence which might lead to contentment. Minor White returned to the 1920’s works by Alfred Stieglitz, such as Equivalents, which functioned metaphorically by subordinating subject matter in order to focus on himself. White sums it up in this statement:
“I photograph not that which is, but that which I am…”
Minor White
Minor White, Sequence 15, 1964
Minor White, Daly City Dump, California, 1953
Moon and Wall Encrustations, Putneyville, New York, 1964
This tightly cropped detail of White’s Moon and Wall Encrustations is of a concrete surface is printed in high contrast to reveal a pattern of minute cracks with light-colored accretions. At the upper center of the image is an oval form which suggests a full moon illuminating a hilly landscape. Minor White was driven by a desire not just to document, but to transform reality; thus, creating works that the viewer could interpret on a personal and poetic level through association. Credit: SLMoA WhiteLinks to an external site.
Alfred Stieglitz’s theory of equivalence, which we studied in an earlier module, depicted images that represented something other than the subject photographed. This clearly resonated with Minor White’s poetic nature. In White’s picture below, the framing of the rock formation creates an image of a woman’s torso with belly button which is aptly named Double Navel. White uses this technique repeatedly in his photographs. Stieglitz, Equivalents, 1925-31
Minor White, Double Navel (Woman Holding
Bottom, Point Lobos, CA) 1947
White didn’t invent subjects to be photographs but rather edited and sequenced reality based images into a fragmentation that deviated them from their original meaning. Ultimately, he freed the image from its burden of representation and he believed the viewer could subjectively read an image for personal meaning. In a process called mirroring, he suggested that we invent a subject out of the substance of ourselves and turned photography into a mirror of some part of ourselves. Most of his photographs contain numerous meaning and the viewer is the source of their meaning.
This made the audience as creative as the photographer. He taught at the California School of Fine Arts with Ansel Adams, he was curator of exhibitions, editor of images at the George Eastman House, wrote a manual, and founded a magazine called Aperture in 1952, while serving as editor until 1975.
Universal Humanism: Edward Steichen and the Family of Man
Edward Steichen, Director of Photography at MOMA, organized the Family of Man, an exhibit that celebrated universal Humanism. The photo, Child in the Forest, chosen as the opening piece of the show symbolically represented the mythical first woman. Bullock was chosen because his visual language joined the natural environment with abstract symbolism of the inner world in an accessible manner. He believed reality was constructed through personal experience. The premise of the show was to reveal the message of the essential oneness of mankind. Steichen assembled 508 images from 68 countries taken by 273 photographers into a great three dimensional magazine layout. He believes all people were the same so he did not treat the photos as individual works but as parts of a larger tapestry. Some deemed it as more of an editorial achievement rather than a photography exhibit. The Family of Man answered the question of what it means to be human especially in the decades following World War II. The exhibition was initially shown at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1955, and then toured the world for eight years, making stops in thirty-seven countries on six continents. At the time of this exhibit, the Korean War and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigations about loyalty were going on. People were weary and ready to look at the goodness of humankind. The show traveled and was seen by nine million people around the world.
The Family of Man: The Historical Collection in a Contemporary Context
The collection The Family of Man has enjoyed an eventful history, drawing 10 million visitors and prompting enthusiastic and critical reactions alike. It constitutes an exceptional legacy that never ceases to generate stories and research. The exhibition was created by Edward Steichen as a collection of snapshots and emotions that aimed to convey a message of peace in the midst of the Cold War. While the collection still bears the traces of its context of creation, visitor reactions continue to reflect the impact of these images, which remain relevant to this day. Some have even become icons in the history of photography.
According to Edward Steichen himself, The Family of Man was the most significant work of his career. In a manner that was both unusual and visionary at the time, the collection condensed his approach to photography as well as his understanding of settings: the photographs were chosen according to their capacity of communication, while the layout allowed visitors to immerse themselves in a photographic essay. The collection embodies an astonishing summary of Steichen’s career as an exhibition curator at MoMA.
Current UNESCO Exhibit Recreates Steichen’s The Family of Man
To exhibit this heritage today calls for a deference to history and an almost archaeological approach: the course of the exhibition and the chronology of the images have been respected and follow the layout of the original exhibition at MoMA in order to recreate the visitor experience and the effect the images has on them. This approach nevertheless demanded a shift away from history, resulting in the exhibition rooms featuring a very sober architecture conceived by designer Nathalie Jacoby (NJOY). Also a new mediation approach to the exhibition is part of the new concept and comprises e.g. a new museum library and multimedia guide on iPad mini. It accompanies visitors on their tour, giving them access to documents on the history of the original exhibition and its layout, as well as on the photographers themselves and Edward Steichen. Credit: UNESCO Steichen Fam of ManLinks to an external site.
To view various pictures from the Family of Man Exhibition, go to: the Guardian Steichen Family of ManLinks to an external site.
These Photographs are from the Original Family of Man Exhibition
Wynn Bullock, Let There Be Light, the Family of Man Book, 1951
Wynn Bullock, Child in the Forest, Cover of the
Family of Man Exhibition Book, 1951
Wynn Bullock, on his photograph, Child in the Forest, 1951 once said in an interview:
“I think everything is mysterious….
To me everything in art is a symbol, it’s never the thing….
I believe that symbols are more important than the people.
They have more power to influence the world than the people
who create the symbols. Why is it that all the great philosophers,
scientists, painters, and so forth still have this great influence?
It’s because of the symbols they’ve left us.” Credit Direct Quote: Robert Hirsch, Seizing he Light, pg. 379.
More Photos from Family of Man Exhibition
Elliot Porter
Eliot Porter was a Harvard Med School graduate, teacher, researcher, and amateur photographer. He was one of the first to work extensively with color photography. He was deeply impressed by Ansel Adams and was acquainted with Alfred Stieglitz. He developed new methods for the photography world, and had a deep interest in birds and insects. He used telephoto lenses, flash, and special shutters. Porter saw nature as an undiluted source of pleasure and a reservoir of mysteries especially about life. He wanted to use science to understand nature and protect it. Porter used a dye transfer process which relied on prints from color negatives or positives. He published a book showing what was lost in the landscape from the damming and flooding of the Colorado river in order to create a lake in the pursuit of electricity.
Porter believed in the power of art to promote environmental issues and awaken human consciousness about ecological issues and also the danger of uncontrolled technology. During this time, people were joining environment movements like The Sierra Club and this is what helped color photography gain entry in the art world. This may be because the authority of an image is determined as much by imagination and memory as it is by the real intricacy of life through stimulating a person’s sense that generate empathy. The resulting perhaps riveting images can bear witness during a period of time which may raise our consciousness and desire to bring about societal change.
Ultimately, his resulting photographs were an attempt to protect nature from man and to suggest that the earth is as fragile as humans are.
For more on Porter, go to: Eliot Porter at the Carter Museum with Artist PortfolioLinks to an external site.
Eliot Porter, Aspens by Lake, Pike National Forest, Colorado,
American, September 14, 1959, Dye transfer print
Eliot Porter, Eastern Flicker (Colaptes auratus auratus),
Seney, Michigan, 1973, Dye transfer print Eliot Porter, Sangre de Christo Mountains at Sunset, NM, 1958 16. Lecture
“My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” ~ JFK
Aaron Shikler, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Official Presidential Official White House Portrait Photo of JFK, 1961
Portrait of the 35th U.S. President, Unveiled 1971 (This is a painting not a photograph)
Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present
are certain to miss the future. Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.” ~ JFK
The 1960’s was a time of cultural, economic, and political upheaval. Americans voted into office the youngest president ever at the age of 43. John F. Kennedy (“JFK”) was a bit progressive and invited artists and poets to the White House, which brought a new sense of vitality to the seat of government. JFK created a new frontier of social reform included aid to education, medical care for aged, extension of civil rights, formation of the Peace Corps and a physical fitness program. He also initiated an aggressive foreign policy that included the abortive Bay of Pig’s invasion of Cuba in 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 that brought the US and Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war. While there was an increase in the number of military advances to South Vietnam, astronaut Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969 and people thought it was staged. The reality that “surface appearance could not be trusted” was becoming increasingly clear.
At the time, the idea that photography was made of direct or unmanipulated pictures of the world was being replaced with the idea that photography had its own changing path that lived somewhere between reality and what the viewer saw.
Roland Barthes: Critic, Semiotician, French Literary Theorist Barthes decoded the formal relationship of signs to one another and the symbolic logic of photography for the purpose of cultural analysis. Barthes discovered that the image yields a first message which is linguistic and is supported by captions or labels. Barthes wrote, “photography crushes all other images by its tranny.”
Roland Barthes, 1915 – 1980 Semioticians
Semioticians looked at how meaning is constructed and understood. They analyzed mental association to find hidden meaning and to understand how a society creates meaning. They did not limit their practice to language and included the photographer, the person who was able to communicate meaning in signs and symbols. Semioticians provided the historical foundation for modern structuralism
Semioticians maintain that the relation of words to things is not natural. It is assigned by society; thus, language is a self-contained system of signs made up of two components, the signified and the signifier:
Signified represents the mental association one has with a word which may or not be conscious and which is generated by the culture (the meaning or the connotation).
Signifier is the word itself that people use to define the material world around them (the representation or the denotation).
Inclusive Restroom Sign No Left Turn Sign
Starbucks Logo The “word” tree over the tree as a figure/sign/symbol
What does all this mean?
It means that when someone says the word “tree,” one may immediately sees a picture of a “tree” in their mind.
What does this have to do with photography? A new debate ensued over what a photograph could mean, and the following questions resurfaced:
“Was a photo a witness to history or an equivalent to inner vision?”
“Was the meaning of a photograph determined by its maker, the editor, or a free floating idea? “
“Could two individuals read the same photo and ascribe different meaning to it based on life experience?”
”Was the meaning of the photograph written in a universal language or did outside influences determine the meaning?”
Structuralism and Photography: Structuralism Explains the Relationship Between Language, Literature, and Images
Structuralism looks at the signs and hidden underlying meanings of a society that can be decoded. The signs are compared to components of language that create meaning and examine how a society uses language as a “framework to understand the world.” Structuralists ask “how one sign might relate to another?” Photographers are part of this complex cultural structure of signs, which are filled with hidden messages and analyze their meaning based on experiences of both photographer and viewer. Structural theory gave hope to understanding a seemingly chaotic atomic world that saw Newton’s unified mechanical universe crumble into the physics of Einstein’s invisible particles theory. Structuralism offered the world a way to make it whole again.
Noam Chomsky, Born 1928
In the 1950’s, Noam Chomsky, an American linguist, revolutionized the study of language with his theory that innate structure, not sound, are the basis for speech. The idea that inherent, unconscious structure might serve as the foundation of understanding started philosophers and artists searching for the hidden structure that shaped meaning.
In the 1960’s, Chomsky accused the media of suppressing vital information important to understanding the Vietnam War. He accused the media of misleading people because he believed that in a democratic society, one should freely arrive at decisions and ideas. He said “images are not neutral containers and thus people must ferret out their meaning.” He further suggested that if the thing itself could no longer be trusted to supply an accurate and complete meaning, then photographers need to devise new ways of making images that offered insight into the world. He asks viewers not to passively accept an image at face value but to take responsibility by extrapolating their own meaning.
If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” ~ Noam Chomsky
Edward Steichen and “Hidden Persuaders”
Throughout the 1950s, Edward Steichen and his exhibition on the human family titled The Family of Man Exhibit reinforced the belief that photography was an exception for these “hidden persuaders” that shaped meaning. Did You Know: The Great Modern Artist Pablo Picasso also worked in Photography too?
Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973
Painters like Pablo Picasso embraced photography and used it occasionally as revealed in his self-portrait above. The Beginning of Postmodernism: “Combines” and Robert Rauschenberg
The photographic image was beginning to dominate and artists had to expand the medium. New definitions came out and painters like Rauschenberg exhibited “combines” by placing discordant and incompatible items together in one work of art. He made lithographs and silk screens which reflected his idea that painting relates to both “art and life.” Rauschenberg’s works are considered both photography and Pop Art.
Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled “combine,” 1964, Oil, silkscreen, canvas
Robert Rauschenberg, Retroactive I, 1964, Silkscreen He used ready made vernacular sources to create motifs and pushed the content of high art to included mass communication, politics, and technology. His way of working was antithetical to photography’s unbroken view of reality of a single moment in time. In Rauschenberg Retroactive I, 1964, (depicted above) he saw the world as a camera saw it and selected, extracted, and assembled visual information. Pop Art: A New Artistic Era
The pop art movement consisted of Assemblage, Conceptual Art, Environmental Art, Minimalism, Op art, Pop Art, and Photorealism. The struggle in the art world between painterly and photographic was revealed during this time.
Photography continued to provoke new attitudes, forms and iconography, and tended to reject painting. Photography captured race riots, Viet Nam, the assassinations of JFK (1963), Malcolm X (1965), MLK Jr. and RFK (1968). Photography may have even resurrected the myth of the doomed outsider. But the alternative community of artists conveyed a sense that anything is possible with new artistic visions, and this was true for photographers too but especially for writers.
Andy Warhol
Warhol found disaster paintings such as car and airplane crashes and also assassinations an interesting alternative to romantic notions as subject matter. In some cases, he produced the action over and over again. In doing so, he destroyed the original context of photography by distancing the viewer from the sense of horror; thus, leaving them uninvolved and even estranged from his works.
His advertising background influenced his work as he used pop culture items like the soup cans or coke bottles to mimic our ability to mass produce commodity and his works started conversation of the effects of technology on society.
Warhol saw the artist as a business man who has the right to sell anything. He once said that every person, every work, would be famous for fifteen minutes in his world. You may have heard this expression before. Warhol said “everybody wants to be famous.” Someone answered him with “yeah, for about 15 minutes.”
Warhol, Disaster Paintings, 1960s, Screen Printed Image of a Car Crash
Warhol, Silver Car Crash, 1963, (Sold for $105M in Nov. 2013 at auction)
Warhol, Coca Cola, 1962 Ultimately, art and artist no longer shared the responsibility to unmask things and explain the incomprehensible or provide morals or taste. It made no difference what art said now.
William Burroughs, Author of The Naked Lunch
Cover of the 1959 Olympia first edition, with misprinted title
William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs wrote The Naked Lunch. He was a beat writer and his book was ruled as obscene in the state of Massachusetts. Burroughs book contained vivid descriptions of homosexuality and drugs. A beat writer is someone who often focuses on a specific issue.
A few years later, in 1962, he wrote The Ticket That Exploded. He cut up and rearranged texts to free his work from linear time and cognitive thinking. He created a world made up of a mosaics of voices. He created a universe in which anything could happen because “nothing is true” and “everything is permitted.” Photographers such as Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and David Hockney (to be discussed in the next module) also worked in a kind of “mosaic” style.
Diane Arbus
She came from an upper middle class Jewish family. While she created advertising photographs for her father’s store and later became a fashion photographer for magazine’s like Harper’s Bazaar, it was the outer fringe of society that interested her most. Perhaps this is so because she felt like an outsider herself. She died by suicide in 1971.
Diane Arbus, Triplets in their Bedroom, New Jersey, 1963
She studied with Lisette Model whose motto was “the most mysterious thing is a fact clearly stated.” The feminist movement was on the rise and her desires shifted to a challenging style using frontal light and a flash to sharply depict a subject. She is said to have broken down public personas by removing them from people living in the margins of society to people who became archetypes of human circumstances. Her work exemplifies that one could indeed find the astonishing in the commonplace.
The concept of having triplet was distressing. It did not fit into the mold of how families should appear during this time. Perhaps because people thought that it did not align with the American dream; thus, making triplets an oddity. The American Dream at the time was to have two children. The first should be a boy and the second a girl. The family should live in a nice house with a picket fence and a pet dog perhaps. Dad goes to work. Mom does not. She stays home because she is a homemaker; thus, her job is to care for the children and take care of the house. Diane Arbus, Eddie Carmel aka “The Jewish Giant,” at Home in the Bronx, NY, 1970 Diane Arbus said that a photo was a secret about a secret and the more you see, the less you know. She focused on secrets no one wanted to share and she said “freaks were born with their trauma. They passed their test in life; they are aristocrats.” Pathos is not felt of her subject but rather by the viewer. She believed they wanted to be “normal” and to be accepted just as we are accepted. She said, “any pain you feel that makes you avert your eyes is due to internal violence.“ She was basically saying it’s our problem if we cannot handle seeing people that are different and do not fit into the mold that most of society fits into. This was profound and insightful for this era in history. Arbus’ pictures are between the void of our inner self-perceptions and that of outer public reality. Her works appeared in Esquire Magazine and showed a new trend toward personal journalism.
Bruce Davidson, Circus Performer Jimmy Armstrong (aka Circus Dwarf), Palisades, NJ, 1958
From the Series The Dwarf and Clyde Beatty Circus
Bruce Davidson, Brooklyn Gang, 1959
Bruce Davidson
Bruce Davidson’s images, like the new journalism of writer Norman Mailer and Hunter Thomson, contain authentic details of people and their situations. Davidson once did a photo essay about a circus little person and a French person and shows us a sympathetic representation of those who are not part of mainstream culture. In 1958, he photographed a New York City gang and their rituals such as hanging out under the boardwalk, drinking beer, dancing, etc.
Bruce Davidson, Two Youths, Coney Island, 1959
Joker in the pack: Bruce Davidson’s photographs of a Brooklyn gang.
In 1959, the 25-year-old photographer embedded himself with a gang
of teenage New Yorkers to create a moving portrait of postwar inner-city youth culture.
His works are about perseverance and holding onto your dreams and remind one of Walker Evans’ sharecropper from Hale County, Alabama. While Davidson shows the face of human dignity in the midst of tribulation, he takes it a step further by adding a sense of intimacy especially when considering what it take to endure in a hostile world. His works are not radical but rather compelling in our social conscience. The Garden Cafeteria couple is a great example of this.
Bruce Davidson, Garden Cafeteria, Lower East Side, NYC, 1973
Bruce Davidson, Woman outside Garden Cafeteria, NYC, 1973
Bruce Davidson, Man Eating Soup, Garden Cafeteria, NYC, 1973
Davidson gave photographic validation to the everyday effects on the disenfranchised and lonely within the urban landscape. Ultimately, he respects his subjects despite criticism. Some of Davidson’s photographic themes are the Los Angeles ghettos, Spanish Harlem, and the Holocaust survivors of the Garden Cafeteria. Displace Jewish persons found comfort at the Garden Cafeteria, which is why Davidson believed wholeheartedly that place matters. Perhaps because Holocaust survivors found other survivors at the Cafeteria.
Bruce Davidson, Circus Performer Jimmy Armstrong (aka Circus Dwarf), Palisades, NJ, 1958
For many, the circus is an enchanting and otherworldly place not just for children. The performance, the magic, the mystery and the fantasy, everything seems captivating and marvelous. But have you ever wondered what happens behind the curtains? Through photography, Bruce Davidson, invites us to take a peek backstage so that we can look into this lonely and not so glamorous life. The 1970’s, Photography, and Higher Education
In the 1970’s, photography was offered as a course of study in Art Departments at higher educational institutions like ours. During this time, it received a pronounced injection of academic aesthetic discourse through the influence of the Society for Photographic Education (“SPE”) and the George Eastman House who formed the SPE. Studies in the field of photography offered teaching gallery and museum jobs for graduates. Universal photographic programs also emerged all over the United States. Additionally, the study of the History of Photography became a popular course in higher education Art History Departments.
17. Lecture
Alternate Visions and a Changing Reality
Life Magazine, November 26, 1965
While Viet Nam ended in 1973 with a cease fire and withdrawal of troops, Watergate provided us with the uncertainty about government integrity. People looked to quieter and more peaceful times. Richard Nixon, President of
the U.S., from 1969 – 74
Famous NYC Disco, Studio 54, 1972 – 86,
Most legendary Club in NYC
Jim Morrison, Lead Singer, The Doors
Ronald Reagan, President of
the U.S from 1981 – 1989
The 1960’s and 1970’s
The 1960’s were filled with screaming guitars. The 1970’s were filled with canned disco sounds. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, photographers practiced like a conservative minority. The Reagan revolution was ushered in during the 1980’s and led to a more pessimistic and restrained stance of diminished possibility in photographic prints. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment was alas disassembled. Photography Finds Itself Once Again at a Crossroad:
Robert Adams and the New Topography
Robert Adams, a former English Professor, took a lighter approach to the new West. He saw it as a site of diverse interaction between nature and culture and perhaps a reaction to Truman Capote’s book, In Cold Blood, and Norman Mailer’s book, The Executioners Song, where tales of heroic deeds were replaced with a senseless lack of respect for life.
Adams recognized that the grace, beauty, and order of the open American West had been obscured by the confusing commercial upheaval of freeways, strip malls, tract homes, and road signs. Robert Adams called it the new topography.
Robert Adams, Mobile Home Park,
Denver, Colorado, 1973 – 74
Robert Adams. Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1968
Robert Adams, Mobile Home Park, 1973 – 74 Hue Masters: Joel Myerowitz, William Eggleston, John Pfahl, and Steven Shore
What do hue masters, Joel Myerowitz, William Eggleston, John Pfahl, and Steven Shore have in common? All of these photographers worked in color and pushed the use of color photography into the next century.
The Washington Post essay, Hue Masters, focuses on the works of these photographers. Link to essay: WAPO Hue MastersLinks to an external site.
What did people think of Color Photography?
Walker Evans dismissed color as “vulgar.” Robert Frank said, “The colors of photography are black and white.”
Together they laid down the law for two generations of American documentary photographers who scorned color as the tool of advertisers and amateurs. A change in attitude can be traced to 1976, when a show of William Eggleston’s dye transfer prints opened at the Museum of Modern Art and, in effect, officially canonized color. Joel Meyerowitz and others had also taken advantage of the new, more controllable color processes that emerged in the 60’s, but it appears to have been Eggleston’s show — and MOMA’s blessing — that touched off the explosion of new color work that has since revitalized contemporary photography.
Joel Myerowitz, Bay/Sky, 1977
William Eggleston, Supermarket Boy, 1974
John Pfahl, Great Salt Lake, 1977
Stephen Shore, Beverly Boulevard and La Brea, Los Angeles, CA, 1975
These photographers are not trendy or Avant-Garde, they are photographers who make personal images in the documentary tradition — straight, unmanipulated images that derive their forms and attitudes chiefly from black-and-white street photographers. All have mastered their craft, and though the taut modernist aesthetic prevails, many have loosened those bonds to allow the sheer romance of color to come into play, along with an occasional undertow of social concern. In that sense, they share the new tendency toward “content.”
Joel Sternfeld, American Prospects Book Cover with Color Photograph
For more of Sternfeld’s works, go to: Sternfeld American ProspectsLinks to an external site.
Like all good art, these photographs are not one-shot images, and layers of meaning slowly unfold only to the exploring eye. Joel Sternfeld’s “An American Prospect,” for example, seems on first encounter to focus mostly on the sheer beauty of the color in his landscapes and deserted factories, all bathed in exquisite light. Closer inspection reveals underlying tragedies such as the unsold rotting pumpkins above. Though his more direct attempts to show alienation among the middle class, some of his works are contrived as they represent contemporary society. Many of these photographs however evoke a sense of place and call to mind the works of Bruce Davidson especially his Cafeteria Garden photographs.
It also puts the old arguments for and against color to rest. Color has now become, in the hands of many of these artists, a tool that only a fool would argue against. Credit: Jo Ann Lewis, WaPo, Dec. 15, 1984, Hue MastersLinks to an external site.
Edward Weston, 1886 – 1958
Walker Evans, 1903 – 1975
C O L O R Photography
The 1960’s and 1970’s saw the emergence of color photography especially for advertising, commercial works, manipulative advertising that pleases viewers as well as glorifying celebrity.
It was Walker Evans who once said:
“There are four simple words which must be whispered: color photography is vulgar.” Why was color photography slow to be accepted?
The 1960’s and 1970’s saw the emergence of color photography especially for advertising and commercial works. It was not highly used because it was associated with the garish and decorative in terms of advertising; thus, it was deemed inappropriate for art photographs. Famous photographers at this time such as Edward Weston and Walker Evans truly believed this and refused to work with color for a while.
Please screen Color PhotographyLinks to an external site.
The Purpose of Photography is Growing: Performance Art
Photography has a new job at the end of the twentieth century. Photography captures performances and preserves them for future use. Photography of performance art reaches a larger audience now. This point cannot be emphasized enough.
Chris Burden 1946 – 2015
Performance art tried to give a documented look at contrived situations. Photographs of performance art are pictures of a real body engaged as a forum for cultural critiques. A perfect example of this is found in the works of artist, Chris Burden, who had his friend shoot him on film. Needless to say, this is not something that should ever be attempted. It’s a performance piece of art that has been captured and preserved for future use and to show to larger audiences. Performance art is an open ended classification for art activists that includes elements of dance, music, and poetry, theatre, and video performed before live audiences. At 7:45 p.m. on November 19, 1971, performance artist Chris Burden was shot. Standing still inside an empty gallery space surrounded by white walls, he watched as his friend pointed a loaded rile at his left arm from a distance of approximately fifteen feet. Ten people observed the scene; they stood to the side. The trigger was pulled, and a black and white photograph was taken to document the event. Chris Burden Getting Shot on Camera Ponder this for a Moment
We now come to realize that EVERYTHING in the world is USED and SAVED in PHOTOGRAPHY and FILM…This is a defining moment in the history of photography. I am sure you can relate to this. Think about how many pictures you have saved on your SmartPhone and in the Cloud. The Performance Artist
The goal of the performance artist is to provide a more interactive experience to a larger audience. Bruce Nauman, Portarit of the Abstract Fountain, 1966
This is a performance piece of the shirtless artist spewing water
like that of a fountain. It pays homage to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (urinal)
and also questions the role of the artist. This work of art
also speaks to Nauman’s own vision that “The true artist is an amazing luminous fountain.” Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970, Rozel Point in the Great Salk Lake
Smithson used corporate funding and large construction equipment such as earth movers to
create the shape of a spiral jetty that is still apparent now that the waters have receded. Eventually, nature
will take back this temporary or ephemeral (aka Earthwork) performance piece through erosion and the passage of time.
This work has been preserved thanks to the great medium of photography. Christo, Running Fence, 1976, Hills of Sonoma and Marin Country, Northern California
Christo created a temporary structure with flowing drapes that bend
in the wind and was intended to mimic the curves of the hillside. As it was a temporary or ephemeral work of art made from 240k yard of fabric and 90 miles of steel cable, it
only existed for two weeks in September, 1976. This work has
been preserved thanks to the great medium of photography. Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger spent ten years as a graphic designer for various women’s magazines that extolled beauty, fashion and heterosexual relations before she began to make photomontages resembling billboards with texts that question capitalism’s relationship to patriarchal oppression and the role consumption plays within this social structure. Barbara Kruger, Born 1945
Barbara Kruger believed that, because of computers, etc., photographs no longer belong to the world of the real but rather to the unreal.
Barbara Kruger, Your Body is a Battlefield, 1989
In her works, Kruger asks “Who speaks?” “Who is silent?” “Who is seen?” “Who is absent?“
These questions focus on how cultures are constructed through pictures and words, and how we are seduced into a world of appearances – into a pose of who we are and aren’t. On both an emotional and an economic level, images and texts have the power to make us rich or poor
Barbara Kruger, Remote Control, Power, Culture and the World of Appearances, 1994
She made confrontational photographs using mass media images like block type from advertising. Not just for museums, public venues too, and commercial formats putting her images and slogans on billboard and even department store shopping bags. Some consider it stylish.
In her book Remote Control, Power, Culture and the World of Appearances, 1994, she deconstructs consumerism, the power of the median, and stereotypes of women to show how images and words manipulate and obscure meaning. She works with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are, what we want to be, and what we become. Her works ask “who speaks?” “Who is silent?” “Who is seen?”
She visualizes what Roland Barthe suggests in his work, The Rhetoric of the Image, and shows viewers the tactics that photography uses to impose their messages and reveal hidden ideological agendas and power. She sees stereotypes of women as instruments of social power determining who is in and who is out. She uses certain phrases such as “Who is bought and sold?” and “Your manias become science?” It goes to the core of the male demonstration of financial, physical, and sexual power.
She reuses commercial images and is not interested in action but in stereotypical transformation of action into gesture. She uses pronouns such as I and My and You and Your to build attraction, emphasis, and significance by connecting the addressee to the speaker. Personal pronouns do not carry gender and allow one to enter the artwork free of that.
Welcome to the Postmodern Era.
The Postmodern Era is Now.
So, what is Postmodernism?
Postmodern is a dissolution of traditional values. There are lots of noticeable differences between artistic mediums now. Art has become less distinct and concepts and processes are comingled. New forms of art are ambiguous and contrary, and the desire to create pure articulated works is waning.
Artists believe that meaning cannot be determined by surface appearance since everything, from a photograph to a TV show, is a text that must be decoded. The act of decoding or deciphering the text to unveil the hidden assumption is called deconstruction. Deconstruction is a term coined by Jacques Derrida. Derrida, a French Philosopher and Semiotician, concedes that to find true meaning is like trying to find your true reflection in a hall of mirrors.
The notion that there is not a single truth of exp