Identical twins- Diane ArbusWhen we first look at the image, the explicit meaning that we can pick up is the concept of symmetry and reflection through the denotation of the identical twins and they're matching appearances. However, if we look further into the image, and focus on their faces we can see the difference between their faces. The denotations of the left twins face are lower eyes, and more of a pouting expression. These features connote sorrow and sadness. The lack of expression presents a more empty atmosphere. The right twin, on the other hand, is showing a more vibrant expression, with denotations of bright, wide eyes and a smile. This connotes that she is happier and maybe more content in life. This division in emotion contradicts the idea that they are identical twins and the original concept of symmetry and could also symbolises that, despite being twins, their personalities differ substantially. Furthermore, the denotation of the slanted angle shown by the uneven pavement further contrasts with the mirror image of the twins. All of these
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A Family on Their Lawn One Sunday in Westchester.On the right we can see Diane Arbus's image 'a family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester'. We can initially see quite a mundane image that connotes normality. The harsh contrasts of the tones with very dark shadows and very bright highlights allows the focal point of the image (the people) to be highlighted and stand out, drawing our attention to them. The background of the enclosing darkened trees introduce this looming presence that creates an ominous, depressed atmosphere. It also connotes a sense of oblivion and the unknown. The vast lawn adds to the sense of emptiness and loneliness that the trees provide which could connote that, physically, you can have all the big flashy space you want, but if you have nothing to fill it with you're left with a sense of isolation. This idea could project a psychological message to the reader. If we focus on the foreground we can see the parents are sat separately from one another. Whilst in a
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Johann Heinrich Schulze was one of the major pioneers of photography. in the early 1700s, Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered that a slurry of chalk and nitric acid into which some silver had been dissolved was darkened by sunlight, concluding that silver nitrate was sensitive to light. This discovery provided a foundation for later discoveries of how to fix a projected image, despite not directly finding a way of permanently preserving an image. This breakthrough is still considered to be one of the most important principles when saving images on negative film.
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Camera obscura was first invented in 400 BC by a Chinese philosopher called Mo-tzu. The camera obscura is known to be where photography was initially created. He discovered that light from an illuminated object that passed through a small hole into a pitch-black room created an inverted image of the original object. This discovery was a great advancement into the development of photography that was used in many different fields. For example, astronomers in the 13th century used camera obscuras to observe sunspots.
Developing from this discovery, Ibn Al- Haytham invented the first pinhole camera. This was a box with a pinhole in it, through which light travelled through and projected an image in colour upside down. |
Following the development done by Joseph Niepce in 1827 where he successfully fixed the first projected image of the view from his window, creating the first photograph as we know it today, Louis Jacques Daguerre worked with Niepce in an attempt to fix his images that he projected. Daguerre differed from Niepce as he was a painter, whereas Niepce was a scientist.
In 1839, Daguerre finally announced his creation of a type of photograph which was reversed and monochromatic printed onto a metal plate. This was called a Daguerreotype, the first commercially successful photographic process. The process of the Daguerreotype produced sharp and detailed positive images on metal plates. They were faster and more affordable to make those paintings. Popular 1840s-1860s and were known worldwide. It was the first invention that would capture sharp detailed images that would last for years to come. |
Pictorialism emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century and flourished for several decades thereafter. During that time, photography wasn't seen as a form of art as it was simply a mechanical process however, pictorialism was a movement that developed photography as a form of fine art, and challenged that by emphasising the beauty of the subject, the aesthetic rather than the realism. In order to further photography’s acceptance as an art, Pictorialists embraced the medium’s painterly qualities. They took time and care to focus on the composition and soft focus, like contemporary artists. They treated photographs as paintings and favoured beauty over fact. Pictorialists aimed to incorporate emotion, senses, feelings into their paintings. They would smear vaseline on their images, or scratch the negatives in the dark room or put chemicals on their prints to simulate brush strokes. the aim was to make photography a hand made process like the other arts. Pictorialism as an art movement peaked between 1885 and 1915, but it remained mildly active well into the 1940s, thanks to its alluring appeal, which remained influential among twentieth-century photographers.
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The movement was founded by the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Alfred Stieglitz played a crucial role in establishing photography as an integral part of modern art in America. His influential work helped form key connections between American and European movements.
Alfred Stieglitz was born in New jersey in 1864 and schooled as an engineer in Germany. In 1980, at the age of 16, he returned to New York to prove that photography was as capable of artistic expression as painting or sculpture. This was the aim of the Pictorialism movement in that time. Stieglitz became the editor of “Camera Notes” a journal that was published by the Camera Club of New York which Stieglitz was the vice-president of. Stieglitz espoused his belief in the aesthetic potential of the medium and published work by photographers who shared his conviction. Stieglitz and several like-minded photographers broke away from the group in 1902 to form the Photo-Secession which worked with an emphasis on the artistry involved in photography. Stieglitz favoured a different approach to the rest of the photographers in the movement in his own work. Although he took great care in producing his prints, often making platinum prints, he achieved the desired affiliation with painting through compositional choices and the use of natural elements like rain, snow, and steam to unify the components of a scene into a visually pleasing pictorial whole. Stieglitz went on to edit the associations highly admired publication of "Camera Work" and organised exhibitions with the help of Edward Steichen where he aimed to support photographers and other modern American artists, while also apprising artists of the latest developments in early twentieth-century European modernism with the help of Steichen’s frequent reports from Paris, including the work of Pablo Picasso. |
Founded by Alfred Stieglitz in New York in 1902, the name was invented by him as a way of affiliating the photographers with the modernist secession movements in Europe. The other members were Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen and Clarence H. White, who all placed great importance on fine photographic printing and used techniques to emulate paint and pastel. In 1910 the Photo-Secession sponsored an international show of more than 500 photographs by its members or by photographers whose aims were similar to its own. World War I ended the pre-war leisurely life many had enjoyed. Stieglitz felt the work was lacking creativity and ‘Camera Works’ began including less and less ‘artistic’ photography replacing it with more candid images by photographers such as Paul Strand. |
During the late 1800s, Steichen worked as an apprentice lithographer (who makes and prepares metal plates used to print books, magazines, labels, and other items) before pursuing photography in 1896. Steichen had a distinct photography style after originally starting out at a painter and this is what set him apart from contemporary photographers such as casual snap shooters and commercial studios. In the beginning of the 1900s, Steichen made a visit to the Camera Club of New York to show his work to Alfred Stieglitz the leading tastemaker in American photography. Steichen sold three of his paintings to Stieglitz for 5 dollars. This was a very big deal for Steichen as he told Stieglitz that he’d never before sold a photograph for more than fifty cents. He then left additional photographs from his portfolio for Stieglitz to publish or send to exhibitions before going to Europe.
Once he arrived in France, Steichen decided to abandon studying paintings where he began to focus on photography. He became more invested in the technical intricacies of different photographic processes and developed a reputation as a portraitist of noted artists, writers and members of society. His photography embraced a more modernistic aesthetic and he experimented with colouring techniques that were initially developed by the French Lumière Brothers. Steichen returned to New York in 1902, and that same year Stieglitz announced the formation of the Photo Secession. Steichen’s name became more and more popular and prominent in the world of photographers as his work was dominantly featured in Stieglitz’s journal, “Camera Work” where 65 photographs were featured and three paintings of his reproduced in fifteen issues. In 1905, Steichen's work was further emerging into recognition in the world of photography as Steichen arranged for Stieglitz to take over the lease of his studio and two adjacent rooms for use as a showcase for the best of artistic photography and avant-garde art; they called it the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession. Steichen’s work as a professional portrait photographer flourished, not least in the wake of his famous portrait session with J. P. Morgan in 1903. “Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossible difficult” - Edward Steichen. |
The Lumière Brothers |
Coburn began taking photographs when he received a camera as a gift on his eighth birthday, but it was not until 1899, when he met the photographer Edward Steichen, that he became a serious photographer.In 1902 Coburn opened a studio in New York City to exhibit his prints, and in that same year he was elected to the newly formed Photo-Secession, a group of American photographers.
Alvin Coburn was one of the foremost photographic artists of the modern age. His field work spanned from pictorialism to abstract over the six decades of his career. He was commissioned to do portraits of British literati for a London magazine and afterward traveled throughout Europe and the United States. He is best known for his last photographic work in the United States in 1912. He pointed the camera directly at the street from the top of New York city, eliminating the horizon line and flattening perspective to emphasise abstraction. A meticulous printer, his unrelenting search for techniques to convey his unique vision resulted in his becoming one of the pioneers of modern photographic technique. These photographs marked a distinct change in Coburn's style. Coburn moved to London, where his concentration turned to abstraction. |
On November 15, 1932, at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, eleven photographers announced themselves as Group f/64: Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Preston Holder, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Van Dyke, Brett Weston, and Edward Weston. The group was devoted to exhibiting and promoting a new direction in photography that broke with the Pictorialism then prevalent in West Coast art photography. The name referred to the smallest aperture available in large-format view cameras at the time and it signaled the group’s conviction that photographs should celebrate rather than disguise the medium’s unrivalled capacity to present the world “as it is.”
The aim of this idea was that the camera was able to see the world more clearly than the human eye, because it didn’t project personal prejudices onto the subject. The group’s effort to present the camera’s “vision” as clearly as possible included advocating the use of aperture f/64 in order to provide the greatest depth of field, therefore allowing for the largest percentage of the picture to be in sharp focus. The concept of the f64 group was that it made the photographer the key director in the production of their images and it was the photographer’s choice of form and his or her framing of it that made the picture. As Edward Weston phrased it, “The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.” |
Herbert Bayer was a very prominent figure in the modernist art movement and in the creative world in general. He studied at the Bauhaus in Germany in 1920 before moving and starting an artistic career in Weimar where he went on to represent the ideal that “modern art and architecture must be responsive to then needs and influence of the modern industrial world and that good designs must pass the test of both aesthetic standards and sound engineering”. Bayer stayed on at the Bauhaus and became a teacher. He went on to continue his artistic journey in Berlin in 1928 where he opened a graphic film firm. As with other designers of his generation, Bayer became alarmed over the increasingly repressive political situation in Germany and finally left in 1938 for New York.
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The Lonely Metropolitan. |
The Lonely Metropolitan.
Bayer used a collage technique to create “The Lonely Metropolitan” by using images that he had found as well as taken. In this image we are presented with two hands cut off after the wrists with open palms as if the viewer were looking at their own hands. In the centre of these palms there are two eyes of two different colours. The light projected on the hands is quite bright in comparison to the background. In the background we can see a tall, rustic, old what appears to be English building. There are several darkened windows, and you are able to see the shadows of the hands projected on the walls of the buildings. There is minimal colour to the image. I think Bayer’s intentions with “The Lonely Metropolitan” were to portray the personal effects of moving to the city during the repressive political situation of Germany at that time. The blackened windows in the back could suggest a sense of isolation since they give this idea that no one’s home, suggesting emptiness. In contrast, they could also suggest that you don’t know who is watching you as you can’t see in but you don’t know who's looking out. Since Bayer was such a respected modernist artist maybe this was his way of expressing his feelings of paranoia and being in the public eye. The eyes in the centre of the palms are looking directly at the viewer which could suggest the Bayer was attempting to personally speak to the viewer about these issues which creates synthetic personalisation and a relationship between the piece of work and the viewer. There is definitely a mood of seclusion and loneliness as described in the title but also the dull colouring of the image. Bayer may have done this to reflect his personal emotions and insecurities of moving from this respected, welcoming, and inclusive school filled with artists like him to modern industrial world of Berlin which was in a repressive political situation following WW1. This could have sparked feelings of isolation, detachment. |
I chose to look into more depth at Lewis Hine. Lewis Hine was a sociologist and a photographer from the early 1900s. His photographs act as social instruments to spread awareness and gain public attention about different issues around America. He was hired by the national child labour committee to search for and photograph children in these exploitative conditions; Factories, mines, fields etc.
Hine caught my attention as I think it is very important how he is giving a voice to the voiceless. The exploitation of children in the early 1900s was normalised and even advocated by some parents as they needed the income. These children didn’t know better and worked consistently and relentlessly as they thought that this is what life entailed. They couldn’t speak out or refuse because children held such little power at the time. I believe that Lewis Hine, by photographing these children in such conditions, was able to create this voice for them and raised an issue that was so fixed into society that no one realised the severity. Hine represents the most important photographer in terms of social advocacy and social change in the first half of the 20th century. These photographs of child labour and exploitation fuelled public opinion and inspired congress to enact the national child labour legislation. |