Week 8 assignment: essay – interrelationships reflection apa format | Applied Sciences homework help
- Considering his attitude toward photography, why would he have sat for a portrait such as Carjat’s? Would you classify this portrait as a work of art? What does the photograph reveal?
jac16871_ch11_276-298.indd 281 12/9/17 10:16 AM 282 CHAPTeR 11 early- and mid-nineteenth-century paintings, pictorialist photographers often evoked emotions that bordered on the sentimental. Indeed, one of the complaints modern commentators have about the development of pictorialism is that it was emotionally shallow. Rarely criticized for sentimentalism, Alfred Stieglitz was, in his early work, a master of the pictorial style. His Paula, done in 1889, places his subject at the center in the act of writing. The top and bottom of the scene are printed in deep black. The light, streaking through the venetian blind and creating lovely strip patterns, centers on Paula. Her profile is strong against the dark background partly because Stieglitz removed, during the printing process, one of the strips that would have fallen on her lower face. The strong vertical lines of the window frames reinforce the verticality of the candle and echo the back of the chair. A specifically photographic touch is present in the illustrations on the wall: photo- graphs arranged symmetrically in a triangle (use a magnifying glass). Two prints of the same lake-skyscape are on each side of a woman in a white dress and hat. The same photograph of this woman is on the writing table in an oval frame. Is it Paula? The light in the room echoes the light in the oval portrait. The three hearts in the arrangement of photographs are balanced; one heart touches the portrait of a young man. We wonder if Paula is writing to him. The cage on the wall has dominant vertical lines, crossing the light lines cast by the venetian blind. Stieglitz may be suggesting that Paula, despite the open window, may be in a cage of her own. Stieglitz has kept FIGURE 11-6 Alfred Stieglitz, Sunrays, Paula. 1889. Stieglitz photographed Paula in such a way as to suggest the composition of a painting, framing her in darkness while bathing her in window light. Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-DIG-ds-00183] jac16871_ch11_276-298.indd 282 12/9/17 10:16 AM 283
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most of the photograph in sharp focus because most of the details have something to tell us. If this were a painting of the early nineteenth century—for example, one by Delaroche—we would expect much the same style. We see Paula in a dramatic moment, with dramatic light, and with an implied narrative suggested by the artifacts surrounding her. It is up to the viewer to decide what, if anything, the drama implies. PERCEPTION KEY Pictorialism and Sentimentality 1. Pictorialists are often condemned for their sentimentality. What is sentimentality? Is it a positive or negative quality in a photograph? 2. Is Paula sentimental? What is its subject matter and what is its content? 3. To what extent is sentimentality present in the work of Cameron or Carjat? Which photographs in this chapter could be considered sentimental? Both paintings and photographs, of course, can be sentimental in subject matter. The severest critics of such works complain about their sentimentality: the falsifying of feelings by demanding responses that are superficial or easy to come by. Senti- mentality is usually an oversimplification of complex emotional issues. It also tends to be mawkish and self-indulgent. The case of photography is special because we are accustomed to the harshness of the camera. Thus, when the pictorialist finds tender- ness, romance, and beauty in everyday occurrences, we become suspicious. We may be more tolerant of painting doing those things, but in fact we should be wary of any such emotional “coloration” in any medium if it is not restricted to the subject matter. The pictorialist approach, when not guilty of sentimentalism, has great strengths. The use of lighting that selectively emphasizes the most important features of the subject matter often helps in creating meaning. Borrowing from the formal structures of painting also may help clarify subject matter. Structural harmony of the kind we generally look for in representational painting is possible in photography. Although it is not limited to the pictorialist approach, it is clearly fundamental to that approach. straight PhotograPhy In his later work, beginning around 1905, Alfred Stieglitz pioneered the movement of straight photography, a reaction against pictorialism. The f/64 Group, working in the 1930s, and a second school, the Documentarists, continue the tradition. Straight photographers took the position that, as Aaron Siskind said in the 1950s, “Pictorialism is a kind of dead end making everything look beautiful.” The straight photographer wanted things to look essentially as they do, even if they are ugly. Straight photography aimed toward excellence in photographic techniques, independent of painting. Susan Sontag summarizes: “For a brief time—say, from Stieglitz through the reign of Weston—it appeared that a solid point of view had been erected with which to evaluate photographs: impeccable lighting, skill of com- position, clarity of subject, precision of focus, perfection of print quality.”2 Some of these qualities are shared by pictorialists, but new principles of composition—not 2Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977), p. 136. jac16871_ch11_276-298.indd 283 12/9/17 10:16 AM 284 CHAPTeR 11 derived from painting—and new attitudes toward subject matter helped straight photography reveal the world straight, as it really is. The f/64 Group The name of the group derives from the small aperture, f/64, which ensures that the foreground, middle ground, and background will all be in sharp focus. The group declared its principles through manifestos and shows by edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and others. It continued the reaction against pictorialism, adding the kind of nonsentimental subject matter that interested the later Stieglitz. edward Weston, whose early work was in the soft-focus school, de- veloped a special interest in formal organizations. He is famous for his nudes and his portraits of vegetables, such as artichokes, eggplants, and green peppers. His nudes rarely show the face, not because of modesty but because the question of the identity of the model can distract us from contemplating the formal relationships of the human body. Weston’s Nude (Figure 11-7) shows many characteristics of work by the f/64 Group. The figure is isolated and presented for its own sake, the sand being equiv- alent to a photographer’s backdrop. The figure is presented not as a portrait of a given woman but rather as a formal study. Weston wanted us to see the relationship between legs and torso, to respond to the rhythms of line in the extended body, and to appreciate the counterpoint of the round, dark head against the long, light linearity of the body. Weston enjoys some notoriety for his studies of peppers, be- cause his approach to vegetables was similar to his approach to nudes. We are to appreciate the sensual curve, the counterpoints of line, the reflectivity of skin, the harmonious proportions of parts. FIGURE 11-7 Edward Weston, Nude. 1936. Weston’s approach to photography was to make everything as sharp as possible and to make the finest print possible. He was aware he was making photographs as works of art. ©2017 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: ©Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation/Art Resource, NY jac16871_ch11_276-298.indd 284 12/9/17 10:16 AM 285
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Weston demanded objectivity in his photographs. “I do not wish to impose my personality upon nature (any of life’s manifestations), but without prejudice or fal- sification to become identified with nature, to know things in their very essence, so that what I record is not an interpretation—my ideas of what nature should be—but a revelation.”3 One of Weston’s ideals was to capitalize on the capacity of the camera to be objective and impersonal, an ideal that the pictorialists usually rejected. The work of Ansel Adams establishes another ideal of the f/64 Group: the fine print. even some of the best early photographers were relatively casual in the act of printing their negatives. Adams spent a great deal of energy and skill in producing the finest print the negative would permit, sometimes spending days to print one photograph. He developed a special system (the Zone System) to measure tonalities in specific regions of the negative so as to control the final print, keeping careful re- cords so that he could duplicate the print at a later time. In even the best of reproduc- tions, it is difficult to point to the qualities of tonal gradation that constitute the fine print. Only the original can yield the beauties that gradations of silver or platinum can produce. His photograph of the church at the Taos Pueblo (Figure 11-8) reveals the character of the southwest adobe architecture while at the same time making us feel the gritty texture of the surfaces of the walls. He has found a moment when the desert light has illuminated the interior and vertical spaces while bathing the walls in a relieving shade. Like Timothy O’Sullivan before him, Adams has made every effort to give us a convincing sense of place, and to some extent a sense of time as well. 3The Daybooks of Edward Weston, ed. Nancy Newhall, 2 vols. (New York: Aperture, 1966), vol. 2, p. 241. FIGURE 11-8 Ansel Adams. Church, Taos Pueblo, 1941. Source: National Archives Catalog jac16871_ch11_276-298.indd 285 12/9/17 10:16 AM 286 CHAPTeR 11 the documentarists Time is critical to the Documentarist, who portrays a world that is disappearing so quickly we cannot see it go. Henri Cartier-Bresson used the phrase “the decisive moment” to define that crucial interaction of shapes and spaces, formed by people and things, that tells him when to snap his shutter. Not all his photographs are decisive; they do not all catch the action at its most intense point. But those that do are pure Cartier-Bresson. Many Documentarists agree with Stieglitz’s description of the effect of shapes on his own feelings. Few contemporary Documentarists, however, who are often journalists like Cartier-Bresson, can compose the way Stieglitz could. But the best develop an instinct—usually nurtured by years of visual education—for the powerful statement, as one can see in eddie Adams’s Execution in Saigon (Figure 2-2). eugène Atget spent much of his time photographing in Paris in the early morn- ing, when no one would bother him. He must have been in love with Paris and its surroundings because he photographed for many years, starting in the late 1800s and continuing to his death in 1927. Generally there are no people in his views of Paris, al- though he did an early series on some street traders, such as organ grinders, peddlers, and even prostitutes. His photographs of important Parisian monuments, such as his view of the Petit Trianon (Figure 11-9), are distinctive for their subtle drama. Most commercial photographs of this building ignore the dramatic reflection in the pond, and none of them permit the intense saturation of dark tones in the surrounding trees and in the water reflection. The more one ponders this photograph, the more FIGURE 11-9 Eugène Atget, Trianon, Paris. 1923–1924. Atget was rediscovered in the 1960s when it became clear he was not just making record photographs but finding ways of intensifying the visual elements to make a statement about how we see. ©The Museum of Modern Art/Scala/Art Resource, NY jac16871_ch11_276-298.indd 286 12/9/17 10:16 AM 287
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FIGURE 11-10 Paul Strand, Wall Street, New York, 1916. Paul Strand photographed New York in the early part of the century, but moved on to photograph churches in Mexico, where he moved during the Depression. He photographed in small villages in Maine and in Italy. Later, he also made films. Wall Street, New York was published in Camera Work, no. 48, October 1916, plate I. Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-97529] one feels a sense of dramatic uncertainty and perhaps even urgency. The many ways in which Atget balances and contrasts the visual elements at the same time make the experience of the image intense. Atget’s work did not refer to painting: It created its own photographic reference. We see a photograph, not just a thing photographed. Paul Strand (Figure 11-10) takes a somewhat different approach from Atget, although he worked in the same tradition at approximately the same time. He used a view camera on a tripod and roamed the streets of New York early in the morning, just as Atget did. But unlike Atget, Strand photographed people as well as buildings, and the content of his photographs was, while artful, less abstract. Yet, like Atget, he looked for strong formal ingredients, as in his remarkable 1915 portrait of workers walking uphill on Wall Street during an economic boom. The building, the Morgan Trust, with its huge dark recessed panels, dwarfs the men and women marching past toward work. The Morgan Trust was a symbol of solid- ity and reliability, and while Strand could hardly have expected the outcome years later in 1929, all that solidity crumbled in the nation’s most devastating Great Depression. The country, whose economy depended on Wall Street, was thrown into unemployment and general poverty for more than ten years. Strand’s photo- graph contrasts the tiny upright people with the sharp diagonal of their shadows on the sidewalk, matched by the diagonal light molding of the building. Above them the powerful upright stone verticals and black panels seem, in retrospect, almost sinister. Strand began documenting people going to work in the financial district, but history now sees him as having documented their progress toward unemployment as a result of the excesses of Wall Street financiers. jac16871_ch11_276-298.indd 287 12/9/17 10:16 AM 288 CHAPTeR 11 Unlike Atget and Paul Strand, who used large cameras, Cartier-Bresson used the 35-mm Leica and specialized in photographing people. He preset his camera in order to work fast and instinctively. His Behind the Gare St. Lazare (Figure 11-11) is a perfect example of his aim to capture an image at the “decisive moment.” The figure leaping from the wooden ladder has not quite touched the water, while his reflection awaits him. The entire image is a tissue of reflection, with the spikes of the fence re- flecting the angles of the fallen ladder. The circles in the foreground are repeated in the wheelbarrow’s reflection and the white circles in the poster. Moreover, the fig- ure in the white poster appears to be a dancer leaping in imitation of the man to the right. The focus of the entire image is somewhat soft because Cartier-Bresson preset his camera so that he could take the shot instantly without adjusting the aperture. The formal relationship of elements in a photograph such as this can produce vari- ous kinds of significance or apparent lack of significance. The best Documentarists FIGURE 11-11 Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare St. Lazare. 1932. This photograph illustrates Bresson’s theories of the “decisive moment.” This photograph was made possible in part by the small, handheld Leica camera that permitted Bresson to shoot instantly, without having to set up a large camera on a tripod. ©Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos jac16871_ch11_276-298.indd 288 12/9/17 10:16 AM 289
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search for the strongest coherency of elements while also searching for the decisive moment. That moment is the split-second peak of intensity, and it is defined espe- cially with reference to light, spatial relationships, and expression. Dorothea Lange and Walker evans were Documentarists who took part in a federal program to give work to photographers during the Depression of the 1930s. Both cre- ated careful formal organizations. Lange (Figure 11-12) stresses centrality and balance by placing the children’s heads next to the mother’s face, which is all the more com- pelling because the children’s faces do not compete for our attention. The mother’s arm leads upward to her face, emphasizing the other triangularities of the photograph. Within ten minutes, Lange took four other photographs of this woman and her chil- dren, but none could achieve the power of this photograph. Lange caught the exact moment when the children’s faces turned and the mother’s anxiety came forth with utter clarity, although the lens mercifully softens its focus on her face, while leaving FIGURE 11-12 Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother. 1936. This is one of the most poignant records of the Great Depression in which millions moved across the nation looking for work. Lange did a number of photographs of this family in a very short time. Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-95653] jac16871_ch11_276-298.indd 289 12/9/17 10:16 AM 290 CHAPTeR 11 her shabby clothes in sharp focus. This softness helps humanize our relationship with the woman. Lange gives us an unforgettable image that brutally and yet sympatheti- cally imparts a deeper understanding of what the Depression was for many. Berenice Abbott, aiming at a career in sculpture and art, left Ohio State after two se- mesters and went to Paris. She became an assistant to the photographer Man Ray and began using a camera, thus finding her calling. She became noted in Paris for her pho- tographs of distinguished artists and writers, such as James Joyce. Man Ray introduced her to the work of eugene Atget, whom she photographed, and when he died she gath- ered as many of his negatives as she could and returned to the United States to publish a book of his work. Her experience in New York in the 1930s led her to produce her own photographs, studies of New York City that have become legendary. Like other good photographers in the Great Depression, she was supported by a federal grant. The subjects of Blossom Restaurant, one of her most powerful photographs (Figure 11-13), are the Blossom Restaurant and Jimmy’s Barber Shop, which were both in the basement of the Boston Hotel at 103–105 Bowery. The Bowery in lower Manhattan was then a refuge for the down and out. The Boston Hotel, a flophouse, rented rooms for 30 cents a night. Meals at the restaurant were 15 cents or 30 cents. The image is alive with strong contrast and a brilliant sense of busyness, indicating what Abbott interpreted as the extraordinary vigor of the city despite the pain of the Depression. Walker evans’s photograph (Figure 11-14) shows us a view of Bethlehem, Pennsyl- vania, and the off-center white cross reminds us of what has become of the message of Christ. The vertical lines are accentuated in the cemetery stones and repeated in FIGURE 11-13 Berenice Abbott, Blossom Restaurant. October 24, 1935. ©The Museum of the City of New York/Art Resource, NY jac16871_ch11_276-298.indd 290 12/9/17 10:16 AM 291
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the telephone lines, the porch posts, and finally the steel-mill smokestacks. The aspi- rations of the dominating verticals, however, are dampened by the strong horizontals, which, because of the low angle of the shot, tend to merge from the cross to the roofs. evans equalizes focus, which helps compress the space so that we see the cemetery on top of the living space, which is immediately adjacent to the steel mills where some of the people who live in the tenements work and where some of those now in the cem- etery died. This compression of space suggests the closeness of life, work, and death. We see a special kind of sadness in this steel town—and others like it—that we may never have seen before. evans caught the right moment for the light, which intensifies the white cross, and he aligned the verticals and horizontals for their best effect. FIGURE 11-14 Walker Evans, A Graveyard and Steel Mill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. 1935. Evans, like Lange, was part of the Works Progress Administration photographic project during the Great Depression. His subject was the nation itself. ©Walker evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: ©The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY PERCEPTION KEY The Documentary Photographers 1. Are any of these documentary photographs sentimental? 2. Some critics assert that these photographers have made interesting social doc- uments, but not works of art. What arguments might support their views? What arguments might contest their views?