Zemni Photography Blog

Photography projects, inspiration and research by Linda Mayoux

Alfred Stieglitz

Tag: art photography

  • Alfred Stieglitz

    Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), for example, was active in New York in the late 1890s and was
    initially a practitioner in the ‘artistic’ sense of documentary photography, trying to emulate
    or deliver what drawing and painting had been delivering. Photography was viewed as a
    replacement for painting so the thinking was that the practices and values of art should be
    subsumed within photography. However the new century, especially after World War I, saw a
    growing respect for photography as an independent medium that could offer something different
    and this was reflected in the work undertaken by Stieglitz in documenting the ephemeral nature
    of everyday life.
    In the image above, Stieglitz portrays the crudity of a fledgling transport system. The destination
    board – Harlem – tells us that this is harsh winter weather in a poor area of the city. The image
    shows how much effort the driver and horses have to put in to be able to operate under such
    conditions – note the steam coming off the horses. Stieglitz was prepared to wait for four hours
    to capture this image. He wanted something different and he got it.

    Stieglitz was very concerned about the initial
    treatment of immigrants arriving in large numbers
    from Ireland and Europe, hoping for a warm
    welcome but receiving the opposite. The authorities
    were concerned about typhoid and other infectious
    diseases and most immigrants were held in isolation
    for weeks before being allowed into America.
    For a biography of Steiglitz visit: www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/stgp/hd_stgp.htm
    Alfred Stieglitz: The Eloquent Eye (1999), a Masters of Photography documentary video about
    the ‘new way of seeing’ that Stieglitz wanted to bring to American photography:
    www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YhwYgdtphE

  • Landscape Perspectives: pictorialism to modernism

     Landscape Art

    Since the very beginnings of human art, artists have been concerned with the relationship between human beings and their environment. That relationship has been perceived and portrayed in different ways in different cultures, all of which have potential to inform current photographic images particularly with the advances and freedom offered by digital cameras and processing.

    • Cave paintings: many early cave paintings were an attempt to tame the human environment, and particularly the animals in them. Many of these paintings simplified form, captured movement and superimposed images over time in a way whose power can only really be appreciated when visiting these very first art galleries. These painting are in warm earth colours and black because those were the pigments available.
    • Chinese and Japanese landscape: show a diversity of approaches to the relationship between people and their environment. Some were produced for the elite, many by monks as part of their religious practice and combined with calligraphy. Confucianism stressed human ability to control the landscape in an ordered and hierarchical manner. Taoism sees human beings as part of the landscape, needing to bend and flow with forces of nature. Zen Buddhism depicted the solitary human being confronted with  unfathomable reality or flash of momentary enlightenment. Many of these images are black and white ink, others are in colours including blues and greens.
    • Indian and Persian miniatures : these were produced for a wealth elite showing the control over nature in gardens and idealised views. They are in full colour, including silver and gold.
    • Western landscape painting: in Western Art interest in landscape came quite late as the poor relation to religious and historical art. But from  18th century artists used the sophisticated techniques made possible by oil paint to depict dramatic plays of light on landscape backgrounds. Form the late 19th century landscape art, partly in reaction to the rise of photography, started to free itself from adherence to strict compositional rules and colour conventions and experiment with different ways of using paint to convey emotions and feelings.

    See page on Landscape Art

    Landscape photography

    Landscape photography, much longer than fine art, has continued to be constrained in traditions, conventions and preconceptions mostly derived from 19th Century Western art. Many people have very particular ideas about what may or may not be considered a piece of landscape art and these ideas are reflected in much of the photographic establishment eg rules and assessment by judges in landscape photography competitions and Royal Photographic Association qualifications . These preconceptions include:

    • suitable subject matter: eg do we include or cut out evidence of human industrial activity?
    • composition: eg canvas ratio and orientation, compositional depth, use of leading lines, golden ratio or rule of thirds.
    • where and how we see images of the landscape: eg what is appropriate for large or small prints as fine art in galleries, illustration in books, advertising or on-line.

    Exercise 1.1 Preconceptions 

    Exercise 1.2 Photography in the museum or in the gallery

    Early landscape photography

    From Alexander 2013 OCA material pp 23-36. To be rewritten, properly integrated and linked and follow up on these photographers (work out how to deal with copyright issues in linking images)

    Early photography was related closely to painting.

    Camera lucida and camera obscura already used by artists like Vermeer to get ‘photographic realism’. Also popular with upper class Victorian travellers.

    William Henry Fox Talbot’s (1800-1877) calotype process. frustration at being unable to draw or paint with any degree of accuracy that the positive-negative analogue process underpinning modern photography was conceived. While in Lake Como in Italy on his grand tour of Europe in 1833, Fox Talbot decided he would find a way to fix the image within the camera lucida. –  Calotype allowed mass production.

    Niepce (1765-1833) and Daguerre (1787-1851)

    Early photography was only accessible to those with quite specialist knowledge of optics and chemistry ( with the economic implications) and so was considered part of science. Fulfilled purpose of illustration, journalism, produce mementos, criminal mug shots and method of scientific inquiry eg eugenics.

    Many painters made use of photography like Monet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and Seurat. Also modern artists like Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Chuck Close and Gerhard Richter.

    Eugene Atget (1857-1927) amassed an archive of many thousands of glass plate negatives with views of the street life and architecture of Paris.

    Discussion of whether or not Atget’s photos merits a place in art galleries given he himself did not demonstrate artistic judgement in the wat he catalogued hos work see

    Rosalind Krauss ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View’. Vs To Papageorge in Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography 2011

    Pictorialism

    “Pictorialism” is only an exaggeration of what the photograph thinks of itself. Barthes 1982 p31

    Link to Wikipedia

    Link to Google Images

    The norm within pictorialism was, and remains, the production of singular, one-off pieces, designed to convey the maker’s mood at the moment it was made and to satisfy the eyes of the viewer.

    Some early photographers believed that in addition to its practical applications as an objective recording or objects, photography also had potential as a means of expressing subjective  impressions – as pictures.

    Brotherhood of the Linked Ring

    founded by Henry Peach Robinson. Philosophy that a photographic print could be considered as a work of art, despite the need for some kind of camera and related chemistry.They split from the organisation that would become the Royal Photographic Society because the organisation was too preoccupied with the scientific rather than the artistic side. RPS then adopted pictorialism.

    Printing process:  Instead of applying the photosensitive coatings to the surfaces of their prints as evenly and uniformly as possible to give continuous tones, pictorialists left visible brushstrokes and marks on the print surface. Bromoil, cyanotype and gum bichromate processes rendered images with less clarity and giving them more atmosphere like drawing, pastels and painting.

    Multiple negatives and first photomontages:  allowed the production of images that, especially in early days, could not have been produced indoors in low light, and it also made possible the creation of highly dramatic images, often in imitation of allegorical paintings.

    • Oscar Rejlander (1857-75) painter who saw the potential offered by photography. The Two Ways of Life (1857) allegorical scenario on a grand scale
    • Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901) Fading Away. (1858)  a typical sentimental narrative. Some of Robinson’s photographs were of twenty or more separate photographs combined to produce one image.

    Modernist approaches

    Wikipedia Modernism

    Link to Google images

    Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) strongly believed in a purer way of seeing, more akin to human vision. He accumulated a large body of work on traditional rural practices around the Norfolk Broads. Emerson championed technical excellence whilst working from life, in the field. He departed from making softer, stylised photographs and began to make images that were sharply focused throughout the image. ‘Democracy’ of the frame, where all of the subjects are on an equal footing in terms of their relation to other elements in the picture, and in their importance to the formation and interpretation of the scene. MetMuseum images.

    Photo-Secessionists. US ‘straight photography’

    ambition for photography to ‘secede’ from previously accepted ideas about photography serving purely practical purposes. Chose impressionistic style. Challenged pictorialism. Radical shift towards celebrating photography for what it really was.

    Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) became editor if American Amateur Photographer 1893 and set up Camera Work in 1902.

    1912 The Steerage depicts with clear photographic realism a group of refused would-be immigrants boarding the SSKaiser Wilhelm II to return to Europe. Image encapsulated an abstract collection on forms and tones alongside a sense of emotional response he felt towards the scene he witnessed. It retained the pictorialsis’ desire to render an emotional response within a photograph, but Steiglitz believed he had achieved this by embracing photography’s unique ability to reproduce optical clarity captured in a split second.

    Edward Steichen (1879-1973)

    Smaller apertures and visualisation.   F/64 group formalised 1932. Dispersed 1935. The name referred to the minimum aperture of the lens which yields the greatest depth of field and best optical quality throughout the image. Using a 10″ x 8″ large format cameras (sometimes called ‘plate cameras’ which take a single image at a time as opposed to being loaded with film on which multiple frames can be shot). Negatives ‘contact-printed’ onto a sheet of high-quality commercially available photographic paper. The contact print is a precise analogy of the negative as made by the photographer.

    It is different from enlarging images taken in smaller formats by projecting the image onto paper, which allows for greater manipulation of the print.

    for the f/64 photographers, mastering exposure in the camera was essential to the creative process. Real artistry in photographic technique and pre-visualisation of the image. This approach differs significantly from the idea of roaming eye fixed to a camera viewfinder, waiting for pctures to jump i to it.understanding of different lenses of different focal lengths.knowledge of exposure to manage the different tones in a scene,

    Edward Weston (1886-1958) an aspiring artist who survived by taking portraits professionally and churning out unchallenging picturesque pictorial works. After a meeting with Steiglitz, Weston changed direction, he took to the precisely composed, sharp and very photographic aesthetic as a valid form of artistic expression, and brought it back home to California. Crops into image to make more abstract.

    dunes, oceano (1936) image explores much more than simply the texture and form of the landscaoe.

    Ansel Adams (1902-1984) best known for his landscapes of Yosemite National Park. Exceptional technical skill. But The formal elements (eg use of perspective and composition) are mostly an extension of painterly traditions.

    Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976) natural forms but more experimental in use of photography. Expanded photographic way of seeing by further cropping into views to make a more abstract photograph.

    Paul Strand (1890-1976)

     

     

  • Jeff Wall

    Jeffrey “Jeff” Wall, OC, RSA (born September 29, 1946) is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Wall experimented with conceptual art while an undergraduate at UBC.

    Wall  produced his first backlit phototransparencies in 1977. Many of these are staged and refer to the history of art and philosophical problems of representation – our collective need to visualise and have our past confirmed. He creates cinema-like tableaux – singular images with large production values, which employ actors and set designers, and are meticulously constructed over time, often combining multiple negatives. Their compositions often allude to artists like Delacroix, Delaroche, Goya, Diego Velázquez, Hokusai, and Édouard Manet, or to writers such as Franz Kafka, Yukio Mishima, and Ralph Ellison.

    Dead Troops Talk

    In her final book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) Susan Sontag uses Wall’s Dead Troops Talk (1992) – a tableau created in the studio with the help of actors – to conclude her discussion on the effects, or rather the ineffectiveness, of images of pain, suffering and violence. She writes:
    “Engulfed by the image, which is so accusatory, one could fantasize that
    the soldiers might turn and talk to us. But no, no one is looking out of
    the picture. There’s no threat of protest. They are not about to yell at us to
    bring a halt to that abomination which is war. They haven’t come back
    to life in order to stagger off to denounce the war-makers who sent them
    to kill and be killed. And they are not represented as terrifying to others,
    for among them (far left) sits a white-garbed Afghan scavenger, entirely
    absorbed in going through somebody’s kit bag, of whom they take no
    note, and entering the picture above them (top right) on the path winding
    down the slope are two Afghans, perhaps soldiers themselves, who, it
    would seem from the Kalashnikovs collected near their feet, have already
    stripped the dead soldiers of their weapons. These dead are supremely
    uninterested in the living: in those who took their lives; in witnesses – and
    in us. Why should they seek our gaze? What would they have to say to
    us? ‘We’ – this ‘we’ is everyone who has never experienced anything like
    what they went through – don’t understand . We don’t get it. We truly
    can’t imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how
    terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t
    imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker
    and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the
    luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels.
    And they are right.”
    (Sontag [2003] 2004, pp.112–13) quoted Alexander 2013 p??

    I begin by not photographing

    [wpdevart_youtube]2yG2k4C4zrU[/wpdevart_youtube]

     Pictures like poems

    [wpdevart_youtube]HkVSEVlqYUw[/wpdevart_youtube]

    Other work

    Wall has been a key figure in Vancouver’s art scene since the early-1970s. Early in his career, he helped define the Vancouver School and he has published essays on the work of his colleagues and fellow Vancouverites Rodney Graham, Ken Lum and Ian Wallace. His photographic tableaux often take Vancouver’s mixture of natural beauty, urban decay and postmodern and industrial featurelessness as their backdrop.

    http://whitecube.com/channel/in_the_studio/jeff_wall_in_the_studio_part_i/

     Presenting his first gallery exhibition in 1978 as an “installation” rather than as a photography show, Wall placed The Destroyed Room in the storefront window of the Nova Gallery, enclosing it in a plasterboard wall.
    http://whitecube.com/channel/in_the_studio/jeff_wall_in_the_studio_part_ii/

    Mimic (1982) typifies Wall’s cinematographic style. A 198 × 226 cm. colour transparency, it shows a white couple and an Asian man walking towards the camera. The sidewalk, flanked by parked cars and residential and light-industrial buildings, suggests a North American industrial suburb. The woman is wearing red shorts and a white top displaying her midriff; her bearded, unkempt boyfriend wears a denim vest. The Asian man is casual but well-dressed in comparison, in a collared shirt and slacks. As the couple overtake the man, the boyfriend makes an ambiguous but apparently obscene and racist gesture, holding his upraised middle finger close to the corner of his eye, “slanting” his eye in mockery of the Asian man’s eyes. The picture resembles a candid shot that captures the moment and its implicit social tensions, but is actually a recreation of an exchange witnessed by the artist.

    Mimic (1982)

    First shown at documenta 11, After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Preface (1999–2001) represents a well-known scene from Ellison’s classic novel. Wall’s version shows us the cellar room, “warm and full of light,” in which Ellison’s narrator lives, complete with its 1,369 lightbulbs.[10]

    Picture for Women (1979). Art critic Jed Perl describes Picture for Women as Wall’s signature piece.

    Picture for Women is a 142.5 × 204.5 cm cibachrome transparency mounted on a lightbox. Along with The Destroyed Room, Wall considers Picture for Women to be his first success in challenging photographic tradition. According to Tate Modern, this success allows Wall to reference “both popular culture (the illuminated signs of cinema and advertising hoardings) and the sense of scale he admires in classical painting. As three-dimensional objects, the lightboxes take on a sculptural presence, impacting on the viewer’s physical sense of orientation in relationship to the work.”

    There are two figures in the scene, Wall himself, and a woman looking into the camera. In a profile of Wall in the The New Republic, art critic Jed Perl describes Picture for Women as Wall’s signature piece, “since it doubles as a portrait of the late-twentieth-century artist in his studio.”[12] Art historian David Campany calls Picture for Women an important early work for Wall as it establishes central themes and motifs found in much of his later work.[13]

    A response to Manet’s Un bar aux Folies Bergère, the Tate Modern wall text for Picture of Women, from the 2005-2006 exhibition Jeff Wall Photographs 1978–2004, outlines the influence of Manet’s painting:

    In Manet’s painting, a barmaid gazes out of frame, observed by a shadowy male figure. The whole scene appears to be reflected in the mirror behind the bar, creating a complex web of viewpoints. Wall borrows the internal structure of the painting, and motifs such as the light bulbs that give it spatial depth. The figures are similarly reflected in a mirror, and the woman has the absorbed gaze and posture of Manet’s barmaid, while the man is the artist himself. Though issues of the male gaze, particularly the power relationship between male artist and female model, and the viewer’s role as onlooker, are implicit in Manet’s painting, Wall updates the theme by positioning the camera at the centre of the work, so that it captures the act of making the image (the scene reflected in the mirror) and, at the same time, looks straight out at us.

    [14]

    Wall’s work advances an argument for the need for pictorial art. Some of Wall’s photographs are complicated productions involving cast, sets, crews and digital postproduction. They have been characterized as one-frame cinematic productions. Susan Sontag ended her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), with a long, laudatory discussion of one of them, Dead Troops Talk (A Vision After an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986) (1992), calling Wall’s Goya-influenced depiction of a made-up event “exemplary in its thoughtfulness and power.”

    Jeff Wall A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993
    Katsushika Hokusai Yejiri Station, Province of Suruga, ca. 1832

    While Wall is known for large-scale photographs of contemporary everyday genre scenes populated with figures, in the early 1990s he became interested in still lifes. He distinguishes between:

    unstaged “documentary” pictures, like Still Creek, Vancouver, winter 2003

    “cinematographic” pictures, produced using a combination of actors, sets, and special effects, such as A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993. Based on Yejiri Station, Province of Suruga (ca. 1832) a woodprint by Katsushika Hokusai, A Sudden Gust of Wind recreates the depicted 19th-century Japanese scene in contemporary British Columbia, utilizing actors and took over a year to produce 100 photographs in order “to achieve a seamless montage that gives the illusion of capturing a real moment in time.”

    Since the early 1990s, Wall has used digital technology to create montages of different individual negatives, blending them into what appears as a single unified photograph. His signature works are large transparencies mounted on light boxes; he says he conceived this format when he saw back-lit advertisements at bus stops during a trip between Spain and London. In 1995, Wall began making traditional silver gelatin black and white photographs, and these have become an increasingly significant part of his work.

    http://whitecube.com/channel/in_the_gallery_past/jeff_wall_on_boy_falls_from_tree/