Test #2: History Of Photography

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Define Pictorialism

Back 1

an early 20th-century movement in art photography, whose photographs were characterized by soft focus, or in which the photographers apparent hand-manipulation of the negative aimed to give the photograph the appearance of brushstrokes or other painterly effects.

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Define Futurism

Back 2

an early 20th-century art movement, primarily in Italy, whose blurred or abstract shapes were meant to celebrate the rise of the machine and the promise of industrialization

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Define Dadaism

Back 3

an early 20th-century art movement that began in Europe in the waning years of World War I, and which gained momentum and international influence directly after the conflict.

Dadaists dwelled on the fragmentary and the incomplete, and instilled their work with postwar cynicism about human promise

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Define Constructivism

Back 4

an early 20th-century art and design movement originating in the Soviet Union during the 1920s.

It emphasized on rejecting traditional materials and subjects. Stressing on the union of art and utilitarianism.

Front 5

Define photomontage

Back 5

a technique popular with experimental artists and photographers after WWI. Images from such sources as advertising and newspapers were cut and reassembled to form composite images.

Sometimes drawing and paint were applied. The final picture might be photographed or prepared for mechanical reproduction.

Front 6

Define Group f.64

Back 6

a group of photographers that dismissed Pictorialism, despite the fact that several of its members practiced it, and urged the exploration of camera vision

their name referred to the small lens opening in their large format camera's that produced great detail in the foreground as well as the background (as a metaphor for their use of sharp focus in their photographs)

Front 7

Define Naturalistic Photography

Back 7

a late 19th century art movement developed by Peter Henry Emerson

a style insisting on the representation of objects to be an accurate dipiction of detail.

Front 8

Define selective focus

Back 8

use of limited depth of field to focus sharply on a specific subject in a scene, while other parts are left clearly out of focus

Front 9

Define Straight Photography

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a term founded by Group f64 in 1930s.

refers to photography that attempts to depict a scene as realistically and objectively as permitted by the medium, renouncing any use of manipulation

Front 10

Define documentary photography

Back 10

refers to a popular form of photography used to chronicle both significant and historical events and everyday life.

the photographer attempts to produce truthful, objective, and usually candid photographs of a particular subject.

Front 11

Define the Farm Security Administration

Back 11

initiated in the 1930s, the Resettlement Association (R.A.) was among President Roosevelt's efforts to fight the Depression

The agency oversaw loans, flood control, migrant camps, and agricultural education

The R.A./F.S.A photographers were heir to an understanding of documentary that revolved around emotionally persuasive, stylized depictions of symbolic images

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Define the Office of War Administration

Back 12

a United States government agency created during WWII to deliver propaganda both at home and abroad

Front 13

Define Mass-Observation

Back 13

was a United Kingdom social research organization founded in the 1930s

aimed to record everyday life in Britain.

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Back 14

The Two Ways of Life by Oscar Gustave Rejlander, 1857

Significance:

This image is considered to be the most famous High Art photograph. While studying art in Rome, Rejlander made a living by copying old Master paintings. This photograph was inspired by Raphael's famous fresco School of Athens. The large print, about 31 inches wide, was made from more than thirty individual negatives in a technique termed combination printing where parts of the sensitized paper were masked so that they would not develop, while a negative is printed where desired.

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Poling the Marsh Hay by Peter Henry Emerson, 1886

Significance:

Peter Emerson was a naturalistic photographer, meaning he rejected emotion or imagination as the focal point of photography.

He used the human's eye range of focus as instructive for his photography and tended to emphasize on the unchanged relationship between people to the land.

This image is from his book Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, a folio of 40 mounted platinum prints.

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The Steerage by Alfred Stieglitz, 1907

Significance:

Alfred Stieglitz's early work includes tranquil scenes on blurriness of Pictorialism, however in the 1890s his images began to focus more on form rather than atmosphere

He took this image while sailing on a trip to Europe, he described this moment of looking out into the steerage as a pivotal moment in his understanding of art - he saw not immigrants returning to Europe but a combination of abstract shapes.

He declared The Steerage would best represent him if all his other images were destroyed, the abstract forms evoked the feeling he had about life.

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Wall Street, New York by Paul Strand, 1916

Significance:

Wall Street is a platinum palladium print photograph by the American photographer Paul Strand taken in 1915. There are currently only two vintage prints of this photograph with one at the Whitney Museum of American Art (printed posthumously) and the other, along with negatives, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This photograph was included in Paul Strand, circa 1916, an exhibition of photographs that exemplify his push toward modernism.

It depicts a scene of everyday life in Manhattan's Financial District. Workers are seen walking past the J.P. Morgan building in New York City on the famous Wall Street, of which the photograph takes its name. The photograph is famous for its reliance on the sharpness and contrast of the shapes and angles, created by the building and the workers, that lead to its abstraction. This photograph is considered to be one of Strand's most famous works and an example of his change from pictorialism to straight photography. Strand moved from the posed to portraying the purity of the subjects. It is one of several images that stand as marks of the turn to modernism in photography.

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Excusado by Edward Weston, 1925

Significance:

Edward Weston was one of the best-known members of Group f.64. When he struggled with his portraiture business in America, he moved to Mexico with his companion the photographer Tina Modotti. There he created his most notorious image, Excusado (spanish word for toilet.) The toilet exemplifies Weston's close-up, sharply detailed approach to everyday objects - a tribute to the distinct style of f.64 members.

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Workers, Mexico by Tina Modotti, 1926

Significance:

Tina Modotti was a photographer based in Mexico who used her closely detailed and sharp images to document injustice in society. This image is an example of her interest in documenting the lower class in Mexico. After 1930, she largely gave up photography in favour of political work.

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Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange, 1936

Significance:

Dorothea Lange was associated with the R.A. during the Depression era and used her photographs to reveal inequality.

Migrant Mother expresses Depression-era values. With an apparent presence of poverty and distress, the image evokes feelings deserving of compassion. This image became the most popular image created during the Depression, the photograph was repeatedly sent out to newspapers by the F.S.A.

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Back 21

A Graveyard and Steel Mill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania by Walker Evans, 1935

Significance:

Walker Evans was on of the first hires to photograph for the R.A. during the Depression.

He believed in finding scenes and objects whose appearance implied a story or acted as a metaphor for an attitude towards life.

This photograph was used as propaganda for the R.A./F.S.A movement. It symbolically guides the viewer from the background to foreground through a fatal progression of work, homelife, and death. The image shows no people, but uses the locale to indicate the compass of their restricted lives.

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Back 22

The schedule for use of the boarding house bathroom by Esther Bubley, 1943

Significance:

Esther Bubley was a photographer for the O.W.A.

She emphasized on women workers, who replaced soldiers in WWII. Taking photographs of women at work, driving streetcars, and in the new residences for women that were formed in Washington.

This image was taken in one of the new residences for women that were created, showing the women coping with the tribulations of war.

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Tatlin at Home by Raoul Hausmann, 1920

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Meudon by Andre Kertesz, 1928

Significance:

Andre Kertesz was deemed a surrealist photographer - however he did not explore the distortion aspect of surrealism, more so the magic of coincidence and the presence of the mysterious in everyday life.

This photograph seized Kertesz's joy in capturing fleeting moment's of mystery in an everyday situation.