PHOTOGRAPHY
I Realism: impression of documentary objectivity: believable, photos give impression of viewer’s "being there," sometimes a social commentary (Nevertheless, there are implicit signs of subjectivity, of the photographer choosing his subject, angle, frame, light, in all photos).
Family: photo as memorial, overcoming death, one of its first uses by the growing nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution created a larger and larger well-off bourgeoisie who wanted to give themselves the aristocratic sense of having a long family history. The photos of individual bourgeois and their families replaced the painted portraits of the aristocracy, which also tended to suggest the immortality of the family. But unlike portraits, photos, by the end of the nineteenth century, had become inexpensive and more and more people could take their own.
French postcard, turn of century, "Poodle"
Also see Moybridge's pictures of a running horse at successive moments and Robert Frank's pictures of America in the 1950s.
Realism/Newspaper Journalism: Documentary Realism
New York Times: Brazil's Landless Movement
II Putting Realism into Question by transforming it ,
sometimes associated with modernism.
A. Unexpected Points of View on the Real (The subjective
point of view of the artist, his choice of angle, light, frame, and overall composition,
seem more important than the real thing photographed. Many of these construct highly posed
and composed images).
John Sexton, "Aspen and Spruce Forest"
John Sexton, "Stands of Aspen"
B. Self-referential photos
Daguerreotype from nineteenth century
Also see photos by Ken Josephson.
C. Constructing the Real
Fragmenting the real, rearranging it according to the
multiple perspectives with which our consciousness constructs it (once again as a
modernist sign of man's control over reality)
Reuter, "Siblings" (a fleeting memory image of childhood? Memory or imagination?)
Also see Duante Michal's multiple pictures that transform photos of real people and places into fantasy stories and David Hockney's Polaroid collage.
D. Cultural Roots (sometimes associated with romantic notion of returning to a lost culture, sometimes with the modernist notion of constructing a purely artificial world. In the nineteenth century, romantic artists idealized exotic scenes from the "orient," i.e. Arab world. In early twentieth century, however, African Art began to be imitated by modernist artists like Picasso, less as a means of idealizing a foreign culture as adding a different way of constructing reality)
E. Postmodern (these artists tend to be very conscious that the images they include in their photos are not only subjective or artificial constructs. The images they include are themselves commodities, which can be bought and sold in the mass market of media images, just as we cut images or coupons out of newspapers. The idea is that all culture involves a repetition of conventions and ideas whose value is determined by their demand in the mass media. No photo is original, since it can always be copied.)
Sandy Skoglund (This is a painting by Skoglund)
Also see Robert Heinecken's images of war and of food, Judith Golden's beauty magazine self-portraits, Andre Serrano's photos, and Nancy Burson's computer generated images..
F. General Photography Links and Galleries
UCR/California Museum of Photography
Los Angeles County Museum of Art - LACMAweb Home Page
Thanks to Jin Lee for suggesting photographers and movements for this page.
