Notes: “On the Art of Fixing A Shadow, 150 years of Photography”

Book on the exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, May-July 1989. Bulfinch Press, 1989

Section 1. 1839-1879. Invention of Photography by Joel Snyder. p.3 ff.

Hippolyte Baynard, “Windmills” 1839, one of the first photographs.

The Camera
• 1558 Pinhole Images well established by 1558.
• 1750 Lenses for Cameras were being made.
• 1825 Manufacture of chemicals was established: silver nitrate, iodine, bromine, sodium
thiosulfate.
• 1802 Humphrey Davy & Thomas Wedgwood used silver on porcelain to make
Photograms.

Joseph Nicephore Niépce.

• Lithography came from Germany in 1798.
• Began 1815-1817. Used varnish (resist) from asphaltum dissolved in oil of lavender.
• Summer 1822. Varnish hardened when exposed to light. The dark areas washed off with
(dissolved in ) oil of lavender producing a negative for lithography. He applied this to “a
stone.”

• By the late 1920s he applied varnish to pewter and silver-surfaced copper plates, exposed
them. Developed the plate in the fumes of iodine and removed the varnish to make a
positive.

Louis Jacques MandéDaguerre

• December 1829, Joined Niepce.
• May 1831 discovered iodized areas of silver metal plates were sensitive to light. This was
silver iodide. It produced a negative.
• 1834. No data as to the origin of this discovery. He fumed the exposed plates with
mercury vapor which produced a positive.
• Late 1837. Sabilized the image with table salt solution.
• January 1839. Count Francois Arago proposed to sell the rights to the French
Government.
• 3 July 1839. Presented to the Camber of Deputies.
• 19 August 1839 Argo presented to a joint meeting of the Academie des Sciences and the
Academie des Beaux-Arts. The process was released and immediately adopted by
many.

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 1 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

William Henry Fox Talbot
• 1834-5 he had worked with silver chloride on paper making photograms.
• He stabilized this with salt or potassium iodide solution producing a negative.
• He used this negative to make a contact print.

• January 1839 through the Autumn. Presented to the Royal Society.

• The Calotype. He brushed paper with potassium iodide and silver nitrate to make silver
idodide. The paper was stable for months. To develop it he brushed it with silver
nitrate, acetic acid and gallic acid to make a negative. Process formalized in February
1841.

Meanwhile Daguerre discovered that adding bromine and iodine made his materials more
sensitive to light.

Following Talbot – evolution of the calotype

• 1844-1846. Talbot made the “Pencil of Nature” book
• 1842 Daguerreotype Studios were common in America EX: Robert Cornelius
• Dr. Paul Goddard (Philadelphia), Southworth & Hawes (Boston)

• The “vernacular approach” revealing the superficial, un-artistic approach evolved.

• 1843 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson took Calotype portraits in Edinburgh,
Scotland.
• 1846 Louis Desire Blanquart-Evrard made the calotype process consistent. (1849-540.
• Gustave Le Gray used a wax paper process producing better sharpness.
• 1851 Commission des Monuments Historiques hired Le Gray, Hippolyte Bayard, Edouard-
Denis Baldus, Heni Le Secq, Mestral but their work became obscure.
• Britan’s Nicholas Nenneman & Thomas Malone under Talbot published books but they
were a financial failure.
• 1852 Robert Fenton won a commission to photograph a bridge in Russia.
• Le Gray and Baldus wrote books and sold prints.
• 1849-51 Maxime Du Camp traveled to the mid-East.
• 1854 August Salzman went to the Mid-East.
• 1853 John Beasely Greene traveled to Egypt.

• By late 1855 there was a very small market for prints.

Wet Plate Photography

• 1847 Claude F.A. Niépce de St. Victor (cousin to Joseph), applied albumin to glass to
make a solution of silver salts adhere.
• 1851 Frederick Scott Archer discovered a collodion solution would adhere silver salts to
glass (collodion is made from ether, alcohol, and nitrated cellulose). The plates were
exposed when wet.
• Everyone was using wet plates.
• 1850 Printing on albumin coated papers was introduced.

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 2 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

Evolution of the Practices of Photography & the solutions to photographic problems.
• Gaspar Felix Tournachon, called Nadar. Mid to late 1850s posed people artistically and
used light creatively. “Moral understanding of the subject.”
• 1863-64 Julia Margaret Cameron did portraits of Major figures in British intellectual
society.
• 1852 P.H. Delamotte photographed the crystal palace in a modern manner.
• Roger Howlett – photographer
• 1855-60 Robert Fenton photographed using patterns and shape.
• 1860-70 Charles Marville photographed Paris
• 1861-65 The Civil War established documentary photography, the major figure being
Matthew Brady.
• His photographers were Alexander Gardner, George N. Barnard, and Timothy H.
O’Sullivan.
• Gardner’s Book “Photographic Sketchbook of the War” combined artistic elements.
• John Reekie.
• Arthur Joseph Russell – railroad photographer in the Civil War went on to do more work
with the railroads after the war.
• 1861 Carleton E. Watkins photographed Yosemite Valley
• William Henry Jackson became a renouned landscape photographer.

• Between 1839 and 1879 the practices came to the medium.

The Dry Plate Method:

From this site:
http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/1_early/1_early_photography_-_processes_-_dry_plates.htm

Richard Leach Maddox made a significant discovery, suggesting, in 1871, that silver bromide held in
a layer of gelatin should be used in preference to collodion for coating dry plates.

Joseph Wilson Swan who patented the carbon process for photographic printing in 1864 is also
credited with having invented the dry plate in 1871.

Seven years later, dry gelatin plates began to be produced in large numbers, following experiments
by J Burgess and Richard Kennett, and discovery by Charles Harper Bennett of a way of treating the
plates to make the emulsion more stable and far more sensitive to light.

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 3 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

Section 2. 1880-1918. The Curious Contagion of the Camera by Sarah
Greenough. (p.129 ff)

Greenough does not give subtitles to the four sections of this superb essay. I have created these
subtitles for my own use. I have paraphrased freely, often quoting passages but not enclosing
them in quotation marks. This summary is in her words, not mine.

My criticism of this essay is that it lacks description of the critically important technical
improvements to photography during this era. The chemistry is not described, nor the
development of standardization, including the concept of f-stops. Doing so would have made the
essay too long, but references to these topics would have been appreciated.

Introduction
• Greenough summarizes the following three sections.
• 1871 Richard Leach Maddox invents the gelatin dry plate process.
• From 1880 to 1917 photography came of age. The practice of photography was
reinvented.
• Like an adolescent, “it was a tumultuous and self-conscious time…[attempting] to gain
better self-understanding, experiment[ing] with various theories and [seeking] out new
friends and allies.” P.129
• The development of the dry plate process and Kodak’s fast films and cheap cameras meant
cameras no longer needed tripods, and everyone could have one.
• The photofinishing industry was born.
• “The legions of hand camera enthusiasts created new subjects, new criteria of pictorial
structure and function, new theories, and a new critical vocabulary.”
• The halftone process permitted the widespread distribution of photographs and cheap
reproductions.
• March 4, 1880 a New York newspaper printed the first halftone image.
• Photographs could be taken by anyone and seen everywhere.
• These two inventions completed photography’s invasion of modern life. Art, science,
social science, business, and all forms of communication were affected.
• The cultural perceptions about the nature, use, and art of photography were changed.
• Photography evolved from where the viewer re-examined what the photographer had seen,
to a primary one where the viewer could discover in the photograph things never seen
before.
• Photography became equated with revelation and with primary knowledge.
• Photography became a personal tool to define personal issues.
• “Whereas an earlier era reveled in seeing how the world looked when it was photographed,
this generation was concerned with doing it themselves, with seeing, knowing, and
defining their personal, social, and emotional life through the rectangular frame of the
little black box.”
• Cogent and influential aesthetic theories were formulated to defend critical positions about
photography.

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 4 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

The Effects of the Kodak
• The “Curious Contagion of the Camera” established a vernacular tradition in photography.
• By 1900 about 4 million people, 10 percent of the population in Great Britain owned a
camera.
• They brought new ideas of what to photograph, taking cameras out-of-doors, on trips,
photographing inconsequential subjects, commonplace incidents, and personal details of
modern life, in a casual, off-hand manner.
• On vacations they documented their presence there rather than recording the places they
saw.
• Photographs “served less as concise literal documents of visual facts and more as selected
details to stir the memory of the maker.”
• The relationship between photographer and subject changed. People no longer needed to
pose for that one special moment in front of a professional photographer’s camera.
There was no chance for primping. The camera became ignored.
• The photographs of these “privileged insiders” are often endowed with a vivacity and
immediacy not previously known in photography.
• Descriptions of photographs of painter Edouard Vuillard, and the child Jacques-Henri
Lartigue follow as concrete descriptions of the concepts above.
• They were not interested in the technique of photography, just the act of taking
photographs and the joy of discovering what their world looked like when photographed.
• Images were called “snapshots” after the hunting term for a hurried shot taken without
deliberate aim.
• Greenough provides a well-stated analysis of their work (p.134-5)
• The aim of the amateur was to record his world, not define it or extract its meaning, to
simply preserve a record of it.
• The photos buried in family archives obtain a patina of history which provides charm and
nostalgia. (I would add, an incentive to know more about the persons in the
photographs, their lives, their era; incentive to get to know them; incentive for
genealogical work)
• At the same period came the invention of the electric light, the cinema, telephone,
automobile, bicycle, airplane, and the establishment of Greenwich Mean time, all of
which profoundly affected the basic understanding of time and space.
• Photographs influenced everyone and became embedded in the general fabric of modern
middle-class life. It would be years before the vernacular style became recognized as
worthy subjects or appreciate their lessons of pictorial structure.

Social and Documentary Photography Comes of Age

• 1890, Danish-born American Jacob Riis published “How the Other Half Lives: Studies
amont the Tenements of New York.”
• He was not the first social documentary photographer: Richard Beard & John Thompson
with Adolphe Smith published works in London.
• Riis’s work initiated a new era in urban and social documentary photography and signaled
a new understanding of how photography could be used.

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 5 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

 • Riis and other documentary photographers were not interested in photography but social
reform or cultural history.
• They used photographs to illustrate their talks.
• Photography became a way to organize, classify, symbolize and understand issues such as
urban growth, ethnic diversity, cultural change, and industrialization.
• Earlier photogrhers like H.P.Robinson or O.G. Rejlander cleaned up the pictures so the
brutality of the situation was not conveyed and moral outrange was not provoked, the
goal of Riis.
• Riis wanted to show that poverty caused crime, filth, moral degradation, corruption, and
neglect. Its cure would be found in government and social organizations that would
provide structure, order, education, and middle-class values.
• Riis used photographs to manipulate his audience.
• Riis invaded the slums and O. Henry wrote that “optical gluttons feast on the misfortunes
of others.” However, Riis was a genuine reformer and did not profit from his
photographs.
• His importance lay with his ability not to make creative photographs, but to use
photography creatively.
• An analysis of Riis continues in some detail.
• There was a sense of invasion into the lives of those in the slums, a confrontation between
one class and its values (family, home, morality, and cleanliness), and another’s instinct
for survival.
• This confrontational and adversarial relationship between photographer and the public
began. One company produced a “detective camera” implying its use was to search out
hidden and perhaps concealed secrets. This provoked controversy.
• 1890s E. Alice Austen photographed Staten Island in a similar manner.
• Waldermar Franz Herman Titzenthaler used the camera to examine and document types of
people in Germany.
• The Paris police produced 100,000 photos of individuals for its crime records, a kind of
social and cultural documentation.
• An effort was made to document the current times and places in the British Isles as well as
Prussia, France, Germany, and scattered US cities.
• Francis Galton used photography to construct physiognomic types to reveal universal
characteristics of class or profession, exploiting racial and cultural stereotypes. (Stephen
Jay Gould discusses this in depth in “The Mis-Measure of Man.”) Greenough somewhat
misses the point here; Gould elucidates it.
• Eugene Atget took about 8500 images of Paris and its environs. Peter Henry Emerson and
Frank M. Sutcliffe’s studies of English fishing people recorded a way of life that was
rapidly becoming obsolete.
• Emerson and Sutcliff’s work is generalized, but Atget was specific. Emerson and Sutcliff
sought representative types with universal characteristics of church and peasant. Atgent
was concerned with details.
• Atget, like Riis, used photography to define an issue of pressing importance for the time
(preservation of the memory of Old Paris and its culture.)
• Thus developed a dichotomy between the purposes of finding the general or the specific, to
reveal the universal qualities of a subject or its individual characteristics.
• Lewis Hine began to photograph the immigrants at Ellis Island in 1904.

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 6 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

 • He worked for the National Child Labor Committee (1908-1918) who wanted specific
facts of abuse to convince the public for the need for protective legislation.
• His images are far more immediate than his consciously artistic constructions.
• He developed methods of merging visual and written data for exhibition and publication.
• “Hine humanized social documentary photography; it would be more to the point to say
that he specified it.”
• “There is a dichotomy between the universal and the specific, between a tradition of
generalities borrowed from the fine arts, and a more uniquely photographic ability to
distinguish details.” See the work of Dorothea Lang and Walker Evans.

The Pictorial Movement

• Peter Henry Emerson published “Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art.”
• It proscribed rigid rules for the construction of photographic pictures.
• It separated camera vision from human vision.
• He implored photographers to produce not a literal description of nature, but an impression
of it.
• Pictorialism sought to demonstrate that photography was capable of subjective expression
and could reveal the personality of the maker, and construct images resonant of universal
themes.
• Pictorialsim sought not only to infuse it with the aspirations of the other fine arts, but to
give photography validity, prestige, and definition, by limiting the nature of its art.
• At the time, Photographers did not share a common goal, had no specific cause with its
accoutrements of salons and publications.
• Pictorialism was the first widespread, cogently formulated theory to define the convetions
of photographic picture-making, and the first consciously adopted international
movement in photography.
• Its contributions are that it raised questions about the nature of the art of photography, the
relationship of photography to the depiction of the external world, and the role of science
in the practice of the medium.
• The invention of the hand camera changed everything. The infatuation with the wonder of
the processes of photography faded and everyone could take photographs.
• The question of artistic expression returned with added urgency.
• The legions of snap shooters altered the definition of who the photographer was and cast
grave doubt on what skill, intelligence, and sensitivity were needed to make a
photograph.. The photographer was demoted from a magician to someone of only
marginal competence.
• There was a dramatic reduction in the business of portrait photography in the 1880s and
1890s.
• Photographers sought to set themselves apart from the snap shooters by declaring the
artistic nature of their work.
• Aside from loss of stature, there was a crisis of faith in all the arts in the late 1880s and
1890s. Pictorialism wike symbolist art and literature, was a result of a waning belief in
the power of science, positivism, and empiricism, and disenchantment with the dominant
materialistic ethos of the nineteenth century.

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 7 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

 • “Man is still walking about in the midst of the same enigmas, in the same formidable
unknown.” (G.-A Aurier, 1892)
• Art must cultivate the imagination and search for “the mysterious center of thought”
(Maurice Denis).
• Artists of the 1880s and 1890s came to believe that their work, through the expression of
subjective and abstract states of being, could reveal a higher and more universal reality
than what could be discovered by science.
• It was a faith in the ability of art to make known the “formidable unknown” that unites the
work of both symbolist and art nouveau painters and sculptors.
• The X-ray and been invented. It is not a stretch to think that art could not show man’s
psyche.
• Stieglitz wrote in 1899 that photography was the bastard child of art and science; that
inherit in it were the attributes of science, accuracy, precision, and verisimilitude. (The
appearance of truth; the quality of seeming to be true; from WordWeb)
• Truth in pictorial photography was not a fixed, quantifiable entity but something relative
and subjective.
• Truth could be distorted to express more forcefully the idea of the photographer. They
sought to banish from their art all references to scientific objectivism and literalness.
• Emerson: when photography presented facts it was a science; when it presented ideas, it
was an art.
• Facts are precise, art is suggestive. The desire to be suggestive and elusive accounts for the
indistinct and at times blurred quality of pictorial photographs.
• Pictorialists thought that the imagination was most profoundly stimulated by suggestion
rather than delineation.
• Names of photographs were purposely vague.
• They sought the nameless view, the anonymous model, on to which to project their ideas
and associations.
• They tried to construct a more immediate art that relied on universal experiences to convey
meaning.
• They built their compositions around the expressive potential of light and form and made
an effort to understand the meanings of line and light.
• The pictorialists envisioned an emotive photography that would appeal not to reasons or
the intellect but to intuition, to communicate what language is inadequate to express.
• Photographs would not simply revive thoughts and memories but create new ones.
• The specificity and individuality of the objects being photographed were of no importance,
but only a vehicle for the expression of an idea.
• By divorcing photography from its scientific heritage, pictorial photographers also
divorced it from reality.
• Pictorialists freely manipulated prints to reassert their integrity and craftsmanship, often
producing a unique image that could not be duplicated. This was a reaction to the mass
production of images.
• The Pencil of Nature was to become the Pencil of Man, to draw or paint by light.
• Pictorialism intentionally became both militant and elitist, a self-conscious act of
separation. They formed associations with other artists, notably the secessionist and arts
and crafts movements.
• Splinter groups formed, like The Linked Ring split from the Royal Photographic Society.
(p.147-8). Others formed in Paris, Vienna, Belgium, Germany, and New York.

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 8 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

 • Large exhibitions of photographs in art museums became commonplace by the turn of the
century.
• Individual photographers attempted to develop a distinctive look.
• The Photo-Secession organization was the most influential, formed by Stieglitz. He
founded his own gallery, the 291 from its address on Fifth Avenue, NYC.
• Pictorialism questioned assumptions about photography, specifically that photography was
an anonymous, style less, transparent, and truthful record of external reality, with
inherent, inviolate properties like overall sharp focus.
• But Pictorialism had wholeheartedly, and sometimes rather unthinkingly adopted both the
subject matter and the pictorial devices of the other arts. The scenes were often so
unreal and dreamlike that they appear devoid of air and human life. The range of
subjects was limited to empty landscapes, wistful women, portraits of each other, as was
the range of moods they conveyed. It had become repetitive and incestuous.
• Stieglitz publication Camera Work provided two avenues out of this conundrum. The first
was the theoretical analogy between art and music. Photography should embody the
expression of feeling that music evoked.
• Camera Work encouraged readers to explore the expressive potential of pure color, line,
and form that would evoke abstract states of being, “visual music.”
• Photographs became simplified, close to formal studies. By 1920 there was a concern for
constructing pictures photographically, using the basic elements of light and form. The
significant mood evolved into the significant form. (English theoretician Clive Bell)
• Subject matter changed with increasing attention to urban life. The city embodied change,
multiplicity, variety, impermanence suggesting new methods of composition often taken
from the vernacular.
• Pictures were composed right up to and beyond the edge of the picture frame, isolated
fragments of a transitory scene.
• Stieglitz applied the same questions to all the arts, exhibiting Picasso, Braque, Cezanne,
and others.
• His last issue of Camera Work in 1916 was devoted to Paul Strand. This marks the end of
pictorialism. Stieglitz, Strand, Charles Sheeler, and Karl Struss tend toward “the pure
expression of the object.”
• Marius de Zayes, theory of pure photography.
• These photographers sought to purge the medium from the heresy of pictorialism.
Photography was the gift of science to the arts, an art of selection, not translation; its
basic property was unqualified objectivity. Truth became rooted in the external, not
internal reality.
• More on Paul Strand. P.151-2
• Pictorialism had proved that photographs could be art, but their intrinsic properties and
function were issues that had yet to be resolved.

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 9 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

Section 3. 1819-1945. Ephemeral Truths by David Travis, p.223 ff

Travis is an erudite writer with a background in the fine arts. His knowledge of painting is
probably as deep as his knowledge of photography, leading to the problem of making references
to painters and paintings not included in the book at hand. He makes almost no mention of the
rapid developing technology upon which photography depends. His organization is more by
topic and photographer than by time making it difficult to keep a time scale in mind as I read the
essay. The essay is long and dense. It took me nearly a day to read it the first time, but about
two hours the second time, partly because of the organization.

The Modern World

• Einstein’s proof of relativity (a photograph) and Marcel Duchamp’s paintings illustrate the
extreme limits of twentieth-century photography.
• The first was proof of a theory, the second a conceptual shell into which the viewer
supplied meaning. The third type of photography was art.
• Photography pervaded the media recording visual data from a wide range of subjects.
• This essay focuses on the period between two wars.
• Three ideas came into play. 1. The viewer was to supply meaning to the art. It is not art
unless perceived as art, and, anything perceived of as art is art. 2. Replacing the historic
and traditional with the fundamental. Photography as an art form of pure optical effects.
3. The addition of time as a dimension of perception. French Philosopher Henry
Bergson wrote in 1907: “form is only a snapshot view of transition.”
• Travis refers often to Bergson!
• Photography became once again an art of fixing shadows, appreciated for its objective and
impersonal properties.
• These decades experienced economic and political turmoil that deeply affected
photography.
• Photographers went beyond their quest for the perfect copy or frozen moment to use
photography to reveal “the ephemeral truth.” (Pierre Bost, p.226)

Leaving the Past Behind.

• The Great War (WWI) finalized the break with the past.
• Duchamp and Picasso with is collages were common enough to preoccupy pictrialists
Coburn, Karl Struss, and George Seeley
• In 1913 Anton Giulio Bragaglia book “Fotodinamismo futurista” was rejected by futurist
movement painter Umberto Bocdcioni with their own innovation, plastic dynamism.
• Bragaglia took pictures with a slow shutter speed to demonstrate time passing. Time was a
dimension of perception.
The dada movement.
• Francis Picabia exibitited in NYC in 1913. He exhibited pictures of mechanical
fantasies at Stieglitz’s 291 gallery.
• After the war, he and Duchamp established the start of the anti-art movement “dada”
which satirized and attacked every convention of art. The term ‘dada’ is a nonsense
word that symbolizes their attitude. Dada was a retort to the insanity of a world torn
to pieces by war and revolution. [retort: A quick reply to a question or remark
(especially a witty or critical one). WordWeb]

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 10 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

 • Christian Shad anticipated this with a photocollage, a method that became popular.
Taking photographs from anywhere and anyone, they dissociated the artist from the
traditional role as the originator of images, and upset the viewer’s pictorial
conventions. (p.229).
• The perfidious Dadaists were the antithesis of the pictorialists with their mechanical
reproduction of appearances, selection divorced from conception, and not idealizing
the subject. [perfidious. Tending to betray; especially having a treacherous
character. WordWeb]
• The Dadaists used photography as a source for readymade images, just one impersonal
and mechanically reliable step away from reality. This view would dominate most
critical discussions of photography for the next two decades. (p.229)
• The artists did not contribute to the redefinition of photographic images.
Stieglitz and the new American photographers
• Marius de Zayas wrote about “pure photography.”
• Stieglitz’s understanding of photography as art was beginning to change.
• Stieglitz was dormant from 1911 to 1915 (when Picabia and Duchamp returned to
NYC, and Paul Strand began to come into his own.)
• Stieglitz was more of a sideline collaborator than an active leader.
• The USA had not experienced the disillusionment of theor own cultural history that
was the basis of the dada attitude (p.230).
• Charles Sheeler, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston fought the sentimental proclivities
and commercial mentality of their native citizens. [A natural inclination to insincere
emotions. WordWeb]
• The new photography from Stieglitz and his circle was an adjustment to the past.
Photographers were rarely iconoclastic [Characterized by attack on established
beliefs or institutions.]. Edward Steichen and Paul Outerbridge became commercial
photographers and chose subjects they respected or revered, photographing in the
“Straight” method regardless of subject, lacking romantic sentiment.
• Straight does not mean not manipulated. Their printing was meticulous, dodging,
burning, retouching, etc.
• Their intentions were in de Zayas’ words “the search for the pure expression of the
object” rather than create a novel thought for an object, retaining a faint trace of
mood and symbolism but allowing the object to speak for itself.
• In 1918 he fell in love with artist Georgia O’Keeffe, took nude photos of her, took
photos of clouds at his family home in Lake George. His cloud absteractions had an
underlying transcendental quality, still symbolic and subjective, spiritual.
• He was influenced by Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art.
• Stieglitz’s path, it turned out, had nothing to do with the temporary, but everything to
do with the eternal. (p.231)
Man Ray and the “discovery” of Atget and Blossfeldt
• Man Ray went to Paris to catch up with his new friends Picabia and Duchamp and their
ideas.
• He was a dada conspirator.
• For Man Ray there were only fugitive situations.
• Man Ray joined the literary circle of young Dadaists: Louis Aragon, “Andre Breton,
Philippe Soupault, Tristan Tzara, in Montmartre in 1921.
• He rediscovered the photogram, dubbing it the Rayogram, pure dada.

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 11 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

 • For surrealists (who published photos by Atget), perceiving new meanings for an
image (or eliminating the intended one) was as permissible as finding one (or
eliminate one) for an object.
• Man Ray “discovered” Eugene Atget living on his same street.
• Atget was unaffected by the new factors of perception, abstraction, and time. He was
still dedicated to his project of documenting old Paris.
• Karl Bossfeldt took pictures of buds, flowers, leaves, and stems.
• Karl Blossfeldt was also “discovered” in the 1920s, both photographed with the
attitude of nineteenth-century photographers Charles Marville and Charles Aubry.
They were not concerned with the status of photography as an art or anti-art.
• By1929, Atget and Blossfeldt would become models for the kind of photographer
capable of depicting the objective poetry of an external reality, of photographing
objects worth saving exactly as they were.
• The Great war destroyed the notion that civilization was capable of progressing toward
rationality, prosperity, and peace. The survivors needed to prove that the inherent
order in nature had been and was still available to them.
•
August Sander
• Sander won competitons in portrait work, but business declined. He went into the
Westerwald countryside of Germany seeking business. Discovered farmers did not
require fancy printing techniques.
• After 20 years of flattering sitters, he convinced himself that rendering the world by
this new objective manner was really the photographer’s true and special role.
• He took analytic photographs of the German people. He organized them into
categories: tradesmen, artists, society’s outcasts. He was dispassionate, but recorded
the sturdy glory of the peasant, the pride of the police officer, and the dignity of the
street beggar.
• Like Atget and Blossfeldt, he believed in a reality separate from his own existence.
They were the models of the objective approach of the documentary style (p.233)
• As more people entered the urban environment and primary contact with nature
decreased, they began ato search actively for authenticity.

• In 1927, one could meet Atget and Man Ray on the same tiny Parisian street, the rue
Campagne-Premiere. Paris would be important in the next decades, but innovation would
come from eastern Europe, Berlin and Moscow.

The New Order and Disorder

• The dada movement was living on borrowed time as peace arrived.

• Although pure abstraction continued in the art world, Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus
in Weimar in 1919, a school that integrated the disciplines of art and design.
• This new order was founded on the rationality of the architects, rather than the impetuosity
of poets. It rested on the belief of a technological Utopia obliterating any resident
nihilism.
• El Lissitzky, an engineer and architect, made photograms photomontages, and photograms.
• He defined himself as a “constructor,” more forceful than “designer.”
• He considered metaphysics unnecessary.

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 12 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

 • Others were Russian Alexander Rodchenko and Hungarian Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
• El Lissitzky’s self portrait is one of the seminal images of the period.
• Plastic art was made by the engineer, not the artist.
• Rodchenko came to Paris, bought a hand camera and took vertiginous views, more
interested in what pictures to take than how to take them. [vertiginous. Having or
causing a whirling sensation; liable to falling.]
• The medium had become its own study and its own reality.
• Mohly-Nagy studied at the Bauhaus (1923-28) took no photography courses, but it was
disccused and practiced.
• His book Malerei, Fotographie, Film (Painting, Photogrpahy, film) concerns itself
exclusively with how the functional mechanisms operated in directing images from the
outside in. (p.235)
• Moholy-Nagy’s view was that photography should be concerned primarily with the plastic
manipulation of light and secondarily with objectivity.
• He said that photography compelled one to see what was objectively true, avoided the
whole issue of illusionary perceptions, putting him at odds with the surrealists.
• The exhibition Film und Foto toured Europe and Japan in 1929 stated it attempted to
represent the three territories belonging to photography: the document, the fixing of
motion, and the conscious modeling of light and shadow. (p.236)
• This new photography was an expansion of the American notion of ‘straight’ photography.
• In surrealism there was a more consistent aesthetic role for photography to play in showing
that the world was not what it rationally appeared to be. Andre Breton, surrealist: “..in
this epoch it is reality itself that is in question.”
• Breton and others adopted automatic writing by which they attempted to mine their own
subconsciousness.
• They considered Atget’s photographs to make daily life a kind of carnival display. This
was not Atget’s intent, but the idea was the beginning of the the belief that anything was
a work of art if only perceived as one.
• For Breton the pencil of of nature was a mechanical way of jotting down coded signals
intelligible to the inner self.
• Man Ray rediscovered the “Sabbatier effect” called solarization, the exposure of a negative
to light that produced a partial positive. Solarization became popular, but it was Man
Ray’s artistic property from 1929 to 1933.
• Multiple exposures was another trick used, implying simultaneous realities, or represented
dreams.
• Surrealism in photography needed a Freudian tone or a poetic imagination ..to make it
something other than a stylistic appliqué of an artists’ prodigal dissipation or half-
hearted mysticism. (p.237). [prodigal dissipation: extravagant, wasteful, rash.
Dissolute, unrestrained, indulgence in sensual pleasure]
• Man Ray and Henri Cartier-Bresson understood that photography’s anchor in reality gave
the medium an entrée to surrealism.

The Right Moment

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 13 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

 • Fredrich Seidenstucker and photojournalist Martin Munkacsi enjoyed a little insouciance in
the Paris and Berlin of the 1920s.[insouciance: The cheerful feeling you have when
nothing is troubling you]. Both took pictures of people on streets depicting motion
caught in a moment of time.
• The concept of time entering photographs entered in the 1920s when publications hired
photographers as journalists, birthing the photo-essay, the sequencing of images.
• The introduction of the high-speed rotogravure presses revolutionized print journalism.
Photographers began to receive bylines.
• Andre Kertesz was perhaps the best among them.
• Kertesz harnessed his energetic Hungarian mettle without abandoning all his romantic
sentiment.
• The belief that revelation was spontaneous was common to both Kretesz and Breton. The
trick was to encounter, through an accident of time, not what was suspected but what
was unforeseen. (p.239)
• Write Pierre Mac Orlan was important.
• Photography now was seen as locating its revelatory truth not only in objects, but in the
suspension of time.
• Witnesssing as a metaphor for photographing became increasingly common beginning
with the photojournalists in the late 1920s through the social documentary photographers
of the 1930s. (p.240)
• The appetite for the unusual increased, seeking the dangerous, concealed, or forbidden
situations.
• Brassai was the most daring., photographing hoodlums, prostitutes, transvestites, opium
dens, and other attractions of the nocturnal city. The Parisian underword world was
used as a massive communal subconscious (present in Mac Orlan’s literary idea of the
“social fantastic”) in which the erotic and threatening was situated out of easy view, non
threatening.
• Brassai’s book was Paris de nuit (Paris by Night) in 1935.
• Brassai used a tripod and lighting equipment, securing the confidence and cooperation of
his subjects, treating them as actors playing their own roles. His aspiration was be a
kind of recording secretary to the act of living.
• Henri Cartier-Bresson. The 35mm Leica was introduced and in 1932 became his traveling
accessory as he rebelled from the bourgeois life of his family.
• Bresson became a surrealist . He had disgust for the moribund spirit of bourgeois society.
[Moribund. Not growing or changing; without force or vitality. On the point of death;
breathing your last.] [bourgeois. Middle class. (according to Marxist thought) being of
the property-owning class and exploitive of the working class.]
• His pictures are more a record of his unpatterned travel on his senseless voyage of
discovery.
• His early photographs exude spontaneity, intuition, and revolt. His photographs took
photography into the dimension of time. He contrasted objects with a situation or event
suspended in time. He hinted at a future possibility of figuring one event against another
where time would be the primary dimension of perception. (p.242).
• Louis Aragon was a surrealist poet turned political activist, urging artists and
photographers to take social realism as the standard of supreme good and beauty, as they
had once taken nature.

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 14 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

 • Photographic art and propaganda took on new meaning with the advent of worldwide
economic depression and the rise of fascism in Europe. During the 1930s photography
split in to wcamps. One responded to the realities that threatened them from the outside,
the other looked further within the medium and themselves for an aesthetic solution to
the impending changes of the modern world.
• The two decades between the war formed a relativistic period that began to see not only
art, but truth, as a matter of perception, and photography as an objective vehicle to either
one.

Spiritual Equivalents
• Edward Weston found it hard to give in to the idea that nature was not the standard of
supreme good and beauty.
• His generation of photographers followed that of Stieglitz.
• In 1929 he wrote photographs were not to interpret in terms of personal fancy, transitory
and supervicial moods, but present nature with the utmost exactness. Photography using
vision, sensitive reaction, and knowing of life are all requisite in nature photography,
indicating or symbolizing life rhythms.
• El Lissitzky believed Weston’s idea of an artist to be hopelessly bourgeois and reactionary.
Weston had doubts about the avant-garde. He was convinced of the inanity in Moholy-
Nagy and Man Ray’s experimental photography.
• In 1923 Weston left his wife and family for Mexico with his young mistress, model, and
soon-to-be-photogrpaher, Tina Modotti.
• He admired Sheeler’s architectural views and did some excellent work of the same sort in
NY. The idea that machines and articles of manufacture could have a photographically
sensual character affected Weston even more deeply. Photographic beauty was
exactness. (p.245)
• One sense of form replaced another: the architectonic-sometimes-planar by the organic-
sometimes-volumetric.
• Steichen was one of the first to adopt “straight” photography as fundamental to the
medium’s inherent scientific rationality.
• Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, and others formed in 1932 the
group called F.64 after the smallest aperture of most view camera lenses, producing the
greatest sharpness and depth of field.
• This movement was parallel and in tune with current German photography.
• They began to grapple with the representation of the distance and atmosphere, the abstract
chiaroscuro patterns of vast stretches of sand dunes, indicating distance, and the
luminous expanses of clouds over a darkened ground, indicating atmosphere, were two
of Weston’s solution s in the mid 1930s. [chiaroscuro A monochrome picture made by
using several different shades of the same color]
• Weston sought to possess what he saw, often compressing his subject, confusing its true
scale. Ansel Adams saw man as subservient to nature and chose subjecdts that
magnified its grace and power.
• Adam’s abstract designs (photographs) of waves on a surf-smoothed beach showing age,
erosion, and time, presented nature as cyclic, renewable, and eternal. Man was a humble
viewer of nature.

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 15 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

 • Weston felt that physical order produced rather than resolved the spiritual mystery within
his perception.
• By 1938 Stieglitz was not longer able to photograph. He photographed dying poplar trees
on his family’s Lake George property, or light raking over grass. Stieglitz felt alone in
an age that was abandoning spiritual values. Weston could understand what “seeing”
was.
• “At the end of their careers, great artists who step beyond their own virtuosity encounter a
world more demanding of their genius than any struggle with youth’s identity or the
style of middle age. Unable to start over, they are forced to finish the person they have
become.” (p.248)
• Both Weston and Stieglitz came to believe that both photography and nature now hod to
satisfy an inner sense of truth rather than supply one.

Impinging Realities.
• Dorothea Lang left her career as a San Francisco portrait photographer to devote herself to
social documentary photography in the mid 1930s.
• A quote from Francis Bacon over her darkroom door: The contemplation of things as they
are, without substation or imposture, without error or confusion, is in itself a nobler thing
than a whole harvest of invention.”
• Van Dyke recognized Lange’s spcial talents, compared her work to Mathew Brady and
wrote (paraphrased): people are in the midst of great changes a tremendous drama
unfolding about them, contemporary problems reflected in their faces, and Dorothea
Lange is photographing it through them. P.248
• Migrant Mother is her most famous photograph. She was employed by the Farm Security
Administration.
• The photographer as social observer was more common in the decade of the Great
Depression than in the “roaring twenties”
• In Europe the 1930s saw the rise of fascism and awakened the dorman social and political
consciousness of many artists and photographers.
• Bill Brandt, a former assistant in Man Ray’s studio, shared the same outrage (as George
Orwell, a socialist) at his country’s complicity in the continued exploitation of its human
resources.
• In America Lewis Hine continued his social photography. He shifted from what needed to
be corrected to what needed to be appreciated.
• The photographers who worked for the Resettlement Administration and later the Farm
Security Adminstration were a generation younger than Hine. The director was Roy E.
Stryker. The group included in 1935 Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Carl Mydans, and Walker
Evans, and Ben Shahn the painter. The photographs were propaganda to help justify
large appropriations by the Roosevelt Administration and Democrats.
• Only Walker Evans refused to give in at all to anything he considered bureaucratic
hackwork and propaganda. His photographs have poignancy unequalled in American
Photography of the period.
• Evans was a late arrival to Gertrude Stein’s “lost generation.” He went to Paris, returned
in 1927, and found his private dissatisfaction with the crassness and mercantile character
of the United States was in sympathy with the poetry and writing of William Carlos
Williams and John Dos Passos, or Hart Crane and James Agee. (p.250)
• His photographs rang true to the decade in which change and decay spared neither the
resistant nor the indigenous strains of American culture. Ordinary things and scenes, the
Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 16 of 25 printed 6/5/2010
 most neglected and perishable of subjects, survived in his photographs. It was a kind of
historical freeze.
• His images read like eloquent depositions of cynical detachment of a subject from which
he could not quite release his affection.
• Berenice Abbott began to roam NYC, and obtained a Federal Arts Project grant in 1935 to
document the urban center. 1939 published Changing New York. She had done as
much as anyone to bring great works of documentary photography to the attention of her
profession and the public.
• The Photo League founded in 1936 in NYC took as their model the work of the FSA
photographers and traditions set by Stieglitz, Strand, Abbott, and kWeston. This
amalgam of the two divergent aspects of photography (Mac Orlan’s documentary and
plastic categories) came about through the gradual veneration of Strand.
• There was common ground between the attitudes of socially and aesthetically-minded
camps of photographers. (p.251)
• In Europe National Socialism in Germany caused many photographic talents to flee.
• Lisette Model took up photography in 1937.
• John Heartfield, Felix Man, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy all fled to London or Chicago. Most
settled in NYC.
• Arthur Fellig, credited as Weegee came to the US in 1909, photographed sensational
subjects by tagging after the police. Photographs were a moral emetic for the lurid
scenes he shot or were merely a cheap vicarious thrill for readers.
• The agile, playful and magical photography which came to maturity in Europe in the 1920s
was born of an optimism that was supposed to take care of everything; the sturdy,
serious, and sardonic photography of the 1930s was born of disillusionment and
impending doom that surrealism or constructivism could not cure. (p.252)
• Helen Levitt’s photographs of the children in the slums were hung in the Museum of
Modern Art and she restored a certain innocence to the camera’s eye. In Levitt’s
photographs there was a graceful new coherence of aggregate motion out in the open.
• Walker Evans took a series of subway portraits with a camera hidden in his overcoat.
• The beauty of the unaltered moment reduced from the chaos that held it in thrall was
something that Evans, Shahn, and Levitt shared with other street photographers, but not
for the sake of politics. (p.253)
• It was in vernacular affairs that Evans, Shahn and Levitt found a residual truth and a
concerned naturalism that was as lyrical as it was literal and as quiet as it was humane.
• Naturalism would only survive as an escape in a world that was about to tear itself apart
for a second time (WWII).
• Bourke-White, George Rodger and William Vandivert photographed the concentration
camps. The vision that the futurists had promoted of WWI as a great aesthetic adventure
of hectic speed and invigorating violence seem centuries gone.
• “Gertrude Stein said “In this horrible war we’re in danger of loosing our humanity.”
• Photographers found their best pictures not of action but of the cost in human terms,
especially when it concerned children, prisoners, or civilians. Carpa’s photographs of
Normandy seem to abstract their subjects from suffering and death.
• W. Eugene Smith worked for Life when he was in Saipan, the first American objective
with a sizable civilian population. War made him look past patriotism and a crusader
whose every exposure was a condemnation of war.

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 17 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

 • Smith might be characterized as an outraged romantic, Capa as a fearless adventurer, or
Bourke-White as a mass-media illustrator.
• Photography gained further credibility as a faithful witness because of the risks
photographers took to become part of the scenes they recorded.
• Photography’s on-the-spot honesty was relative to the context from which the photograph
was taken and the new context in which it was put. (p.255)
• Photographers believed they saw things that no one else saw. Gertrude Stein said “an artist
sees something else and tries to create it. The rest of us see it and are subject to it.
(p.255)
• In order that photographers were not dominated by the world—Eston by its beauty, Evans
by its anonymity, or Smith by its brutality—they kept a distance between their idea of
form and the idea that demanded a form.
• Despondency after the war was unavoidable, especially in Europe. It brought a new,
sobering awareness of being human. Sartre’s existentialism too hold.
• Cartier-Bresson’s photograph of Sartre is an open moment that brought the existence of the
photographer back into a balance with the spirit and essence of the subject. (p.256)
• Photography became more of a technique. It became a human record intimately bound
with the moment of perception, desperate to prove its faith that some connection with
truth still existed, even if it were ephemeral, at best.

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 18 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

Section 4. 1946-1989. Beyond the Photographic Frame Colin Westerbeck, p.345

The Landscape Tradtion.

• In the early 1940s Ansel Adams made photographs that were to be among his best. His
were a uniquely American Transcendentalism where reason abides in nature and is
manifest there. The macrocosm is but an elaboration of the principles that the microcosm
contains.
• Adam’s work draw upon an American landscape traditions that goes back to Carleton
Watkins, and includes William Clift and Edward Weston.
• Stieglitz’s gallery began to show fewer quiet corners and intimate views of nature, and
more panoramic sweeps.
• Adam’s made his photographs amid the chaos of war, Winter Sunrise when he was
photographing the West Coast Nisei. It was as though he were looking beyond the
sordidness in search of some higher truth, to recapture the high moral ground to which
photography had always led him before.
• Adams and Minor White were to get back to the rationality of Edward Weston and Alfred
Stieglitz.
• Minor White noted Stieglitz’s Equivalents (cloud studies) turned photography from a
medium of literal description into one of poetic metaphor.
• White was exploring not photography, but himself, to explore his own feelings. His
feeling was disorientation. White could not escape the existential angst that the war
instilled.
• White took images that were symbolic of the bomb (Sand Dune, Fog over City).
Photography became a way to salvage spiritual value and clarity from chaos.
• White underwent religious transformations from Catholicism to eastern, able to go into a
trance.
• Denis Brihat in France repeated the pattern. He built his career around an explicit
recovery and reaffirmation of Weston’s aesthetic of the thirties where all of nature was
informed by a ubiquitous sexual potency and energy, a natural appeal to post war
photographers. But Brihat’s photographs lack Eros.
• Weston’s cabbage leaf suggests flowing water, bolts of electiricy, phallic power, a
woman’s hair in the wind.
• Brihat’s cut cabbage suggests total paralysis, like an image of a dissected brain, of bodies
writhing, post war.
• Brihat’s work was part of the intellectual and artistic crisis that artists were going
through. He wanted to reach back over the war to link up with some aesthetic order that
made sense to him. But neither Brihat nor White could cut away from the insanities of
war.
• These photographers created a deflection and transformation of earlier photographic
aesthetics.

Subjective Photography
• Mario Giacomelli and Jan Dibbet’s make the head spin. Eliot Porter showed special
ambiguities in the reflections in water. Bill Brandt’s have an aura of hallucination.

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 19 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

 • Street photography is characterized by confusion and distortion. Callahan saw double in
window scenes. Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand suggest the photographer was off-
balance. The wide angle lens made subjects pitch and yaw in the frame (William Klein).
• Joseph Koudelka from Utekac, Czechoslovakia shows a girl seemingly floating. Roy
DeCarava shows a man passed out in a NY subway. Lee Friedlander’s shots where
foreground and background are indistinguishable.
• German members of fotoform show similar trends in landscape photography. (p.349)
They included Toni Schneiders and Peter Keetman, Christer Stromholm.
• There was the influence and heritage of Bauhaus on both European and American
photographers. They turned to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy who had resettled in Chicago and
started what became the Institute of Design. Harry Callahan ran the photography
program and hired Aaron Siskind as instructor.
• There was an impulse toward reductionism originating in Moholy’s work.
• A movement called The New Objectivity (in German) arose. Photography was a tool for
the exploration and celebration of external realities upon utopian principles that hoped to
rebuild society. It became known as Subjective Photography.
• With the threat of the bomb, the destructive power of man made it impossible to return to
the utopian aspirations of art or the idealization of objective reality. They turned to the
self as the last refuge of human sensibility.
• Disorientation is one form of subjectivity in landscapes (White, Keetman), street
photographers (Winogrand) and Siskind’s abstract close-ups.
• Paul Strand had huge influence from cubism abstractions, but cubism was a means of
analyzing external realities, abstract expressionism was a means of exploring internal
realities.
• Disorienting points of view and bare scenes of winer were a distinctive visual theme or
motif widespread in postwar photography.
• The world in a Small Room is one motif expressing the new insular consciousness of the
post-war years, from those who photographed small rooms, to those who retreated into
them. [motif: A unifying idea that is a recurrent element in literary or artistic work]
• Irving Penn published Worlds in a Small Room.
• Minor White retreated as did Callahan, suggesting that only the private emotions in a
room have validity now. Bill Brandt did similar work, turning away from documentary
work toward more personal projects (England). He was “deciding to remain a poet.”
• Josepf Sudek in Czechoslovakia was forced to work in a room during the Nazi
occupation. Jan Saudek, Lucas Samaras, Duane Michaels are other photographers doing
this.

Photojournalism
• The humanist photojournalism from the 1920s and 30s (Kertesz, Bresson, Capa, others)
continued in the 1940s and 1950s, but a new subjectie element emerged.
• Robert Doisneau (France) work has a sense of humor, poking fun at artists, revealing
something about himself and Paris.
• Manuel Alvarez saw the world through the eyes of his Mexican peasant subjects. He saw
the capacity to exploit chance in the spirit of surrealism and thereby create symbolic
juxtapositions with poetic meanings.
• Elliott Erwitt’s photograph, Confessional, p. 353, contrasts the sacred and profane, truth
and confession, absolution and relapse, playing one element against another.
Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 20 of 25 printed 6/5/2010
 • Marc Riboud and Erwitt were members of Magnum, the photo-cooperative founded in
1946 by Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, David Seymour (“Chim”) and others. Magnum’s
innovations were organizational and commercial, not aesthetic.
• Magnum allowed Capa, Cartier-Bresson, and others to take long sojourns to the remote
corners of asia, Africa, or South America where they were convinced much postwar
history would be made.
• Sid Grossman was director of education at the Photo League but was branded a
Communist, and left. There was a subtle shift toward a new emphasis on personal
creativity, not social commentary. Grossman ended up in his small room apartment,
paranoid, rarely going out.
• Kertesz stayed in NYC but did not feel comfortable as he did in Paris. He spent much
time in his room overlooking Washington Ssquare.
• W. Eugene Smith left Life in the mid-1950s working in a small room he was loath to
leave. While David Douglas Duncan went to Korea, Cartier-Bresson to China and
Russia, Smith retreated. He worked for Life in small places: N.Carolina, rural Spain,
(p.354).
• A common thread in Smith’s photographs is his view of life as a mixture of brutality and
tenderness. He became addicted to alcohol and amphetamines. He did essays on
Pittsburgh and Minamata, Japan. Still, the sense of exile within himself persisted as the
views from his window gave way to experimental work, housebound.
• Robert Frank, the young Swiss photographer who came to NY from Paris in 1947 was a
fashion photographer at Harper’s Bazaar. He admired Smith.
• Frank lacked the confidence in the righteousness of photography itself as a vocation, a
calling. His new aesthetic had an historic impact.

Street Photography.
• Kertesz work speaks much. He employed visual counterparts to conceit, meter, formal
control, in the late 1920s. Cartier-Bresson brought this to perfection in the 1930s.
Elegance became a form of eloquence.
• Frank wanted to find away around this aesthetic. . He wanted to take a photograph that
was literally a dumb picture, one that does not speak. Frank arranged perfect photos into
sequences that had a wholeness and power no single photograph could achieve.
• The Americans (1958) is his product. The precedent was Walker Evans’ American
Photographs which appeared two decades before. Another likeminded book was by
Minor White, Mirrors, Messages, Manifestations. The flow of sequences brings the
beholder associations as he passes from picture to picture.
• White’s sense was heightened, Frank’s depressed as Frank descended into the spiritual
depths of the postwar world. There was the expresson of an anonymous self as opposed
to a transcended one.
• There was a movement toward a stylistically raw and violent art that explored primal
emotions, in particular in action painting.
• Jacob Riis was rediscovered. His intentionally crude photos were then appreciated.
Weegee and Lisette Model were celebrated at the Museum of Modern art. The anti-
aesthetic strain of post war photography became an aesthetic in its own right.
• Siskind captured the look of action painting, but Frank truly worked in the spirit of this
new art.

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 21 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

 • Roy DeCarava and Bruce Davidson were working in a dark way. Davidson worked on
the verge of the sixties, felt the mixture of discontent and passion that was gathering,
especially among the young.
• William Klein published Life is Good and Good for You in New York: Trance Witness
Revels. He wated to push, or abuse the medium and break all rules of photographic
aesthetics.
• The tendency toward gritty, high-contrast prints can be seen in much work. Frank’s dour
realism, Klein’s extreme expressionism, Brandt or Giacomelli’s poetic surrealism, and
Hosoe’s Zen ritual. (Hosoe’s 1969 Kamaitachi book.)
• Frank opened the way for Garry Winogrand and others of the 1960s. Joel Meyerowitz
was inspired by Frank. The possibilities that Frank created were not stylistic as much as
psychological, amounting to a kind of license for a reflex behavior with the camera that
came from their most instinctive needs and emotions, to delve deeper into the self for
their imagery, while exploring the behavior of those on the margins of society. (Danny
Lyon, The Bikeriders)
• Winogrand surpassed Frank in his willingness to make dumb images. He and
Meyerowitz wold take “crazy” pictures, “wow” images.
• Lee Friedlander never liked the city. His work was more self-conscious than Winogrand
and Meyerowitz, given to optical illusions, compartmentalization of the space, and a cool
analytical way of seeing. American Monuments project of the 1970s. He associated
himself with Eugene Atget and Walker Evans to be aware of his place in the medium’s
history.
• Robert Adams (same age as Friedlander, born in the mid 1930s) was influenced by
Timothy O’Sullivan.
• The Family of Man was Edward Steichen’s exhibit in the 1950s, the most important
exhibition in the 1950s, at the Museum of Modern art. It was markedly ahistorical.
• There is a new historical consciousness among photographers.

The New Topographics

• Eliot Porter has continued the work of Ansel Adams and Minor White, in color. He
worked at the Radiation Lab at MIT (both an engineer and a medical degree, working in
biochemistry). Porter felt the need to dwell on the truth of nature with the greater fidelity
that color made possible. 1962, In Wilderness is the Preservation of the World.
• Minor White superseded Adams as spiritual influence through the magazine Aperture
which he cofounded in 1952, at teaching at RIT.
• White’s students were Paul Caponigro and Jerry Uelsmann, White searching for
revelation in the landscape, to make private worlds visible, illusion and ambiguous space.
• Frederick Sommer worked toward abstract and disorienting effects. Arizona Landscape
inspired by surrealists, White, Siskind, Callahan and others at te Institute of Design.
• There was a minimalist impulse. Others: Ray Metzker, Art Sinsabaugh. From Callahan.
• Callahan and Sinsabaugh provided the crucial groundwork for the landscape photography
of the 1970s and 1980s know as “new topographics.” Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz
were among those whose created a landscape look that was original and unique to the
postwar period in the same way as Frank and Wonogrand were to street photography.
• Robert Adams work is flat topography, depicting a vast and empty landscape with limited
possibilities. Adams photographs in the part of the West that is shutting down, closing
up, losing steam.

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 22 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

 • Lewis Baltz photographs in the part that is forging ahead, industrial parts, housing
developments, but managed to wrest from a despoiled subject matter an exact beauty.
• Baltz, Adams, Winogrand, Friedlander, and Meyerowitz in the 1960s extended an
American hegemony in photography. [Hegemony: The dominance or leadership of one
social group or nation over others]
• Street photography is in a quiescent phase, probably because it is dependent on the social
conditions in which it is practiced. Society was entering an era of turmoil and
extroversion where the streets were “where the action was.” The subject matter begged
to be photographed. It continues in countries where tis a sharp, visible contrast between
an underground culture and an official one. P.364.
• Color photography is currently functioning as a separate genre. [genre: A class of art (or
artistic endeavor) having a characteristic form or technique]. Color photography could be
called, like New Topographics, New Color.

New Color
• Color landscape tradition had been established by Eliot Porter who had made b/w work
under the tutelage of Adams. Ansel Adams hated color. Serious photographers (my
question: what is a serious photographer?) felt color was the province of advertising and
fashion. It was expensive. Porter had an independent income that allowed him to do dye
transfer printing. Color chemistry was unstable. Color was meretricious. [Meretricious:
Tastelessly showy, Based on pretense; deceptively pleasing]. It was thought that color
was not a suitable medium for any artist who hoped to be capable of truths that were
timeless.
• Adam’s work achieved its greatest popularity only after the profound social changes of
the 1960s had liberated public mores and made a new hedonism permissible in American
Life. Adams b/w vision of nature was a repository for the stern rectitudes of the time
before the work, of New England values. [Rectitude: Righteousness as a consequence of
being honorable and honest]. Porter shared the same heritage as Adams.
• Porter’s authority and authenticity is from the force of character of the photogpher who
approached color photography with the same care, dedication, and reference with which
he approached nature itself.
• Color has been a troublesome aspect of perception in western culture. In metaphysical
philosophy, it has usually been taken to be a secondary attribute, something the mind
imposes on reality. Legitimate color work may have been the result of a gradual shift of
postwar attitudes toward photography, it was not until after the psychedelic rainbows of
the 960s that color gained wide acceptance.
• [I would add that in addition to the shortcomings of expense and instability, colors were
not true. Control of color was very difficult. I think it was the technology that brought
color into its prominence, and would suggest that digital color has made color
photography dominant.]
• He discusses Joel Mererowitz’s and Helen Levitt’s photographs. P.365. Excellent
observations.
• He discusses Joel Sternfeld, William Eggleston, John Pfahl. It is clear Colin Westerbeck
does not like color!

Conceptualism
• Hilla and Bernhard Becher were indicative of the crossover influences between
photography and the visual arts. (1975-1985)

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 23 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

 • Standardized, repetitious views are a variation on the theme of the dumb picture.
• Conceptual does not necessarily mean cerebral. Conceptual work is often visceral, a gut
reaction against pretentiousness and idealization in the arts. An attempt to be clear
headed, not high minded. It might better be called perceptual art. Conceptual art is often
vulgar, aware of the mass media. It challenges our assumptions about art.
• Vito Acconci, Robert Cumming, William Wegman, and John Baldessari are conceptual
artists.
• Acconci’s photography has led him to create a work so suffused with the mystery of
paradox that it threatens to become high art all over again. (p.368).
• Conceptual artists gravitated toward performance in the late 1960s and 1970s.
• Hamish Fulton, William Wegman. Others. Wegman’s photos (cat.325) are diptychs that
have that familiar conceptualist feeling of rationality and logic run mad. [diptychs: A
painting or carving (especially an altarpiece) on two panels (usually hinged like a book)]
• Performance pieces are about the privatization of experience.
• Conceptualists are fascinated with pop culture, but have rejected the consumer-goods
approach.
• Andy Warhol lived his life as a parody of bohemianism.
• Baldessari comments on mass media, with a strong intellectual and theoretical bias. His
works are a parody of the formalism (abstracted and highly patterned uses of shapes)
inherent in so much modern art.
• [I did not enjoy this section. To arty.]

Postmodernism
• Sherrie Levine, Victor Burgin, Hans Haacke, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman.
• [pathos: A quality that arouses emotions (especially pity or sorrow). A feeling of
sympathy and sorrow for the misfortunes of others. A style that has the power to evoke
feelings
• They want to raise art lover’s political consciousness which for them has a priority over
aesthetic considerations.
• Feminism is a concern of Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman.
• Postmodernism is as preoccupied with the presence of media imagery in our lives today
as some earlier photographers were with WWII or the atomic bomb.
• Christian Boltanski, French conceptualist.
• Anselm Kiefer.
• Postmodernism has presented a challenge that younger artists taking up the medium
cannot ignore or dismiss even if they want to.
• One possibility that postmodernism raises is that it has come into existence as a kind of
end-game, a final phase, or phase-out, of the history of photography as an art.
• One way to define postmodernists would be as photographers who are disenchanted with
their own medium. The longer the history goes on, the more the options seem to be
closed off.
• [I think this is something like what the editor of Scientific American said when he
implied that all the major discoveries in science have been made. Westerbeck implies
that all that could be done has been done. Ooops! Wrong.]
• The medium (photography) has been coming to an historical consciousness of itself.

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 24 of 25 printed 6/5/2010

Beyond The Photographic Frame
• Long before conceptualists and postmodernists became fascinatd with celebrity
photographic portraiture had made itself into a study of the subject even as it was creating
the celebrities themselves.
• The work of Richard Avedon and Irving Penn inevitably led to commentary.
• In the 1920s and 1930s portraitists almost always glamorized famous subjects. Penn and
Avedon provided a dyspeptic, adversarial relationship between photographer and subject
began to develop. [Dyspeptic. Irritable as if suffering from indigestion.]
• Avedon’s photo of Marilyn Monroe turns his subject from a start into a mere mortal. His
work suggests an ethnographic study, a documentary of anonymous people.
• Penn’s work In the American West he treated primitive subjects like fashion models.
• Perhaps the point was just the opposite: that the famous celebrities seemed a doomed
ethnic group, a “tribe” that sacrificed itself to popular culture in the late twentieth
century.
• Documentation is the common ground on which the functions of photography as art and
as news can meet to be reconciled.
• Nicholas Nixon took annual pictures of his wife and her sisters.
• Where Avedon would reduce a famous subject to ordinary mortality, Nixon would
elevate ordinary subjects to a universal theme.
• Avedon’s work undoes the very illusion of fame that it would create.
• Perhaps portraiture at the highest level became a succession of grim, wary, almost
anonymous faces because the ideal of the celebrated individual seemed too ironic when
so many millions of unknown people had perished.
• The precise moment for the end of modernism could be 29 December 1972 when the last
weekly issue of Life magazine was published. Television pre-empted it. It was a
medium no longer essential as a culture’s source of information. It turned into an art
form.
• It is not mere coincidence that the decline of photography as a mass medium was
accompanied by the rise in photography galleries, history courses, art-school degrees, and
auction prices for vintage prints.
• Photography in the postwar period has extended beyond the photographic frame in the
sense that it has made a concerted effort to exceed the traditional limits of the medium to
find new ways of conceiving of it that lie beyond the uses to which it had been put
before. P.376
• There developed a growing sense that the possibilities of photography were being
increasingly diminished. Modernism demanded an even more austere constrained,
negative image until finally, in postmodernism it seemed that the only option left was
repetition of images already in existence. (p.377)
• Hockney has understood that the possibilities for art lie in displacement and interruption.
Hockney’s whimsy cannot hep but put us in a good mood.
• Which way will photography go?

Notes: “Art of Fixing a Shadow” Page 25 of 25 printed 6/5/2010