The Master Photographers: A Survey of Fine-art Photography - For Art's Sake UIUC

it's this presentation is called the master photographers to survey a fine art photography and the reason why I call it that it's not because it's complete nor because it's especially exhaustive it might be exhaustive for for the means of tonight but as far that's as far as we can go and indeed a lot of you may disagree with who I have decided to profile so essentially it's a profile of 21 different photographers with just a couple pics of each person's great work and it's especially focusing on late nineteenth twentieth century photographers this is a period when photography really becomes in our integrates with the art establishment and specifically the pictorialist and modernist movements and so we've I've squished out some of the earliest and squish outs on the latest photographers but I want you to imagine that you're in a museum for now but that somehow we're in the greatest single greatest photography museum in the world right George Eastman Museum in Rochester New York by the way that's the one but let's not say I said that rather we're just in the best in the world and somehow all the greatest photographers are here and so you've just entered the museum and this great exhibits of all the great photographers and we see the sort of beginning of the exhibit outlining it and and so essentially I'm here to not give you a complete survey this isn't a complete at all the great photographers period but it's a story it's a narrative it's a narrative of America's role in photography it's a the role of photography becoming its own and it's a role of the development of photography so for instance a lot of people would tell me that my choice of featuring Alfred Stieglitz and not usually a J is awful and I should die for that or something of course I don't say that RJ is is worse than Stieglitz and I didn't feature Robert Mapplethorpe there's no particular reason for and I think those are in many ways Mapplethorpe's is better than all of his contemporaries but this is I'm most gonna be two hours long so I've chosen a more narrative approach I chosen the contemporary a plethora but not map with or just so I can tell the story better but so this is a story it may also become your inspiration and it's also a way to understand photography more generally just the way that photographer developed in the nineteen and twentieth centuries and I want to also foster your individual knowledge so this isn't a particular indef it's just a quick look at just a few of the best works and so then you can go and research out on your own so it's just twenty one photographers in their best work and so we begin ironically without a photograph this picture on our right here it's not a photograph it's a print and prints were before we had political cartoons or newspaper cartoons we needed to use printing presses for everything and so prints were basically etched into stones or engraved into the different mediums metals and they were basically form a cartoon before cartoon dick however this was a lot more well regarded than a cartoon it was a fine art in its own and the person who created this print was uh no hado me a a french print maker he was considered the best of the best he was the best of his generation and still remains in extremely important artists today so what's important about domi a in this in this print here is specifically caption the caption reads nada elevon the photograph Allah o ta de la translated in English it means Nadar has elevated photography to an art so this is someone who's deep in the artistic establishment who is an important artists of his time realizing that photography has become an art indeed with our first featured creator here and his name isn't doc he is French that's not his real name but it's his pen name so he was a man who had one of the earliest photographs photographic studios he was famous for his portraits and specifically in that last week he was in a hot-air balloon because he created some of the first aerial photographs but what's interesting is back thing we didn't have aerial photographs in plane he had here's hot-air balloons this was a mid 19th century it's it's crazy to think about before planes we have aerial photographs right but he is not particularly well-known for his own photographs he's considered to have his best work as just regular studio portraits but he was incredibly well known for his portraits so much so that all the famous people had lined up to take have their portrait taken in the da studio this is the photograph you see here to the right that is a self-portrait of the DA but it's important that he doesn't call it a selfie like we do today it's it's not that you just turn the camera around he calls it a self-portrait and it is actually signed it's a signed print this is very important he's equated to a painting of baroque or the antiquity and this is specifically a piece of fine art they is asserting this is fine art this is something that I'm signing and going to sell for a premium so what can we notice here why is this considered a great photograph why why do we take a selfie now and it's just something you put up on Instagram and this is a powerful photograph well for one he's posing very self-consciously this is not a normal hand placement nor is this he's making a very specific face it's it's one of deep contemplation perhaps even anguish but what's also important is that it's a dramatic face he is standing at what's 3/4 view so he's not straight forward he's not staring at the viewer but his eyes are in other words his eyes are straying straight forward but his body has shifted 3/4 now what's important in that is that it's a dramatic pose it's the shift between two poses and he's also has his fingers scrunched up it's all dramatic but he also understands the ability to use light in photographs especially black and white photographs to create even more drama photographers will refer to this style as a new dark style as the Rembrandt style now a more correct art history term will be cattle just because it's older it's Italian and it applies some more genres more mediums but cow Escudo just means that you're it's it's a technique in making the subject contrast tonally with the background or with what's a the subject and you can see this here this is a portrait of Alexander Dumas the author of The Count of Monte Cristo among other works and this is viola the Duke he was one of the most important architects in Paris at the time and so these are two of the most important members of society so clearly in the dive studio is in high demand but what you see here is look at how really the Dukes forehead is so much brighter than the background here it makes him shut out even though he is more traditional 3/4 view he simply doesn't really have much of an expression he still has that drama he still sticks out that's childish scooter encounters scooter was even more important because it wasn't really used produce Lee until the Renaissance and Baroque period especially the Baroque so it's directly tying his photographs nataas photographs to the Baroque it's a very clear indication that endow wants to be known as an artist and he is successful in fact in 1874 the first ever impressionist exhibition the first thing exhibition of the impressionist artists was held in the docs studio but that was in France and so I started in France with this general idea that that photography there starts to be some rules some techniques to taking photographs but the same time in this era of the mid 19th century we get a very interesting occurrence also in in America this is the work of Matthew Brady but this is nervously not Matthew Brady this is robert e lee so Brady was also well known for his portraits but in his case he would take his camera outside of the studio also not take it outside the studio interesting enough he took a studio with him he had built basically a house on wheels a gigantic carriage that contained a darkroom contained as his own little studio and where he kept all his photographic equipment and you need to construct this amazing feat in the mid 19th century because he was photographing a civic civic civil war so here we have the a leader of the opposite side to come to Sherman and Sherman here is take not in the studio he's at leisure as if it was in the studio he's just resting it's a very naturalistic portrait and that's I mean that Brady is really well known for its it's extremely naturalistic it's as if you just caught him at the moment right that he's just thinking about something and you're just catching up with him but he's not in a studio he doesn't have Brady doesn't have it at his expense all the equipment's at this time cameras are bulky it would take a long time to expose the photograph so in a studio you usually have at your expense lots of little dinky rinks and little tables for people to sit on and stand on and etc so they could be happy and at rest as a photograph is being exposed in this case he has nothing for this random tree and yet he looks so naturalistic that's just Brady's expertise that in the field in the tent he can still create beautiful photographs and further more poetic ones we can see here one of the earliest examples of the rule of thirds and that means that this two thirds over here is kept two thirds of the composition on the right here is kept mostly not entirely but mostly empty and empty as in lacking the subject and the subject is pushed here to the leftmost third and this is these are two soldiers who have been wounded on the battlefield the resting off the front lines and we have a sense of poetry here although two thirds of the pictures empty it's purposely been left empty so then we have a sort of narrative contemplation here our eye is very quickly drawn because these two thirds are empty our eye is drawn very quickly to these soldiers first to the one on top then to the one on bottom and we see the look on their faces look of tiredness their browbeaten they've been through so much but then slowly our eye begins to wander in gaze here to the ruins of the environment that someone's house might have been here someone's farm there's a story that begins to come up with in your head so that's the Bradys but that's the Brady touch and this early 1865 he can generate a story with just a single image that we can imagine that a battle took place here someone was someone lived here for decades and their work is gone their lives are gone ravaged by war and then we see the people who have been more recently wounded physically where their blood has been shed for their country these are Union soldiers and the poetry continues really especially with this picture on the on the left here these are Confederate soldiers who have been captured and they seem at rest they definitely aren't going anywhere they know that they're going to be stuck here for a long time and in the background we see that the pictures generally cut into thirds again with with three people cutting the composition into three but also in the background we see that there's the expanse of mountains and it's a little bit difficult to see but there's actually a church in a town far in the background we get the sense of home this is such a powerful profound artful image that they're not just framed just on a random fence then the fence in a beautiful environment but they're in prison they're going to stay here this is not a fun experience for them and yet there's home in the background there's this longing here that's on their faces to their tired just like the Union soldiers pictured in the last sight and finally with this photo it's just that's my food Brady himself that's him in this studio unfortunately later in his life he died a poor man that he had spent so much taking photographs in the Civil War no one bought them after the Civil War there just wasn't that much interest and unfortunately they were almost lost but fortunately you can buy books today there are hundreds of his photographs collected fast-forward a little bit so we have this use of we understand now the rules of photography we don't really know what to use it for Edward is Curtis here this is a photograph of a Zuni girl and the Zuni are a Native American group their pro on people which just means that they live in the southwest basically their group in the southwest and at this time they were known for being the only Native American group that had lived in the same area in the same surroundings in the same villages in many cases in the same houses for millennia they had mostly been at points been successful in keeping the Spanish the colonialists away and in this case we see that they're all they were also world famous their pottery it's just you see a woman of Zuni combined with a pot from the Zuni people they're well-known art this is an ethnographic photograph this is an anthropological photograph we began to realize that photography can be used to document not just create poetry not just to just take pictures of people at rest at leisure but we also as we investigate in the nineteenth century as we're trying to investigate what is this camera for we see that it can also be used to capture a people to tell people a message in other words if you have some white Americans living in New York in Chicago they probably never seen Native Americans especially those in Europe there was a sense of exotics ISM so curtis's pictures were in very very high demand he was a best-selling well author pictures of his photographs he was best selling because people were really interested in these Native Americans or at that time you know we didn't use such high terms for them but people were interested and so they sought good photographs of Native Americans and so when you had someone who traveled out there to see them and take photographs of them they wanted them and so suddenly we realized that photographs can communicate a message of a people they can communicate a culture and in this case there's a very clear message being communicated in this photograph to a white American to a European they look at this photograph they've never seen Native Americans before and they realize a very distinct message well for let's look at the composition in this photograph there's parts to this there's a rhythm in the subject of course are these writers here these are navajo writers not horde just another people in the southwest so the writing here so we have this bottom section which is dedicated to the active subject but most of the photograph is not for the subject there's a section for the sky and there's a big section for this mapping here it's not actually a mountain it's actually canyon de chelly in still visit it today it's a National Monument but so you have the canyon you have the sky and it's geometric in many ways this the canyon sort of forms a rectangle and the same thing for the sky same thing for the writers there's a poetry so it's almost like your eye is bouncing off from section a section until you reach the writers they're dominated by this model that's clearly hundreds of writers tall and you realize that the Native Americans the message does communicate here is that the Native Americans are in tune with nature that nature is a part of the Native American culture so with a photograph that they would have been accompanied by words but even without words you still basically get the point of it you get that these are supposed to be Native Americans and it's trying to communicate that the Americans are in tune with nature that they're in some ways a part of nature but there's a problem with Edward s Curtis Curtis photographs which is that he had the anthropological viewpoint of the day which is that Native Americans however sympathetic you are with them they're still savages even the most sympathetic Americans still desired not just photos of Native Americans they wanted photos of what they thought were Native Americans so in many cases Curtis with photograph famous Native Americans like Geronimo here and you know these have become more popular and in other cases he'd photograph them in very sensationalized environments sometimes a Native American would use modern-day equipments modern-day appliances and it purposefully hide those sometimes he literally just edits them out of the print and and he replaced their clothes he doll them up and this has gained him a lot of controversy however we do need to remember that this is still the 19th will in this case supposed to early 20th century but this is still very early right this is still very very liberal for the time that he's living in but nonetheless it is something to understand that there is in a way whoops a dishonesty in its photographs but generally I want to end on this photograph because even though there may be a lot of dishonesty there's still poetry there's still a power with Curtiss photographs that few other photographers have you see this photograph here and just like the K in the Shelli photograph it hits you it's very clear with the messages it's very clear that in this case these are some Canadian Native Americans I'm not sure exactly of which ethnicity but it's very good they are happy the way they are and in the 20th century in in such an early period that's very poignant because certainly we weren't leaving them the way they are even though Curtis may have been a little bit racist from looking today to the message overall here is that is is very very liberal and it's clearly very poetic and powerful and to speak about trying to improve the lot of a people it's not just Native Americans who were trying to improve a lot of with photographs it's also well white Americans themselves so this is a photograph by Lewis Hine from 1920 it's probably his most important photograph and it's one of the most notable photographs of all photography history this is Lewis Hine was a liberal reformer he did not believe in child labor he did not believe in the 12-hour work workday so he was fighting for eight hour work days and ending child labor which this was a period when we had 12 hour work days in child labor and so he wanted to try to improve working conditions for people and he decided to use photographs you know people like Ed where's that Edward as courtesy can inspire change you can inspire these ideas and people by using photographs now we have a likewise inspiration here that Klee this is a man who's working very very hard justice alone you might say well isn't Kurt is it or isn't high in celebrating ingenuity isn't he celebrating hard work this is a celebration well when you look at the other photographs here you mean he follows up with the photographs like this of children looking at the viewer the this childhood here especially I think very pointed because he's staring straight at you and he's got this soot on his lower cheek here and they're just in this awful environment it's dark you can see that the light there's strong light here but it receives very quickly in a darkness it gives you a message to clear that these people shouldn't belong here and or don't belong here I should say and so clearly it's not a celebration of hard work it's hard work in the context of something being wrong here it's too much hard work that the industrialism that we saw in the first photograph is taking advantage of people here is what many many thousands of young girls were subjected to in the early 20th century young girls having to work in sewing factories and this was the case in America that when America became this industrialist power that America was one of the most industrialized nations in the world they were this industrial powerhouse many many many of the sewing companies of making garments required young girls because their fingers were small and nimble which is very sadistic thing to say but it was true and so you had people like this the focus is soft there's a very small f-stop and we're focusing on the the subject here of the girl and even though this is the background is out of focus a viewer would have known that this is a garment factory very very easily they would have seen this they would have seen how dirty and unkempt she is and they would have understood and I wanted on this photograph because I think it's especially poignant that baseball especially at this time was such an a big part of American culture so Lewis Hine decides to photograph baseball everyone knows baseball especially in this period you know Babe Ruth's time I think this might have been even before Babe Ruth but in any case baseball is huge and so you know Sandlot are all across Chicago in New York but here we're seeing a Sandlot of a whole different type we're seeing a Sandlot of kids who do not look that happy so to someone of this time imagine this like being football practice except it's and you know ditch right it's the same point in image of why are we subjecting children to this and how I was successful Hina is actually cited by people like many many politicians at the time as one of the key factors why child labor was stopped because his photographs were widely popular but these photographs they're still documenting something these photographs are still serving some purpose in the end they're serving a purpose to something that is not part of the human condition on a deeper level right so like Hine he's documenting child labor but but there's a political reason for that Curtis he's mainly an anthropologist he is using photography tricks you know and and same thing goes for in the doc and Brady that they might be having this attachment but there's four no doctors or social elements for Brady there's an element of war that because he's thing in the government purchases photographs he's taking pictures of wars it documented for the government and hollandaise was one of the earliest people who said this is preposterous this isn't real arts you still haven't created a real art here art needs to appeal far far deeper it needs to appeal to just a human consciousness and it needs to be something that's timeless and this is very very important here he started what the first true art movement in photography called pictorialism this is really the first art the true fine art movement because a photo like this isn't really tied to labor reform it isn't tied to changing the environment it's tied simply to well for one the title is youth it's time to something that we have all experienced it's high to something that is known to everyone this is clearly depicting a nude young man there's a reference to Greek antiquity here it's he seems sculptural he seems like a Greek sculpture and that's important it's referencing so like the dock it's referencing arts but it's referencing it in a way that appeals to it's not referencing it in service of anything it's not referencing it's simply because he can and he's just photographing he's mainly photographing famous people and he's referencing it meanwhile this isn't anyone famous this is an artist model so he's choosing artist models as if you know he is an artist and the most important thing about symbolism is sorry pictorialism pictorialism is sort of the equivalent of symbolism in painting but the really the main thing is soft focus nothing is really in focus in this photograph and this is the first in a series of seven photographs by f holland a which depict Christ and so they're the seven last words of Christ that's the name of this series and there's sort of this unconventional way of taking the photograph he's purposefully leaving out of focus he's purposely making it sort of jarring and this is suggesting that there's something deeper than just the image here so beyond just the image this is actually I found a himself so he's photographing himself as Jesus he thinks he's Jesus haha but it's more than just an image of himself it's an image that means what the words mean so the seven last words of Christ is actually seven phrases that he says while that Jesus says while he's being crucified and so at first his father forgive them they know not what they do and so clearly this beyond just a photograph of Jesus it's he's looking up at God and saying this to him so because it's addressed to father and then he's looking back and saying this day thou shalt be with me in paradise then he looks down he looks down at the woman at his feet as in the mortals on the ground you know and said they say woman or he says woman behold thy son and then he looks up again and clearly now his face is full of anguish and the focus even softer than before it's an extremely soft focus now because this Jesus is now in a moment of extreme passion of extreme anguish he's now starting to sort of question things my God my God why hast thou forsaken me and now he's totally forlorn he's begun to become resigned to his fate and he says I thirst into thine hands I commend my spirits and then finally it is finished this is perhaps the most famous of the southern photographs purposefully F ho and they sort of cut off there and it's an unconditional way of taking the photograph but in a way it's more powerful anyway I've Holland they had an enemy in the photographic world he had a big big enemy and it was Alfred Stieglitz Stieglitz they were enemies because they both want to do basically the same thing they both wanted to elevate photography to a fine art that appeals deep within the person and at least in the first phase of Stieglitz's career he was also a pictorialist they were of the same art movement they both want to become really famous but Stieglitz ended up basically winning the fight Stieglitz became way more famous and he became known as the world's greatest photographer period for the time he started a photographic journal and big which became the most important photographic journal copies of it are sold in auctions and he owns the most popular art gallery in New York sadly it's closed today well close like 50 years ago but Stieglitz was in Hornung guy and so this photograph we can see it's very clearly pictorialist it's taken a very unconventional way it's not rule of thirds more like rule of six it's tight and it's in very soft focus its pictorialist but he starts to transition here this is off the pictorialist it's in a very soft focus this is actually a photograph of Sieg with his daughter but this begins to shift I should make a note about the timeline here because it becomes a little bit difficult to move the timeline there are technically those who started taking photographs after Stieglitz but we're still pictorialist but there are also those of the next movement who started in the middle of sequences career so because of that I'm gonna have to show some photographs on the movement after pictorialism and also pictorialism afterward it it gets a little bit strange but bear with me it's men that Stieglitz begins to move into the movement after pictorialism which is called modernism and so this photograph here is mostly pictorialist but he is moving into modernism so what's the difference here it is pictorialist in the way that is still soft focus you the the buildings here are still sort of blurry especially building in the background but modernism is about deep focus well there isn't that too here but it's also about geometry it's about that some what the modernists believed is that the pictorialist were idiots they believe that the pictorialist s-- were too shallow that yes they were symbolic yes they meant something deeper than the photograph itself but the depth of it was something that was too obvious such as the seven last words of Christ it's it's so obvious that you can just literally take the words from the Bible match it up with the image and it's very clearly the same the modernist wanted something deeper the mana is something one is something that you had to think about that you had to consider that actually made you question yourself and in that way it's actually better in a way that the photograph isn't just something that you can take in a moment that you can just glance at and say oh that looks cool it's something that you have to think about and here you see geometry he's taking houses and buildings this is a skyscraper that's rising up and turn them into geometric shapes so thinking about what that is its people's dwellings people live there people these are people people's livelihoods and he just takes this man on the street and is he really a man anymore he's not a man anymore he's a line this is not a bush anymore it's a rectangle these are not houses anymore their lines receding into space with one point perspective this is not a skyscraper anymore it's some sort of pencil trace it's almost like it's an arrangement of shapes and not anymore just a picture of buildings so you need to think about it more you need to look at how he arranges the shapes the fact that this man is staying so straight keep dinner Stiglitz did not ask the man of sin there it's out of a chance my modernist value chance it makes you wonder about what chance really is what what chance feels like and can you manipulate chance and this is a photograph that changed everything this is the photograph that signaled the beginning of modernism the true beginning of modernism and made the world turn to modernism completely and it's called the steerage there's a bit of a story to this photograph this was on a ship to Europe and Stieglitz being you know the most popular art impresario that the most powerful avant-garde artists in the world he was sitting in first class with his very wealthy wife who he hated and a group of other bourgeois folks he hated being there he hated how stifling it was and he hated his family frankly so he decided to go for a walk he decided to take a look in the steerage which is where the lower-class folks were taking their trip and he saw this scene and he suddenly saw first of all just how many people were in the steerage these were mostly immigrants to America who were taking a trip home to have perhaps bring back some money bring back some Goods you know just visit family so this is he saw first the a great story but then just like the photograph before taking people taking dwellings taking people's livelihoods and sort of dis configuring it sort of removing that and just making it shapes he saw people but not just people he saw a hat and he suddenly saw that the Sun was reflecting off the Hat in a remarkably bright way such that the brightest value in the entire photograph is a hat and the Hat is two circles so he said with his photograph there's no rule of thirds there's no rules anymore or is or other so it may seem if you look at it at first the largest feature is probably this this drawbridge here and this very powerful line here and if you look on those two elements you'd say there's no rule of thirds because it cuts it almost in half but then if you look at the Hat and try to readjust the image around the Hat yes there is actually rule of thirds the Hat is in the top third so the subject isn't actually what's most pronounced in the photograph it's actually what's what has the highest exposure it's actually what it's the brightest and in other words he's making circles not people that despite the fact that there's so many people and it's a ship he's not making a ship the subject he's not making the people subject he's making circles the subject but anyway he wasn't actually walking on this camera unfortunately and he was totally by chance that the guy leaned down it was in the Sun so he immediately sprinted back hope to god that the man would still be in the same spot came by his photograph for this camera and set it up remember that the cameras back then are super bulky and take a long time to expose very very fortunately for the history of photography that guy stood still and we have this photograph now but as time went on he got more and more modernist here we see deep focus that everything is in focus it's a very high f-stop and these two photographs are Steve with his second wife this is the woman that he actually loved and her name is Georgia O'Keeffe or was Georgia O'Keeffe she was an abstract painter so like him an artist and she was also modernist and she was a painter and she creates she created these beautiful modern works in fact she's probably more well-known than Stieglitz today but Stieglitz being completely in love created these these two photographs among many many others of Georgia O'Keeffe on the left one you wouldn't think that the title of this photograph is actually hands it's not my wife it's not Georgia O'Keeffe it's not even untitled it's hands why is that again in the mountainous style he's not actually taking a photograph of a person you might see it as a loving picture of a wife by a husband it's not it's actually the geometry of the hands so many modernists are interested in the scientific technological mathematical fundamental quality of shapes of geometry of the interplay of shapes and they try to get people try they try to get the models to contort themselves and the photographs are mainly through the model is contorting themselves into geometric shapes in this case the hands are contorted into lines into curves into triangles into the sort of quadrilateral here it shapes again and in this case it's a nude but she's not naked interesting because this is a nude photograph but it's more about curves than actual nudity this is not sexualized right it's it's not like she's she's you know flaunting anything and and there's no sort of it's it's sort of a brazen nudity that she doesn't care but the fact that her hand comes and serves squeezes her breasts the fact that this plant I don't know what plant that is but she's admiring the plant and that her neck is creamed in this way everything is a curve in this photograph so again it's not actually knew its curse which is strange to think about but and and here's where the timeline gets a little bit strange because Steichen Edward Steichen he's originally from Luxembourg came to America because he was totally totally in love with the work of Stieglitz and he wanted to be part of Stieglitz's journal he wanted to be featured in camera work and Stieglitz absolutely loved that psychons work and so Stieglitz featured stuck in quite a lot in camerawork camera crews name of this journal and but Steichen is not - Seiken was a pictorialist through and through so the timeline gets a little weird because Steichen was staying with his friend in the early phase of Stieglitz his career but anyway Steichen here is really this is really really really soft focus it's it's sort of like that it feels like a charcoal drawing and that's purposeful this is not actually technically a photograph it's a photograph year and a photograph year is basically taking a photograph and transferring that onto metal to create a print and so you have the this feeling as if it was etched into some stone so here he specializes in this photograph your technique that is super soft focus that makes it feel sort of shimmery and it's very the highest achievements of the pictorialist style but I really like who is featured here this is Auguste Rodin and here's his thinker and so it's almost like he's thinking about the thinker which is thinking about something else and cool little assemblage here but Rodin odin and Steichen were very good friends stiking took a lot of photographs of Honan and many of them were published in camera work anyway this these two photographs I think really highlight what pictorial isn't all about this is a photograph the Flatiron Building in New York but instead of just a flat iron building he has these sort of branches that come down and create this sort of frame within a frame and it's this weird symbolic sort of feeling that it sort of gives you this creepy feeling right the shimmery symbolic feeling that's what pictorialism is all about and same thing here his founder random lake but gives to the super super soft focus makes it feel weird but on the other hand in a later phase of Stieglitz's career he really loved to feature in Kevin work Charles Schiller and Paul strand so most the time these two guys are actually put way separates but I put them together for a reason this photograph is by Charles Schiller it's really fantastic it's the River Rouge Ford plant so this is one of Ford's plants where they manufacture cars in Michigan but what's interesting here is that beyond just you can see very clearly that it's not just you know a plant it's not just a factory very clearly here lines this is a curve it's more about the geometry it's more about how light happens it's sort of a scientific photograph but also there's this interest in industry modernists love to analyze industry and you know just the power and technology that is advancing in this period of the Industrial Revolution and and so during the Industrial Revolution they see this as sort of the worker gaining significance a lot of modernists were very strong leftists and so they saw this industrial evolution as socialism on the rise that the world will become a better place of course we know what happened afterward but this on the other hand is by Paul strand and you see again this is all deep focus you know you can see the windows here pretty clearly but this is so interesting that she has the interplay of light and dark there's sort of an unnatural darkness to this building it feels like it shouldn't be that dark but he makes it that way he plays around with the exposure in the printing techniques such that this building is this dark so then it can function as a rectangle of its own so you have you know rectangle rectangle and fence which is many many many rectangles and it's sort of a background middle ground for ground technique and so here's a trial Sheila that's very similar to that Paul strand that we saw again you know it's sure it's a door there's something architectural to this but it's deep focus and again we have such an amazing interplay of shapes he's way more interested in the shadow here and how the shadow matches a door so it's not just this random placement of the door it's placed so that the shadow here matches right the shape of the doors top and the shadow here so modernism has these little tiny details that are so amazing when you when you gaze closely you look closely at the photographs you begin to notice these things and also the strength of the light its bathed in this light that here you also see the really strong shade here but I featured them together because they came together and created a documentary which is the most amazing like silent short film ever I'll play for you just a minute of it here oh by the way so this is in 1921 it's a short film documentary style creation it's more about photographs really of New York this is trying to show New York in the developing way in the industry of New York rising up and how people are immigrating into New York and as usual and modernist photography pasted into the shapes [Music] [Music] [Music] yep so I think this is just one of the greatest photographs of all time like wow this is actually Wall Street this is what Wall Street looked like in the 20s imagine that now it's some high-rise but like the interplay between the these massive things and the people yeah anyway so one of Stieglitz greatest fans was Ansel Adams he was a huge fan of Stieglitz and when he became when Adams became a photographer he wanted to Stieglitz his approval so he sent over a portfolio Stieglitz holding that this is the greatest work I've ever seen and Stieglitz was right Ansel Adams I have to emphasize is the most famous the most important the most influential photographer in all of American history and this is one of his works this is in Taos Pueblo in the southwest adams is famous as a landscape photographer he was the greatest of the modernists well the greatest of all time but certainly a leader of the modernists he founded a group called F slash 64 now photographers will know that that's not F slash its f-stop 64 and the what the f-stop is is the depth of field that how deep the focus goes and the F / 64 is very very very very high so that means that everything needs to be an extremely crisp focus and you see that here look at the texture of this entryway it's so crisp like you can see the little tiny piece of stucco there and Adams came up with a system he called it the zone system it was basically his idea of exposure he said that all exposure every single light value in the photograph needs to be along these it was either 11 or 12 and 12 different light values so in other words you have to you can take a section of an image and it has to line with one of these 12 and there has to be a certain number sections that align with this certain number sessions that align with that number or certain on recession in the line with that number so in other words it's extremely difficult to do especially in this time period however somehow we did it just out of how experienced he was and how skillful and you can see that it works right that the difference between this area of the photograph and the difference end and this air of the photograph it's an extreme difference somehow he waited here for a very long time wait until the light was just right so that this is in shadow this edge here is in very bright light but the doorway itself like the flat face of the jewelry is not in complete light it's only in partial lights anyway until this precise moment to take this photograph so then we get bright light or well sky and then bright edge then really dark face then another bright edge and then this beautiful beautiful sort of intermarriage between light and dark it's absolutely wonderful and here we see two of his most famous photographs he's most famous for photographing Yosemite National Park this is specifically the mountain named Half Dome and this photograph in 1927 was one of his earliest really really successful uses of exposure there's an amazing story to this photograph he was climbing of 70 he was an amazing environmentalist that he wanted to preserve the outdoors he really really fought hard he was one of the great fighters for national parks but beyond that he also loved being in the outdoors he was a great mountain climber and he was climbing Yosemite for however many hundred times and suddenly he looked at Half Dome this great peak here and he said oh my god it it truly was transcendental it truly was an awakening for him in him this philosophical awakening and he said how can I capture that on film how can I capture that into a photograph it seemed to him to be almost impossible that when I recaptured it the tones didn't feel as dramatic in real life as real life it didn't feel as powerful it didn't give them the same feeling and he just tried again and again and again remember how long the exposures were back hit back at this time and also how film was expensive and not that easy to keep track of you know you had to use glass plates to film was not that bendy and of course today we don't even need to use film anymore but he was running low on plates when he was here and he was taking a really long time you know and slowly she was on his last one or two plates his last one or two photographs left on his film and suddenly he got an epiphany he took a red filter and put it in front of the camera and the effect that crater was that the sky instantly became completely blacked out and that meant that the sky was blacked out so you see blackness then the shimmering edge then blackness and then he took that photograph and realized I don't need to take anymore this is the one and he that was his discovery of the system in which if you make the light values strong enough if you make the contrast strong enough you create something powerful and for him this photograph was able to reproduce that power in his later years you see this is one of his late works he still has that extreme ability to control his exposure and he also has like the other modernists this geometric feeling half dome here looks tur like a rectangle but in his later years he would want to capture the moon so here there's a poetry to capturing the Mon know he the moon serves us as poetic barrier so that the top third the subject is a moon that's only the other 2/3 the only other two vertical thirds that the subject is actually the mountain so the moon in the mountains sort of have this dialogue but this is extremely extremely well done in this photograph moonrise Hernandez New Mexico this is Ansel Adams most famous photograph technically I could actually get in trouble with putting this here because this being is the most famous photograph Ansel Adams was really good at promoting his photographs and so he still actually even though he's dead he's long dead his company still licenses out all his photographs and they're super successful just out of how famous he is but nonetheless let's look at this photograph the story goes that he was driving along on the highway in New Mexico after a long day of photo shoots the Sun was setting and it was the last few minutes the very very last few minutes of daylight then the Sun has you know was was going down the horizon and suddenly he looked off to the side and saw this image of Hernan the little town of Hernandez Mex New Mexico and he saw the graveyard and he saw that the Sun you know if you think over here is a Sun the Sun is coming over and hitting the graves look very closely at this gravestone then I had this gravestone the Sun was hitting the gravestones at the exact right angle that the Krave stones shimmered the reflected light right back at him and he was like I need to take this photograph but he only had people estimate three to five minutes to take this photograph the immediately stops the car and silently not saying a word there were assistants with him and they had no idea what he was doing but he jumped out got out his his everything that he had in and which at this time was a lot right a tripod a camera didn't need an exposure meter and the glass plates the film etc but he realized he didn't have time three to five minutes right he just lowered the plate didn't use the exposure meter didn't even need to look through anything all you need to do was just glance at the image loading the plate BAM take the photograph and that was that and he caught this amazing thing somehow in three to five minutes he got that shimmering light that's all the time he needed and it's just terrific I mean how can you top this photograph that again he has that magical formula the mountains just accentuate here also but the magical form of dark and light then dark and then these little jewels the greys are almost like jewels it's it's absolutely brilliant but he has more which is really fantastic right that this is this this photograph exudes tranquility makes you feel tranquilly it's it's not just about one subject in general it's about the overall composition of the photograph even though it's in deep focus you still feel the mist this is in Glacier National Park here's another National Park it's Grand Teton this is a snake river running through this is one of his most often reproduced photographs the proportions for one like you actually can't take this photograph anymore because all this forest has basically gone it's it's been flooded it's been terraformed it's been everything you can't take a photograph like this anymore and in this time 1942 you could take color photographs he doesn't because what a lot of people don't understand this that black and white does not mean absence of color black and white technologically yes technologically that might mean that you don't have actors to cover but more importantly black and white means the power of light that with color the light is sort of filtered away that that you're more attracted to the colors but when you use black and white then he purposefully used black anointing in this case he didn't he refused to use color black and white accentuates the shadows and light and the interplay between them because that's all there is and just like that the sun's reflection on the water here it accentuates that and makes it all that more beautiful anyway so he so enzymes had this group f/64 or f-stop sixty-four he one of the other members in the group was Edward Weston Edward Weston in this amazing saying or quote that I unfortunately don't him in full and I'm gonna paraphrase it he said that a rock when you take a photograph of a rock it has to look like a rock it has to be identifiable as a rock it has to remind you of a rock but it cannot be a rock interesting interesting interesting what does it mean what does that mean so he's a modernist as well this photograph is a bell pepper but what is it also of it looks like a bell pepper mines yeah bell pepper clearly is a bell pepper but it's also to people going at it it's some sort of sexual image and it's not clear what exactly what exactly they're doing but it's some person either one person or two people however you see this and they're being intimate somehow they're they're nude and they're being intimate so or one person is being instrument they're posing and it's really just about pepper he literally just found the bell pepper somewhere and I was able to find one that was disfigured in a way such that it expressed that and then took it took a photo as if he was taking photo of a nude this is lit as if it was a nude with this really really strong lighting from the top right there so that's the idea it's clearly a bell pepper but it's also not interesting enough this of nude woman but it's not a nude woman it clearly is identify was a woman but she hides her face she is contorted very very very similarly with Stieglitz's photos of georgia o'keeffe his second wife the same thing occurs here that the photographer makes the model contort herself and by doing that they they gain the geometry in the body it's not about nudity it's not about sexuality it's not about genitalia it's about the the figure of the body it's about the form of the body and this here it's it's even difficult it if you haven't seen this photograph before it may be very difficult to even see what that is it's a shell it's a nautilus shell but it's again lit in a way that might be a swimmer might be a lamp right it's it it doesn't seem like it in that beautiful beautiful contrast between a very bright interior of the shell and the background how did he do it no idea you're gonna have to read a book about her listen I guess here's some other photographs I did it again capturing the woman here in this moment in which she sort of garish as a woman but very interesting as an object which that seems very sexist that seems really really massages say but it's feminists in many other ways because nudes in all of Arts a lot of artists torian's say they're not really their nudes but they're not naked because they still have around them the pretensions of men that men that there are so many female nudes because men want to see women naked I mean it's true that they're always if you look at all the nudes an art it's always the most beautiful supple versions of women the most idealized versions of women but in this case this is not idealized it may seem at first like it's being objectifying turning the woman into an object but more importantly it's turning her into something that isn't actually objectified it's not for a soldier not for a sexual reason it's for the reason of that well she is a woman that she is a human it's a human portrait and this was in the very late life of Wesen at a Wesen he took photographs of his home in Point Lobos California or near his home and Point Lobos was known for these beaches that are really really rocky and craggy and also these craggy trees so here he really evokes a sort of Ansel Adams type feeling and so he might be learning from his friend anyway so we have this American modernist movement but this is not Martin ISM exactly in painting it's it's the Marne ISM in photography but the modernist and painting actually also take photographs very interestingly man-ray he was born American his name is not his real name isn't man right but he went by man ray yes if you think that's funny there's actually a photographer who went by the name we G but man ray lived for most of his life in Paris he was a member of the Dada movement and Dada he was one of the most important artists and the Dada were were were the first one of the first anti art movements really the first they were talking about creating something that didn't have logic right normally in the modernists they try to emphasize geometry they try or emphasize this mathematical sides of the world and there's a logic there by using geometry they're reducing everything to a basic logic man Ray's doing the opposite he's still a modernist for sure but in the way that it's more surreal Dada is were seen as sort of the predecessor to the Surrealists and this is clearly nonsense what's funny it's it's a joke it's this is a photograph named portmanteau that's actually French for the coat stand so it's a woman turned into a coach then I get it's about the objectification of women who and it's it's sort of funny because she's wearing a black sock but if you look at it at first it's like she it doesn't have the bottom of her leg and also if you look even closer it's almost like she's in the studio but then the rug just runs out and it just random tiled floor and you know there's even more that her that she has pubic hair but it's covered very very very tastefully by the metal coat stands and although the most sexualized parts of her body are being shown the actual identifying part of her body is covered by this sort of like childlike stupid idiotic strange paper covering and that's sort of joke dadaism is about jokes it's about having this disillusioned jokes about art and and creating jokes Man Ray was part of Dada for the first part of his career he actually moved into surrealism and so this these are identifiable more with surrealism these he called rayou graphs so now photographs or rheya graphs and the reason for that today we have to call them photographs what photograms are they are taken without a camera so he would take film in a dark room and put objects on the film and then expose them to light so he never actually used as a camera he just exposes the film and so for instance in this case what looks like a slinky he just puts it on the film and then shines light on it but what's interesting is you sort of get the feeling that you know what the object is but it's never what the object really is like I have no idea what this actually is but it's definitely a slinky now take my word for it what is this nobody may know this looks sort of like a trumpet but what is this you know what is this going on here what is this smoke how did he do that who knows it's surrealism it's sort of like the dreamlike quality of humanity that you look at this and you sir just associate with objects that you've seen already and it's analyzing the dreams here who knows what this metal rod who knows where he got this sort of piece of metal here it just exists like is there even a pointing question here is it even a point in trying to find out what it is this is also interesting he he Surrealists are interested in taking what is familiar and making unfamiliar you know Surrealists would often would often paint an elephants but then the lower half of the elephant would be like a bowl and then there'd be like cherries her feet in this case this is a woman but this is not how you see a woman this is she's using some op2 effects to make it so that it's completely you've never seen a woman like this before well perhaps today since we have digital effects and everything but you get the point in this case also you get the idea that it's sort of a lamp but people don't see lamps like this he's trying to do things with a camera and with film that normally you wouldn't see in real life it's something that is only only exists in this dream world and here are two more Rayo graphs I think are absolutely absolutely amazing this sort of a little bit phallic and that's interesting because it might be just be a needle and maybe ice cubes who knows but he gives you sort of these these strange little funny sometimes jokes inside the photographs like for instance here this looks sort of like a gun but instead of a trigger like this is clearly just a beer bottle or well what looks like a beer bottle but this sort of triggers such Mac magazine thing turned into a mushroom looking thing and then they're just beads coming out of it so you realize that's not a gun who knows it's this funny idea that you can tort a gun it's it's something that it's not something that you would see only in a dreamland and this is actually man ray this is what he looks like and this is a portrait taken by someone who at the time was the leading portraitist with a camera I mean photographic portraits and so he founds a lot like in the dark because all the famous people in America so he's American whereas Nadal has French he was really the man who all the cultural elites wanted to take one have their photographs taken by he was known as this avant-garde photographer and he took some of those interesting photographs of people ever so on the left here we have Ella Fitzgerald but he being a modernist decides to do things his way instead of using the rule of thirds she's in this really uncomfortable position visually it's not rule of thirds it's it's know who whatsoever she has the weirdest head room in the world right why I didn't that photograph wasn't edited it's it's not cropping it's it's just that way but this makes it more interesting the fact that you haven't seen the photograph like this before makes it a bit more interesting and also it's evoke enough act that she is a singer and so she is she seems to be singing and this is Norman Mailer so there's purposeful blowing out there's purposeful making the exposure to high and blowing out sections of the photographs of sections of the face even to make it feel well different new because Norman Mailer should feel new Norman Mailer was a writer he was known for challenging the government so everything hero was basically about how awful government is and so just like he challenges convention in his writings this photograph challenges conventions challenges what lights should be in a photograph and also he looks questioningly questioningly at the viewer as he questions the government right and also we see that just like Anand ah he does not use the modern way we light he does not use a studio light system normally when we take a portrait we use a three-point light system we have three lights so that the face is very is lit very flatly and and is very evenly lit in this case this is actually Orson Welles and Orson Welles's faces partially lit very bright and then it sort of recedes we saw that an or male or a second go as well that the middle of his face wasn't lit so you plays around with the light to try and get as far away as the standard studio lighting as possible this is a oh darn what's your name Gertrude Stein that's it someone say kerja Stein there you go yeah but gorgeous Stein was one of Carl Van Vechten very very good friends in fact when I believe in Stein died Vechten was actually charge of her estate and so it makes sense that he take up at least one portrait of her and it's it's it's absolutely wonderful that she's framed with a background of an American flag if you know anything about Gertrude Stein she sort of hated America she left America for France she was one of the so-called lost generation so you know interesting framing there but from so van vecten and man-ray they're sort of a part of these formal art establishments Dorothea lanch pioneered a different style of photography or a different new brand new way of photography that sort of recalled Edward s Curtis but in a new way this is documentary photography so Dorothy lands her most famous photograph is Migrant Mother you've probably all seen this but it's it's set on a depression this is important because whereas Edward us courtesy generally takes photographs documentary culture this is documenting culture in a very specific time with a very very specific point she it's not just documenting it's documenting with such a specific point at a very specific time Dorothea Lange she worked in a completely different way compared to all the photographers before her she didn't chemists in the mid century we to get a little bit less bulky began to take a little bit less time to expose and so she could take the camera around and walk up to someone and begin talking to them and converse with them and get to know their story and snap several snapshots of them and then she could choose one of those to actually print this is very important it's not like Ansel Adams taking one photograph that's the best it's taking the most poignant moment out of several and it's also getting to know the people first it's the subject is almost part of the photograph and in this case especially I don't need to tell you that much about this photograph except that it's in California it's during the Great Depression you can probably already tell me that these are Okies that they've gone to California because their land has dried up and they're seeking a better life but with this photograph this shows that Dorothea lands unlike Edward s Curtis Curtis just wanted to document a culture to make people aware of them he was sympathetic we didn't necessarily want to make change now hi yes he wanted to make change now but he didn't have moments right with land she made moments and she also want to change very very specifically it is not always this is the man's in our war camp this was one of the camps that japanese-americans were sent to during World War two FDR basically made an executive order forcing the Japanese into these relocation camps but which are basically concentration camps you know it was one of the darkest times in American history and Dorothy Lanza posed this Dorothy Lance wanted to close the war camps so when the United States Army asked her to please document the you know you're our greatest you're the most famous documentary photographer in America right now they also asked Ansel Adams by the way they asked Ansel Adams and Dorothy Blanche and so you're the most famous landscape and documentary photographers please take photographs of Manzanar war camp to show people that it's not that bad because the Army is in charge of these camps now insulin is being a landscape photographer and a modernist he didn't believe in for photography's ability to change people's minds necessarily so he took you know standards or landscape photographs that were very beautiful land waited until the moment a dust storm came up and waiting for the dust storm so she gets take the snapshot of people this huge American flag that you know saying that you know these people are still Americans and this dust storm that show that they're an awful living conditions so in other words she completely betrayed the army this is absolutely terrific because here also she shows that these are people who are suffering but they're also Americans you know she published these two photographs in tandem and so when you look at these together awful conditions but an American flag and American flag and who's under the American flag Americans who are suffering old people young people like you know she's stirring our hearts it's sort of sensationalized but it's for a point she's interested in photography as a social change so that's documentary photography and continuing that Diane Arbus also use a sort of technique of taking photo of getting to know a subject and then taking their photograph several times crane these moments they they're portrayed in a very standard pose just taking a smoke break it's something that's very natural it's something that well in especially in this time period a lot of people did not take this kid she doing is he doing something normal no right he's holding two grenades if this is oh one grenade whoops but in Central Park this is Central Park it looks like he's a terrorist he's gonna blow something up but he's a kid but he's normal so in other words we have the normal treatment the the regular treatment of a UH normal person but a quote-unquote normal person is treated straight so this is an interest in making these people questioning the idea of normalcy this is you should recognize this photograph it's in the shining Kubrick who directed The Shining was a photographer when he started out so it makes sense that he knew about our business working copied it but in this case these are two very normal teens or not teens twins these are two very normal twins but there's something really strange about them it's like their eyes like the shifty they're weird something's really really weird about them but is there anything weird about twins so that's what Arbus is asking she's capturing moments and she gets to know her subject then takes a lot of photographs and she purposely finds the one photograph that is the most alien a the most strange photograph and that idea of the moment of capturing the moment was best typify by a Haycock tigress on a french food photographer and he believed in the idea of the decisive moment that that when you took a photograph ultimately your goal was to find the very moment that was most indicative of the person most important to the subject and to really take find the moment and capture it on the film so pressed song here takes a photograph of a sculptor named Alberto Giacometti and so he was an Italian sculptor he's one of the most well known sculptors of the modern era and he takes the photograph to try and typify the way that he works so he's setting up an exhibition here and you can see that he was running about he's very fervent with his work and so all he needs is one photograph to sort of tell a story let's try to show you that Giacometti is very fervent you can sort of see him running around you know you can sort of see the scene play out but it's just one photograph similarly you know this is capturing the very very moment this is in Italy and it's capturing the very moment when you know this person's here and this person down here is here and it creates this wonderful geometric composition that it's taking croissant here it's taking a lot of lessons from the modernists it's very geometric but the reason why it can be geometric is because of the moment created by the people being here it's a coincidence this also you know it's it's this is in France and it's this very moment that gives you this visual splendor there the moment of this bicyclist being right here like how luck you will see to catch that right but it's not luck it's skill that he can see things that are going to happen and you can take that and that gives you the sort of visual interest as your eye runs down the banister and you know get to him the cyclists here so press on did not consider himself a documentary photographer he was a street photographer he photographed people out on the street and and they were oftentimes in these sort of interesting situations where the nation was in an interesting situation this is all the way in the 30s sort of a tumultuous time for France you know as as world war looms and so we have press some cocktail a song is expressing tumult but not in taking pictures of the front lines not in taking fingers of war at all rather this one old guy that gives you a general sense of dread instead of you know war so this is the most he's saying that in a way the streets of war are more poignant than war itself the streets and the people of a nation that's who is most important that's the people who are affected the most by war this is in Greece and it's just a really really beautiful photograph of a child you know the geometric calm the deaf you know the wonderful cascading of the geometry there but also I think this is the best summation of croissants calf taper songs worked in the street this is in Beijing it's 1948 Beijing at this time was in a huge amount of time this was a Chinese civil war that it just picked up again after World War two ended the Chinese Civil War sort of restarted and it was absolutely bloodbath it is undeniable that millions perished it was it was beyond insane that governments would change like Beijing would be under one government one day and one government the next and yet in the streets of Beijing so he's tapping this at the time the civil war but instead of cannons or anything he's going the street and just looking at this one old guy eating rice or whatever that is something so in other words he's more interested in the people of the streets so in a way he captures war in a better way by humanizing the people of that country so when he brings his photograph back to France and exhibits it it's a sort of post-colonial way of dealing with war in that he's been saying that what goal do we have to go to foreign countries and capture their their with all this violence what what right do we have instead let's go capture what the country really is it's sort of post-colonial it's it's saying that France is no longer an empire you know there's a really really deep meaning to these photographs and cockt a blessing was sure like Stieglitz he was really really influential incredibly influential a startup group named magnum photos and Magnum Photos one of their members well she was actually never confirmed remember he basically he was a member his name was Danny Lyon and Magnum Photos it's very important to talk about cocktail passant even though this is in a presentation about America because Magnum Photos had a lot of American member and Danny Lyon was one of those American members and the EPA in the 70s the Environmental Protection Agency hired had this program called document our grits some the greatest street photographers in America - and photo journalists to go in and take photographs of the streets to try and show the effects of pollution on a multilateral scale and what was interesting is there are more all the great photographs that came out of duck America almost all of them were not actually directly about pollution they're about poverty and the point was that the most impoverished and the most and the ethnic minorities especially those are the people who are being most affected by pollution and in this case this is dock America photograph by tagging lion showing sort of the poorer ethnic minorities playing in this polluted sort of unsafe area right there there's graffiti and there's a lot of lessons learned here from tape a song just like half tape a song treats deaf with like this this foreground to background treatment of death in the background we have the graffiti in the fore and the middle ground we have the actual subject the children playing and then we have a fence for the foreground there's this amazing treatment of death but Danny Lyon is probably more famous for photographs he took of bikers he's a dandelion as a New Yorker but he took a trip to Chicago and joined the biker gang in Chicago all the basically the entire photograph community hated him for doing this because they're like what are you doing you're getting too close to your subjects the buyer gangs are dangerous don't do it or whatever you do but he did it anyway you came out alive and he took this amazing poignant photograph of a biker looking back I'm not actually not sure if pointing will be the correct word it's simply beautiful it's simply you know simple it's a better word for it it's it's there's no pretension about it and the fact that the biker doesn't look straight in the camera it almost shows you an inside view this is what members of the gang would see so similar here in this case they're looking at the camera but it's still this really intimate feeling that's what Danny Lyon does best he really captures intimacy especially in times of tumult so Danny Lyon is known for he goes in the middle of civil rights era he goes to protests all the time so the day actually goes to occupy route well okay occupies on anything anymore but but he just goes to protest all the time and takes pictures of protests in fact recently he gave a speech he stock is still alive and recently gave a speech in which he said that Donald Trump's election was the is the best thing that can happen to a photographer because and this is my quote there this is actual quote of him there will be blood on the streets and we will go photograph it she was really happy with blood on the streets basically this guy is a socialist anarchist he's really strong leftist but he makes amazing works and and this is an example that that he's interested in this very leftist idea of the minorities being oppressed here but portraying them as sort of more human he's very close and intimate with them you get the feeling that he did talk to these people and this is probably his most famous photograph of the civil rights era this is in the middle of Selma as the violence is going down as police are clashing with the protesters or the marchers he's here he's in the middle of it all taking the photograph of the fallout and this is so amazing in media your eye is drawn to this woman and she's looking at the camera as if to say America look look at what is happening look at what you're doing to us look at you know the situation and you know newspapers picked us up and and this was huge so but on the left side it's really terrific that there are also these onlookers looking at what the violence that's going on and you get the idea that these people are witnessing something just so awful and it shows on their face it's it's absolutely a brilliant piece of work but also working on the dr. merica project was a great photographer a Chicago based photographer still letting me in Chicago I don't think he's working though I think he retired just a couple years ago and she was laid off she worked for the Chicago Tribune for a long time but he got laid off unfortunately but anyway John H white also in the 70s he made these amazing photographs for the dock America project and here we have a more direct treatment of pollution all this waste here but mainly the the minorities he's saying that the minorities of the southside of Chicago this is where this is taken are the people who are feeling the effects of pollution and he himself is black is african-american and so he got to actually get really really up close with the Nation of Islam which is to today it's sort of considered sort of far a sort of fringe group but they're basically a really strongly Muslim group they try to ignite they try to reignite the Muslim faith in african-american communities and so this is at a meeting these were the cadets of the Nation of Islam who were trying to protect the people on the stage so this is a stage and there here are the actual worshipers so the Nation of Islam was this brand of Islam that was about African Americans that was about poverty and in the struggle and it was fundamental to civil rights so here is whoops no back okay here is someone who is attending the meeting these are the kid that's guarding it so you have this interesting interplay here and showing that these people are angry these the the the people who live in the south side of Chicago and impoverished areas like this they are angry they want change and that's what doc in America was about this was also a documentary ko photograph so interesting you know this is a teenager but get it it's a sort of a symbol for black power there you go I don't think I really need explain that but so William Klein he was also a street photographer but he moved into fashion in photography and he was an American but came to Paris and lived in France for most of his life I can't repeat still alive or not and so here is a photograph that he took while he was still in America absolutely fantastic use of death like croissant or cacti Bassam you know you have the strong foreground and receding into a background and like croissant it's this moment it's this moment capturing the the strength of youth it's sort of evoking youth and here's a photograph they took in Louisiana and it's it's like the other photograph you have this fantastic reitman of the subject in the foreground subject in the middle ground and a subject in the background this is sort of a beach in Louisiana and and you get a sort of rural feeling you get a sort of homey feeling but also it was a very interesting story that's sort of being told here that she is sort of outgoing and he's a little bit ashamed he's a little bit disappointed in the woman but it's a start being told within the photograph so clients work in Paris sort of defines this chic coach or ideology in France in the 60s and 70s of beautiful women with glossy clothes and sort of this avant-garde style to all of fashion and this work in France gains him the friendship of not just like octopus on but a lot of the other cultural elites which they culturally in France allowed him to make a series of films bashing America this was he directed this film named mr. freedom commenting on how awful America is from the point of view of an expatriate and so I want you to notice how this really isn't a film it's more like a series of photographs that are just strewn together but yes you got the idea so moving on to Julius Shulman I I really want to highlight at least one architectural photographer and he's probably the most famous of the architectural photographers in America he worked for a lot of the most famous architects in America in California that was his main area that he worked in and this is a house called the stall house and wow what an amazing photograph he had he believed in this term that he coined Co visual acoustics and it's basically a fancy way of saying rhythm in photography there is definitely a rhythm here in the verdict in the horizontal lines I said they're horizontal lines of the eaves of the roof here the vertical lines of the glass moving into the horizontal lines of the city of Los Angeles so he actually had a lot of work to create this photograph because at this time of night the lights of Los Angeles are not that bright he basically created a combination of both exposure tricks within the camera and tricks when printing to make this portion of the photograph way brighter than this portion of the photograph so that most of the photo that the photograph isn't actually blown out the exposure control is absolutely amazing because if you look at the photograph before it was printed like the raw negative this is all black somehow she was able pronounce those lights and by bringing out the lights he created the rhythm of the lines that created what he called acoustics visual acoustics here as well you can see that he has people sort of in the foreground and then the rhythm that beats toward the Los Angeles City Hall this is a photograph of Los Santos City Hall but instead of just a photograph of Los Santos City Hall like anyone can just walk up to LA City Hall and snap a photo of it with a digital camera he takes a time to wait for this rhythm it's by complete chance that's these people having to stop here but it's very fortunate that they did and in any case even if they didn't he would have waited for a similar chance so he waits for this rhythm to appear and also it's not just waiting it's it's also that he's framed it in a way that you get rectangle then rectangle then the tower so this is is a fantastic image that he did for Frank Lloyd Wright this is Frank Lloyd Wright's hollyhock house in Los Angeles and the rhythm of this Wow just the foliage the plant here and then the hill in the house itself extending back into the background I mean look at the look at the geometry of the house flat then out then flat again then out there's a rhythm here same thing here that the the house this is a house that's in Palm Beach and the house almost feels like an extension of the mountains all about the framing here and also it's not the mountains or the background the house is in the mid ground and also you have you got these chairs in the foreground it's almost like your eye bounces off them or yeah I think it's just as likely to see the middle and then back and in front but in any case your there is a pattern here that your eye doesn't just stay in one place it moves around there's an interest here but now we sort of are leaving the post or we're leaving the modernist era that with these last two photographers I wanted to just touch very briefly on the post modern and contemporary errors which are the errors that we live in today today we live in the contemporary art world it is not actually modern art today we call it contemporary art but contemporary is really powerfully influenced by post-modernism and the greatest of the post Martin well the most famous of the postman photographers is Cindy Sherman I mean if you're interested in postmodern photography singing Sherman is only one of a very large movements but it's hard to it's very hard to approach so I will just highlight this one um this is herself this is a self-portrait but it's also not really Cindy Sherman with post-modernism it's purposefully garish it's campy in fact the word camp was invented for post-modernism a scholar on post Lauren arts invented it it's campy because it's evoking medieval paintings of the Virgin Mary and also Greek the portrayal of women in Greek drama but it's a commentary it's sort of a feminist commentary on the treatment of women in history in general she is super dolled up she does not look like that in real life she has put on a huge amount of garish makeup like hair dye and all sorts of eyeshadow all of sorts of shadows and giving herself a very campy setting you know it's just this weirdest gold-color curtain the robe here evokes the in the way that light comes off it evokes medieval paintings this she literally went down to a local Halloween store and bought a random mask these are actually fake feet that she also bought at a Halloween store and so when you just look at it you're like well it's just a really bad photograph of a woman no it's deeper she purposely has these fake feet it's they're super oversized and they look like a man's foot or a monster's foot even so in other words this is talking about the way that women are dolled up in history that the fact that they have been objectified that they are represented in oftentimes sort of sexualized or victim victimized roles you know think about that it's the woman in the Bible that that kills people and serves their head on a platter it's in mythology women are the the lustful creatures and and but she's most famous Cindy Sherman is most famous for what she calls the untitled film stills this photograph is one of these she purposefully makes herself look like she's in a film from the 50s and she performs roles that women in the 50s were expected to perform so they're always in black and white like a 50s movie and so here she's a librarian and all of the there are hundreds of untitled film stills in the series and they're not really from a film their photographs that look like they're from a film but she's performing these sort of stereotypical 50s roles it's talking about women and how they are always objectified and turned into these lower roles so you know here she's librarian in this photograph she's in the city but she's lost it's almost like women shouldn't be in the city and here she's in the kitchen you know it's almost like it's a cartoon and she's she's saying like oh no I'm so distressed and waiting for my husband it's a parody right and notice in each time she looks completely different she's purposely dialling herself up every time and here she's alone and this sort of innocence femme fatale but here interesting enough this was me later in and it's almost like the aftermath of the entire film stills it's almost like the woman is discarded but one wonders if they really have you know she's wondering here do we still face the same challenges as the 50s you know like she's still in the 50s archetype here but it's no longer film still it's now in color it's now today and and the woman is still sort of in a in a bad place but in a way that is different there started more i-knot dolled-up so this is polish monism it's purposely camping it's it's revealing something more interesting about culture itself it's sort of considering culture and then finally gets the last photographer who is any li bovitz she is the most famous contemporary or she's the most famous living photographer period this is a photograph you took I think that day before John Lennon died and this is of course John Lennon Yoko Ono now this photograph shows a trademark of Annie Leibovitz sexuality her photographs very very often explore the idea of sexuality and oftentimes cetera that isn't expected other words like for instance here it's John Lennon is someone who is respected and he's purposely posing nude just to show the sort of unexpected role that a respected person would play but also her photographs she she did photographs her Rolling Stone in Vanity Fair magazines and so this is a magazine photograph this is actually for rolling stone and it's evoke in John Lennon's role and Yoko Ono their roles as music artists artists in general but also artists who are about artists who don't follow tradition and thus they are they are in a non-traditional photograph in this case this is a photograph for Vanity Fair I think this is a great indicator of Annie leibovitz's visual style because it is the modern contemporary traditional style it's it's three-point lighting so we see that the lighting is very flat and even on Demi Moore's faces it's a photograph called Mort anymore and it's for Vanity Fair cover so in other words these are very flat in this case it's even been airbrushed you can see the difference there glamorized but that doesn't mean they're not art because they're also very provocative and they're not standard so they're often made for magazine covers and magazine articles but what's interesting is that more than me more actually attracted this photograph attracted a huge amount of publicity and controversy because you don't often see pregnant women posing nude in a magazine this isn't really a standard of society so leave of its just like with the John Lennon piece she's trying to question this he's trying to question is there something wrong with this should there be something wrong with this are we discriminating against women just because you know they're pregnant why do we see that as unattractive and she does us more this is Whoopi Goldberg it is a really weird photo she is new to the bathtub and that white stuff is milk so there's ass weirdness to it but she's concerning these respected people and start twisting them around right and finally I wanted to close and say that Lee bovitz she is the most famous photographer in the world and I want to show that she's still working just as hard so if you want to learn stuff from someone who's still relevant today leave it with this one

Channel: For Art's Sake UIUC

Views: 32,599

Keywords: photography, art, nadar, college, fine art, history, presentation, tedx, lecture, ansel adams, education

Id: ncaGFlIF4Zg

Length: 105min 22sec (6322 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 28 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/kingsocarso]

Hi guys, this is a personal project I've been working on for a while. I lead a club of art lovers called For Art's Sake and we're trying something new: recording some of our events and putting them on YouTube. I hope you enjoy it; this took a ton of work to prepare! The speaker is yours truly; huge shout-out to David, our graphic design nerd, for making the thumbnail and title side, as well as leading the design of our logo. Nikolas Pfanner was manning the camera.

[u/matteblackfuinha]

Great! Looking forward for more.

[u/talking_saguaro]

This was great and so informative!