After a break from studying for the last 5 months with extremely difficult family circumstances, I now feel my old spark of creativity returning! It’s been a tough decision to carry on. To be truthful I had decided to give up the course, but I’ve had so much encouragement from colleagues and friends to continue that I didn’t want to let them down. Actually, I don’t want to let myself down ! They are right I have invested so much time doing the course up til now, it would be regrettable not to keep going.
So to ease back into things, I’m finding it useful to summarise the course notes on concepts and ideas that are new to me to cement them in my mind. It’s also an opportunity to stop and look up the work of some of the photographers discussed and read around their subjects. These notes are just notes! They are key points and book references that I can use to refer back to during the module.
The Linked Ring (founded by Henry Peach Robinson) favoured the artistic side of photography as opposed to the scientific. These pictorialists believed that the print making process as opposed to the taking of the image was the key to establishing a photograph as a work of art. They explored alternative ways of processing the image, leaving visible brushstrokes and rendering the images with less clarity to produce an impresssionistic and atmospheric aesthetic such as painting.
Rejlander and Robinson also experimented with photomontages, creating an image that had multiple negatives but with an appearance of a single exposure.
The Two Ways of Life, 1857, Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1857-75) © The Royal Photographic Society Collection (Accessed Here)
Fading Away, composite photograph made from five negatives by Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901), 1858; in the George Eastman Collection, Rochester, New York. (Accessed Here)
However, these experiments challenged the notion that photography was an accurate and truthful representation of the the tme. Tableau’s created by Rejander and Emmerson were also challenged by art establishmnets as being sentimental narratives and allegorical scenarios.
Peter Henry Emmerson (1856-1936) had a purer photographic way of seeing. He believed in single one-off pieces conveying the makers mood at the moment it was made to satisfy the eyes of the viewer, as is the norm within pictorialism. His scorn for tableau led him to produce pictures of excellence, sharply focussed throughout the image where all subjects are on an equal footing in relation to other elements in the picture and their importance to the formation and interpretation of the image.
Peter Henry Emmerson, Gathering Water-Lilies 1886, platinum print from glass negative , 19.8 x 29.2 cm. Wilson Centre for Photography (Accessed Here)
The ‘Photo-Secessionists’ Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), Clarence White (1871-1925) and Edward Steichen (1879- 1973) later defined this simpler approach. They withdrew from the previously accepted ideas that photography served purely practical purposes. Thier style was impressionistic and they challenged the style and philosophy of pictorialism (for example soft focus for a stylistic effect).
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- Drops of Rain (1903) Clarence White (Accessed Here)
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- The Flatiron. Edward Steichen (Accessed Here)
Alfred Stieglitz
Stieglitz was the force behind the attempt to raise the photograph to the status of art in its own right rather than imitating traditional painterly styles. The image below is an example of how Stieglitz defines his own sense of a photograph as art. Rather than taking a social or documentary stance, stieglitz saw “a picture of shapes, not of human figures and concentrated on an abstract pattern which for him suggested the feeling he had about life” (The Photograph, Graham Clarke p.168)
The Steerage (1907) Photogravure on vellum. The Museum of Modern Art. New York – Alfred Stieglitz (Accessed Here)
The image denotes a ‘pure’ or ‘straight’ photograph. It is free from manipulation, distinguishing the photograph from painting and pictorial stylistic effects to one that is “The subject itself, in its own substance and personality” (The Photograph, Graham Clarke p.169). Stieglitz described the composition as ‘a picture of shapes’ which bore no relationship to the scene of abject misery. He had no interest in the particulars of the scene or people but reacted to what he refers to the ‘feeling’ he had about life.
Stieglitz’s contemporary at the time, Paul Strand (1890-1976) also believed in ‘straight’ photographic methods. He declared the photograph to be the result of an “intensity of vision resulting in the fullest realisation of the potentialities of a subject” (The Photograph, Graham CLarke p. 169). This was seen as a revelatory process where the photographer transforms a literal reality into something different, by lifting the subject out of its historical context.
Stieglitz also produced a series called Equivalents, images of skies and cloud with intense tonal range and contrast. These were classic examples of the aesthetics of art for they were not literal equivalents of the subject but equivalent of the philosophy and spirit behind it. Stieglitz extended the act of photography into a philosophy which informed all parts of his life. (The Photograph, Graham Clarke p. 170)
Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalents 1923 (Accessed Here)
At his summer house on Lake George, in upstate New York, Stieglitz isolated the components of landscape, photographing clouds without any indication of a horizon line and sections of trees separated from the surrounding woods. In The Dancing Trees, the composition produced by the layered and interlaced trunks and branches highlights Stieglitz’s primary aim at this time: “to think more about the relationships in the pictures than subject–matter for its own sake. (Art Institute Chicago)
Other works in Stieglitz’s oevre included Dancing Trees and Music (Accessed Here)
f/64 Group
Formalised in 1932, this group included Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Minor White and Imogen Cunningham. The group was named the f/64 after the aperture setting that provides the most detail. Weston was inspired by Stieglitz who told him to ‘aim for a maximum detail with a maximum of simplification’ (Photography, Stephen Bull p. 133). They used large format / plate cameras where the negatives were contact printed allowing for greater detail and manipulation of the final print. However, the real artistry of their images lay in the exposure. Getting that technique correct and the pre-visualisation of the image was part of the creative process.
Edward Weston
In his essay ‘Seeing Photographically’ (Classic Essays on Photography p.169-175) Weston believed the essence of life lay in simplicity rather than in variety of form. He starts by saying that a photo-painter’s approach is fixed on the idea that a straight photo was purely the product of a machine and therefore not art. The negative is a point of departure to be used for improvement during the development adding painterly texture and brushstrokes to make it art.
He believed the recording of an image is instantaneous and the nature of this image contains certain qualities such as fine detail and sequences of unbroken subtle gradations from black to white which distinguishes the picture as photographic. The finished print actually has to be created in full before the film is exposed and in order to acheive this the photographer has to learn how to see photographically. By selecting the simplest equipment and procedures and sticking with those, this can be acheived. The process should be considered as a whole and not singularly such as the perfect lens, perfect aperture, perfect negative etc.
When the right kind of exposure and development is learnt for one kind of print, a photographer needs to vary this process to produce other kinds of prints. He must also learn to see in black and white and judge the strength and quality of light. With this knowledge the photographer instinctively knows how the final print will look without consciously thinking of the procedurel steps to carry it out.
He finishes off saying photography provides a means of looking deeply into the nature of things anda presenting subjects in terms of basic reality. Rules of compostion when forced to fit into preconceived patterns do not produce freshness of vision and will only lead to repetitive pictorial cliches. In order to convey the photographer’s own response to the subject, simple directness both technical and other influeces can only reveal the nature of the world he lives in.
The course notes talk about how Weston was more experimental in his approach to photography compared to Ansel Adams. They expanded their photographic ways of seeing by creating more abstract images. Weston’s image below is an example of how he has made the sand appear mysterious and spiritual – something other than its physical appearance of texture and form.
Edward Weston, Dunes, Oceano, 1936 (Accessed Here)
In his book Photography, Stephen Bull (p.133) describes another example of how Weston’s subjects look differerent to the actual physical appearance. His images of female nudes are composed to look like dunes of the desert and these rolling dunes look like curving female bodies. The photos appear as one transforming into the other again and again. Similarities can also be seen between his nudes, shells and peppers.
© Edward Weston
Ansel Adams
Adams photographed various locations in Yosemite. They reflect the grand scale in nature with a sense of awe bought by Adams himself – he assumes the role of arbiter of the natural world, his images reflecting nature in its ideal state. In the image Moon and Mount McKinley below, ‘the primary elements – land, sky, water, mountains and light – are imaged as part of the sublime union of the solid and the ephemeral’ (The Photograph, Graham Clarke. p.67)
Ansel Adams, Moon and Mount McKinley. 1984
References
Bull, S. (2010). Photography. Abingdon. UK. Routledge
Clarke, G. (1997). The Photograph. Oxford. Oxford University Press
Trachtenberg, A. (1980). Classic Essays on Photography. Stony Creek, USA. Leete’s Island Books
Landscape 