Week 6 - Documents for Artist [BBC The Genius of Photography: Notes]

BBC's The Genius of Photography - Episode 2: Documents for Artists

Here are the notes I made whilst watching the second episode:

The Machine Age for Photography

When WWI ended, people wanted to invest in machines. 

- Houses became machines for living.

- Writers became engineers of the human soul.

- Celebrities took on the machine style of sports cars.

In the age of the machine, photography was seen as a machine like process, manufacturing objective truths, purged of subjectivity and emotion. 

Photography also become and organ of propaganda too.

To hold a camera in your hands during the 1920s was the same as holding the future. 

Hungarian Artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy believed the camera offered a new visiting that would spark a 20th century renaissance.

"Anyone who fails to understand photography will be one of the illiterates of the future."

Carl Blossfeldt's Artforms of Nature 1925

Art-forms of Nature

In Germany, after the WWI it was a nation struggling with the trauma of defeat and chaos,photography offered clarity, rationality and order.

- One of the best selling photographers of 1925 was Carl Blossfeldt's "Artforms of Nature" which revealed the precision engineering that underpinned the vegetable world.

Early Typology

The potential for making systematic and accurate records of places, people and other subjects had been one of the great successes of the medium.

- The first typology, Anna Atkin's catalogue of Algae appeared just four years after the mediums invention. 

- Within a decade, photography was then used as a way of filing people's police records through cataloging people's mugshots. 

- Photographic typologies are still being made but to more extreme lengths than in the early 20th century. 

Photographer Donovan Wylie spent a year photographing British army watch towers that once dominated the hill tops of Northern Ireland.

- Typology is about comparisons. You can only get to know something if you can compare it against something else. 

- Wylie goes to enormous lengths to document the watch towers in the same lighting conditions, with the same framing and with the same point of view - this is when the army helicopter comes in handy. He wanted to shot these photographs systematically. 

Typology is about the facts and nothing else. 

Bernd and Hilla Becher applied similar systematic methods to their photography for over 50 years. 

- They shot subjects such as blast towers, water towers and other bizarre creatures of the industrial landscape. 

- According to photographer Martin Parr, "you can see the image clearer without the emotion of shadows and sunlight."

Auguste Sander

One of the most popular typology's was human typology via the photographs taken by Auguste Sander in Germany during the 1920s

- Sander was a commercial portrait photographer, who had been working since the turn of the century, using old fashioned glass plate negatives.

- In 1929, he staked his claim as a modernist when he published a selection of his portraits under the title "The Face of the Times".

Pastry Cook, Auguste Sander 1929

- People occupied the same amount of space in the frame but you were invited to look at the differences in appearance between everybody 

Sander categorised his photographs into seven social types: 

1. The Farmers

2. The Young Farmers

3. The Farmer's Child and Mother

4. The Farmer's working life

5. The Head Farmer

7. Odd Farmers

The unspoken messages that lie behind Sander's pictures is due to the chaotic condition of Germany during the 1920s. All his subject had lived the consequences the post world war effects had on the country which came through in their expressions and appearance in their images.

Auguste Sander's son, Eric, was a a communist. When he was arrested in 1934, Sander arranged to have his photograph taken in his prison cell. 10 years later, Eric died as a prisoner and Sander to a photograph of his face mask and categorised it" The Last People".

Alexander Rodchenko

Alexander Rodchenko was a Russian photographer during the time of the Soviet Union. 

- When the Bolsheviks came to power, Rodchenko declared painting to be dead. Photography was modern, objective and bourgeois subjectivity. He showed it could play its part in the proletariat.

Pioneer with a Bugle, Alexander Rodchenko 1930

Rodchenko didn't use traditional methods of photography:

- Fortunately for Rodchenko, this was a time when a new means of production had become available - compact, hand-held, lightweight cameras. The Leica camera

- These were some of the first cameras which were "freed from the tripod". You could now capture movements from any direction, making capturing social life more fluid. It was revolutionary. 

There were two types of photography becoming popular at the time

1. Shooting from the hip 

2. Making it apparent that you are photographing the world differently

- The latter would encourage the viewer to take on perspectives that were unknown to them. 

Rodchenko and Photo Montage

The White Sea Canal, Alexander Radchenko

The magazine designed by Rodchenko "USSR in Construction". It was a showcase of political propaganda glorifying the achievements of the Soviet Union. 

- The magazines displays Rodchenko's mastery of "Photo Montage" a graphic technique that was inspired by the cinematic technique, film montage 

- Rodchenko's photo montages treated photographs as raw footage, surpressing their individualities, collectivising their energy, cutting, pasting, retouching and rephotographing them to conjure up dizzy envisions of the future. 

- Photo montage are almost mute documents with fluid meanings. 

Rodchenko harnessed photography to its greatest effect in one of this issues of the magazine he designed. 

- Rodchenko travelled to the canal to take the photographs that would provide the raw material for this masterpiece of political propaganda. 

- The original image looks rather grey and flat, with the montage being a much more successful image. He gives much more impact to the crowd of workers and the man standing above them all through heightening the contrast. 

- When you first look at the image, you wouldn't think it's a montage until you see the original, you then get an understanding of photo montages intention. 

- However, the photograph conceals a grim truth. The workers in the image were political prisoners, the 140 mile long gulag were the White Sea canal. 

200,000 of them died because of this photograph. 

Eugene Atget

Eugène Atget in 1927 by Berenice Abbot

In Paris, another photographer was attempting to preserve an old society through his photographs

- Atget spent 30 years photographing and documenting the cities ancient core before it was swept away by redevelopment,

- By the 1920s, Atget was in his 60s and assembled a unique typology of old Paris, consisting of more than 10,000 images. 

- Like Sander, his equipment techniques were old fashioned when he began photographing, using technology know as argument prints  from the 1850s during the 1920s. Various people tried to get Atget to use modern materials but he simply replied "I don't know how to do that."

- Atget may have been behind the times, but he was a commercial photographer. Some consider him to be the maker of photographic documents.  

Atget is the photographer's photographer. 

Understanding his photographs can take time and juggling. 

- To understand why he took this picture Meyerowitz explains that he spent ages looking at the photograph, he eventually thought to flip it upside down (as he does with a lot of Atget's work) and noticed a bright white strip in the middle. A chimney flume that had been freshly cemented. Atget construct his photograph around this marking, bedding that the interested looker will go past the tree, around the lamppost and across the street and take his eye right up to building and say that's delicious. 

Man Ray

Dust Breeding by Man Ray 1920

Another French photographer was pushing deep into the territory of the unreal. His name was Man Ray. 

- For Man Ray, the camera was not a machine for making documents but an instrument for exploring dreams, desires and the unconscious mind. 

- He discovered different methods of photography that no one had attempted before such as the solarisation process. This is where he makes people look as though they are made of aluminium, giving their skin sleek and metallic qualities making them look almost robotic. 

- This image delights photography's infinite capacity of ambiguities. The silver recorder of reality. There no sense of scale or familiarity on the image. 

- In 1926, Atget and Ray finally met (even though they lived in the same street) Bernie Salad, a close friend of Man Ray's took Atget's portrait in 1927. 

In 1929, the first Film and Photo exhibition was held in Stuttgart which a defining moment for the mediums. 

Walker Evans

Penny Picture Display, Walker Evans 1936

During the 1930s, American Photographer, Walker Evans was a poignant photographer of the time

- It's an image of American identity and democracy. Each individual is shot the same way, given the same size and power within the image. 

- The straight forwardness of his photographs is deceptive. 

- As a young man, Evans wanted to be a writer. He went to Paris to serve his apprenticeship. He spent his time there failing to write whilst learning the latest trades and trends in avant-garde photography

- When he came back to the US, he began to photograph in a style straight from the style of a film and photo catalogue. However, he developed his own distinctive voice thanks to an old master - Eugene Atget

- When he saw Atget's work, Evans put aside his hand-held camera and like Atget, began working with an old fashioned large format view camera. It slowed him down but made him look more closely.

- Evans understanding of documentary photography was more complex. Documentary photography meant it was delivering the truth and was a social agent. Evans changed this because he reproduced the facts giving it what he called a document style aesthetic 

- He didn't simply record what was in front of him. He rearranged the scene to minimise the squalor and his work eventually developed into artwork. 

Allie Mae Burroughs by Walker Evans 1935–1936 - a symbol of the Great Depression

Evans in 1937 he was sacked as a propaganda photographer. Soon after he was sacked soon came along WWII

For British Photographer Bill Brandt, coupling close observation with unabashed artifice was second nature. He met Man Ray and learnt a photograph can have such a simple meaning behind it. Brandt is the photographer of a combination of truth and fiction.