Lecture 2, ITAP - The Genius of Photography

Questions & Answers

What are Typologies?

       The first typology made by Anna Atkins catalogue of algae, appeared just 4 years after the mediums invention. Just after 10 years photography was used record the criminal underworld, cataloged with police mug shots. Donavan Whiley photographs watch towers, from the same point of view, with the same lighting and the same framing. There has to be a direct view to the object, it’s a discipline in photography, it creates just the facts and nothing else. Can see clearer without shadows and sunlight.

What was “The Face of the Times”?

       August Saunder, did a typology of humans, this is when he became a modernist and published a selection of his portraits under the name ‘The Face of the Times’. He collected people and fitted them into a frame, people occupied the same amount of space in each photograph, but there were differences for each person. He used a system of several social types, for example the grouping of the farmers, then sub categories e.g. young farmers. It shows you how people want to be seen, not what is actually going on, but there is hints. A world that is pregnant with things that cant be spoken of, the chaos of German after WW1.

Which magazine did Rodchenko design?

       He designed photography magazine called, USSR en construction, it glorified the achievements of the soviet union. He took photographs with Leica, with freedom, not conventional photography. He thought that we needed to banish ‘belly button’ photography, he tried to make very apparent that he was photographing the world differently.

What is photo-montage?

       A graphic technique that took its cue from cinema montage. Rodchenko treated photographs as royal footage, suppressing their individuality, collectivizing their energies. Cutting, pasting, retouching and re-photographing them, he was creating dizzying scenes from the future. Photo-montage also shows up photographs for what they really are, mute documents whose meaning remains fluid.

Why did Eugene Atget use albumen prints in the 1920’s?

       Prints that came out in the sunshine, and were started to be used in the 1851. People tried to get him to use modern materials, and he told them he didn’t know how to do that.

What is solarisation and how was it discovered?

       Man Ray discovered solarisation through placing object in a darkroom on photographic paper and exposing it briefly to create interesting patterns on the paper, this happened in the late 1920s in the period of dada and surrealism. Through solarisation he makes people look as though their faces look like they’re made out of aluminum, they become super people, slightly inhuman, slightly robotic.

What was the relationship between Bernice Abbott and Eugene Atget?

         Bernice Abbott was a young American photographer and one of Man Ray’s assistants. Abbott photographed Atget as a living, breathing found object in 1927, she preferred the profile photograph, because he looks like an old man. Abbott also brought 5000 of Atget’s negatives to America.

Why was Walker Evans fired from the FSA?

         In 1935 he was commission to produce propaganda images for the Farms Security Agency, set up to ease the affects of depression in rural America. They were there to take the photographs for the Government, to support the aid methods, and to make the Government look good, not only the government but the recipients of relief. Evans hated the fact that documentary photography was ‘suppose’ to show the truths and was a social agent. He instead called his work documentary style and documentary aesthetic, to make the point it just looks like the facts, it in fact isn’t. He readily molded the world to his requirement, but he could not mold it to the requirements of the FSA, and in 1937 he was sacked.

Lecture 1, ITAP - The Genius of Photography

Questions & Answers

What is photography’s “true genius”?

       Transforms what it describes, that’s the art of photography, to control that transformation. It has intrigued us, showing us the secret strangeness that lies beneath appearances.

Name a proto-photographer.

       Henry Fox Talburt, MP, master of Laycock abbey, world authority on botany and cuneiform writing. He couldn’t draw, so in 1834 he experimented with paper covered in silver salts and shoebox sized camera, nicknamed mouse traps, creating paper negatives.

In the 19th century, what term was associated with the daguerreotype?

       Mirrored metal plate with one off images. Jerry spanuley, says it produces a visual experience that’s unique. And in the 19^th century it was called: ‘A mirror with a memory’.

What is the vernacular?

       A genre of photography including journalistic, amateur snap shots, scientific, touristic, forensic, insurance records, court documents, passport, postcards, boxing match records – every use except art. It includes the most natural occurring photographs possible, a gift of the medium itself, rather than a product of the genius of the individual photographer.

How do you “Fix the Shadows”?

       In the 1830s it was found that certain chemical were light sensitive e.g. silver salts, silver chloride and silver nitrate. To find a way of fixing the image, to stop it carrying on exposing was difficult. In 1834 Henry Fox Talbert, he thought about camera obscurer, and with the mouse trap camera created negative, when sandwiched with another piece of paper would print the right way around. This was through only allowing the paper to be exposed for a certain amount of time. This represented the era of how modern photography would be founded. Louis Daguerre had his own method, who started in 1824, he created the daguerreotype to stop the shadows, where he would fix his images on a mirrored metal plate.

What is the “carte de visite”?

       Major innovation in photographic technology was the carte de visite, a type patterned by a French man named Disdery in 1854, photographed 8 times, in a number of minutes by a camera that had 8 lenses, so you could get a series of portraits, and because the cards were small, they could be sent through the post, they got flown everywhere, making photography a true industry.

Who was Nadar and why was he so successful?

       Gaspard Felix Tournachon, also known as Nadar, mastered the ‘natural expression’ when it came to portraits in the studio, unheard of really in the 1800s. Nadar is a made up name, its his copy write. He knows how to put a program of publicity. He photographed up coming artists and celebrities in a way that is unrivaled. He photographs them as equals, he doesn’t have to dress them up or put them in stupid settings, he just photographs them standing in his studio, looking authentic and beautiful, the best portraits of artists ever. He always isolates his sitters, nothing to indicate their profession, the force of personality alone that has to portray what them do.

What is pictorialism?

         Mean, moody and occasionally magnificent, this era is where photography was at its most poe faced. These very small, self elected elites tried to establish photography as one of the fine arts. These elites are trying to establish this status, withdrew into a very narrow world, to intimate print making and things like that, whistler, and whislarian type art, an absolutely artistic dead end. Photography really merges with the arts a craft movement. Stylistically they retreated and in terms of the content. You do not see a machine or a car or a poor person, its all about nudes and landscapes, it looks as about as up to date as a rusting suit of armor.