ART 462 East Los Angeles College The Family of Man Exhibition Questions

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Describe the Family of Man Exhibition. Include the name of the curator, the venue in which the exhibition was initially held, the number of photographs in the exhibition and the number of countries and number of artists included in the show.

Now describe the layout of the Family of Man Exhibition. What was the curator’s inspiration for the layout? How did he organize the show?

What were criticisms of the Family of Man Exhibition?

What was the theme or aim that the curator used/had for the show? What major events was he reacting against by curating the show? How was he trying to help people overcome?

What is the idea of “cultural relativism” and how does it relate to the Family of Man Exhibition?

Define the stylistic qualities and preferred subject matter of Manual Alvarez Bravo.

Select one of Bravo’s photographs and describe it in depth.

How does Bravo’s work relate to Surrealism? Which one of his photographs was featured in a Surrealist exhibition?

What famous artists was Bravo associated with?

Define the stylistic qualities and preferred subject matter of Seydou Keita.

What country is Seydou Keita from? As a native African photographer what advantage did he have over colonial/European photographers in Africa?

Give general facts about the state of photography in Japan. How did WWII affect photographic artists in Japan? What issues did they struggle with?

Describe Eikoh Hosoe’s series of photographs entitled

Kamaitachi.

What is the theme of this series?

Select one of Hosoe’s photographs and describe it in depth.

Describe Eikoh Hosoe’s series of photographs entitled

Barakei.

What is the theme of this series?

Define the stylistic qualities and preferred subject matter of Eugene Atget.

What kind of camera did Atget photograph with? What qualities did the Surrealists like about his photographs?

What country did Robert Frank come from? How did that affect the way he photographed in the United States?

What series of photographs is Robert Frank well known for? Describe the subject matter and style of this series of photographs by Frank.

Why was Frank so controversial in the United States?

Define the stylistic qualities and preferred subject matter of Garry Winogrand.

Define the stylistic qualities and preferred subject matter of Lee Friedland.

Define the stylistic qualities and preferred subject matter of Roy DeCarava.

Define the stylistic qualities and preferred subject matter of Weegee.

Define the stylistic qualities and preferred subject matter of Harry Callahan. Be sure to mention the two distinct bodies of work that he pursued.

Define the stylistic qualities and preferred subject matter of Diane Arbus.

EUGENE ATGET, Rue des Nonnains-d´Hyères, 1900
Eugène Atget (French, 1857–1927)
• In recording the daily appearance of a rapidly
changing Paris, Atget made methodical surveys of the
old quarters of the city.
• In the manner of a cinematic director, Atget made
close-ups, long shots, details, views from different
angles, at different times, almost as though in his mind
he were challenging time by preserving this world in
photographic form.
• The vast number of images – perhaps 10,000 – of
storefronts, doorways, arcades, vistas, public spaces,
and private gardens, of crowds in the street and
workers pursuing daily activities – of just about
everything but upper-class life – evoke a Paris that
appears as part legend, part dream, yet profoundly
real.
Eugène Atget (French, 1857–1927)
• One of Atget’s earliest admirers was the young Ansel
Adams, who wrote in 1931: “The charm of Atget lies
not in the mastery of the plates and papers of his time,
nor in the quaintness of costume, architecture and
humanity as revealed in his pictures, but in his
equitable and intimate point of view. . . . His work is a
simple revelation of the simplest aspects of his
environment. There is no superimposed symbolic
motive, no tortured application of design, no
intellectual ax to grind. The Atget prints are direct and
emotionally clean records of a rare and subtle
perception, and represent perhaps the earliest
expression of true photographic art.”
EUGENE ATGET, Café, Avenue de la Grande-Armée, 1924–25
Eugène Atget (French, 1857–1927)
• A voracious reader of 19th-century French literature,
he sought to recreate the Paris of the past,
photographing buildings and areas marked for
demolition in the hope of preserving the ineffable
imprint of time and usage on stone, iron, and
vegetation.
• A series of tree and park images, made in the outlying
sections to the south of Paris, suggest a compulsion to
preserve natural environments from the destruction
already visible in the industrialized northern districts of
the city, and, in the same way, images of working
individuals may have been made to record distinctive
trades before the changes in social and economic
relationships already taking place swept them away
•
Atget, Untitled (Kiosk), 1898-99 (Picturesque Paris, Part 1)
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Atget, Parc Montsouris- Plane Trees, 1923 (Paris Parks)
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Atget, Courtyard, Church of Saints-Gervais-et-Protais, 1899-1900 (Art in
Old Paris)
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Atget, Rues des Chantres, 1923 (Art in Old Paris)
Printed by Berenice Abbott, c. 1930
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Atget, Shop, avenue des Gobelins, 1925 (Picturesque Paris, Part III)
Printed by Berenice Abbott c. 1930
•
Atget, Temple Market, 1925 (Picturesque Paris, Part III)
•
Atget, Boulevard de Strasbourg, Corsets, 1912 (Picturesque Paris, Part
II)
Weegee
• Weegee could easily be described as one of the most
important freelance photojournalists who ever worked in the
profession. He produced, in one decade of news photography
from the mid-1930s through the mid-1940s,an extraordinary
chronicle of New York.
• Weegee (they say he got his name from the Ouiji board, since
he arrived at crime scenes almost faster than the police. It
was like he knew where the crimes were going to be before
they happened.) was born in Austria.
• He sold his specialty- raw crime scene photographs to many
New York newspapers.
• He had a short wave radio in his car and home and he
monitored the broadcasts so he did get there sooner than the
police did sometimes.
WEEGEE (ARTHUR FELIG) THEIR FIRST MURDER, 1936
WEEGEE (ARTHUR FELIG) THEIR FIRST MURDER, 1936
• What is Weegee showing us here?
• Voyeurism- he is showing us the reaction of the people who
are watching this murder.
• What reactions do we see?
• A whole variety- shock, horror, grief, but also some people
who are thrilled to think that they might get their picture in the
newspaper…
• He liked to include bystanders in his photos- he shows us how
people are capable of overriding our reactions to death and
human suffering and to become voyeurs- these people act as
stand-ins for the people who are going to be reading the
newspaper and gawking at these images.
WEEGEE (ARTHUR FELIG) BOOKED FOR KILLING POLICEMAN, 1939
WEEGEE (ARTHUR FELIG) BOOKED FOR KILLING POLICEMAN, 1939
• The golden period of American news photography began in
the 1920s and continued to the 1950s when it was displaced
by televison news.
• Weegee used flashbulbs on his camera so he could shoot at
night without worrying about whether there was enough light.
• The flashbulb lights everything evenly and creates a signature
style for Weegee.
• Graphic images, revealing secrets of the nighttime world. His
images are raw and spontaneous and show us a pessimistic
view of humanity.
• Weegee shows us a world of brutality, fear and confusion.
WEEGEE (ARTHUR FELIG) MURDER IN HELL’S KITCHEN, N.D.
WEEGEE (ARTHUR FELIG) MURDER IN HELL’S KITCHEN, N.D.
• Weegee slept in his clothes and his car was outfitted with a
makeshift darkroom so he could develop his pictures on the
spot.
• These photographers worked freelance for the newspapers
and it was all about who could get their images to the
newspaper first.
• He tells a story about how he hired an ambulance to take him
to the newspaper with the sirens blaring while he developed
his negative in the back so he could get there first and get the
scoop.
• He also developed his film on public transportation to get their
first.
WEEGEE (ARTHUR FELIG) SIMPLY ADD BOILING WATER, 1937
WEEGEE (ARTHUR FELIG) The Critic, November 22, 1943,
first published in LIFE, December 6, 1943
WEEGEE (ARTHUR FELIG) The Critic, November 22, 1943, first
published in LIFE, December 6, 1943
• “The Critic” is probably Weegee’s most famous image, and certainly
his most widely published.
• The opening night of the Metropolitan Opera in 1943 was
advertised as a Diamond Jubilee to celebrate the 60th anniversary
of the company.
• In a recent interview, Louie Liotta, a photographer who acted as
Weegee’s assistant, recalled that Weegee has been planning this
photograph for a while.
• Liotta, at Weegee’s request, picked up one of the regular women
customers at Sammy’s on the Bowery at about 6:30 p.m.
• With a sufficient amount of cheap wine for the woman, they
proceeded to the opera house.
WEEGEE (ARTHUR FELIG) The Critic, November 22, 1943, first
published in LIFE, December 6, 1943
• When they arrived, the limousines owned by the members of high
society were just beginning to discharge their passengers.
• Weegee asked Liotta to hold the now intoxicated woman near the
curb as he stood about twenty feet away from the front doors of the
opera house.
• With a signal worked out in advance, Weegee gave the sign to
Liotta, who releasd the woman, hoping all the while that she could
keep her balance long enough for Weegee to expose several
plates.
• Liotta recalled the moment he released the disheveled woman: “It
was like an explosion. I thought I went blind from the three or four
flash exposures which Weegee made within a very few seconds.”
• For his part, Weegee told the story that he “discovered” the woman
viewing the opera patrons after the negative had been developed,
never revealing the prank, saying it was as much a surprise to him
as anyone.
WEEGEE (ARTHUR FELIG) The Critic, November 22, 1943, first
published in LIFE, December 6, 1943
• On the opposite page from the women arriving at the opera
was another photograph by Weegee taken during the
performance of the opera with the caption, “The plain people
waited in line for hours to get standing room, listened intently
and, as always, showed better musical manners than the
people sitting in boxes.”
• This contrast of images, the rich with the jewels, and the wellmannered “plain people” was exactly what Weegee was
striving for in all of his photography.
• The incongruence of life, between the rich and poor, the
victims and the rescued, the murdered and the living – his
photographs had the ability to make us all eyewitnesses and
voyeurs.
• The first time the photo appeared with the actual title, “The
Critic,” was in Weegee’s own book, Naked City.
WEEGEE (ARTHUR FELIG)
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Weegee was quite a character.
He wore a trenchcoat and fedora and smoked a cigar.
He shot instinctively and cropped his images in the darkroom to get what
he wanted.
He was very aware that he wanted his images not to just be considered
news or documentary and he cultivated a relationship with the art world.
He got his images shown in the Musuem of Modern Art in New York.
The publication of his epic, Naked City, will always be considered a classic
love affair between a photographer and his subject.
In Weegee’s case, the subject was New York, and his photographs
became the frozen moments that are the icons of urban life in its calm, joy,
and chaos during that period.
He gives us a raw, spontaneous view of life in the city.
If you take his images away from the newspaper context they tell stories of
morality in the city.
Weegee DRUNKS 1940
Does he seem to be sympathetic to his subjects?
Does he seem to like them?
Or is he letting us know something about them that is negative?
Is he drawing a negative conclusion about the people he photographs?
So his images are raw, dramatic, voyeuristic, graphic and
don’t present most of his subjects in a positive light.
Compare to Lewis Hine,
Girl in Carolina Cotton Mill
Roy DeCarava
• Roy DeCarava first won acclaim in 1955 for his collaboration
with writer Langston Hughes on The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a
classic book about everyday life in Harlem.
• DeCarava has photographed black life over three decades
with tenderness and an acute sense of harsh political realities.
• His subjects have included jazz musicians (John Coltrane,
Billie Holiday, and Lester Young), children, African American
fathers and their children, and New York City street life.
Roy DeCarava
• “Photography is a facile medium which is made difficult by its
ease. Once one learns the secret of taking a picture, and is
able to coordinate one’s hands with the shutter, the image,
and the mind, one is still only at the beginning. After learning
the mechanics of taking pictures, one must learn to develop
them if the entire photographic process is to be controlled.” Roy DeCarava
Roy DeCarava
• DeCarava was born in New York City and grew up in Harlem.
• He studied painting at Cooper Union from 1938 to 1940.
• DeCarava started photographing in 1946 to document his
paintings.
• He gave up painting to devote himself to photography. His
first solo exhibition of photographs was held at the FortyFourth Street Gallery in New York in 1950.
• In 1952 DeCarava became the first black artist to receive a
Guggenheim Fellowship.
• The photographs he made during his Fellowship year
included many which appeared in Sweet Flypaper of Life.
• From 1954 to 1956 DeCarava operated A Photographer’s
Gallery in New York, one of the first galleries devoted to
photography as a fine art.
Roy DeCarava
• DeCarava’s own work appeared in the Family of Man
exhibition of 1955 and was particularly admired by Edward
Steichen.
Roy DeCarava, The Graduation 1949 from his book the Sweet Flypaper of Life, 1955
Langston Hughes, 1955
Window and Stove, 1952
Roy DeCarava
Roy DeCarava Bill & Son, 1962
Mississippi freedom marcher, Washington, DC
1963
Roy DeCarava Coltrane on Soprano, 1963
Roy DeCarava Milt Jackson New York 1956
Man With Portfolio – 1959
Street Photography
• Street photography is as old as photography itself.
• One of the first important images we saw was Daguerre’s
image on the boulevard in Paris.
• But after WWII, street photography was increasingly practiced
by art photographers who were very interested in taking
pictures on the crowded streets of big cities.
• Robert Frank is a very important photographer who
photographed on the streets of the United States
Robert Frank and his influential book
entitled The Americans
•
The Americans is a photography book by Swissborn Robert Frank, published first in France (1958)
and then in the US (1959).
• It consisted of 83 photographs, with only one
photograph per page.
Why was Robert Frank s book so
influential?
• It challenged the documentary tradition.
• During the era that Frank published The Americans ,
documentary photography was seen to be as something
transparent and not to be influenced by the thoughts,
emotions, or viewpoint of the photographer.
• “In the late 1950s and early 1960s neither The Americans
nor Frank’s work made on his Guggenheim fellowship were
well received, especially by the photography press.
• Edgy, critical, and often opaque at a time when
photography was generally understood to be wholesome,
simplistic, and patently transparent, the photographs
disconcerted editors even before the book was published.”
Why was Robert Frank s book so
influential?
• He was Swiss-born, and he saw America from an outsider
perspective.
• Although his work was a labor of love, he clearly showed the
ugly parts of American society, which included mass
consumerism, racism, and the divide between the rich and
poor.
• Through “The Americans” Frank wanted to highlight the
darker side of America which hadn’t been shown before.
Why was Robert Frank s book so
influential?
• It challenged the aesthetic of photography
• During the 1950′s, the tradition and aesthetic of
photography championed clean, well-exposed, and sharp
photographs.
• Technical perfection was considered very important
(remember the f64 photographers like Ansel Adams.)
However in Frank’s “The Americans”, he was first harshly
criticized by critics saying things like the prints were
“Flawed by meaningless blur grain, muddy exposure,
drunken horizons, and general sloppiness”.
• Not only that, but critics would see Frank as having
“contempt for any standards of quality or discipline in
technique.”
Robert Frank and
his Leica
Why was Robert Frank s book so
influential?
• He would often shoot at night using imprecise focus,
incorporated blur into his work, and would use grainy film.
• Not only that, but Frank experimented printing his
photographs with extreme contrast (disregarding the need
to create an image with good tonal range) and would crop
radically.
• If you look closely at his contact sheets, many of his
photographs were either too bright, too dark, so offbalance, and out-of-focus that “Frank seems at times not
even to have looked through the viewfinder or bothered to
check the controls on his camera.”
• Frank certainly did this with the purpose to better convey
the feelings that he had about America– the dark,
alienating, and foreign.
• Robert Frank, Parade – Hoboken, New Jersey
• The work starts with a picture of the front of a building, an
American flag draped across its front and two windows, in
each a person.
• Both are apparently female, though both are obscured.
• Taken during a parade at Hoboken, the bottom edge of the
flag visually cuts off the head of the figure at the right,
preventing us and her from seeing.
• He showed Americans responding to the commercialism of
the post WWII era.- to American prosperity and he gave
voice to the rising racial tension that would explode in the
late 1950s and early 1960s in the United States.
Robert Frank and
his Leica
Why was Robert Frank s book so
influential?
• He would often shoot at night using imprecise focus,
incorporated blur into his work, and would use grainy film.
• Not only that, but Frank experimented printing his
photographs with extreme contrast (disregarding the need
to create an image with good tonal range) and would crop
radically.
• If you look closely at his contact sheets, many of his
photographs were either too bright, too dark, so offbalance, and out-of-focus that “Frank seems at times not
even to have looked through the viewfinder or bothered to
check the controls on his camera.”
• Frank certainly did this with the purpose to better convey
the feelings that he had about America– the dark,
alienating, and foreign.
• Robert Frank, Parade – Hoboken, New Jersey
• The work starts with a picture of the front of a building, an
American flag draped across its front and two windows, in
each a person.
• Both are apparently female, though both are obscured.
• Taken during a parade at Hoboken, the bottom edge of the
flag visually cuts off the head of the figure at the right,
preventing us and her from seeing.
• He showed Americans responding to the commercialism of
the post WWII era.- to American prosperity and he gave
voice to the rising racial tension that would explode in the
late 1950s and early 1960s in the United States.
Parade, Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955© Robert Frank
Why was Robert Frank s book so
influential?
• “[Frank] had learned about the relationship between tone
and scale to the sensation of weight, and he recognized
that shadows or out-of-focus forms need not be legible –
could even approach abstraction – and still be highly
evocative.
• With this understanding, his photographs became not
merely unclear in their subjects and casual in their style but
also potent, deeply haunting, and deliberately ambiguous.”
• It challenged the rules of photography, and emphasized
feeling.
Why was Robert Frank s book so
influential?
• Not only did Frank challenge how he approached
documentary photography and the aesthetic in which he
employed– he also created images with an emphasis on
feeling above all else. Frank says this about his own work:
• “The photograph must be the result of a head to head, a
confrontation with a power, a force that one interrogates or
questions.”
• “Rebelling against the popular 1950s notion championed
by Edward Steichen (in the Family of Man exhibition) and
others that photography was a universal language, easily
understood by all, he wanted a form that was open-ended,
even deliberately ambiguous- one that engaged his
viewers, rewarded their prolonged consideration, and
perhaps even left them with as many questions as
answers.”
Why was Robert Frank s book so
influential?
• Therefore in “The Americans”, he didn’t want to create
simply a straightforward documentation of America that
was more “objective”.
• Rather, he took very subjective photographs that
challenged the viewers of “The Americans” to ask
themselves what they were looking at — and to challenge
their own views and prejudices about America.
• Frank confronted racial issues that were present in the
United States in the 1950s.
Men’s Room, Railway Station, Memphis, 1955 © Robert Frank
Charleston, South Carolina, 1955. © Robert Frank
Drugstore lunch counter, Detroit, 1955. © Robert Frank
Trolley, New Orleans, 1955, Robert Frank “The Americans”
• Frank was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Switzerland.
• Though Frank and his family remained safe in Switzerland
during World War II, the threat of Nazism nonetheless
affected his understanding of oppression.
• He turned to photography in part as a means to escape the
confines of his business-oriented family and home, and
trained under a few photographers and graphic designers.
• Frank emigrated to the United States in 1947, and secured
a job in New York City as a fashion photographer.
• Though he was initially optimistic about the United States,
• Frank’s perspective quickly changed as he confronted the
fast pace of American life and what he saw as an
overemphasis on money.
• He now saw America as an often bleak and lonely place, a
perspective that became evident in his later photography.
Political Rally, Chicago, 1956. © Robert Frank
• With the aid of his major artistic influence, the
photographer Walker Evans, Frank secured a grant from
the Guggenheim Foundation in 1955 to travel across the
United States and photograph its society at all strata.
• He took his family along with him for part of his series of
road trips over the next two years, during which time he
took 28,000 shots.
• Only 83 of those were finally selected by him for publication
in his book entitled The Americans. Frank’s journey was
not without incident.
• While driving through Arkansas, Frank was arbitrarily
thrown in jail after being stopped by the police; elsewhere
in the South, he was told by a sheriff that he had “an hour
to leave town.” .
• Frank is an outsider to American culture.
• His images inspired many young photographers at that
time and later to set out on the streets and highways of
America looking for images.
• We see these photographs eroding or unraveling the
certitude of documentary photography as practiced by the
FSA photographers and the press.
• Durning the Depression, photographers like Dorthea Lange
has captured images that showed Americans as doing their
best in the face of desperate odds, like Migrant Madonna.
• In contrast, Frank showed Americans in the middle of the
tension of the cold war.
• He showed the restrictive xenophobia of the McCarthy era.
• Chicago, 1955/58.
• Perhaps the most famous of the pictures using the flag is
of a man playing a tuba at a political rally, rendered
anonymous, the bell of the instrument replacing his head,
and growing out from this a pole with the flag spreading
out.
• Already we begin to see some of the ways Frank is building
a story, using montage – the recurring element of the flag,
the orator followed by the listeners.
• Frank said, “I was very free with the camera. I didn’t think
of what would be the correct thing to do; I did what I felt
good doing. I was like an action painter.”
Robert Frank, Chicago
A crop of his photograph of the political rally. You
can see how he cropped it on the contact sheet with
the red grease pencil.
• Here’s Franks vision of the Wild West, a bar in Gallup, New
Mexico, taken from a low viewpoint, perhaps even shot
appropriately from the hip.
• The picture is at an angle and slightly blurred, half
obscured by the looming back of a man close to the
camera.
• Across the bar a man stands alone and desperate, hands
perhaps just in pockets or on his hips, but giving the
suggestion of a gunfight that is ready to start.
• Frank’s images are often gritty, tilted and blurred. They are
taken with a 35mm camera which lets him shoot quickly
and secretly.
• They have a very spontaneous, unpremeditated look that
makes them very intense. They have a sense of freedom
and risk since he is shooting so quickly in situations..
Robert Frank, Bar – Gallup, New Mexico
• Frank often used the device of deliberately obscuring his
subjects’ faces – from the opening picture where we have
two people, both without faces.
• Here we see a man whose body is visible, but head hidden
behind the staircase up to a Rooming House in Bunker Hill,
Los Angeles and on to other examples.
• In part this allowed the photographer to remain unseen and he was more interested in his views than the reactions
of his subjects.
Robert Frank, Roaming house – Bunker Hill, Los Angeles
How did Robert Frank prepare for his trip
photographing the Americans?
• Gathered maps and itineraries from the American
Automobile Association
• Collected letters of reference from the Guggenheim
Foundation and friends in the press (in-case people
questioned his photographing intentions)
• Introductions to representatives to industries around the
country (to capture a wide variety of images)
• Suggestions from fellow photographers of places to visit.
How did Robert Frank prepare for his trip
photographing the Americans?
• Frank also prepared some symbols that he wanted to
pursue/capture:
• Flags
• Cowboys
• Rich Socialites
• Juke-boxes
• Politicians
• Frank also numbered his rolls of film in chronological order
and labeled according to location. He also sometimes
labeled his film according to subject matter.
Ranch Market, Hollywood, 1955-56. © Robert Frank
Robert Fank, Movie Premiere Hollywood 1955
US 285, New Mexico, 1955. © Robert Frank
Harry Callahan
• Self-taught in photography, Harry Callahan enjoyed a long
and influential career which began in 1938.
• After studying engineering at Michigan State University he
worked first for the Chrysler Corporation and then at the
General Motors Photographic Laboratories in Detroit.
• Callahan’s early photographic work was influenced by Ansel
Adams, whom Callahan heard lecture, and by the life of Alfred
Stieglitz.
• Callahan went to a workshop by Ansel Adams in 1941 and
after that committed his life to photography.
Harry Callahan
• He said, upon seeing the work of Ansel Adams in 1941, “ I
was just completely freed. I can’t explain it, it was almost
like somebody getting religion. Totally Freed.”
• Adams visited the Detroit Photo Guild in 1941 and gave a
workshop in which he talked about the intrinsic potential of
camera, film and paper and told the audience to work
honestly and simply.
• Callahan committed himself to photography as a means of
exploring the “simple aspects of his own life.
• He was transformed into an artist from a hobbyist.
• Callahan relied on his intuition.
• He became interested in the paintings of Magritte and the
surrealists.
Harry Callahan
• Harry Callahan was a shy man.
• He was a homebody who found the unusual in objects that
were familiar and close to him.
• He was an experiementer- and he was very persistent and
patient.
• He believed in photographic experimentation, and he was
open to chance, coincidence, serendipity (all things the
Surrealists believed in.)
• His ideas about photography evolved though the act of
repeatedly photographing, looking, experimenting, making
mistakes and persisting in more photographing.
• Instinct and action were at the heart of his process.
• He learned by trying out a new camera or lens or by walking
in an unfamiliar area.
Harry Callahan
•
Eleanor and Barbara, Lake Michigan, 1953
Harry Callahan: Photographs of his wife
and daughter
• Callahan often transformed his everyday subjects—nature,
architecture, city streets, his wife Eleanor and daughter
Barbara into (barely recognizable) simple forms; a visual
essence that still evokes their worldly counterparts.
• Callahan’s goal, however, was to describe, not to conceal or
distort.
• For each new subject, he refreshed his photographic
vocabulary and used his 8×10 view camera and strong sense
of design and composition to create meticulously crafted and
elegant images.
• Much of Callahan’s work is personally oriented; many of his
pictures artistically interpret his family relationships, especially
portraits of his wife, Eleanor and daughter Barbara.
Harry Callahan: Photographs of his wife
and daughter
• Callahan’s work was a deeply personal response to his own
life.
• He was well known to encourage his students to turn their
cameras on their lives, and he led by example.
• Callahan photographed his wife over a period of fifteen years,
as his prime subject.
• Eleanor was essential to his art from 1947 to 1960.
• He photographed her everywhere – at home, in the city
streets, in the landscape; alone, with their daughter, in black
and white and in color, nude and clothed, distant and close.
Harry Callahan: Photographs of his wife
and daughter
• In 1950 his daughter Barbara, was born.
• Even prior to her birth she showed up in photographs of
Eleanor’s pregnancy.
• From 1948 to 1953 Eleanor, and sometimes Barbara, were
shown out in the landscape as a tiny counterpoint to large
expanses of park, skyline or water.
• Through his detailed studies of Eleanor, which delineate the
boundaries of their lives together and describe the most
intimate and incidental minutia of their daily existence – the
feel of the folds of skin, for example, or the quality of light
failing on the bed – Callahan speaks of an all-encompassing,
ever-present relationship, one that is so powerful that even
when he is not with her, he sees her all around him.
Harry Callahan
Harry Callahan: Street Photographs
• In the 1960s Callahan began a new way of photographing.
• For Harry Callahan, as he walked on the streets of Chicago,
he found fresh material for his photographs.
• He called this “seeing photographically.”
• So Callahan shot on the street.
• He crammed his images with stark contrasts of black and
white- allowing for few middle gray tones.
• He saw the city as tense and inhospitable, opposed to the
beautiful lyrical portraits he took of his wife…
Harry Callahan, Chicago, 1961
Harry Callahan: Street Photographs
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We have seen photographs of the city by Alfred Stieglitz and
Alexander Rodchenko.
Stieglitz’s images of the city emphasize technology and
modernist abstraction- the sky scrapers become geometric
abstractions.
Rodchenko also emphasizes modernity and geometry by
looking down from elevated viewpoints.
Rodchenko throws the viewer off guard by showing them the
unexpected. We have also seen (will see) some documentary
approaches to the city- Weegee, Roy de Carava (social
issues)- and some images that work on the narrative that is
formed by putting together dissimilar people in one sceneLee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand.
Callahan’s images are more about quietude, emotional
restraint and lack of an overt narrative.
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Harry Callahan, New York, ca. 1945
Harry Callahan: Street Photographs
• His photographs of pedestrians convey certain characteristics.
• He is fascinated by people walking “lost in thought.”
• He was interested in the visual rhythms of people walking, the
spaces carefully preserved between them and the linear and
graphic effects of light and shadow.
• The people in his images are typically pictured in motion,
proceeding in an orderly fashion from one unspecified place
to another.
• Their eyes are usually fixed right ahead of them and they are
very isolated from the other (unacknowledged) people in the
image.
• These photographs suggest the tension of living in the cityinherent contradiction in the beauty of living with so many
other people- isolation, alienation, meaninglessness, the
“walking dead” in the city.
•
Harry Callahan, Providence, 1968
Harry Callahan: Street Photographs
• In his image we see the impersonality and oppressive scale of
the city.
• His images show how we take on a protective armor as we
walk though the streets of the city surrounded by strangers.
• At the same time, though, they also show our underlying
vulnerability and our solitude.
• His images show the fundamental loneliness of the human
condition and demonstrate why we reach out to one another.
Harry Callahan,
Chicago, 1961
Harry Callahan: Street Photographs
• These silent solitary women staring straight ahead symbolize
the costs of living in the city- anonymous, lonely.
• He did not want to confront these people. He sensed in them
a feeling of solitude that was like his own.
• They are lost in thought, like he was, and he pictures that
quality.
• He records their moment of privacy (even though he breaks
that to photograph them.)
• Unlike other street photographers he doesn’t find the drama,
but the quiet moments on the streets, as we walk in lost in
thought.
• He uses the 35 mm camera, small easy to use, quick to focus
and shoot so he can get these close up images.
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Harry Callahan, New York, 1962
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Harry Callahan, Chicago, 1950
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Harry Callahan, Untitled Chicago, 1950
Harry Callahan: Street Photographs
• He says: “I always loved to walk and those winters in Chicago
were particularly powerful for me. I would go down to the lake
in the cold and always find a few lonesome people wandering
around on the shore. I like to think that they were feeling the
same fascination with the place that I was.”
• Callahan left almost no written records–no diaries, letters,
scrapbooks or teaching notes.
• His technical photographic method was to go out almost every
morning, walk the city he lived in and take numerous pictures.
• He then spent almost every afternoon making proof prints of
that day’s best negatives.
• Yet, for all his photographic activity, Callahan, at his own
estimation, produced no more than half a dozen final images
a year.
Compare and contrast these two images by Harry Callahan.
Street Photography
• Street photography is as old as photography itself.
• One of the first important images we saw was Daguerre’s
image on the boulevard in Paris.
• But after WWII, street photography was increasingly practiced
by art photographers who were very interested in taking
pictures on the crowded streets of big cities.
• The photographers often find an outlet for their feelings and
emotions by watching and photographing people walking on
the streets.
• Many photographers like Garry Winogrand and Lee
Friedlander developed what became known as a “snapshot
aesthetic.”
• The snapshot aesthetic consisted of apparently uncomposed
subject matter, illuminated with ambient light (the light falling
on the scene with no flash or lights added by the
photographer) and in a way that seems casual.
The Social Landscape
• In the 1960s a new photographic trend emerged, which did not
care about social reform but was interested in how the camera
saw the world.
• Several important exhibitions about these new “social
landscape” photographers happened in 1966 and 1967.
• The social landscape street photographers like Garry Winogrand
and Lee Friedlander were not as interested in telling a personal
story or narrative in their images.
• Instead they were more neutral in their vision.
• They were not asking the viewer to change society, like the FSA
photographers like Dorothea Lange.
• Rather the social landscape photographers looked at the
subjects they photographed with “disinterested irony.”
• Other street photographers like Lisette Model had a greater
interest in content and a personal point of view.
• Model for instance was interested in looking at human foibles
and vanities.
Garry Winogrand
• Garry Winogrand came from a background as a photojournalist
and had a photograph included in the Family of Man Exhibition.
• However, in the 1960s he began making psychologically
complex, tense photographs shot on the streets of major cities.
• Like Robert Frank, he was given a Guggenheim grant and in
1964 began a series of road trips across America.
• Walker Evans and Robert Frank had also gone on similar road
trips to photograph across the United States.
• Winogrand was particularly interested in photographing what
was going on in the United States after the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy.
• Winogrand focused his photographs on human gestures and
body stances that indicate interpersonal tension and inner
turmoil.
• Winogrand was interested in photographing situations that were
very tense and uncomfortable between people who were
walking on the streets of America.
Garry Winogrand
Untitled
1954
Garry Winogrand
• Garry Winogrand photographed to see what things looked
like photographed.
• He first picked up a camera in the 1950’s and didn’t put it
down until his untimely death in 1984.
• During the 30 years he photographed, Winogrand created
numerous images, produced five books, and exhibited
extensively throughout the United States and abroad.
• He shot in the street, from the hip, up close with a wideangle lens, often tilting the camera.
• He was a prolific shooter and his images capture what is
known to photographers as the ‘decisive moment.’
• Winogrand’s subject was America.
• He documented the city and the urban landscape,
concentrating on its unusual people and capturing odd
juxtapositions of animate and inanimate objects.
Garry Winogrand
American Legion Convention Dallas Texas 1964 (with amputee)
Garry Winogrand
• Garry Winogrand is often quoted as saying, “I photograph to find
out what the world looks like photographed.”
• Winogrand’s sarcastic, corrosive view of human nature is shown
in the way he crops his images, or tilts the camera.
• For Winogrand (and Lee Friedlander also) the photograph is not
just a “window on the world” but a new object in the world.
• Like the cubists and Dada artists, he and Lee Friedlander are
pointing out that the photograph is a two-dimensional
representation of the three-dimensional world, not just a replica
of the world.
• He is interested in how the camera creates composition and how
the camera represents object in the world on a two-dimensional
surface.
• He is interested in exploring photograph’s unique picture-making
qualities, but what the viewer often takes away from the images
is a sense of the awkwardness of the social interactions
Winogrand photographs on the streets.
Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984),
Untitled from Women are Beautiful, 1975
Garry Winogrand
• For his book entitled, Women are Beautiful, Winogrand
photographed women on the streets of New York.
• He pictured them going about their business, unaware that
they were being photographed.
• The women pictured are determined and fierce, and not
necessarily feminine or beautiful.
• The pictures seem to be less about a particular subject
than where the subject lies in space and how the light falls
to illuminate them and their surroundings.
Garry Winogrand
• Winogrand made the city, the zoo, the airport, and the
rodeo his home, and spent hours photographing there.
• A photographer of this sort is a wanderer, constantly
roaming the globe, clicking the shutter wherever he went.
• Winogrand’s photographs catch that odd moment where
unrelated activities coincided, and it is the nature of these
juxtapositions that sets his work apart from other
photographers.
• He photographed all subjects with the same detached but
observant eye, making complex compositions.
• In his first book The Animals (1969), photographs of people
and animals at the zoo are both a humorous and sarcastic
look at the human race.
• The animals exhibit human-like qualities and when
photographed in relation to humans it is often hard to tell
who is performing for whom.
Garry Winogrand Central Park Zoo, New York City 1964
Garry
Winogrand
Park Avenue,
New York
1959
Garry Winogrand Minneapolis n.d.
Garry Winogrand
• In photographing Los Angeles, Winogrand opened up his
compositions, allowing light the fill the frame.
• These images feature the lure of Los Angeles–snake
charmers on Venice Beach, tourists in Hollywood, the
Huntington Gardens and the Santa Monica pier.
• The characters who populate these places, celebrating the
complexities of their interactions, is the subject of these
images.
• Winogrand might document a single small gesture or look,
but the photograph makes that moment significant.
Garry Winogrand Los Angeles, California 1969
Lee Friedlander
• Lee Friedlander (b. 1934) emerged in the early 1960s as a
significant photographer of the contemporary American
environment.
• His is a witty, multilayered vision which emphasizes the
two-dimensional confines of the picture plane, challenging
photography’s formal conventions and making familiar
objects and people enigmatic through near-surrealist
juxtaposition.
• His images involving reflective and semi-transparent
surfaces create playful ambiguities of space and meaning.
• The awkward, offhanded “snapshot” quality of his work
disguises its considerable sophistication.
• Like Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand,
Lee Friedlander also went on an extended road trip across
the United States photographing in different cities and
towns.
Lee Friedlander
• Lee Friedlander did not want to “spell out” the meaning in
his photographs for the viewer.
• He did not want to give clear visual clues to the viewer.
• He often hints at a story in his images but the story is not
clear and the viewer has to put the pieces together for him
or herself.
• For Friedlander, photography has compositional rules just
like painting.
• Just like a paint brush leaves brush strokes on the canvas,
the type of camera and lens and the type of developer the
photographer uses all leave a mark on the photograph.
• Friedlander often photographs reflections on glass in store
fronts and store windows.
• He creates a type of deep perspective in his photographs
by layering space.
Lee Friedlander
• Lee Friedlander often includes his reflection or shadow in his
photographs.
• This is not a personal statement, but a reminder that the
viewer is looking at a photograph, a flat two-dimensional
object made with a camera and not a “window out into the
world.”
• His images often featured undramatic views from automobiles
and a variety of reflections and images within images.
• Friedlander’s images often resemble collages, with many
different perspectives layered together.
• Both Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander are famous for
exposing many hundreds of rolls of film and then selecting
their images from their contact sheets.
• Lee Friedlander was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in
1960 and again in 1962 for photographic studies of the
changing American scene.
Lee Friedlander, New York, 1963
Lee Friedlander New York 1963
Lee Friedlander New York 1963
Lee Friedlander Lafayette Louisiana 968
Lee Friedlander New York City 1964
Lee Friedlander Cincinnati 1963
Lee Friedlander New Orleans 1968
Diane Arbus “Puerto Rican Woman with Beauty Mark,” 1965, Silver Gelatin Print
134
Diane Arbus “Young man in Curlers,” 1966, Silver Gelatin Print
135
Diane Arbus “Child with Toy hand Gernade,” 1962, Silver Gelatin Print
136
Diane Arbus “Indentical Twins,” 1967, Silver Gelatin Print
137
Diane Arbus – Stylistic Qualities
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Diane Arbus “Child Crying, New Jersey,”
1967, Silver Gelatin Print
Stylistic Qualities
Snap shot composition
Confrontational
Frontal flash
Heroically centered
Used twin lens camera
Square image
• Normal people look strange
• Reveals the hidden self of people
• Broke down public personas
• People on the fringe look weird
• Compassion for bizarre people
• Approach people without judgment
138
Diane Arbus “Teenage Couple,” 1963, Silver Gelatin Print
139
Diane Arbus
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Her use of a square medium format camera with a waist-level
finder meant that she could view her subjects while talking to
them but not actually looking at them.
She observed their image in the viewfinder, seeking to catch the
moment when they looked somehow different, of a peculiar
dislocation.
The relationship between photographer and subject is quite
different when using a waist level finder compared to a camera
held at eye-level.
Using the camera at the eye pointing at the subject is clearly an
aggressive and intrusive act – a kind of amplified staring at the
subject. It maintains and exaggerates eye contact.
To use the waist level finder, and eye contact is broken.
The subjects are less aware of the photographer and less aware
of what she is doing. They may even be puzzled as to what is
happening.
When using a camera in this way, the communication between
photographer and subject is mainly by talking (or not), whereas
at eye-level gesture often dominates.
Diane Arbus
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“I don’t know what good composition is…. Sometimes for me
composition has to do with a certain brightness or a certain
coming to restness and other times it has to do with funny
mistakes. There’s a kind of rightness and wrongness and
sometimes I like rightness and sometimes I like
wrongness.” Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus “The King and Queen of a Senior Citizens Dance,” no date, Silver Gelatin Print
142
Diane Arbus
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Perhaps not surprisingly, a central feature of many Arbus
pictures is relationships or their dysfunction – particularly in the
teenage couples and families in her pictures.
Perhaps this reaches its most poignant in ‘The King and Queen
of a Senior Citizens Dance, NYC, 1970’ where two elderly
people sit facing the photographer in regal capes and crowns,
holding feeble maces and wrapped gifts.
Between them is a gap emphasized by their fairly tight framing
and they stare resolutely ahead, ignoring each other.
Diane Arbus
‘Young Brooklyn
Family going for
a Sunday outing’
1966
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The ‘Young Brooklyn Family going for a Sunday outing’ Arbus met in
1966 stand facing the camera on the street, the father hanging back
slightly, gripping the hand of his son who has clearly got fed up
waiting for the woman who has stopped them and is now standing in
front of them.
The infant, clutched in its mother’s arms together with coat, camera
and vast handbag stares fixedly into space beyond and over the
photographers left shoulder; only the two adults remain looking at the
camera.
Obviously this is a working class family, and the woman is dressed up
for the Sunday outing, her face a thickly painted mask surrounded by
a vast beehive of hair.
Arbus has accentuated the mask-like quality by placing her flesh
tones (and that or the child she clutches) rather lighter than normal,
perhaps by angling the flash more towards her, or perhaps simply
because she is slightly closer to it.
Her husband is dressed far more far more informally and appears in
more natural – and his flesh tones are much darker.
Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus
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Arbus used the central placement in a square format to
concentrate the viewer’s attention on the subject rather than the
composition.
Her use of flash both served to isolate the subjects and also to
give them a theatrical or even surreal quality.
Arbus got her subjects to face the camera, to present
themselves to it, usually gazing directly at its lens.
The means of photographing has in part a kind of neutrality,
although just occasionally it seems to be the neutrality of the
butterfly collector pinning specimens neatly to the display board.
Usually we sense an intimacy and cooperation with her subjects
to present them in a calm and non-judgemental manner.
Diane Arbus
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“I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don’t like to arrange
things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I
arrange myself”
Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus
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Often the power of her pictures comes out of a disparity between this
straightforward presentation and the unusual nature of her subjects.
At least one writer has remarked on many pictures in which Arbus has
posed here subjects on their beds, suggesting that Arbus had a
particular interest in bedrooms, perhaps because these more often
reflect a person’s personality than other rooms in the house.
Diane Arbus
‘Mexican Dwarf in his
hotel room in NYC’
1970
Diane Arbus
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The ‘Mexican Dwarf in his hotel room in NYC, 1970′ was certainly not
living in a five-star suite.
Again, Arbus’s cropping around the naked torso emerging from the
rumpled bedclothes is fairly loose, though it does just clip his hat and
his toes.
As usual her camera is upright, with the flash a little more out to the left
than before – or perhaps giving this effect simply because she is closer
to the subject.
Again he looks back to the camera, self-assured, even jaunty, rather
pleased with himself below his tilted hat.
The deep shadow cast by the flash leads to a bottle of some kind of
liquor on his peeling wood bedside table.
Diane Arbus
“Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot … it had a terrific kind of
excitement for me… Most people go through life dreading they’ll
have a traumatic experience. Freaks are born with their trauma.
They’ve already passed it. They’re aristocrats”. Diane Arbus
• Do we use the word “freaks” today when we describe people?
• What do you think Arbus meant by using this word?
• What do you think of the way that Arbus treats people who look
or act differently than the “norm” in society?
• Do you feel she is taking advantage of the people she
photographs?
• Remember, she always interacts with her subjects, unlike some
photographers who shoot from a distance and don’t let their
subjects know they are being photographed.
• Arbus always had some kind of relationship with the people she
photographed.
• What do you think Arbus means by this quote?
Diane Arbus
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Arbus went up to people she met on the street or in bars and
clubs and asked if she could photograph them.
Sometimes she photographed where she found them, usually
using flash – to separate them, often very discretely from their
background.
And sometimes she would ask to photograph them in their
homes.
She was a pioneer in this technique of using flash in daylight,
now one of the standard techniques of the press photographer.
Diane Arbus
‘Lady
bartender at
home with a
souvenir dog’
Diane Arbus
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Like a number of Arbus’s pictures – for example the ‘Lady
bartender at home with a souvenir dog’ with its similarity
between the two figures both with their ludicrous hairstyles – this
picture amuses, but it also is worrying.
In many of her pictures we sense that somehow her subjects
have become disconnected from reality as we know it, are
wandering sad and lonely and lost as Arbus herself perhaps
was.
Diane Arbus, Flower girl at a wedding, 1973
Diane Arbus
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The young ‘Flower girl as a wedding, 1973’ stands awkwardly, facing
the camera, staring fixedly into the lens that looks down on her.
As well as the flowers around her hair, Arbus has stood her so some
kind of weedy shrub appears to be growing out of the bottom of her
floor length dress, her fur jacket appears distressed, and on side of her
collar is oddly larger than the other.
Her expression is one of fear, and she clutches a wicker basket in front
of her.
Behind her is a lawn with trees looming out of the mist, the unknown.
It is a long way from a normal wedding photograph
After her divorce from Alan Arbus, do you think this photograph reflects
Arbus’s personal feelings on marriage?
Diane Arbus
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Did Arbus exploit her subjects?
Do you feel like you have “power” over the people you
photograph?
Well, clearly we all do to some extent when we photograph
other people – we make use of them for our own purposes.
Do you think Arbus was giving her subjects something in the act
of photographing them?
Do people in the world with physical disabilities or who act or
live in ways that are not generally accepted by society get many
opportunities to be “visible” in society?
Do you think Arbus gave them an opportunity to be visible with
her photographs?
Much of Arbus’s work seems clearly to be creative and affirming
towards its subjects, and it was clearly also meeting some need
on her own part.

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