Contextual studies is all about the understanding of history and past cultures and how we put that knowledge into context with how we produce and consume culture and different forms of art. This module can be basically broken down into two main elements.
1. Historical content (who did what, what they did and when they did it).
2. Critical analysis (how they did it and why they did it).
To understand our society and who we are today we must first look to the past at older cultures and societies and examine what they were trying to reflect in their art and cultures.
CAVE ART
If we go back to the earliest forms of art, we come across cave art and this dates back to almost 30000 years ago.
CLASS DISCUSSION
In this weeks class discussion we went over last weeks lecture and discussed topics covered by Chris. We also went over the handout from last week about the artist JR. Last week we were given a small brief to look at an artist called JR , website to look at bellow:-
http://jr-art.net/
We all had to look up the website and familiarise ourselves with the artist and his work for a discussion in our first seminar session.
His work i found to be multi-layered and provoked discussion from all the class. I think it made us all look at work and look more into the meaning of what we actually see.
We also learned that we would be discussing our Monday morning seminars and that research and cross referencing people, ideas and concepts were key to our learning.
We discussed whether we had come across the term camera obscura in our lectures yet and was then given a task to look up on the internet about them and also pinhole cameras which we would have to make one for the following week.
PINHOLE CAMERAS
I looked around on the internet and found some really good websites detailing how to make and use pinhole cameras and then in today's lesson we actually made them. I didn't think that Katy had much expectation from the results she thought we would get but that it would be a fun little project to do.
http://www.pinhole.cz/en/pinholecameras/whatis.html http://www.kodak.com/ek/US/en/Pinhole_Camera.htm After we had built them , we all went off to experiment with different exposures. I had made a large one out of a light tight shoe box. I put four pin holes in mine as i wanted to try different exposure times and the results were not to bad considering the time it took us to make them.
EGYPTIAN CULTURE
The Egyptians had an infrastructure, much like we do today. Except because of advances in technology we do almost everything electronically. We have computers in nearly all households in the united kingdom. We use mobile phones, interactive tv's, tablets, laptops, games consoles and we can even turn on our lights in our homes with the wave of our hand. Without an infrastructure the Egyptians would have not been able to build the Pyramids. They worshiped their Pharaohs like gods in were in awe of them and it was these Pharaohs that were at the pinnacle of Egyptian culture. We know this because it is recorded in their art, buildings and writings.
GREEK CULTURE
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| Greek Mosiac |
Mosaics can be seen all over the world today and are a great testament to Greek culture.
http://matadornetwork.com/trips/10-impressive-mosaics-world/
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| Greek Fresco |
http://www.goldennumber.net/goldsect.htm
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| The Golden Rule/Ratio |
ROMAN CULTURE
As we can see the Greeks power came from knowledge, whereas the Romans power came from its state. The Romans were obsessed with sexuality and a lot of the art and architecture from this period has a dark and brutal edge to it. Rome began as a small cluster of huts and buildings around about the 10th century BC. At first Rome or Roma was ruled by kings and then around 509 BC it became a republic and was ruled over by a government. During the early years of the republic, Rome was ruled by the privileged rich these were known as patricians. Patricians made all the decisions in popular assemblies. Eventually Rome started to collapse due to huge military commitment,an ever expanding empire and the huge divide growing between the rich and the poor. This generated social breakdown, political turmoil, and the eventual collapse of the Republic. From around that time and after Rome was ruled over by a series of powerful Emperor's and became an Empire.
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roru/hd_roru.htm
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| Emperor Augustus |
Decimation was a form of military punishment that was used by the Roman's and was very brutal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_%28Roman_army%29
http://www.livius.org/de-dh/decimation/decimation.html
Though not thought to be used often it was a good deterrent. Most soldiers were very obedient and marched forward in lines with their shields. The term testudo is Latin and means tortoise. This is derived from a roman battle formation in which when being fired at from above or with arrows, they would lift their shields above there heads. Interestingly Hitler was supposedly to have based his army on Roman army strategies and tactics.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/primaryhistory/romans/the_roman_army/
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Statuette of a Roman Legionary |
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| 1 |
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| 2 |
Above are images of Trajan's column in Rome, it was erected in 113 AD in honor of Emperor Trajan. Around the outside of the column is a winding band of carved reliefs. This band is more than 600 foot long has more than 2000 carved figures, that depict the story of Trajan's Dacian wars.
"THE DARK AGES"
This period comes from around the time of the fall of the western Roman Empire. When the Romans left they took with them a lot of technical knowledge and infrastructure, this was a period of huge religious conflict. There was a huge Muslim uprising and they rode through the "Fallen Empire" sowing seeds of intellectual and social heresy, wherever they went. This continued until the time of the crusades. Despite all the conflicts though this time period is seen as a time of religious faith,we as men sought after god. As much is wrote down in history, we still don't know enough of this period.
http://www.allabouthistory.org/the-dark-ages.htm
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| The Crusades |
BYZANTINE ART
Byzantine art refers to the art of the Eastern Roman Empire. The name refers to a style rather than the place and was from around 330AD to 1450AD. This kind of art is known for its rich colours and style of figures that it depicts.
http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/b/byzantine.html
A lot of paintings from around this time are know as Icons, they were painted with egg to symbolize the soul and gold metal as a symbol of Gods long lasting love, onto wood as this symbolized the wood of the cross.
IDOL
noun
2.
Bible.
a.
an image of a deity other than God.
b.
the deity itself.
3.
any person or thing regarded with blind admiration, adoration, or devotion: Madame Curie had been her childhood idol.
4.
a mere image or semblance of something, visible but without substance, as a phantom.
6.
a false conception or notion; fallacy.
ICON
1.
a picture, image, or other representation.
2.
Eastern Church. a representation of some sacred personage, as Christ or a saint or angel, painted usually on a wood surface and venerated itself as sacred.
4.
Computers. a picture or symbol that appears on a monitor and is used to represent a command, as a file drawer to represent filing.
5.
So basically it boils down to Icons depicted a person that we worshiped, Jesus, Mary, God etc, and an Idol we worshiped that item itself.
This painting shows us the tremendous power of nature in the sea. The powerful light of the moonlight is in contrast to the tiny lamp on the boat. This whole scene emphasizes natures power over mankind and the fate of the fishermen is totally in the hands of mother nature.
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999996&workid=15008&searchid=11161
Turner had such a big impact in the art world, that we now have the Turner prize . It started in 1984 and was named as such in reference to how Turner's work itself was controversial in is day. Also Turner himself was said to have wanted to establish a prize for young artists from around his time.
Famous quotes about Damien Hirsts win :-
Quotes took from the Tate website linked below.
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/turnerprize/history/1995.shtm
As we can see some people don't understand the nature of this competition and some winners have proven to be controversial. Art has always been good at dividing opinion.
CONSTABLE
We can say, if anything that Constable was famed for how well he painted the sky. His Career was a slow burner and it wasn't until he was in his forties that he began to gain recognition for his work and eventually at the age of 52 he was elected to the Royal Academy. His best work was painted around the areas he lived IE Suffolk and Hampstead. He was said to have worked exclusively out in the open , preferring to paint or sketch outside. There is a great sadness to his work.
http://www.john-constable.org/
IMPRESSIONISM
Impressionism was an art movement that originated in paris around the 1870's. It takes its name from a painting by Monet called impression, soleil levant (impression, sunrise). It is said the critic Louis Leroy conned the term when giving the painting a satiric review. The style is known for its rapidly brash, brush strokes and the use of bright pure colours.
MANET
Manet is most remembered for his painting The Luncheon On The Grass. This painting caused huge outrage and shock when it was first shown in 1963. The idea of a naked woman with two fully clothed men at that time was considered an outrage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_déjeuner_sur_l'herbe
MONET
Monet tried to exaggerate what he was seeing when he painted. He was trying to give us a sense of being there or an idea of what the feeling or emotions were like in that scene. In contrast a photograph is just an image took a fraction after something has actually happened. If we look at his water lilies paintings we can see that he was using bold brush stokes to try and show what the scene looked and the emotion it gave him. He was showing us the movement or lack of, reflections, the lighting and the mood.
BOUDIN
Eugene Boudin was a landscape painter who was born at Trouville in France. Light was one of the most important tools for Impresionist painters, and Boudin showed the skies of his paintings. He was known for this and was called " A Master Of The Sky".
http://www.eugeneboudin.org/Beach-at-Trouville-large.html
VAN GOGH
Van Gogh is well known for his sunflowers painting. Impressionism was not just about one type of art, it encapsulated lots of different ideas. When we think about impressionists we think of Monet or Van Gogh.
Van Gogh became one of the most recognizable and famous painters of all time. He amassed a great amount of work in his lifetime and his paintings have had a big impact on todays culture. His work was influenced by Edgar Degas and to a latter extent his health.
http://www.vangoghgallery.com/
DEGAS
Degas tried to show movement in the human form in his drawings, it showed contour and an expression of movement. He liked to work mainly in pastels, though he used other mediums too, even sculpting in bronze.
http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/degas/
Nice documentary above about Degas.
SURREALISM
Surrealism came after the Dada movement and they thought that there was a more natural way of making art, where as the Dada movement was more anti art. They wanted to tap into their ID. When we think of the word surreal we could use the word weird to describe this but that's not necessarily what it actually means. Surrealists based there ideas and followed the same principles as two well known physiologists, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and drew on the principles of the subconscious and UN-subconscious mind. Freud tried to psychoanalyze women but when we look now we can see that he often got this wrong.
Image from Google images.
http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/a/personalityelem.htm
http://allpsych.com/psychology101/ego.html
The above websites go into more detail about Freud's theories but basically we can boil this down to the fact that every one is born with their ID. This works on the pleasure principle ie
Eat it
Kill it
Have sex with it.
If we look at attitudes we British are quite prudish, whereas some were like Germany they are more open and talking about something like Sex is not deemed shameful.
SALVADOR DALI
Dali is the poster boy when we talk about surrealism, though others in this movement tried to discredit him. They thought of him as a buffoon and even Freud tried to discredited Dali's work.
When we look at his work we don't necessarily see the dream scape that Dali said his work was, instead we could say that his inspiration could have come from other areas like his childhood.
http://www.daligallery.com/?gclid=COOS9JTM16wCFYEhtAoddGmTBQ
RAYMOND GEORGES YVES TANGUY
Tanguy's work has an instantly recognizable surreal look to it. He uses huge landscape type images but done in a way that makes them seem almost alien.They have a very organic look to them and they are filled with abstract shapes and objects. The paintings have a familiar feel to them but at the same time they are unusual and thought provoking.
http://www.yvestanguy.org/en/
A lot of surrealist imagry is based on the way some things can look like others. We can describe this by the use of the image below. It shows how a cloud could actually look like a teddy bear ie how a cloud can look like something totally different but at the same time instantly recognizable.
MAX ERNST
Surrealist Max Ernst pioneered the use of frottage in his work. It consists of rubbing soft pencil over paper placed onto the object or surface you want to get the texture from. He used to see strange shapes and images on his wooden floor and this was a way for him to try and record these shapes or images. His paintings then took on a mixed media image as he built them up around the textures.
http://patriciagrayinc.blogspot.com/2009/06/mixed-media-painting-classes.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Ernst
http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=113
Show IPA
We only know of around 25 per cent of what our brain (mind) can do. I am a big believer in the phrase sleep on it, when we sleep our mind sorts everything out and organizes our thoughts and subconscious. In our lecture we then looked at automatic writing and automatic drawing were you try not thinking about what you are doing and try and let your pen or brush just make images without thinking. We then tried to draw each other without looking at the paper at all. This was fun but hard to try and not look at what we were doing.
(INSERT IMAGE)
http://diary.wenxuecity.com/diary.php?id=0&yearID=2010&monthID=8&dayID=6&currdate=201008&pid=5350&page=1
The quote from above became known as the surrealists manifesto.
Other forms of art and literature used the surrealists form not just painters. There were the poets :-
Rimband
Baudelaire
Lautremot
They looked at what happens when things that don't belong together get put together, what happens to them. They also looked at the relationships between different objects. The idea of using images that could shock was something that the surrealist's were very interested in. We looked at two clips from surrealist films Un Chein Andalu and Le Sang Des Betes to show how they used shocking images to get there point across.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020530/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVbTEVfLksU
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041842/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFAUA8_mfXs
The shocking reaction to these to films is exactly what they wanted to achieve. In the case of the second film, we that is us as humans remove ourselves from the whole process when it comes to meat production. We don't like to think of how it is processed into something that we eat.
Surrealism more than any other art movement effected and had more impact than anything that had come before. It had a huge impact on the art we see today and its effect are long lasting.
POP ART
Pop art is a movement that started in the mid fifties in england and then around the late fifties in America. It drew its inspiration from all forms of media including :- mundane packaging (soup cans, soap boxes), television commercials, Hollywood and cinema icons, pop music and comic books. This was seen as low art and art critics were mortified at the thought of this kind of work being hung in galleries. Pop art started to show art in a whole new light and new ways of looking at things around us and how we could depict them.
http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=226
British Pop art differentiated from American pop art as the cultures are so different. One of the key founders of the British movement was Peter Blake. He produced work in multiple mediums and was very well known for his album covers. His most famous album cover was his work on the Beatles Sgt Pepper's in 1967.
ANDY WARHOL
Andy Warhol became probably one of the most famous artists within the Pop Art movement well certainly in America. He was Obsessed with fame , celebrity, money, consumerism and death. He knew that we also would consume this idea and it fascinated him. Culture and mass production were his tools that he used to apply to his art. Nowadays we have the internet and this can be seen as another way to mass produce/distribute art. Its an easy way to get your images out there to a huge following of viewers.
Warhol's death and disaster series was based on car crash photos blown up and then screen printed on canvases. He was so fascinated by death that that he made a whole series of these screen prints and also a series on different electric chairs from different states in America. He knew that the consumer of his art also shared his morbid fascination of death. (The Gaze) IE The idea of us liking to watch, its like the idea of us being fascinated by our own mortality.
Exert from the Andy Warhol Diaries:-
Wednesday, November 24, 1976-Vancouver-New York
BRIT ART
1990s To Now
This was not an art movement as such, as the main thing that most of them had in common was that they came from Britain. Most certainly in this country we can say that it is the most widely viewed art and that it is the most controversial art from this time period. The YBA'S, (young British Artists) as they were known who's work can be seen as disparate, they used both old and new together. They have been referred to as the young Turks of the art movement.
DAMIEN HIRST
Damien Hirst was one of the main artists involved in the Freeze exhibition in London's Docklands during the time of the Brit arts. He has been quoted as saying about the exhibition "the kind of exhibition everyone says they saw and hardly anyone did"
They used an old abandoned factory and converted it into a studio/gallery to show off their work.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/jun/01/art
He eventually won the Turner prize in 1995 for his piece "Mother and Child,Divided".
This piece of work is very controversial for its subject matter of a cow and calf that's been Bisected.
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=99670&tabview=text
MARCUS HARVEY
Marcus Harvey is known for his paintings based on photographic imagery, but his most talked about and infamous piece was Mira. It gained lots of press coverage in a bad light and was based on notorious child murderer Mira Hindly. The painting was painted using a child's hand prints and though he knew that it would shock, its the press that in doing what they do, then reiterated what he was trying to say. The sun newspaper got hold of the story and blew it up out of proportion but we can see this as them also using this image just as they knew it would sell newspapers. He is quoted as saying about the work :-
http://whitecube.com/artists/marcus_harvey/
The image was shown as part of the "Sensation" exhibition in September 1997 at the Royal Academy in London. Nearly all of this work was owned by Saatchi, Saatchi liked work that shocked. His earlier work was based on paintings based on home brew porn magazine "Readers Wives".
JAMES RIELLY
His work has often caused outrage with the media and the public alike. His most famous exhibition also happened to be in the same "sensation" exhibition as Marcus Harvey's Mira. The work was a random collection of family photographs left for the viewer to coax out and elaborate on a connecting narrative. As per usual the press misrepresented the work and wrote about images of children with pedophiles, when in fact they were just of members of the artists family. The faces that he had blacked out were of family members that had died and he couldn't remember what they had looked like.
http://www.jamesrielly.com/
JENNY SAVILLE
Her work mainly consists of images of the female form, though she has also looked into transgender imagery. When we look at her work it can be seen as how we explicitly look at the female form. She often makes her paintings larger than real life and she is trying to challenge the viewer into what female beauty represents.
Some of her work is self portrait using photographs and with her body pressed into glass.
Images taken from Google images.
I really like this kind of work and it reminds me of the Rubber Johnny music Video by Chris Cunningham. Maybe he used this as a starting point or he liked the work, but while Jenny's images are more sexual in nature, Chris's work is more body horror from a more masculine point of view.
Bellow is the full music video which i own along with the book.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7382676545570345084
DOUGLAS GORDON
His most famous piece of work is called 24 Hour Psycho and it is the film Psycho slowed down to a running time of 24 hours. This piece of work was a proposition It moved very very slowly and he was trying to show the definite difference between a photograph and a film. His film is now made up from many still images while the actual film is more fluid. The film was shown on two screens but with each two frames reduced to a second.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/may/17/douglas-gordon-artist http://www.theartsdesk.com/visual-arts/theartsdesk-qa-artist-douglas-gordon
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/mar/07/douglas-gordon-portrait-artist-k364-gagosian
SARAH LUCAS
Her most prolific work challenges street slang used to describe women. Instead of anger at attitudes towards women she used humor to display her reaction to what she felt was important to her. A lot of her work uses everyday objects in a humorous way.
I have heard her work described as :-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A6641318
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/aipe/sarah_lucas.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/video/2011/oct/13/frieze-art-fair-sarah-lucas-video
TRACY ENIM
Tracy Enim is probably one of the most famous of the female artists in this group. Lots have been written about her and her personal life and she comes across as quite an abrasive character. She has in the past been quoted as saying that she:-
This work is not about who she slept with sexually though no doubt she added their names too but rather who she had slept with IE next to in bed. Her brothers name is there as is her husbands. A lot of her work especially her earlier stuff involved the use of stitching, quilting and was text heavy. It can be seen as work about herself and taken from a personal female perspective, as is the same with a lot of female artists. Sadly the tent was destroyed in a fire in the warehouse that it was stored in.
The Piece "My Bed" was made at a time when she was suffering from clinical depression. We do not often see this side of women and the idea of showing your personal things to such a degree was considered shocking at the time.
For some reason we as viewers still seem to have a problem with seeing real objects in a gallery space but this was done long before as in Dechamps "The Fountain" way back in 1917.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2073970/Tracey-Emin-Uproar-Royal-Academy-artist-Professor-Drawing.html
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/tracey_emin.htm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/8517013/Tracey-Emin-Love-Is-What-You-Want-Hayward-Gallery-review.html
THE CHAPMAN BROTHERS
They are sometimes referred to as the bad boys of art. They have tried their hand at many different forms of media. They can be seen as two little boys having fun but there work has a serious edge to it.
They have used sculpture, model work, painting and many other forms of media to get across their art.
Below is an extract taken from The Telegraph website and was wrote by Richard Dorment.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/8646040/The-Chapman-Brothers-Jake-or-Dinos-Chapman-at-the-White-Cube-review.html
This kind of body shock imagery reminds me of the film Society, its a late 80s film that i remember seeing and really liking at the time. The film poster and the trailer below and a couple of images i managed to find in Google.
On watching the trailer again now it all looks very dated and 80's but the film has stuck in my mind every since i watched it and it was very ahead of its time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDHzfyiZE_A
The Chapman brothers are probably most famous though for buying and then the defacing of a couple of Goya's prints. They have challenged the idea that art is sacred, why is it that we are precious about art?
Does this still make the original after its been changed art anymore? Or does it just turn the image into a commodity that can be sold and passed around collectors for large sums of money. There can be seen as a lot of intelligence within their work and on a personal level i really like their style though they can sometimes be seen as their own worst enemies.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3593618/Inspired-vandalism.html
http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue8/goya.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/aug/03/jake-dinos-chapman-childrens-art
PHOTOGRAPHY
This section is not a history of photography but rather a look at key works and some important photographers.
The above image changed everything in the art world. It showed us that we could take images mechanically rather than manually make images. It has been said to have an exposure of around 8 hours long and if you can see a clear version of this image you could see that there are two suns in the image as it took that long to make this photograph. It was taken by a photographer known as Joseph
Nicephore Niépce.
Sadly he died suddenly in 1833 and none of his pioneering inventions were ever recognized.
LOUIS DAGUERRE
Louis Daguerre was responsible for the first ever photograph of a human being. This image took with an exposure time of around ten minutes shows the Boulevard De Temple in Paris around 1938.
If we look closely in the bottom left hand corner of the photograph you can see the image of a man having his shoes shined. The boulevard would have been busy at the time this was taken, but as everyone including horse drawn carriages are moving quick they didn't register on the photograph. The man and the shoe shiner are the only people keeping reasonably still enough to be caught on film.
Images taken from the below website.
Another of his most well known images is of this still life.
This image has a really nice Gothic feel to it and to say it was taken so long ago, the lighting is perfect for an image of this kind.
HENRY FOX TALBOT
Born in Dorset in 1800, William Henry Fox Talbot became known as a great pioneer of photography. He was also a mathematician an astronomer and an archeologist. He went onto invent and develop the three key areas of photography. These were of course developing, fixing and the printing of an image. After he discovered the positive and negative aspects of photography, it then allowed him to keep reproducing images from the same negative over and over again.
This process enabled people to share images and really allowed us to see more of the world around us. It was a very important step in the history of photography. Before this process people didn't really know what other parts of the world looked like, as they could only go of drawings/paintings of things or listen to descriptions.
To most people this is what they thought a rhinocerous looked like until the first photographs emerged of them. This image is of course a very elaborate interpretation of what one actually looks like, but we know now that they do not quite look like that and that the artist had taken a few liberties in his depiction of the beast.
This is a typical image of a rhinocerous that we think of today. Below though is a photograph of an Indian Rhino and you can see when you compare this image to the Rhino print, were the artist has elaborated his version of what a Rhino looked like.
"THE CAMERA NEVER LIES".
The above statement is a lie within itself. In the first instance we can never actually take a photograph of what we see, as when we press the shutter, what we saw has already happened seconds before. Also the view through the camera is not what our eyes see but rather a small frame within our view, because of this we don't get to see in a photograph the whole picture/story and this can be used to create a false view of what is happening or what is actually there.
I found a great photography time line from the website bellow. There will be a couple of missing links but on the whole this is quite comprehensive.
http://photo.net/history/timeline
Time line from the above website.
ancient times: Camera obscuras used to form images on walls in darkened rooms; image formation via a pinhole
16th century: Brightness and clarity of camera obscuras improved by enlarging the hole inserting a telescope lens
17th century: Camera obscuras in frequent use by artists and made portable in the form of sedan chairs
1727: Professor J. Schulze mixes chalk, nitric acid, and silver in a flask; notices darkening on side of flask exposed to sunlight. Accidental creation of the first photo-sensitive compound.
1800: Thomas Wedgwood makes "sun pictures" by placing opaque objects on leather treated with silver nitrate; resulting images deteriorated rapidly, however, if displayed under light stronger than from candles.
1816: Nicéphore Niépce combines the camera obscura with photosensitive paper
1826: Niépce creates a permanent image
1834: Henry Fox Talbot creates permanent (negative) images using paper soaked in silver chloride and fixed with a salt solution. Talbot created positive images by contact printing onto another sheet of paper.
1837: Louis Daguerre creates images on silver-plated copper, coated with silver iodide and "developed" with warmed mercury; Daguerre is awarded a state pension by the French government in exchange for publication of methods and the rights by other French citizens to use the Daguerreotype process.
1841: Talbot patents his process under the name "calotype".
1851: Frederick Scott Archer, a sculptor in London, improves photographic resolution by spreading a mixture of collodion (nitrated cotton dissolved in ether and alcoohol) and chemicals on sheets of glass. Wet plate collodion photography was much cheaper than daguerreotypes, the negative/positive process permitted unlimited reproductions, and the process was published but not patented.
1853: Nadar (Felix Toumachon) opens his portrait studio in Paris
1854: Adolphe Disderi develops carte-de-visite photography in Paris, leading to worldwide boom in portrait studios for the next decade
1855: Beginning of stereoscopic era
1855-57: Direct positive images on glass (ambrotypes) and metal (tintypes or ferrotypes) popular in the US.
1861: Scottish physicist James Clerk-Maxwell demonstrates a color photography system involving three black and white photographs, each taken through a red, green, or blue filter. The photos were turned into lantern slides and projected in registration with the same color filters. This is the "color separation" method.
1861-65: Mathew Brady and staff (mostly staff) covers the American Civil War, exposing 7000 negatives
1868: Ducas de Hauron publishes a book proposing a variety of methods for color photography.
1870: Center of period in which the US Congress sent photographers out to the West. The most famous images were taken by William Jackson and Tim O'Sullivan.
1871: Richard Leach Maddox, an English doctor, proposes the use of an emulsion of gelatin and silver bromide on a glass plate, the "dry plate" process.
1877: Eadweard Muybridge, born in England as Edward Muggridge, settles "do a horse's four hooves ever leave the ground at once" bet among rich San Franciscans by time-sequenced photography of Leland Stanford's horse.
1878: Dry plates being manufactured commercially.
1880: George Eastman, age 24, sets up Eastman Dry Plate Company in Rochester, New York. First half-tone photograph appears in a daily newspaper, the New York Graphic.
1888: First Kodak camera, containing a 20-foot roll of paper, enough for 100 2.5-inch diameter circular pictures.
1889: Improved Kodak camera with roll of film instead of paper
1890: Jacob Riis publishes How the Other Half Lives, images of tenament life in New york City
1900: Kodak Brownie box roll-film camera introduced.
1902: Alfred Stieglitz organizes "Photo Secessionist" show in New York City
1906: Availability of panchromatic black and white film and therefore high quality color separation color photography. J.P. Morgan finances Edward Curtis to document the traditional culture of the North American Indian.
1907: First commercial color film, the Autochrome plates, manufactured by Lumiere brothers in France
1909: Lewis Hine hired by US National Child Labor Committee to photograph children working mills.
1914: Oscar Barnack, employed by German microscope manufacturer Leitz, develops camera using the modern 24x36mm frame and sprocketed 35mm movie film.
1917: Nippon Kogaku K.K., which will eventually become Nikon, established in Tokyo.
1921: Man Ray begins making photograms ("rayographs") by placing objects on photographic paper and exposing the shadow cast by a distant light bulb; Eugegrave;ne Atget, aged 64, assigned to photograph the brothels of Paris
1924: Leitz markets a derivative of Barnack's camera commercially as the "Leica", the first high quality 35mm camera.
1925: André Kertész moves from his native Hungary to Paris, where he begins an 11-year project photographing street life
1928: Albert Renger-Patzsch publishes The World is Beautiful, close-ups emphasizing the form of natural and man-made objects; Rollei introduces the Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex producing a 6x6 cm image on rollfilm.; Karl Blossfeldt publishes Art Forms in Nature
1931: Development of strobe photography by Harold ("Doc") Edgerton at MIT
1932: Inception of Technicolor for movies, where three black and white negatives were made in the same camera under different filters; Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, Edward Weston, et al, form Group f/64 dedicated to "straight photographic thought and production".; Henri Cartier-Bresson buys a Leica and begins a 60-year career photographing people; On March 14, George Eastman, aged 77, writes suicide note--"My work is done. Why wait?"--and shoots himself.
1933: Brassaï publishes Paris de nuit
1934: Fuji Photo Film founded. By 1938, Fuji is making cameras and lenses in addition to film.
1935: Farm Security Administration hires Roy Stryker to run a historical section. Stryker would hire Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, et al. to photograph rural hardships over the next six years. Roman Vishniac begins his project of the soon-to-be-killed-by-their-neighbors Jews of Central and Eastern Europe.
1936: Development of Kodachrome, the first color multi-layered color film; development of Exakta, pioneering 35mm single-lens reflex (SLR) camera
World War II:
If i were to pick out some highlights from this list then they would be of Man Ray and Henri Cartier-Besson. Of course there are plenty of other photographers that have contributed to the history of photography but there are that many it would be unwise for me to even try and list them all.
Intead i will show some of my favorate images and state who the photographer was.
These are just a selection of works and images that i really like and get inspired by and i that the photographers themselves are all masters of their game
ESSAY
Introduction.
This essay is about
evaluation of two of the most iconic images from the last 100 years of
photography and it is divided into three main parts. To understand what this
essay is setting out to achieve we must first define what the word iconic means
and secondly explain what the term “documentary photography” actually relates
to. On the understanding these two facets we can then begin to evaluate each of
the two images in isolation of each other. Then finally in summing up we could
compare any similarities that these two images might share, in regard to them
both being from the same genre.
Secondly, What is “documentary photography”? This type of photography refers to images that are a true representations of people, places, or events within history that are factual and that have not been doctored or altered. Whenever we take a photograph we capture that moment and freeze time, the image therefore that we create is a representation of that particular moment. How honest that image is of that moment is mainly due to how much of the scene we have managed to capture. Photographs by nature cannot show feelings, but they can give a general idea or a brief look at our outward emotions that we choose to show. We could have an image of a woman crying for instance but this does not necessarily show us why the woman is crying, only that she is. It could be that she is crying because she is extremely sad or it could be that she is crying because she overcome with joy. It is only when we see the whole of an image, that is, with the woman in context with her surroundings, that we can begin to get a better understanding of the meaning as a whole. After watching a recent video about documentary photography it can be best summed up by saying that the final image is a result of something that the photographer sees and how they define it(3).
Image one.
Visually an image can tell the viewer a lot about the subject that it depicts, but in her choice of getting in close for this image we are unable to learn much about Florence Thompson's surroundings ( unless of course you have seen the other images from this set). This actually works in favour when reading this image as it allows us to see the plight of the Thompson's through the depiction of the mother. She has a weathered face, tattered clothes, dirty nails and looks out toward the distance pensively. It allows us not to be distracted by any background features and emphasises her desperate situation.
If we examine the photograph more closely we can read many things into the interpretation of this image. It has been described as a “Madonna For The Bitter Age”(5). This is a strong tittle to suggest
but possibly one that fits the image perfectly. The Madonna in art terms usually describes or depicts the virgin Mary and she can normally be shown to be holding an image of baby Jesus. It is an image that has been used again and again by many artists throughout history. A great number of examples of this type of image were made during the Byzantine art period in the middle ages. One of the more famous images that depict the mother and child was by the artist Raphael.
If we compare both images it is clear to see why Lange's image has been described and compared to images of the Madonna and child. In both images the “Mother” looks away from the viewer therefore avoiding “The Gaze”(7). This allows us to linger and scrutinise the image without feeling guilt at the subject because she does not look back at us. It does not create a two way conversation between subject and viewer. Also of note is the composition in both images where by we only see a small area around the subjects and that the images are presented in a portrait format.
Taken as a set of images, Lange's photographs of Florence Thompson and her children show us just how bleak living during that period must have been. But as a single image it allows us, as viewers to show empathy for her. We feel for her plight and the desperation of her circumstances. Lange herself was also a mother and the connection she must have felt towards her subject shows in the tenderness of the set of images that she took on that day.
The following quote is taken from an essay that Dorothea Lange wrote in 1960, The Assignment I’ll Never Forget.(8)
“ I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was 32. She said they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children had killed. She had just sold the tyres from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”
Image two.
V J Day in Times Square, New York City, 15 August 1945 By Alfred Eisenstaedt.
As an introduction to the next photograph we first must find out a little bit about the photographer himself. It is of his employment that we are most interested in here for the purpose of this essay. Albert Eisenstaedt was one of the first four photographers to be employed and work for Life magazine. He was there right from the beginning in 1936 until right at the very end of the publication. He amassed a huge volume of photographic work and made 86 covers for Life magazine and contributed to more than 2,500 picture stories. Eisenstaedt became synonymous with a candid style of documentary photography and was known for not carrying lots of equipment around with him. His motto was to “keep it simple”. It has been said that “he was able to shoot anything that moved,” while only taking few images to get the shot that he wanted. He was very certain of his skills as a photographer(10).
If we look closely at the photograph and try to read it we can ascertain that many different details
come to light. Everyone around the couple in the image are smiling, people are happy, its a time of jubilation, a celebration. The nurse in the image has her right foot is raised. The raising of the foot when a woman is being kissed is known as “Foot Popping”(11) and is a sign of trust on the female part based on her trusting the stronger male to keep her upright.
“I was walking through the crowds on V J Day looking for pictures. I noticed a sailor coming my way. He was grabbing every female he could find and kissing them all – young girls and old ladies alike.... The sailor came along, grabbed the nurse, and bent down to kiss her. Now if this girl hadn't been a nurse, if she'd been dressed in dark clothes, I wouldn't have had a picture.” Alfred Eisenstaedt(14).
Semiotics. a sign or representation that stands for its object by virtue of a resemblance or analogy to it.
So basically it boils down to Icons depicted a person that we worshiped, Jesus, Mary, God etc, and an Idol we worshiped that item itself.
The book of Kells is an example of an idol.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08614b.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Kells
http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/A699023
The book the name of the rose is an interesting historical murder mystery set around this time period and although it is fiction the author Umberto Eco has researched this period and filled it with a lot of fact.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsjKsl1bY0Y
Just looking at the film trailer above makes me glad they don't use that awful voice over anymore in modern trailers.
GOTHIC ART
This was a form of Romanesque art from around the middle of the 12 century. It is thought to have been a movement that was founded in France and eventually it spread to the whole of Europe. A lot of media from this period that relates to Gothic art are sculpture, panel painting, stained glass and fresco's.This kind of art continued until around the late 15th century.
Giovanni del Biondo was a 14th century painter from Italy of the Gothic and early Renaissance period.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_art
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/mgot/hd_mgot.htm
Images from Google Images.
RAPHAEL
Born in Urbino to a court painter farther Giovanni Santi. His earlier body of work was influenced by Pietro Perugino that he undoubtedly learned about from his farther.
From around 1500 to 1508 he worked around central Italy but mainly in Florence and became well know for his portraits and as a painter of Madonnas.
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/after-raphael-the-madonna-and-child
This is an interesting painting to look at now because of modern technology it has been X-Ray ed and a landscape has been discovered in the background. So there is a possibility that the black background was not originally intended but was painted in at a later date.
http://viewfromthebow.blogspot.com/2011/01/landscape-discovered-in-raphael.html
This picture shows the use of perspective that was not used until around this time and could possibly show the early existence of a camera obscure. The book The Secret Knowledge by David Hockney goes into detail of the use of early cameras and is a really interesting argument for this theory.
http://www.koopfilms.com/hockney/intro.html
BRUEGEL
He is sometimes referred to as the "Peasant Bruegel" for his works depicting peasant life such as The Peasant Wedding Feast.
RENAISSANCE ART
Artists from around this time period started to perceive the world around them differently. This was due partly to an explosion of culture. People started to record events differently and look at things in a new way. There are three periods in Renaissance history: Early, High and Late.
LEONARDO DE VINCI
Leonardo De Vinci is probably the most talked about of the Renaissance artists. He is often referred to as the Renaissance man because he had a great deal of knowledge about many different things. He was interested in Mathematics, Geology and he was fascinated with how the human body worked as well as being an artist and an inventor, he was trying to find solutions to things that fascinated him.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/leonardo/
His most well known piece of work is probably the Mona Lisa. A lot of the power of this painting is the way in which he painted the eyes, as they follow you. This is sometimes known at the gaze.
The text bellow was took from the following website and gives a good description of what the gaze can mean.
http://artandpopularculture.com/Gaze
The gaze can be characterized by who is doing the looking:
http://www.thedailytechnews.com/mona-lisa-a-self-portrait-of-da-vinci-065.html/
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-09/07/content_6683599.htm
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/leonardo-da-vincis-mona-lisa-self-portrait/story?id=9662394#.TsFfD_K2VzI
His most accomplished piece though was undoubtedly The Last Supper and is considered by many critics to be his best work. It is one of the most studied pieces of art around today and has sold more posters in reprints of anything that he ever painted.
http://www.davincilife.com/lastsupper.html
He led a very eventful and fruitful life and was like a modern day celebrity in his time. His life was up and down, in fact most of the artists from around this time led colorful lives. After his death a lot of his work disappeared and is lost to us now. It is estimated that only around 50% of his work is known to us.
SANDRO BOTTICELLI
This is one of Botticelli's most famous and recognizable pieces of work, The Birth Of Venus. A lot of Renaissance paintings were not about religion as such but instead depicted more ancient mythical themes and stories. Showing nudity at this time was deemed fine but as long as it was shown in context.
http://www.sandrobotticelli.net/biography.html
TITIAN
Titian lived for a long time compared to other artists from around the same time. His paintings show how time changed during his lifetime and how his skills progressed from Artisan (lower craftsman) to by the end of his career, being fit to be in the company of the king every day. A lot paintings by famous artists from around this time became assets to whoever owned them IE wealthy people or the church. People saw these paintings as powerful and in the case of the church, it brought people into the church, so they could view these grand images. These kind of paintings became very collectible amongst the rich and for the church. If we put someone like Titian into context then as a celebrity of there time then they would be like today's equivalent of someone like David Beckham, people would have paid to see him. We can say that high art had a kind of celebrity status attached to it and that low art was something that you or i would have seen, as it was not considered worthy.
His painting David and Goliath was damaged by water when there was a fire in the seminary next door to where it was being exhibited.This and two other Titian paintings were damaged, (Abraham and Isaac and Cain and Abel).
http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/7299
Mark Twain was supposed to have said that Titian's Mary Magdalene was the most horrid piece of art from the whole of the Renaissance period. I guess that there have always been art critics throughout time.
VELAZQUEZ
Velazquez was a court painter in Spain, he painted for the Spanish king. A lot of his work can be considered as " breaking the fourth wall".
He painted a lot of pictures of dwarfs and these paintings show a tenderness to his subject matter. In fact we can say that these were his most humanitarian pieces of work. He was said to be fascinated by dwarfs.
Around the time of the late Renaissance period we could see mannerism becoming more evident in paintings, mannerism is an exaggeration of the style.
MICHELANGELO
We probably know Michelangelo most for his decorative paintings in the Sistine Chapel, but he was also a sculptur. This is a phenomenal achievement by any standards. As we look at this artwork now, we can see lots of hidden meanings and messages in this piece of work. If we look closely at one part of this piece we can see what looks like a human brian and this is said to be an in joke in that he was trying to say " God is in the mind of man". We think that art today can shock or be challenging but artists have been doing this for centuries.
CARAVAGGIO
Caravaggio's work has a dark and edgy tone to it, he moved away from exaggeration and onto more of a realistic kind of look. Some of his paintings have a very dark look to them, not just in content but also in the use of light and shadow.
I personally love Caravaggio's work and on a trip to Rome a couple of years ago i managed to see some of his work first hand. Its amazing to actually see that close up they do look so dark he uses lots of black and deep tones in his painting. He led a very eventful life and some say that the above painting can be viewed as a self portrait and its a penath for his lifestyle. He famously went on the run after a duel was said to have gone wrong but on his way back he caught Typhoid and died.
The lighting in his works even inspires the modern movie makers of today and you can say that nearly every one of his paintings would have caused quite a scandal, at the time when they were revealed.
caravaggio.com
ROCOCO
This is a style of art that can be best summed up by the word....Busy. It is certainly a style that nowadays at least is an acquired taste. It is referred to as chocolate box style painting. It was applied to almost everything IE painting, architecture and sculpture.
VERMEER
Little is known of Vemeer, that is to say of his lifestyle or his career. In fact there are about only 36 pieces of art that we can accredit to him. The work that we know as his though, is held in high regard. The film The Girl With A Pearl Earring staring Colin Firth as Vermeer is based on the book by Tracy Chevalier and uses a colour scheme based on his painting style. Its also named after the painting of the same name, this is probably one of his most recognised piece of work, well this and The Milkmaid.
The detail and use of light in the milkmaid is extraordinary and he also liked to paint scenes of everyday life. The people he painted weren't poor but just normal people, going about their everyday lives.
GEORGE STUBBS
Its worth just a mention here the artist George Stubbs who was known for his paintings of horses that he painted for the rich and famous.
NEOCLASSICISM
This is a western art movement that started around the 1760's. We can group music, literature, architecture, paintings and theatre into this movement. Buildings like the bank of England were built around this time. Art started to become valued in this time period and lots of art academies were set up. A good example of an academy painting is the Birth Of Venus By Alexandre Cabanel.
ROMANTICISM
The romantics liked beauty and the sublime. Where the sublime is something that is bigger than us, something that can be awe inspiring. Like the feeling you get when you climb a mountain or when you look over the edge of a great height.
THEODORE GERICAULT
The raft of Medusa is a painting by the artist Theodore Gericault and is based on a famous french navel tragedy. It depicts the madness endured by survivor's of the French frigate Meduse that ran aground in around 1816. Of the 147 people said to have set off on the raft only around 15 survived. They were said to have endured horrific scenes of starvation, dehydration, cannibalism and madness, this was a national French Scandal.
JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID
The death of Morat is a famous painting by Jacques-Louis David, and has been described by some as being one of the first modernist paintings.
I really love this painting and the story behind it. The painting shows us Jean-Paul Morat lying dead after being murded. The piece of paper he's holding in his hand reads (translated from French), i am just to unhappy to deserve your kindness. His murderer claimed "i killed one man to save 100 000. Subject matter aside it is a beautiful painting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Marat
REMBRANDT
Rembrandts work is known for its artificial use of light. He painted lots of commission work for the rich and famous. One of these paintings was the Night Watch.
The story goes that the people that commissioned this piece hated it upon being presented it. Is this true, well we will never know but lots of people debate this subject. Like modern art there will always be critics willing to savage a piece of work that either they don't understand or just don't like.
http://www.rembrandtpainting.net/rembrandt_van_rijn_legend_and_man.htm
ROMANTICISIM
The whole point of romanticism was to show something that was bigger than us as human beings. It placed emphasis on our emotions, like awe. It was in direct response to the scientific, social and political agenda's of the time.
THOMAS COLE
Bellow is Thomas Coles four piece paintings from the series The Voyage Of Man and it depicts the four stages of mans life. In the paintings we follow a man on the river of life being guided by an angel.
DAVID CASPER
David Casper or to give him his full name David Friedrich Casper was a German landscape artist from 1774 to around 1840. He was considered to be one of the most important painters from Germany's history. But towards the end of his life he became known as an eccentric and someone that was out of touch with the times.
GOYA
Goya is often referred to as The farther of modern art. His artwork changed the way that other artists viewed and painted the world around them. His work is world renowned and a lot of it is dark and forbidding, especially his later paintings and etchings. His work output spans around 60 years and is a realistic view of the world at that time. We could say that modern art started as a reaction to photography. People didn't like the idea of a machine being used to make images and the camera had a massive impact on culture as a whole.
His painting, shootings was a reaction to the French invasion of Spain and a lot of his paintings and etchings show violence in a then unheard of realistic manner. His most brutal work is possibly the etchings entitled Los Desastres De La Guerra.
These etchings show how horrific war is and he made them after seeing a lot of brutality during the war. This must have affected him so much and it really shows in these etchings.
Impressionism can be seen as a direct response to photography. Camera's were starting to push image making into realistic areas but painters like Turner were already trying to do this through painting.
TURNER
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08614b.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Kells
http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/A699023
 |
| Image From The Book Of Kells |
 |
| The Book Of Kells |
The book the name of the rose is an interesting historical murder mystery set around this time period and although it is fiction the author Umberto Eco has researched this period and filled it with a lot of fact.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsjKsl1bY0Y
Just looking at the film trailer above makes me glad they don't use that awful voice over anymore in modern trailers.
GOTHIC ART
This was a form of Romanesque art from around the middle of the 12 century. It is thought to have been a movement that was founded in France and eventually it spread to the whole of Europe. A lot of media from this period that relates to Gothic art are sculpture, panel painting, stained glass and fresco's.This kind of art continued until around the late 15th century.
 |
| Gothic Sculpture |
 |
| Late Gothic Sculpture |
 |
| Late Gothic Fresco |
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/mgot/hd_mgot.htm
Images from Google Images.
RAPHAEL
Born in Urbino to a court painter farther Giovanni Santi. His earlier body of work was influenced by Pietro Perugino that he undoubtedly learned about from his farther.
 |
| Raphael Self Portrait |
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/after-raphael-the-madonna-and-child
http://viewfromthebow.blogspot.com/2011/01/landscape-discovered-in-raphael.html
http://www.koopfilms.com/hockney/intro.html
He is sometimes referred to as the "Peasant Bruegel" for his works depicting peasant life such as The Peasant Wedding Feast.
 |
| The Peasant Wedding Feast |
Artists from around this time period started to perceive the world around them differently. This was due partly to an explosion of culture. People started to record events differently and look at things in a new way. There are three periods in Renaissance history: Early, High and Late.
LEONARDO DE VINCI
Leonardo De Vinci is probably the most talked about of the Renaissance artists. He is often referred to as the Renaissance man because he had a great deal of knowledge about many different things. He was interested in Mathematics, Geology and he was fascinated with how the human body worked as well as being an artist and an inventor, he was trying to find solutions to things that fascinated him.
His most well known piece of work is probably the Mona Lisa. A lot of the power of this painting is the way in which he painted the eyes, as they follow you. This is sometimes known at the gaze.
 | |
| Mona Lisa |
The text bellow was took from the following website and gives a good description of what the gaze can mean.
http://artandpopularculture.com/Gaze
The gaze can be characterized by who is doing the looking:
- the spectator's gaze: the spectator who is viewing the Art This is often us, the audience of a certain art.
- intro-diegetic gaze, where one person depicted in the text who is looking at another person or object in the text, such as another character looking at another,
- extra-exegetic gaze, where the person depicted in the art or text looks at the spectator, such as an aside, or an acknowledgement of the fourth wall, or
- the camera's gaze, which is the gaze of the camera, and is often equated to the director's gaze.
 |
| Self Portrait ? |
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-09/07/content_6683599.htm
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/leonardo-da-vincis-mona-lisa-self-portrait/story?id=9662394#.TsFfD_K2VzI
His most accomplished piece though was undoubtedly The Last Supper and is considered by many critics to be his best work. It is one of the most studied pieces of art around today and has sold more posters in reprints of anything that he ever painted.
 | ||
| The Last Supper |
He led a very eventful and fruitful life and was like a modern day celebrity in his time. His life was up and down, in fact most of the artists from around this time led colorful lives. After his death a lot of his work disappeared and is lost to us now. It is estimated that only around 50% of his work is known to us.
SANDRO BOTTICELLI
 | |
| The Birth Of Venus |
http://www.sandrobotticelli.net/biography.html
TITIAN
 |
| Titian Self Portrait |
 |
| David and Goliath By Titian |
http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/7299
 |
| Mary Magdalene By Titian |
VELAZQUEZ
Velazquez was a court painter in Spain, he painted for the Spanish king. A lot of his work can be considered as " breaking the fourth wall".
 |
| Dwarf sitting on the floor |
Around the time of the late Renaissance period we could see mannerism becoming more evident in paintings, mannerism is an exaggeration of the style.
MICHELANGELO
 |
| Sistine Chapel |
 | |
| David By Michelangelo |
 |
| Judith Beheading Holofernes By Caravaggio |
 | |
| David And Goliath By Caravaggio |
 | |
| Sleeping Cupid By Caravaggio |
caravaggio.com
ROCOCO
This is a style of art that can be best summed up by the word....Busy. It is certainly a style that nowadays at least is an acquired taste. It is referred to as chocolate box style painting. It was applied to almost everything IE painting, architecture and sculpture.
 |
| Rococo Style Chairs |
 |
| Rococo Ceiling |
 |
| Rococo Painting |
Little is known of Vemeer, that is to say of his lifestyle or his career. In fact there are about only 36 pieces of art that we can accredit to him. The work that we know as his though, is held in high regard. The film The Girl With A Pearl Earring staring Colin Firth as Vermeer is based on the book by Tracy Chevalier and uses a colour scheme based on his painting style. Its also named after the painting of the same name, this is probably one of his most recognised piece of work, well this and The Milkmaid.
 | |
| The Girl With The Pearl Earring |
 | |
| The Milkmaid |
GEORGE STUBBS
Its worth just a mention here the artist George Stubbs who was known for his paintings of horses that he painted for the rich and famous.
NEOCLASSICISM
This is a western art movement that started around the 1760's. We can group music, literature, architecture, paintings and theatre into this movement. Buildings like the bank of England were built around this time. Art started to become valued in this time period and lots of art academies were set up. A good example of an academy painting is the Birth Of Venus By Alexandre Cabanel.
 | |
| Birth Of Venus |
The romantics liked beauty and the sublime. Where the sublime is something that is bigger than us, something that can be awe inspiring. Like the feeling you get when you climb a mountain or when you look over the edge of a great height.
THEODORE GERICAULT
The raft of Medusa is a painting by the artist Theodore Gericault and is based on a famous french navel tragedy. It depicts the madness endured by survivor's of the French frigate Meduse that ran aground in around 1816. Of the 147 people said to have set off on the raft only around 15 survived. They were said to have endured horrific scenes of starvation, dehydration, cannibalism and madness, this was a national French Scandal.
 |
| The Raft Of Medusa |
The death of Morat is a famous painting by Jacques-Louis David, and has been described by some as being one of the first modernist paintings.
 |
| The Death Of Morat |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Marat
REMBRANDT
Rembrandts work is known for its artificial use of light. He painted lots of commission work for the rich and famous. One of these paintings was the Night Watch.
 | |
| Night Watch |
The story goes that the people that commissioned this piece hated it upon being presented it. Is this true, well we will never know but lots of people debate this subject. Like modern art there will always be critics willing to savage a piece of work that either they don't understand or just don't like.
http://www.rembrandtpainting.net/rembrandt_van_rijn_legend_and_man.htm
ROMANTICISIM
The whole point of romanticism was to show something that was bigger than us as human beings. It placed emphasis on our emotions, like awe. It was in direct response to the scientific, social and political agenda's of the time.
THOMAS COLE
Bellow is Thomas Coles four piece paintings from the series The Voyage Of Man and it depicts the four stages of mans life. In the paintings we follow a man on the river of life being guided by an angel.
 |
| Childhood |
 |
| Youth |
 | |
| Manhood |
 |
| Death |
DAVID CASPER
David Casper or to give him his full name David Friedrich Casper was a German landscape artist from 1774 to around 1840. He was considered to be one of the most important painters from Germany's history. But towards the end of his life he became known as an eccentric and someone that was out of touch with the times.
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| David Friedrich Casper |
Goya is often referred to as The farther of modern art. His artwork changed the way that other artists viewed and painted the world around them. His work is world renowned and a lot of it is dark and forbidding, especially his later paintings and etchings. His work output spans around 60 years and is a realistic view of the world at that time. We could say that modern art started as a reaction to photography. People didn't like the idea of a machine being used to make images and the camera had a massive impact on culture as a whole.
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| Shootings |
THE FIRST EVER KNOWN OR SURVIVING PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGE
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| First Known Photographic Image |
As art began to take notice of photography, its interesting to see how artists reacted to this. Exposure times were slow and its said to take around 8 hours to capture something like this.
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| Photographer's Studio |
TURNER
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| Fishermen At Sea By Turner |
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999996&workid=15008&searchid=11161
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| The Fifth Plague Of Egypt By Turner |
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| Damien Hirst Winning The Turner Prize In 1995 |
‘It’s amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw.’
– Damien Hirst’s acceptance speech, 1995
‘How anyone can consider a stuffed cow as art must lie even beyond the most illiterate mind. I fear you have smeared the great name of Turner with this “waste of space”.’
– Letter from a member of the public to Tate, November 1995
‘My sixteen-year-old daughter was at The Tate two weeks ago, as part of her A-Level Art course, and having seen this particular exhibit, has suffered nightmares, poor sleeping and cannot eat beef as it makes her feel sick.’
– Letter from a member of the public to Tate, December 1995
‘It’s going to be Hirst … he has done more for British art than any artist of his generation. To pass him over would be like the Booker Prize’s failure to recognise Martin Amis.’
– Richard Dorment, The Daily Telegraph, November 1995
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/turnerprize/history/1995.shtm
As we can see some people don't understand the nature of this competition and some winners have proven to be controversial. Art has always been good at dividing opinion.
CONSTABLE
We can say, if anything that Constable was famed for how well he painted the sky. His Career was a slow burner and it wasn't until he was in his forties that he began to gain recognition for his work and eventually at the age of 52 he was elected to the Royal Academy. His best work was painted around the areas he lived IE Suffolk and Hampstead. He was said to have worked exclusively out in the open , preferring to paint or sketch outside. There is a great sadness to his work.
http://www.john-constable.org/
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| Salisbury By Constable |
IMPRESSIONISM
Impressionism was an art movement that originated in paris around the 1870's. It takes its name from a painting by Monet called impression, soleil levant (impression, sunrise). It is said the critic Louis Leroy conned the term when giving the painting a satiric review. The style is known for its rapidly brash, brush strokes and the use of bright pure colours.
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| Impression, Soleil levant By Monet |
Manet is most remembered for his painting The Luncheon On The Grass. This painting caused huge outrage and shock when it was first shown in 1963. The idea of a naked woman with two fully clothed men at that time was considered an outrage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_déjeuner_sur_l'herbe
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| The Luncheon On The Grass By Manet |
MONET
Monet tried to exaggerate what he was seeing when he painted. He was trying to give us a sense of being there or an idea of what the feeling or emotions were like in that scene. In contrast a photograph is just an image took a fraction after something has actually happened. If we look at his water lilies paintings we can see that he was using bold brush stokes to try and show what the scene looked and the emotion it gave him. He was showing us the movement or lack of, reflections, the lighting and the mood.
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| Water Lilies 1906 Monet |
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| Water Lilies (The Clouds) 1903 Monet |
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| Water Lilies Green Reflection, Left Part 1916-1923 Monet |
BOUDIN
Eugene Boudin was a landscape painter who was born at Trouville in France. Light was one of the most important tools for Impresionist painters, and Boudin showed the skies of his paintings. He was known for this and was called " A Master Of The Sky".
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| Beach At Trouville By Boudin |
VAN GOGH
Van Gogh is well known for his sunflowers painting. Impressionism was not just about one type of art, it encapsulated lots of different ideas. When we think about impressionists we think of Monet or Van Gogh.
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| Still Life: Vase With Fifteen Sunflowers By Van Gogh |
http://www.vangoghgallery.com/
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| Starry Night By Van Gogh |
Degas tried to show movement in the human form in his drawings, it showed contour and an expression of movement. He liked to work mainly in pastels, though he used other mediums too, even sculpting in bronze.
http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/degas/
Nice documentary above about Degas.
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| The Dancing Class By Degas |
SURREALISM
Surrealism came after the Dada movement and they thought that there was a more natural way of making art, where as the Dada movement was more anti art. They wanted to tap into their ID. When we think of the word surreal we could use the word weird to describe this but that's not necessarily what it actually means. Surrealists based there ideas and followed the same principles as two well known physiologists, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and drew on the principles of the subconscious and UN-subconscious mind. Freud tried to psychoanalyze women but when we look now we can see that he often got this wrong.
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| ID, EGO, SUPER EGO. |
http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/a/personalityelem.htm
http://allpsych.com/psychology101/ego.html
The above websites go into more detail about Freud's theories but basically we can boil this down to the fact that every one is born with their ID. This works on the pleasure principle ie
Eat it
Kill it
Have sex with it.
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| Sigmund Freud |
SALVADOR DALI
Dali is the poster boy when we talk about surrealism, though others in this movement tried to discredit him. They thought of him as a buffoon and even Freud tried to discredited Dali's work.
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| Salvador Dali |
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| Dali 1 |
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| Dali 2 |
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| Dali 3 |
RAYMOND GEORGES YVES TANGUY
Tanguy's work has an instantly recognizable surreal look to it. He uses huge landscape type images but done in a way that makes them seem almost alien.They have a very organic look to them and they are filled with abstract shapes and objects. The paintings have a familiar feel to them but at the same time they are unusual and thought provoking.
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| Tanguy 1 |
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| Tanguy 2 |
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| Tanguy 3 |
A lot of surrealist imagry is based on the way some things can look like others. We can describe this by the use of the image below. It shows how a cloud could actually look like a teddy bear ie how a cloud can look like something totally different but at the same time instantly recognizable.
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| From The Film Amelie |
Surrealist Max Ernst pioneered the use of frottage in his work. It consists of rubbing soft pencil over paper placed onto the object or surface you want to get the texture from. He used to see strange shapes and images on his wooden floor and this was a way for him to try and record these shapes or images. His paintings then took on a mixed media image as he built them up around the textures.
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| Max Ernst 1 |
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| Max Ernst 2 |
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| Max Ernst 3 |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Ernst
http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=113
frot·tage
[fraw-tahzh] Show IPA
noun
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/frottage
1.
a technique in the visual arts of obtaining textural effects or images by rubbing lead, chalk, charcoal, etc., over paper laid on a granular or relief like surface. Compare rubbing ( def. 2 ) .
3.
the practice of getting sexual stimulation and satisfaction by rubbing against something, especially another person.
We only know of around 25 per cent of what our brain (mind) can do. I am a big believer in the phrase sleep on it, when we sleep our mind sorts everything out and organizes our thoughts and subconscious. In our lecture we then looked at automatic writing and automatic drawing were you try not thinking about what you are doing and try and let your pen or brush just make images without thinking. We then tried to draw each other without looking at the paper at all. This was fun but hard to try and not look at what we were doing.
(INSERT IMAGE)
http://www.fantasyarts.net/oppentea.html"Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table"
http://diary.wenxuecity.com/diary.php?id=0&yearID=2010&monthID=8&dayID=6&currdate=201008&pid=5350&page=1
The quote from above became known as the surrealists manifesto.
Other forms of art and literature used the surrealists form not just painters. There were the poets :-
Rimband
Baudelaire
Lautremot
They looked at what happens when things that don't belong together get put together, what happens to them. They also looked at the relationships between different objects. The idea of using images that could shock was something that the surrealist's were very interested in. We looked at two clips from surrealist films Un Chein Andalu and Le Sang Des Betes to show how they used shocking images to get there point across.
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| Un Chein Andalu |
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVbTEVfLksU
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| Le Sang Des Betes |
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFAUA8_mfXs
The shocking reaction to these to films is exactly what they wanted to achieve. In the case of the second film, we that is us as humans remove ourselves from the whole process when it comes to meat production. We don't like to think of how it is processed into something that we eat.
Surrealism more than any other art movement effected and had more impact than anything that had come before. It had a huge impact on the art we see today and its effect are long lasting.
POP ART
Pop art is a movement that started in the mid fifties in england and then around the late fifties in America. It drew its inspiration from all forms of media including :- mundane packaging (soup cans, soap boxes), television commercials, Hollywood and cinema icons, pop music and comic books. This was seen as low art and art critics were mortified at the thought of this kind of work being hung in galleries. Pop art started to show art in a whole new light and new ways of looking at things around us and how we could depict them.
http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=226
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| Peter Blake On The Balcony |
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| ST Peppers Album Cover |
ANDY WARHOL
Andy Warhol became probably one of the most famous artists within the Pop Art movement well certainly in America. He was Obsessed with fame , celebrity, money, consumerism and death. He knew that we also would consume this idea and it fascinated him. Culture and mass production were his tools that he used to apply to his art. Nowadays we have the internet and this can be seen as another way to mass produce/distribute art. Its an easy way to get your images out there to a huge following of viewers.
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| One Of Warhol's Death And Disaster Images |
Warhol's death and disaster series was based on car crash photos blown up and then screen printed on canvases. He was so fascinated by death that that he made a whole series of these screen prints and also a series on different electric chairs from different states in America. He knew that the consumer of his art also shared his morbid fascination of death. (The Gaze) IE The idea of us liking to watch, its like the idea of us being fascinated by our own mortality.
" In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minuets". Andy Warhol.
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| Andy Warhol |
Exert from the Andy Warhol Diaries:-
Wednesday, November 24, 1976-Vancouver-New York
" Got up at 7 am, in Vancouver and cabbed to the airport ($15 plus $5 tip, magazines, $5). This is the end of the trip to Seattle for the opening at the Seattle Art Museum there, then we'd gone to Los Angeles for Marisa Berenson's wedding to Jim Randall, then to Vancouver for my Ace Gallery show opening there. Nobody in Vancouver buys art, though-they're not interested in painting. Catherine Guinness didn't get edgy till the last day when she started this annoying thing the English do-asking me over and over, "what exactly is POP ART?" "
BRIT ART
1990s To Now
This was not an art movement as such, as the main thing that most of them had in common was that they came from Britain. Most certainly in this country we can say that it is the most widely viewed art and that it is the most controversial art from this time period. The YBA'S, (young British Artists) as they were known who's work can be seen as disparate, they used both old and new together. They have been referred to as the young Turks of the art movement.
DAMIEN HIRST
Damien Hirst was one of the main artists involved in the Freeze exhibition in London's Docklands during the time of the Brit arts. He has been quoted as saying about the exhibition "the kind of exhibition everyone says they saw and hardly anyone did"
They used an old abandoned factory and converted it into a studio/gallery to show off their work.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/jun/01/art
He eventually won the Turner prize in 1995 for his piece "Mother and Child,Divided".
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| Mother And Child Divided 1 |
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| Mother And Child Divided 2 |
This piece of work is very controversial for its subject matter of a cow and calf that's been Bisected.
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=99670&tabview=text
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| Hirst After Winning The Prize In 1995 |
Marcus Harvey is known for his paintings based on photographic imagery, but his most talked about and infamous piece was Mira. It gained lots of press coverage in a bad light and was based on notorious child murderer Mira Hindly. The painting was painted using a child's hand prints and though he knew that it would shock, its the press that in doing what they do, then reiterated what he was trying to say. The sun newspaper got hold of the story and blew it up out of proportion but we can see this as them also using this image just as they knew it would sell newspapers. He is quoted as saying about the work :-
“The whole point of the painting is the photograph. That photograph. The iconic power that has come to it as a result of years of obsessive media reproduction.”
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| Mira |
The image was shown as part of the "Sensation" exhibition in September 1997 at the Royal Academy in London. Nearly all of this work was owned by Saatchi, Saatchi liked work that shocked. His earlier work was based on paintings based on home brew porn magazine "Readers Wives".
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| Marcus Harvey Julie from Hull |
JAMES RIELLY
His work has often caused outrage with the media and the public alike. His most famous exhibition also happened to be in the same "sensation" exhibition as Marcus Harvey's Mira. The work was a random collection of family photographs left for the viewer to coax out and elaborate on a connecting narrative. As per usual the press misrepresented the work and wrote about images of children with pedophiles, when in fact they were just of members of the artists family. The faces that he had blacked out were of family members that had died and he couldn't remember what they had looked like.
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| Nobody somebody By James Rielly |
JENNY SAVILLE
Her work mainly consists of images of the female form, though she has also looked into transgender imagery. When we look at her work it can be seen as how we explicitly look at the female form. She often makes her paintings larger than real life and she is trying to challenge the viewer into what female beauty represents.
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| Passage By Jenny Saville |
Some of her work is self portrait using photographs and with her body pressed into glass.
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| Jenny Saville 1 |
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| Jenny Saville 2 |
Images taken from Google images.
I really like this kind of work and it reminds me of the Rubber Johnny music Video by Chris Cunningham. Maybe he used this as a starting point or he liked the work, but while Jenny's images are more sexual in nature, Chris's work is more body horror from a more masculine point of view.
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| Image From Rubber Johnny Video |
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| Image From Rubber Johnny Video |
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7382676545570345084
DOUGLAS GORDON
His most famous piece of work is called 24 Hour Psycho and it is the film Psycho slowed down to a running time of 24 hours. This piece of work was a proposition It moved very very slowly and he was trying to show the definite difference between a photograph and a film. His film is now made up from many still images while the actual film is more fluid. The film was shown on two screens but with each two frames reduced to a second.
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| 24 Hour Psycho By Douglas Gordon |
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/may/17/douglas-gordon-artist http://www.theartsdesk.com/visual-arts/theartsdesk-qa-artist-douglas-gordon
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| Douglas Gordon: Self-portrait as Kurt Cobain, as Andy Warhol, as Myra Hindley, as Marilyn Monroe, 1996 |
SARAH LUCAS
Her most prolific work challenges street slang used to describe women. Instead of anger at attitudes towards women she used humor to display her reaction to what she felt was important to her. A lot of her work uses everyday objects in a humorous way.
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| Sarah Lucas 1 |
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| Sarah Lucas 2 |
I have heard her work described as :-
" Bad jokes, badly told to the wrong audience"So as we can see it is not to everyone's taste, but then life would be a pretty boring place if it were. Personally i like the humor involved and they way she reuses old objects to create her art.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A6641318
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/aipe/sarah_lucas.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/video/2011/oct/13/frieze-art-fair-sarah-lucas-video
TRACY ENIM
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| Tracy Enim |
Tracy Enim is probably one of the most famous of the female artists in this group. Lots have been written about her and her personal life and she comes across as quite an abrasive character. She has in the past been quoted as saying that she:-
" Liked to bait men by punching them in the face".One of her most famous pieces of work was called " Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995
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| Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 |
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| Tracy Enim Quilting Piece |
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| My Bed By Tracy Enim |
For some reason we as viewers still seem to have a problem with seeing real objects in a gallery space but this was done long before as in Dechamps "The Fountain" way back in 1917.
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| The Fountain By Dechamp |
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2073970/Tracey-Emin-Uproar-Royal-Academy-artist-Professor-Drawing.html
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/tracey_emin.htm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/8517013/Tracey-Emin-Love-Is-What-You-Want-Hayward-Gallery-review.html
THE CHAPMAN BROTHERS
They are sometimes referred to as the bad boys of art. They have tried their hand at many different forms of media. They can be seen as two little boys having fun but there work has a serious edge to it.
They have used sculpture, model work, painting and many other forms of media to get across their art.
Below is an extract taken from The Telegraph website and was wrote by Richard Dorment.
"In the Nineties they were showing shop-window mannequins of naked children who had been genetically engineered to sprout adult genitals on the backs, foreheads, faces or thighs. At White Cube, the mutant kids are back again, but this time clothed in school uniforms and with the faces of dogs, ducks, elephants or bears. The little Nazi storm troopers whom we met when they turned the landscape in Hell into a human abattoir are resurrected in the basement gallery at White Cube Mason’s Yard in the form of life-size mannequins with the faces of worm-eaten corpses. Dressed to kill in chic black uniforms with smiley- face insignias on the arm bands, they have morphed into art lovers, inspecting a show of abstract sculpture of the sort the real Nazis would have banned. And whichever brother defaced plaster statues of the Virgin and saints at White Cube Hoxton Square was doing to religious images what the brothers have already done to Goya’s prints."It is from a review of their exhibition at the White Cube dated 18th July 2011.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/8646040/The-Chapman-Brothers-Jake-or-Dinos-Chapman-at-the-White-Cube-review.html
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| Chapman Brothers 1 |
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| Chapman Brothers 2 |
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| Chapman Brothers 3 |
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| Society Image 1 |
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| Society Image 2 |
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| Society Image 3 |
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| Society Film Poster |
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDHzfyiZE_A
The Chapman brothers are probably most famous though for buying and then the defacing of a couple of Goya's prints. They have challenged the idea that art is sacred, why is it that we are precious about art?
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| Defaced Goya Print |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3593618/Inspired-vandalism.html
http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue8/goya.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/aug/03/jake-dinos-chapman-childrens-art
PHOTOGRAPHY
This section is not a history of photography but rather a look at key works and some important photographers.
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| Niepce The First Known Surviving Photograph |
Nicephore Niépce.
Sadly he died suddenly in 1833 and none of his pioneering inventions were ever recognized.
LOUIS DAGUERRE
Louis Daguerre was responsible for the first ever photograph of a human being. This image took with an exposure time of around ten minutes shows the Boulevard De Temple in Paris around 1938.
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| Boulevard De Temple |
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| The Man Having His Shoes Shined |
http://www.petapixel.com/2010/10/27/first-ever-photograph-of-a-human-being/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/8898962/Louis-Daguerre-and-the-pioneers-of-photography.html
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| Daguerre Still Life |
HENRY FOX TALBOT
Born in Dorset in 1800, William Henry Fox Talbot became known as a great pioneer of photography. He was also a mathematician an astronomer and an archeologist. He went onto invent and develop the three key areas of photography. These were of course developing, fixing and the printing of an image. After he discovered the positive and negative aspects of photography, it then allowed him to keep reproducing images from the same negative over and over again.
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| Henry Fox Talbot |
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| Henry Fox Talbot Image 1 |
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| Henry Fox Talbot Image 2 |
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| Henry Fox Talbot Image 3 |
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| 1515 Indian Rhino Print By Albrecht Durer |
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| Rhino Image |
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| Indian Rhino |
"THE CAMERA NEVER LIES".
The above statement is a lie within itself. In the first instance we can never actually take a photograph of what we see, as when we press the shutter, what we saw has already happened seconds before. Also the view through the camera is not what our eyes see but rather a small frame within our view, because of this we don't get to see in a photograph the whole picture/story and this can be used to create a false view of what is happening or what is actually there.
I found a great photography time line from the website bellow. There will be a couple of missing links but on the whole this is quite comprehensive.
http://photo.net/history/timeline
Time line from the above website.
- Development of multi-layer color negative films
- Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Carl Mydans, and W. Eugene Smith cover the war for LIFE magazine
- 1947: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and David Seymour start the photographer-owned Magnum picture agency
- 1948: Hasselblad in Sweden offers its first medium-format SLR for commercial sale; Pentax in Japan introduces the automatic diaphragm; Polaroid sells instant black and white film
- 1949: East German Zeiss develops the Contax S, first SLR with an unreversed image in a pentaprism viewfinder
- 1955: Edward Steichen curates Family of Man exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art
- 1959: Nikon F introduced.
- 1960: Garry Winogrand begins photographing women on the streets of New York City.
- 1963: First color instant film developed by Polaroid; Instamatic released by Kodak; first purpose-built underwater introduced, the Nikonos
- 1970: William Wegman begins photographing his Weimaraner, Man Ray.
- 1972: 110-format cameras introduced by Kodak with a 13x17mm frame
- 1973: C-41 color negative process introduced, replacing C-22
- 1975: Nicholas Nixon takes his first annual photograph of his wife and her sisters: "The Brown Sisters"; Steve Sasson at Kodak builds the first working CCD-based digital still camera
- 1976: First solo show of color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, William Eggleston's Guide
- 1977: Cindy Sherman begins work on Untitled Film Stills, completed in 1980; Jan Groover begins exploring kitchen utensils
- 1978: Hiroshi Sugimoto begins work on seascapes.
- 1980: Elsa Dorfman begins making portraits with the 20x24" Polaroid.
- 1982: Sony demonstrates Mavica "still video" camera
- 1983: Kodak introduces disk camera, using an 8x11mm frame (the same as in the Minox spy camera)
- 1985: Minolta markets the world's first autofocus SLR system (called "Maxxum" in the US); In the American West by Richard Avedon
- 1988: Sally Mann begins publishing nude photos of her children
- 1987: The popular Canon EOS system introduced, with new all-electronic lens mount
- 1990: Adobe Photoshop released.
- 1991: Kodak DCS-100, first digital SLR, a modified Nikon F3
- 1992: Kodak introduces PhotoCD
- 1993: Founding of photo.net (this Web site), an early Internet online community; Sebastiao Salgado publishes Workers; Mary Ellen Mark publishes book documenting life in an Indian circus.
- 1995: Material World, by Peter Menzel published.
- 1997: Rob Silvers publishes Photomosaics
- 1999: Nikon D1 SLR, 2.74 megapixel for $6000, first ground-up DSLR design by a leading manufacturer.
- 2000: Camera phone introduced in Japan by Sharp/J-Phone
- 2001: Polaroid goes bankrupt
- 2003: Four-Thirds standard for compact digital SLRs introduced with the Olympus E-1; Canon Digital Rebel introduced for less than $1000
- 2004: Kodak ceases production of film cameras
- 2005: Canon EOS 5D, first consumer-priced full-frame digital SLR, with a 24x36mm CMOS sensor for $3000;
If i were to pick out some highlights from this list then they would be of Man Ray and Henri Cartier-Besson. Of course there are plenty of other photographers that have contributed to the history of photography but there are that many it would be unwise for me to even try and list them all.
Intead i will show some of my favorate images and state who the photographer was.
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| Henri Cartier-Besson |
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| Henri Cartier-Besson |
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| Man Ray |
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| Paul Trevor |
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| Paul Trevor |
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| Diane Arbus |
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| Diane Arbus |
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| Jaromir Funke |
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| Jaromir Funke |
These are just a selection of works and images that i really like and get inspired by and i that the photographers themselves are all masters of their game
ESSAY
An evaluation of
two of the most iconic documentary photographic images from the last 100
years.
Secondly, What is “documentary photography”? This type of photography refers to images that are a true representations of people, places, or events within history that are factual and that have not been doctored or altered. Whenever we take a photograph we capture that moment and freeze time, the image therefore that we create is a representation of that particular moment. How honest that image is of that moment is mainly due to how much of the scene we have managed to capture. Photographs by nature cannot show feelings, but they can give a general idea or a brief look at our outward emotions that we choose to show. We could have an image of a woman crying for instance but this does not necessarily show us why the woman is crying, only that she is. It could be that she is crying because she is extremely sad or it could be that she is crying because she overcome with joy. It is only when we see the whole of an image, that is, with the woman in context with her surroundings, that we can begin to get a better understanding of the meaning as a whole. After watching a recent video about documentary photography it can be best summed up by saying that the final image is a result of something that the photographer sees and how they define it(3).
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| Illustration 1: Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California 1936(4). |
Possibly one of the
first things that should be noted when discussing this photograph is its change
of name. Originally it was just called “U.S.A: Dorothea Lange Farm Security
Adm.,” but was changed at a later date to “ Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California
1936. This gives the already powerful image more punch, though it is not known
for sure why the image was renamed.
The image is part
of a set of images all depicting the squalid living conditions of a migrant
worker and her family. The time when the photograph was taken was known as “The
Great Depression” and was used to describe the decade following the 1929 Wall
Street Crash in America. This led to great poverty and unemployment throughout
America. Of the “Mother” in the photograph it is surprising how much
information is known. Her name was Florence Thompson, she was married and had
seven children. They were staying at a camp in Nipomo, California along with
around 2,5000 other people.Visually an image can tell the viewer a lot about the subject that it depicts, but in her choice of getting in close for this image we are unable to learn much about Florence Thompson's surroundings ( unless of course you have seen the other images from this set). This actually works in favour when reading this image as it allows us to see the plight of the Thompson's through the depiction of the mother. She has a weathered face, tattered clothes, dirty nails and looks out toward the distance pensively. It allows us not to be distracted by any background features and emphasises her desperate situation.
If we examine the photograph more closely we can read many things into the interpretation of this image. It has been described as a “Madonna For The Bitter Age”(5). This is a strong tittle to suggest
but possibly one that fits the image perfectly. The Madonna in art terms usually describes or depicts the virgin Mary and she can normally be shown to be holding an image of baby Jesus. It is an image that has been used again and again by many artists throughout history. A great number of examples of this type of image were made during the Byzantine art period in the middle ages. One of the more famous images that depict the mother and child was by the artist Raphael.
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| Illustration 2: The Grand-Dukes Madonna oil painting by Raphael 1505(6) |
If we compare both images it is clear to see why Lange's image has been described and compared to images of the Madonna and child. In both images the “Mother” looks away from the viewer therefore avoiding “The Gaze”(7). This allows us to linger and scrutinise the image without feeling guilt at the subject because she does not look back at us. It does not create a two way conversation between subject and viewer. Also of note is the composition in both images where by we only see a small area around the subjects and that the images are presented in a portrait format.
Taken as a set of images, Lange's photographs of Florence Thompson and her children show us just how bleak living during that period must have been. But as a single image it allows us, as viewers to show empathy for her. We feel for her plight and the desperation of her circumstances. Lange herself was also a mother and the connection she must have felt towards her subject shows in the tenderness of the set of images that she took on that day.
The following quote is taken from an essay that Dorothea Lange wrote in 1960, The Assignment I’ll Never Forget.(8)
“ I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was 32. She said they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children had killed. She had just sold the tyres from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”
Image two.
V J Day in Times Square, New York City, 15 August 1945 By Alfred Eisenstaedt.
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| Illustration 3: V J Day 1945(9) |
As an introduction to the next photograph we first must find out a little bit about the photographer himself. It is of his employment that we are most interested in here for the purpose of this essay. Albert Eisenstaedt was one of the first four photographers to be employed and work for Life magazine. He was there right from the beginning in 1936 until right at the very end of the publication. He amassed a huge volume of photographic work and made 86 covers for Life magazine and contributed to more than 2,500 picture stories. Eisenstaedt became synonymous with a candid style of documentary photography and was known for not carrying lots of equipment around with him. His motto was to “keep it simple”. It has been said that “he was able to shoot anything that moved,” while only taking few images to get the shot that he wanted. He was very certain of his skills as a photographer(10).
If we look closely at the photograph and try to read it we can ascertain that many different details
come to light. Everyone around the couple in the image are smiling, people are happy, its a time of jubilation, a celebration. The nurse in the image has her right foot is raised. The raising of the foot when a woman is being kissed is known as “Foot Popping”(11) and is a sign of trust on the female part based on her trusting the stronger male to keep her upright.
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| Illustration 4: A perfect visual example of "Foot Popping" |
Also of note is the
fact that the nurses eyes are closed. This shows not only another form of trust
but of her enjoyment of the situation. It has been said by some that we close
our eyes while kissing to focus on our emotions(12). Though not a lot of data is known about
research into why we close our eyes while kissing, it can be seen as a romantic
ideal that fits the tone of Eisenstaedt's image.
We do not have much
information about the couple in the image only that after the image was taken
both people parted and went their separate ways. We do not know whether they
ever saw one and other ever again or if they met up at a later date. Lots of
people have come forward and have
claimed that they were either the kisser or the kissed, but nothing is
solid and it has not been proven ether
way. The not knowing only adds to the image of two strangers and the chance
encounter they had on that day.
The contrast of the
black and white clothes of the two main characters are a test of Eisenstaedt's
eye for detail and masterful composition. He took the photograph quickly and
did not have much time to think or compose his shot. Seconds later and he would
have missed the whole scene that had unfolded before him. Henri Cartier-Bresson
once was famously quoted “the decisive moment, it is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction
of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise
organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression.” (13) This quote can be used to sum up
Eisenstaedt's method an ideology in the taking of his V J Day image.
“I was walking through the crowds on V J Day looking for pictures. I noticed a sailor coming my way. He was grabbing every female he could find and kissing them all – young girls and old ladies alike.... The sailor came along, grabbed the nurse, and bent down to kiss her. Now if this girl hadn't been a nurse, if she'd been dressed in dark clothes, I wouldn't have had a picture.” Alfred Eisenstaedt(14).
In summery, both
photographs have become important documentations of defining moments in our
history, one formed from hardship and the other from celebration. Lange's image
shows the power of a determined feminine character struggling to hold a family
together while Eisenstaedt's image shows off a fun chance encounter between a
sailor and a nurse. It is most likely true that both images represent, to some
degree the personality of the photographer that took the image. It has been
stated by Rankin a well known English photographer that Eisenstaedt had a
cheeky and naughty persona and this comes across in his V J Day image. While
Lange was said to have had a skill at showing strong heroic female figures(15).
Both photographers showed skill in
capturing the images talked about in the above text as proven by how renown
each image has become in defining their respected eras. To go back to the
definition at the start of this essay we can now definably say that the two
images did become a symbol of their respectful places in the history of
photography. Iconic status has been
granted to both images and they have stood as exemplary examples within the
field of documentary photography.
Bibliography.
1.An iconic image or thing is important or
impressive because it seems to be a symbol of something. (English Collins
Dictionary). http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-cobuild/iconic.
2. Iconic means “like
a symbol” was taken from the website answers.com.
3.What is documentory photography?
Time into the video
that this issue was mentioned. (3.21)
4.Image of “Migrant Mother” Taken from:
5.The heading for a synopsis on the migrant mother image
taken from – The Taschien book 50 Photo
Icons the story behind the pictures. Hans-Michael Koetzle.
6. Image referenced from the following website.
“The Gaze” is a term used in art to describe the relationship
between the subject and the viewer.
The gaze can be characterised by who is doing the looking:
•
The spectator's
gaze: the spectator who is viewing the text.
This is often us, the audience
of a certain text.
•
Intra-diegetic
gaze, where one person depicted in the text is looking at another person or
object in the text, such as one character looking at another.
•
Extra-diegetic gaze, where the person depicted
in the text looks at the spectator, such as an aside, or an acknowledgement of
the fourth wall.
The above text was referenced from the website found at :
8. Quote taken from the website bellow. And relates to
personal interaction between photographer and subject.
9.Image taken from
website below.
10.Referenced and quoted from the BBC documentary America In
Pictures. The version I watched was from Youtube from the website below.
11. Foot popping I researched from various websites bellow.
12. referenced from
now for the science bit from the website below.
13. Quote from Henri Cartier- Bresson taken from the website
below and checked against other sources.
14. Quote of Alfred
Eisenstaedt taken from the following website and checked online via other
sources.
15. Information
researched about lange taken from the art story website.
Other references and
websites used to gather information.
