History Lecture #4

• social documentary photography
• their culture, time and society (described)
• like a social activist
• 1880, Jacob Riis
• police photographer, New York
• affect position change
• was a police reporter, not a photographer first
• people in the slums
• Bandit's Roost
• Pifford and Lawrence (photographers) and Dr. Nagle
• Baxter Street Alley, 1888
• lantern slides
• 1888, published 12 drawings of his photographs
• article name Flashes from the Slums
• shot with a large view camera, magnesium flare and glass negatives
• 1890, book, How the Other Half Lives
• 36 images, 17 were printed in half tones, 19 were shown as drawings / engravings
• the impact wasn't there or what he intended
• badly reproduced
• Alexander Eland, found the negatives in 1947, reprinted them and displayed them in New York
• sympathetic
• Louis Hine,sociologist, 15 years later
• thought camera would be a useful tool
• hoped to make better for poor or underprivileged
• in New York and photographed immigrants arriving after WWI
• Looking for Lost Baggage, 1905
• understood that his photos were subjective
• same intent as Riis
• referred to as photo interpretations
• Carolina Cotton Mill, 1908
• photographed child labour
• Child Labour, Chester New Hampshire
• Coal Sorters, Pennsylvania
• c. 1918 went to Europe to photograph red cross workers
• Men at Work, book in the US people doing different jobs
• not creating an image for melodrama, but a straight-forward representation of jobs that happen to be dangerous
• August Sander, working on an atlas / catalog of people, Germany
• Man in the Twentieth Century
• trained as a portrait photographer
• his own studio near Cologne
• Studio portrait and environmental portrait
• got tired of photographing the wealthy
• made over 600 photos for his project
• Architect, 1929
• Boxer, 1929
• Business Man, 1928
• Circus Artist, 1926
• Circus People, 1930
• City Children, 1932
• Corps Student, 1928
• 1929 first volume of his work, Face of Our Time
• first of what he hoped to be part of 20 volumes
• Varnisher, 1932
• his plates were destroyed, Nazi regime did not approve
• the only volume that got published
• 1930s depression in the US
• US created agencies to promote financial aid
• one agency was to hire photographers to document the progress of these agencies, and the people they met
• Farm Security Administration, FSA, government agency
• Walker Evans, 1936, FSA
• prior, during and after FSA work, explored a "dual theme" the American form and the American people
• large view camera, 8x10
• Burrows Alabama
• Burrows Kitchen, 1936
• schools, churches, graveyards
• New York subway portrait
• sat on the subway and hid his camera in his coat
• 35mm camera, smaller, less noticeable
• Chicago street portraiture project
• remembered by his work for the FSA
• Dorthea Lang, joined FSA in 1935
• prior interest by people affected by the depression
• exhibition in Oakland, c 1934, 1935
• remembered for people
• Ditched, Stalled and Stranded, 1935
• families, mothers and their children
• Jobless at the Edge of a Pea Field
• Migrant Mother, 1936, more published and widely well known
• hands, off, do not molest or touch, arrange
• sense of place, sense of time
• no manipulation
• late 70s, Florence Thompson, after Lang's death, wrote a letter expressing anger towards not being paid for the picture
• had a stroke and family could not afford medical expenses
• didn't ask for her name or to ask to take their pictures
• Florence felt exploited
• Dorthea didn't introduce herself
• Steglitz and White worked with metaphor to get passed the subject matter
• emotionally symbolic idea that was created by formal or structural elements, the sentiment
• Sun in rock, 1947
• Rock and Frost, 1958
• Minor White
• for what else it is
• 1957, article found photographs
• Aaron Siskind
• Kentucky, 1951
• Symbols in Landscape, 1944
• both are abstract, but like straight photography
• Jerry Uelsmann, practiced combination printing
• studied under Minor White
• "...a certain moment when things just come together"
• '...produce something that is uniquely his"