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| Bragaglia Brothers, Change of Position, 1911 |
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| Alvin Langdon Coburn, The Octopus, 1912 |
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Alvin Langdon Coburn, Vortographs of Ezra Pound, c 1917
-multiple mirrors placed before the lens of the camera.
-By fracturing the space, Coburn created his own kind of cubist photograph. |
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Paul Strand, Porch Abstraction, 1917
Paul Strand’s visualization revealed the order and structure or significant form which can result from intensified looking through the camera’s viewfinder. Strand was enamored of the fact that the camera could see better than the human eye. By isolating fragments of the world and taking care to visualize his subject in the strongest way, his photographs revealed a structure that was not immediately apparent to the naked eye. |
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Paul Outerbridge, Shirt Collar, 1922
Outerbridge believed that the exacting clearly of the photograph could be used to transcend the medium’s descriptive function. The collar is distinguished by the clarity of its description; yet it is also transformed by being isolated and removed from its normal context. In this sense, it has been monumentalized - made to be more than it is. The collar is an early advertising photograph that effectively illustrates the important role photography will play in advertising. |
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Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, From Berlin Radio Tower, 1928
Photographers like Moholy were attracted by unusual vantage points that the small, 35mm camera made possible. Work during this period in Europe comes under the heading of "New Vision" or "New Objectivity" rather than straight or purist photography. In Moholy -Nagy's photograph, we are presented with disorienting vantage points that transform the appearance of ordinary subjects. |
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Andre Kertesz, Fork, 1928
New Vision photographers also explored the expressive possibilities of the close-up. |
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Alfred Stieglitz,The Steerage, 1907
This photo was made on his trip to Europe titled The Steerage. The Steerage is suggestive of the new direction Stieglitz was moving in. Like Coburn, he was becoming more interested in FORM over CONTENT or SUBJECT. The Steerage has the look of a "documentary "photograph. Its title defines that area of a ship where the lowest priced tickets were sold. A reasonable guess would be that we are looking at the huddled masses about to arrive in America. The reality is that the ship is going to Europe. Stieglitz had no interest in this scene as a social document and even less interested in the picture’s subject matter. He was, however, enamored of the "significant form" he found in this composition. In his journals he recalls how moved he was when he visualized the scene from his position on the upper deck. Notice the way in which he relates to the individual elements of this picture... |
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Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalent, 1923
Most are dark and seen without context. They suggest a sense of isoltion, alienation, and deep contemplation. He coined the term "equivalent" to indicate that a photograph could move its maker or viewer beyond what was merely presented in the photograph. |
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Edward Weston, Pepper, 1930
"This then, to photography a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock." Weston understood that while photography begins with clearly presented visual facts, its ultimate aim was symbol. The revelatory possibity of photography is perhaps best illustrated in this photograph of a simple pepper... |
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Paul Citroen, Metropolis, collage
Collage, in its strictest sense, describes a recombination of existing visual materials pasted or glued onto a support. In photography, the resulting collage may be left as constructed or photographed and printed onto a piece of photographic paper. This collage was created created from pre-existing, mass produced images. Citroen’s collage is a visually confusing picture of numerous vantage points that reference dthe complexity of modern life |
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| Herbert Bayer, The Lonely Metropolitan; collage |
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Wanda Wultz, I and Cat, montage, 1932
Montage refers to the combining of camera images on film or on photographic paper in the darkroom. This montage was done as a multiple exposure in the camera or with two separate negatives printed onto a sheet of photographic paper. |
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Margaret Bourke-White, Flood Victims, Louisville.
Bourke-White was well known for her fierce competitiveness and flamboyance. Her statuesque beauty, and mental toughness made her a formidable competitor in a profession that was believed to be the territory of men. This classic images needs little explanation... |
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| Andre Kertész, Cyclist, Paris; |
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| Brassai, La Mome Bijou, Bard de la Lune, 1932 |
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Lisette Model, Lower Eastside
Lisette Model emigrated to America from Austria in the late 1930s and began working as a darkroom assistant for one of the New York Tabloids. The paper she worked for published some of her images taken on the French Riviera which prompted Alexi Brodovitch, art director at Harper’s Bazaar, to hire her. Enamored of life in New York, she began making photographs of people from unusual vantage points such as this. |
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Weeegee, Life Saving Attempt, Coney Island, 1949
With this image we get a glimpse of what is to come in a culture increasingly obsessed with pictures and self-presentation before the camera...
The young man is being resuscitated as his girlfriend seems for concerned for how she will look in the photograph. |
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Jacob Riis, Stale Beer Dive
The homeless paid a nickel to sit and sleep at tables in a basement that offered stale beer taken from empty beer kegs. Without the use of flash powder, Riis would not have been able to make this photograph. Whatever Riis’s photographs may have lacked in compositional structure is made up by his powerful and shocking subject matter. One might say that social documentary photographs are driven by content rather than form. |
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| Lewis Hine, Young Girls Knitting; 10 Year Old Spinner |
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| Dorothea Lange, Tractored Out |
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| Walker Evans, West Virginia Coal Miner’s Home |
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| Dorothea Lange, White Angel Bread Line, San Francisco |
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| Wynn Bullock, Child in the Forest, 1950s |
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| Clarence John Laughlin, The Mask Grows to Us, 1947 |
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| Frederick Sommer, Arizona Landscapes |
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| Aaron Siskind, Chicago, 25 |
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| Minor White, Moonn and Wall Encrustations, 1964) |
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| Robert Frank, Parade, Hoboken, New Jersey |
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Robert Frank, Trolley, New Orleans
his picture Frank made in New Orleans is arguably one of the most poignant in the entire book. It’s just a picture of people on a trolley but it is also a biting commentary on segregaton. Like Weston’s Pepper, its symbolism moves far beyond the simple visual facts.... |
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Man Ray, The Kiss, Rayograph
A close associate of the artist Marcel Duchamp and active participant in the Parisian Dada and Surrealist groups between the wars, Man Ray was a painter as well as commercial photographer. Man Ray was attracted to cameraless photography due to the unpredictability of the process. Governed by chance and unrepeatable results, his "rayographs" were perfectly in line with Dadaist sensibilities |
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| Leon Levinstein, New York |
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Garry Winogrand, Albuquerque, New Mexico
From this image get somewhat of a grim view of emerging suburban American life. Suburbia represented the ideal environment in which to raise children. It was where new communities would form, children would be safe, and—nuclear annihilation notwithstanding—it offered a bright future for the postwar American family. Winogrand’s photograph of an emerging housing development conjures a different interpretation of the American Dream. A toddler squints as he emerges from the dark carport of a new tract house. Looking puzzled, he appears on the verge of taking a step, perhaps toward an overturned tricycle halfway down the driveway. Surrounded by a scrub desert terrain and under a treacherous sky, this new American habitat is barren and menacing—a landscape of peril and threat rather than hope and opportunity. |
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| Lee Friedlander, Galaxy, Virginia, 1962 |
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| Lee Friedlander, Knoxville, TN, 1971 |
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| Diane Arbus, A Woman with her Baby Monkey |
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| Diane Arbus, Child with Toy Hand Grenade |
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Jerry Uelsmann, Symbolic Mutation, 1961
-multiple negatives |
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| Jerry Uelsmann, Untitled, 1983 |
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| Duane Michals, Things are Queer |
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Robert Heinecken, Altered Periodicals, 1969-71
One of Heinecken’s most interesting conceptualizations was a series in which he dissassembled popular magazines and silkscreened images of the Vietnam war and soft porn over its pages. He then reassembled the magazines so that they appeared not to have been tampered with. His final act of aesthetic defiance was to place them back on magazine shelves for unsuspecting consumers to buy them. Who knows what people thought when they opened up a magazine and saw images like these...This conceptual act, for Heinecken, was a way of using the images of contemporary culture to jolt one into a recognition of the irony of consumer indulgences when juxtaposed with real events in the world... |
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