HISTROY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
During the renaissance (16th century) many artists became interested in exploring and representing the reality of nature. Leonardo Da Vinci was well known for his anatomical drawings and took a great interest in contemporary advances in science.
CAMERA OBSCURA
In order to achieve such realism,artisits developed various instruments to assist them in their quest for the perfect perspective. One such instrument was the camera obscura which was invented in 1685 by Alhazan, an Arab scientist.. This was a could have been a dark box or room with one point of entry for the light. the light would enter the box and an image would be revealed on the wall of the box upside down. this was the closest artists could get to a photorealistic image.
THE 19th CENTURY
As the industrial revolution transformed society in the 1800's with mass production leading the way forward, scientists endeavoured to reproduce reality in a fixed format. In 1827, the scientist Joseph Niepce was successful in fixing the first projected image of is view from his window in Le Gras (south France).
CAMERA OBSCURA
In order to achieve such realism,artisits developed various instruments to assist them in their quest for the perfect perspective. One such instrument was the camera obscura which was invented in 1685 by Alhazan, an Arab scientist.. This was a could have been a dark box or room with one point of entry for the light. the light would enter the box and an image would be revealed on the wall of the box upside down. this was the closest artists could get to a photorealistic image.
THE 19th CENTURY
As the industrial revolution transformed society in the 1800's with mass production leading the way forward, scientists endeavoured to reproduce reality in a fixed format. In 1827, the scientist Joseph Niepce was successful in fixing the first projected image of is view from his window in Le Gras (south France).
Louis Daguerre worked with Niepce in his quest to fix the projected image. Daguerre was a painter for stage sets and illusionistic scenery for the Diorama, a popular visual entertainment in Paris. However in 1833 Niepce died and Daguerre had to continue alone. In January 1839, Daguerre announced the invention on the Daguerreotype. However there was a problem with the Daguerreotype. I t required long exposure which meant any movement would result in blur.
PICTORIALISM, SECESSIONISM, STRAIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY
The invention of the camera meant that the artists no longer had to depict the world in a realistic way. The impressionists focused more on capturing the changing qualities of light and atmosphere.
Pictorialists hoped to express and engage feelings and senses and felt that their images should be concerned with beauty rather than fact.
Straight Photography
Photography was now the art and did not need to be made to be an art form by changing it.
Alfred Stieglitz rejects pictorials and encourages other photographers including Paul Strand to do so as well.
Photo Secession
The movement was founded by Stieglitz in 1902. It had the ideals of Pictorilaism but the concerned photographers also wanted the mechanical origins to be apparent.
The photography 'movement' begins in New York
1903- 'Camera work' : An art/ photography journal is founded in the U.S
1905- Stieglitz opens 'little Galleries of the Photo-Succession' in New York
World War 1 ended the pre-war leisurely life many had enjoyed. Stieglitz felt that the work was lacking creativity and 'camera works' began including less ' artistic' photography replacing it with more candid images by photographers such as Paul Strand. This led to the end of Secessionism.
Straight Photography
Strand realised that the camera had a unique ability to capture shape and form. The modernist movement that he pioneered was called simple straight photography.
Instead of distorting the image Strand placed emphases on the selection and framing of the picture.
f64 Group
The f64 Group placed emphasis on the ' pure' photography, sharp images, maximum depth of field, glossy printing paper, emphasising the unique qualities of the photographic process. The significance of the name lies in the fact that f/64 is the smallest aperture on the lens of a large format camera and therefore provides the greatest depth of field.
Impressionism
Imperssionism is an art movement that began in the 19th century. Many painters rejected realism as a result of the efficiency with which photography could replicate scenes in such vivid reality. Instead they decided to paint more impressionistic interpretations of the environment, focusing on light and atmosphere.
Vincent Van Gogh was a Dutch post impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he created about 2,100 artworks including 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self portraits, and are characterised by bold colours and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art.
Pictorialism
Pictorialism is the name given to an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the lat 19th century. There is no standard definition of the term, but in general it refers to a style in which the photographer has somehow manipulated what would otherwise be a straightforward photograph as a means of creating an image rather than simply recording it. Some photographers were also keen to define photography as something unique and not just scientific representation of the world. They tried to capture the mood and atmosphere of a scene similar to impressionists.
Edward Jean Steichen was a Luxembourgish American photographer, painter, and art gallery and museum curator. Steichen was the most frequently shown in Alfred Stieglitz' ground breaking magazine Camera Work during it'd run from 1903 to 1917. Together Stieglits and Steichen opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, which eventually became known as 291 after its address.
Modernism
A general term used to encompass trends in photography from roughly 1910-1950 when photographers began to produce works with a sharp focus and emphasis on formal qualities, exploiting, rather than obscuring, the camera as an essentially mechanical and technological tool. As modernism took its roots, art work become more and more abstract, which influenced some photographers to focus more on formal elements such as line, form, and space.
E.O Hoppe was one of the most renowned portrait photographers of his day, as well as a brilliant landscape and travel photographer. His strikingly modernist portraits describe a virtual Who's Who of important personalities in the arts, literature, and in politics in the Great Britain and the US between the wars.
Constructed Landscape
Artists started to respond to the hopes and fears of the modern world and used photo montages as a way of constructing realities to reflect utopian and dystopian society. These artists were often referred to as 'Constructivists'.
Kazimierz Podsadecki was a painter and creator of applied graphic art derived from the constructivist tradition. He was also interested in photomontage and experimental films. He was born in 1904 9n Zabierzow, near Karkow, and died in 1970 in Krakow.
Conceptual photography
Conceptual art tended to be deadpan and ridicule itself, often choosing to focus on the mundane and ordinary. German photographers, Bernd and Hilla Becher, set out to document defunct industrial structures in a systematic and ordered way. They photographed objects from the same perspective, producing a catalogue of images often presented formally as a grid.
Bernhard "Bernd" Becher and Hilla Becher were German conceptual artists and photographers working as a collaborative duo. They are best known for their extensive series of photographic images, typologies, of industrial buildings and structures, often organised in grids.
Direct Intervention
Some photographers view themselves objective and act as 'recorders of the truth'. Conversely, some photographers choose to see themselves a artist that constructs a scene, preferring to highlight the subjectivity through which we see the world.
THE CITY IN PHOTOGRAPHY
In the 1860's Charles Marville was commissioned by the city of Paris to document both the picturesque, medieval streets of old Paris and the broad boulevards and grand public structures. He documented aspects of the radical modernisation group that had been launched by Napoleon III.