Chapter Resources
Chapter 1
Introduction
In Chapter 1 we introduce key issues relating to photography and, most particularly, identify some of the positions elaborated by established theorists. The chapter focuses initially on a number of debates which have characterised theoretical and critical discussions of the photograph and of photographic practices starting with the interrelation between aesthetics and technologies. We then summarise and discuss historical accounts of photography. Finally we consider sites of practice, institutions and the audience for photography. Central to the chapter is a case study of ways in which one single image, Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, has been discussed. It acts as a model of how particular attitudes and assumptions can be illuminated through considering a specific example. The chapter is designed as a foundation for discussions, many of which will be picked up again for more detailed examination later in the book.
Postmodernism, Appropriation and Sherrie Levine
“The postmodern was not concerned with the aura of authenticity.”
(Liz Wells 2015: p25)
What is postmodernism?
There are many complex ideas of how postmodernism came into being, but three key points are the following. Postmodernism comes after Modernism. Postmodernism is a reaction to modernism, and Postmodernism is a continuation of some of the aspects of modernism that had been left behind.
One way to understand what this means is to look at real world examples of things that are considered Postmodern.
The first example comes from the first Gulf War. The American government excluded the Press Corps from the front-lines, and therefore images of the conflict were limited to footage recorded by the air forces themselves, from their targeting equipment.
Click here to see an example.
Drain Magazine offers an interesting article on the representation of war through the ages here.
The second example comes in the form of Celebration, a town in Florida. A creation of Disney, Celebration draws on the mythology of small town America, and aims to offer a return to a kinder, gentler era, that fits with the representation of life in Disney films.
Click here to read about the town.
The third example is the Lascaux Caves in France. These caves are the location of cave paintings depicting hunting scenes from the Palaeolithic Era. The real caves however, were closed to the public in 1963, and today, visitors view a recreation built in a nearby quarry.
Click here to read about the caves.
So, what makes these things Postmodern? Firstly, the audience is at a distance from reality, but this removal, or absence is not noticed. The imaging from the Air Force in the Gulf War soon became the norm, and night after night, people would watch the latest movements displayed in this form on the evening news. In France, thousands of tourists visit a quarry to look at images painted by a contemporary artist, imagining, or believing that they are in ancient caves. Our understanding of the world is beginning to be based on mediated images.
So, in a postmodern world, we live within a mythology created for us by the media. The town of Celebration may represent a more pleasant lifestyle, that many American’s want to get back to, but that lifestyle only ever existed on the celluloid of the Hollywood movies.
The first real use of postmodernism, as a popular term comes from Architecture, and in particular, in relation to Philip Johnson’s A.T&T building. In 1979 Johnson put a Chippendale top onto the skyscraper, referencing the vernacular forms, historical details and pop imagery that modernism had banished. Johnson’s top was ironic and self deflating, putting a kind of cosy domesticity onto a form of architecture that had grown remote and authoritarian. The key to this new term, and new era, was self-awareness. Postmodernism art is defined by its ability to reflect on itself.
Click here to read an article about the building and its history.
SHERRIE LEVINE
For this case study, we will look at the work of Sherrie Levine, and her postmodernist appropriation. Levine is a key figure in postmodern photography, making work that critiques no only the practice of Modernism, but also some of its leading figures.
Click here to see some examples.
Before we consider Levine, it is important to look at the creative environment in which she arose. During the mid to late 1970’s the first wave of postmodern appropriation was beginning to happen in New York. At the time this was not considered postmodern, but rather a scene that was growing up around appropriation and post-structuralist theories of reproduction and repetition. This scene had links with Roland Barthes’ ideas around authorship, and would go on to be one of the defining aspects of postmodernism. Key aspects of the early appropriation movement were the Pictures exhibition curated by Douglas Crimp in Artist’s Space, the Metro Pictures gallery, and October journal. These helped create a place of exciting experimentation, as well as deep critical reflection.
“In 1981, Sherrie Levine photographed reproductions of depression-era photographs by Walker Evans, such as the famous portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, the wife of an Alabama sharecropper. This work came to exemplify the ideas of appropriation, with the series, entitled After Walker Evans, becoming a landmark of postmodernism, both praised and attacked as a feminist hijacking of patriarchal authority, a critique of the commodification of art, and an elegy on the death of modernism.”
(The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
In 1984 Levine stated ‘for the last 4 years I have considered myself a still-life artist – with the book plate as my subject’ (Welchman 2001: 11), and although many saw this work as simply plagiarism, in postmodern terms they were the purest forms of appropriation.
Krauss called Levine’s images an ‘act of theft that takes place, so to speak, in front of the surface of Weston’s print [and] opens the print from behind to the series of models from which it, in turn, has stolen, of which it itself is the reproduction’ (Krauss 1985: 168).
So, this theft by Levine shone a light onto the male dominated environment that was Modernism, as well as questioned the value, and originality of the photographic image. In terms of postmodernism, the work makes us consider the images in front of us in greater scrutiny, and in a way, the digital world that we live in now has taken things even further. An image that exists digitally can be endlessly reproduced with little or no reference to its original context.
Two artists that have extended this notion of appropriation, and of Levine’s work in particular are Dylan Stone and Hermann Zschiegner.
Stone takes the idea of appropriation further again, with his project to reconstruct in miniature, the photographs of Eugene Atget. This project takes as its starting point Levine’s appropriations of Atget’s photographs. Stone takes a sideways step however, and uses Atget’s original book titled Intérieurs Parisiens Début du Vingtième Siècle Artistiques Pittoresques et Bourgeois, as the basis for his work. Stone then delicately reassembles these interiors within the confines of a shoebox, each box depicting in three dimensions the exact contents of Atget’s photographs down to the smallest inlay of wood.
Click here for more information.
Again, taking Levine’s appropriations as a starting point, Zschiegner’s project ‘+walker evans + sherrie levine’ considers the digital application of appropriation. Through the search engine Google, he uses the criteria +walker evans + sherrie Levine, and collects the resulting images. These are then shown as an installation of prints, flagging up the infinite nature of appropriation possible on the Internet, and with digital imagery.
Click here for more information.
References
Wells, Liz (2015) ‘Thinking about photography’ in Photography: A Critical Introduction, 5th edition, London: Routledge.
Welchman J.C. (2001) Art after Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s, Amsterdam: G+B Arts International.
Krauss, Rosalind (1985) ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde’ in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Biographies
Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821 – 1867)
Baudelaire was a French poet, essayist, art critic, and translator. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty, and is set in Paris during the 19th century. Baudelaire influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé among others. He is credited with coining the term "modernity".
Walter Benjamin (1892 –1940)
Benjamin was a German philosopher and cultural critic. He wrote essays on Goethe, Kafka, Leskov, Kraus, Proust and Baudelaire. As a translator, he worked on Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. He is associated with the Frankfurt School, and was a Marxist, partly due to the influence of Bertold Brecht. In photographic terms, his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is a seminal text, and helps consider photography in a modernist context.
Siegfried Kracauer (1889 – 1966)
Kracauer was a German writer, journalist, sociologist, cultural critic, and film theorist. It is Kracauer's theories on memory that are most relevant to photography, with the idea that memory is under threat, challenged by modern forms of technology. This is most significant when considering the relationship of memory to photography. The reason for this comparison is that photography, in theory, replicates some of the tasks currently done by memory.
Jean Baudrillard (1929 – 2007)
Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism, with the theme of Technology being a recurrent aspect. His writings are on a wide range of subjects, but are mostly related to social change and cultural studies.
David Bate
Bate is Professor of Photography at the University of Westminster, London, UK. He is known for his photographic practice, as well as his many writings on photography, including the books Photography and Surrealism and Photography: Key Concepts. He was also one of the first UK photographic artists to experiment with digital photographic processes and created the innovative series European Letters in 1992.
Victor Burgin (b. 1941)
Burgin is a conceptual artist and a writer. During the 1960’s he came to prominence as a conceptual photographer, working with the semiotic relationship between image and text. Theorists and philosophers such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes influence his work. Burgin often makes work that is interested in the social messages embedded in photographic images from advertising and film.
Susan Sontag (1933 – 2004)
Sontag was an American writer, filmmaker, teacher and political activist. Sontag is a significant voice in photography, with her seminal books On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others. The New York Review of Books called her "one of the most influential critics of her generation.”
Roland Gérard Barthes (1915 – 1980)
Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician, with ideas that explored a diverse range of fields. His key work on Photography was Camera Lucida (1980) which was an exploration of the nature of the medium, as well as a reflection on the image of his mother.
Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939)
Freud was an Austrian neurologist, now known as the father of psychoanalysis. He qualified as a doctor in 1881, before going on to teach neuropathology. It was here that he created psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst. In his ground-breaking work, Freud developed many therapeutic techniques, and studied areas such as libido, erotic attachments, death drive, hate, aggression, neurotic guilt, wish-fulfilments, symptom formation and the mechanisms of repression. In artistic terms, Freud’s work influenced a generation of artists, most notably the surrealists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/219848/Sigmund-Freud
Dr. Jae Emerling
Emerling is a writer and academic, his work focuses on contemporary art and critical theory. Emerling is an associate professor at the College of Arts + Architecture at the University of North Carolina. His research includes, reflections on theory and photography, issues of historiography, memory, and aesthetics. His recent publication Photography: History and Theory, has brought many of these ideas together.
Beaumont Newhall (1908 – 1993)
Newhall was an American curator, art historian, writer, and photographer. His book The History of Photography remains one of the most important records in photography, and is an essential textbook for all students of the subject.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaumont_Newhall
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-beaumont-newhall-13299
Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984)
Foucault was a French philosopher, historian, social theorist, philologist and literary critic. His theories were engaged with the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. His key writing includes, The History of Madness, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality.
Chapter 2
Introduction
Chapter 2 focuses upon the documentary role of the camera, especially in relation to recording everyday life. There is also some discussion of travel photography and of photojournalism, especially the expanding journalistic role for photography in the early twentieth century. Claims have been made for the authenticity or ‘truth’ of photography used within social surveys or viewed as evidence. The chapter considers disputes that have arisen in relation to such claims in the nineteenth century, in the early twentieth century – especially in the 1920s and 1930s when the term ‘documentary’ was coined – and in relation to contemporary practices in documentary and reportage.
The chapter is concerned throughout with the multiple discourses through which the nature of photography and its social project has been constructed and understood. By concentrating on particular periods it offers a critical history of documentary which problematises and clarifies the relationship of a specific form of representation to other debates and movements.
Documentary and the Document: August Sander
“…the question is and will remain: in documentary photography, what is it that is really documented?” (Derrick Price 2015: p132)
So, what is the significance of the photographic document? And how have photographers worked with documentary portraiture to create such records? There are also complexities when making images as a record, as Durand says, the “[objective] can be shifted and reconstituted again and again during the course of our historical perception of it.” (Derrick Price 2015: p132). The examples in this case study show how different photographers have worked to create historic records, and how in some cases, these have moved beyond their creator’s initial aims.
Hill and Adamson
The first example here is that of Hill and Adamson. Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill were pioneering photographers, working in Edinburgh during the 1840’s. In 1843, Adamson established his studio in Rock House in Edinburgh with the aim of documenting the 447 faces of all those to appear in the monumental painting, ‘The first General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, signing the Act of separation and the Deed of Demission’, which had taken David Octavius Hill twenty-three years to paint.
The project began as a study of the Scottish Free Church, but eventually spread to a wider selection of the community. In less than 4 years, they produced 3000 Calotype paper negatives. These images were collected into photographic albums depicting fishing folk from Newhaven, near Leith Docks, Edinburgh. This was one of the first photographic records of the working classes in Britain.
August Sander
August Sander was a German photographer who worked commercially in the studio making portraits for various different purposes. He is known however for his monumental project ‘People of the Twentieth Century’, made during the Weimar era, he produced hundreds of portraits of the German people.
Sander’s plan was to create a ‘Master Portfolio’, a set of pictures that showed the different ‘types’ of people who made up Germany. This would be a compendium of society, and began with a commission to photograph farmers in Westerwald, the area in which he lived.
MASTER PORTFOLIO
The Master Portfolio was made up of: 46 Albums, with12 pictures in each. These were then split into 7 different groups.
The 7 key groups were:
- Farmer: Original primal-type.
- Craftsmen: The Worker, and Worker Types.
- Women
- Professions: Ranging from Student, to Soldier to Politician.
- Artists
- The City
- Marginal Figures
The list aimed to cover all walks of life, from those grounded to the earth (Farmers), to high culture and then the lowest members of society (as seen at the time).
All of the images are carefully arranged, with either full or half-length images, produced in a very formal manner. The images relate to the early ethnographic images made during the 19th century, where subjects are seen with props and costume that refers to their culture. For Sander’s images, this refers instead to their job or role in society.
Developments in the Art World at the time.
After World War 1 artists all over Europe were concerned with a new form of expression. This was particularly characterised by a critical engagement with contemporary events, and the development of more conceptual work. However Sander was not interested in the experimental practices of other German photographers at the time, but rather stuck to his own rules:
See, Observe and Think Correctly
Sander was focussed on what he called STERN FRONTALITY , and producing a Typological classification, a system that works to reveal similarities and differences when viewed in a series. This formality led him to become involved in a growing movement in Germany in the 1920’s – 40’s called New Objectivity. This movement say a stripping away of the pictorial, and poetic from imagery, to leave a more objective representation of the world.
Key figures in the movement were:
And these led on to more contemporary artists, who have explored the themes further.
Sander and the Nazi Party
During the 1930’s and 40’s Sander had several dealings with the Nazi Party. One of the most significant was when his son Erich, a member of the Socialist Workers Party, was sentenced to 10 years in Prison for political crimes.
After this, in 1936, Face of Our Time (an initial book from the Master Portfolio) was seized by the National Socialists, and the plates destroyed. The Nazis resented Sander’s intrusion into their arena, that of presenting a collective view of German society. The images did not conform to the perception the government tried to express, with many of the people photographed not having the Aryan features. Sander had also included the Unemployed and Disabled within the collection, again a group that were not representative of the master race. They did respect him as a photographer though, and commissioned him to photograph many of the party members, hence these images being included in the final portfolios.
THE ARCHIVE
Today, Sander’s portraits are seen as being of great historical and humanistic interest, this in spite of the fact that in retrospect the rationale for his project seems very problematic. As with other thinkers of the time, Sander was categorising society based on inherited hierarchy, and that this, linked with a study of physiognomy, could tell a persons position in the world.
As time has passed however, the initial 7 groups, and their associated stereotypes have become less important, as the power of the images, and the record they offer comes to the fore. What we are left with is a truly enlightening document of a place, and a time.
ANOTHER RELATED ARTIST
Richard Avedon – In The American West
This project, commissioned by Mitchell A. Wilder the director of the Amon Carter Museum in Texas, saw Avedon spend 5 years travelling to the West of America. During these trips, he spent his time photographing what he saw as the ‘real’ America. This was a study of working class people, photographed in a simple objective way much like Sander.
References
Price, Derrick (2015) ‘Surveyors and Surveyed’ in Photography: A Critical Introduction, 5th edition, London: Routledge.
Biographies
Susan Meiselas, (b.1948)
Meiselas is an American documentary photographer. Her first major photographic essay Carnival Strippers was published in 1976 and focused on the lives of women doing striptease at New England country fairs. In 1976 Meiselas joined Magnum, and is now best known for her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua and her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America.
Moises Saman (b. 1974)
Saman is a Spanish/Peruvian photojournalist. His first major work was photographing the immediate aftermath of the last Balkan war in Kosovo. In 2000 Moises joined Newsday as a Staff Photographer, where he covered the fallout of the 9/11 attacks, as well as conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other Middle Eastern countries. Since 2007, Moises has worked as a freelance, for Panos Pictures and Magnum.
http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL535GR6
Roger Fenton (1819 – 1869)
Fenton was a pioneering British photographer, one of the first war photographers and perhaps one of the most significant 19th Century photographers. During a short period, he worked with Landscape, Portraits and Still Life. It was his work documenting the Crimean War however, that is most remembered, with his image ‘The Valley of the Shadow Death’ being one of the most important war photographs ever made.
Mathew B. Brady (1822-1896)
Brady was one of the first American photographers, best known for his early war photography. He is considered one of the fathers of photojournalism after his documentation of the American Civil War. Brady used a mobile studio and darkroom on the battlefield, and his images brought details of the conflict to the public. During this period thousands of scenes were captured, as well as portraits of generals and politicians on both sides of the conflict. Like Fenton, these early images would become some of the most significant records of conflict ever made.
Robert Capa (1913 –1954)
Capa was a Hungarian war photographer who, during his short career, photographed the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and the First Indochina War. Capa was based in Paris, where his circle of friends included Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway. In 1947 Capa founded Magnum Photos with Cartier-Bresson, Seymour, George Rodger and William Vandivert. Magnum was an agency for freelance photographers, the first of its kind. On 25 May 1954 he was killed when he stepped on a landmine in Thai-Binh, Indochina.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Capa
http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL535353
Don McCullin, (b. 1935)
McCullin is an internationally known British photojournalist, particularly known for his war photography. During his long career he has photographed the Cyprus War, conflict in Biafra, the Belgian Congo, the Northern Irish 'Troubles', Bangladesh, the Lebanese Civil War, El Salvador, and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. His most significant images came from Vietnam and Cambodia, where he spent long periods of time covering the horrors of the conflict.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_McCullin
http://www.hamiltonsgallery.com/artists/29-don-mccullin/overview/
Luc Delahaye (b. 1962)
Delahaye is a French photographer known for his works depicting conflicts and social issues. In 1994, he joined the Magnum Photos but left in 2004 due to an apparent lack of freedom. He has worked in many conflict zones, including Lebanon, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Chechnya. He is particularly known for his books Portrait/1, L'Autre and Winterreise, as well as his large scale gallery images of conflict, made using large format.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Delahaye
http://www.prixpictet.com/portfolios/power-shortlist/luc-delahaye/
Paul Seawright (b. 1965)
Seawright is Professor of Photography and Head of Belfast School of Art at the University of Ulster. He is particularly known for his images of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ and his 2002 commission by the Imperial War Museum to create a document of the war in Afghanistan. His quiet reflective approach is considered as a divergence from conventional war photography.
Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin (b. 1970 + 1971)
Broomberg & Chanarin are artists living and working in London. Together they make work that analyses images of conflict, as well as the nature of photography itself. In 2013 they were awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for War Primer 2, and in 2014 they were awarded the ICP Infinity Award for their publication, Holy Bible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Broomberg_%26_Oliver_Chanarin
Jacob August Riis (1849 - 1914)
Riis was a Danish American social reformer, journalist and perhaps the first social documentary photographer. His most significant work was the documentation of the poor neighbourhoods of New York. He worked tirelessly through first writing, and then photography, to raise awareness of their deprivation. Riis was a newcomer to photography, having first worked as a journalist, but soon helped push the medium forwards, with his gritty images often using flash, of the New York communities.
Sebastião Salgado (b. 1944)
Salgado is a Brazilian social documentary photographer and photojournalist. He is considered one of the most significant photographers of the 20th Century, having made seminal work for over 3 decades. Salgado worked for the photo agencies Sygma, Gamma, and Magnum Photos until 1994, when he formed Amazonas images, an agency created exclusively for his work. Throughout his career he has travelled to over 100 countries, making work for a range of different outputs. He is perhaps particularly known for his powerful books, such as Other Americas, Sahel: l’homme en détresse, Sahel: el fin del camino, Workers,Terra, Migrations and Portraits, and Africa.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebasti%C3%A3o_Salgado
http://www.amazonasimages.com/
Humphrey Spender (1910 - 2005)
Spender was a British photographer and painter. He is best known for his photographs of the working class in Britain for Mass-Observation and Picture Post. Whilst working as a photojournalist for the Mirror, Spender grew to distrust press photography viewing it as propaganda. It was at this time that a group of liberal intellectuals set up Mass Observation, to study ‘real life’. Spender would become a key member of this project, working alone to photograph everyday life. The images have now become an important record of this time.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/mar/15/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries1
Farm Security Administration (FSA)
The FSA (originally called the Resettlement Administration) was an American Government organisation, created as part of the New Deal in 1935 to combat American rural poverty. The FSA aimed to rehabilitate the lives of sharecroppers, tenants and farmers by moving them to new, more suitable land. The FSA shifted in time, away from collectivised farming, towards a program to help farmers buy land. It is now called the Farmers Home Administration. As part of the original FSA project, Roy Stryker was given the job of producing a photographic record of rural poverty. This photography program created some of the most influential documentary photography of the 20th Century, and included the photographers Arthur Rothestein, Theo Jung, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Carl Mydans, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, John Vachon, and John Collier
Helen Levitt (1913 – 2009)
Levitt was an American photographer, known most for her images in New York. She spent 6 decades making observations on the street, and has created a lasting poetic image of men, women, and children on the streets and among the tenements of New York.
Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 – 2004)
Cartier Bresson was a French photographer who founded the term The Decisive Moment. He helped develop ‘street photography’ as well as a new form of candid reportage. Due to the emergence of the Leica, Cartier-Bresson became an early user of 35 mm film. He was a prisoner of war during WWII, but escaped in 1943 to join the resistance. In 1947, with Robert Capa, George Rodger, David 'Chim' Seymour and William Vandivert, he founded Magnum Photos. In 1952 he published his seminal book, Images à la Sauvette (The Decisive Moment).
http://www.henricartierbresson.org/en/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Cartier-Bresson
http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL53ZMYN
Martin Parr (b.1952)
Parr is a British documentary photographer and collector. He is known for his witty observations of English society as well as images that explore wealth and power around the world. He is now a major collector of Photobooks, and alongside Gerry Badger, has published 3 volumes of The Photobook: A History. Key works include: The Last Resort (1983–85), The Cost of Living (1987–89), Small World (1987–94) and Common Sense (1995–99)
Chapter 3
Introduction
Chapter 3 focuses upon the popular and the personal, developing an historical overview of leisure and domestic uses of photography as a medium of everyday immediate communication as well as one through which individual lives and fantasies have been recorded. Particular attention is paid to the family album, which both documents social histories and stands as a talisman of personal experience. The chapter also considers the strategies by which a mass market for photography was constructed, in particular by Kodak, and notes contemporary developments in digital imaging for domestic use. Finally the chapter comments upon recent research on the family photograph, considering what is concealed, as much as what is revealed, in family relationships, gender and sexuality. Attention throughout is drawn to the role of women as photographers and keepers of the photograph album.
In keeping with the style of this book, this chapter signals key texts and further reading. However, the history of popular photography to date has attracted less critical attention than has been directed to other fields of photographic practice; for instance, documentary. In contrast to other parts of the book, this chapter draws upon original research and materials that, being personal, are little known.
Photographers and Personal Documents
In this chapter, the focus is on the development of Personal Photography, from snapshots to albums and from Kodak to Flickr the history of these intimate photographs is discussed. Here, we will divert from the chapter, and focus on photography that has grown from this history, and finds itself presented in the gallery, for the entire world to see. Here, photographers use intimate photography. “[The] technical shortcomings of domestic, non-art photographs are employed as the language through which private experience is communicated to the viewer.” (Charlotte Cotton 2014: p137). The main focus for the case study is the artist Richard Billingham, and refers to the sections in the book titled ‘The working classes picture themselves’, as well as ‘And in the galleries…’
Patricia Holland introduces this idea in the chapter, saying “…since the 1970’s, a fascination with the personal and everyday life, together with the influence from the feminist movement brought private photography into galleries in new ways.” (Patricia Holland 2015: p187) Here, we will take this point and expand upon it, moving away from the main content of the chapter.
RICHARD BILLINGHAM
Billingham came to prominence in 1994 as a student at the University of Sunderland. It was here, as a student of painting, that his images of his parents home were noticed for their power and beauty. Taken over a period of years beginning in 1990 and initially intended as source material for paintings, the images have a striking authenticity. The focus of the images are Billingham’s father Ray and mother Liz. This often chaotic relationship is documented with great sympathy, set as it is, against a stark domestic environment.
At the time, Billingham was not making the images with any consideration of presenting them, but intended to make paintings inspired by artists such as Walter Sickert, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. It is in the work of these artists that the inspiration can be seen. Their raw and expressive work, combined with a subconscious awareness of personal photography has lead Billingham to make the images he has.
Patricia Holland describes “…Billingham’s painful yet hilarious images which relentlessly record, in huge and garishly coloured panels, the chaos of his parent’s home…” (Patricia Holland 2015: p187) This refers to the presentation of the work, which is seen in two different ways. Firstly on the gallery wall, where large aluminium mounted images are seen in all of their bold glory, and secondly in the book Ray’s a Laugh, published in 2000.
Doug Rickard writes that the book “…is a bone jarring chronicle of the parts of life that shouldn’t… the life that tried, but wouldn’t, and dreams that simply couldn’t. It is a chronicle of everything that hurts… a cartoonish-nightmare jaunt through the land of alcohol-living, wet-smelly breath that stinks and simmers, chapped-lips that burn and crack, of space to live that shrinks and crowds further inward, of carpet that rots, of scratched linoleum that looks as if it wants to escape, of paint that wants to peel away and go somewhere else, of childhood dreams that learn to stay in the closet and behave, that learn to stay in the clouds, far away, of love and devotion that exists but is trampled on by vice and forcefully dominated by earthly human-short-circuits…”(Doug Rickard)
Billingham went on to be nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001
RELATED ARTISTS
“... [photographers] developed a form of domestic hyper-reaism, seeking out the squalor of everyday life, peeling off the conventions of the family snapshot.” (Liz Wells 2015: p187)
There are many artists that use the visual language of the snapshot, or the intimacy of the personal photograph in their practice. Each of the following has their own approach, but all are exploring domesticity and the everyday.
NAN GOLDIN
Goldin has been photographing her friends since the 1970’s, creating an intimate record of various outsider communities of New York. Her first publication The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a seminal example of the personal photograph as artwork.
NOBUYOSHI ARAKI
A significant figure in photography since the 1960’s, Araki has explored many areas of photographic practice but it is his sexually explicit images of women that have made him the phenomenon that he is today.
LARRY CLARK
Clark came to prominence in 1995 after the release of his film Kids but it was the book Tulsa in 1971 that really saw the beginning of his exploration of intimate photography. This explicit record of drug-using teenagers from his hometown began a career long exploration of teenagers and their self destructive lifestyles.
NICK WAPPLINGTON
Wapplington’s book Living Room aims to be a counter-point to the conventional grim representation of the working classes in Britain. Filled with colour, chaos and joy, the work uses the language of the personal photograph to tell a sympathetic and authentic story.
ELINOR CARUCCI
Carucci, rather than working with the snapshot style, or the normal visual style of the personal photograph, focuses on the intimacy that is found in images of loved ones. In her book Closer, she gathers images that represent a universal insight into personal relationships.
References
Cotton, Charlotte (2014) The Photograph as Contemporary Art. 2nd Edition, London: Thames and Hudson
Holland, Patricia (2015) ‘Personal Photographs and Popular Photography’ in Photography: A Critical Introduction, 5th edition, London: Routledge.
Biographies
Jo Spence (1934 - 1992)
Spence was a significant member of the photographic community from the 1970s onwards. As a photographer, she constantly experimented with the medium, making highly political work as well as work that dealt with her own personal struggles with cancer. Spence also worked to develop community photographic projects, including the Photography Workshop Ltd (with long-term collaborator Terry Dennett), the Hackney Flashers and Polysnappers.
Chapter 4
Introduction
Chapter 4 focuses upon the body photographed, discussing the extent to which the body image came under scrutiny especially at the end of the twentieth century. Here a history of attitudes to photography and the body is traced, noting ways in which the photograph has been taken to embody social difference. Taking as its starting point the proposal that there is a crisis of confidence in the body consequent upon new technological developments, along with a crisis of representation of the body, the chapter explores questions of desire, pornography, the grotesque and images of the dead, in relation to different modes of representing the body familiar from media imagery as well as within art history.
Bodies in Transition: Rineke Dijkstra
“Dijkstra’s photographs … depict bodies as social and changeable, transformed by experience. Although they are displayed to us, these bodies are not frozen, not easily objectified. They are bodies in transition.” (Michelle Henning 2015: p230)
For this case study we will focus on the work of Rineke Dijkstra, and in particular her series Olivier (2000 – 2003).
Click here for more information.
Dijkstra photographed an 18-year-old named Olivier Silva at the beginning of his time in the French Foreign Legion. The project began immediately after he had been accepted into the elite military unit, and followed him through a further 3 year period. During this time Dijkstra visited Olivier for 6 more sessions in front of the camera. Dijkstra explains the project thus: ''The idea was to follow a soldier, someone who comes in soft and young, then turns tough … but I'm really talking about a mental change, not a physical one.'' (Michael Kimmelman 2001)
The French Foreign Legion has legendary status as the destination for outcasts and renegades, with its tough regime of training, and offer of anonymity. Dijkstra followed Olivier through his training in Aubagne, near Marseille, when he was stationed at Castelnaudary and the Pyrenees until the moment he was sent on active duty to Gabon, on the Ivory Coast.
Since the early 1990s, Rineke Dijkstra has been making portraits that have formed a key part of contemporary European photography. Within her work is the question of identity, and the ability of the photograph to reveal more than the surface of the subject. Dijkstra often focuses on intense emotional states to try and uncover a telling truth.
Her large-scale color photographs, typically of young or adolescent subjects recall her 17th- and 18th-century Dutch precursors. The images are minimal, and force the viewer to engage with the subject. The use of the series further encourages scrutiny, with minimal shifts becoming amplified.
As well as Olivier, Dijkstra has made studies of bullfighters in Portugal, after an appearance in the arena, marked both physically and mentally. She also made portraits of three young mothers holding their newborn babies, tired, emotional and shaken, but with a strength that exudes from the image. But it is with Olivier perhaps, due to the serial nature of the work, that the transitions are so apparent. We see a young man shift and change in front of our eyes. The insecurity that can be found in Dijkstra’s Beach Portraits slips and fades away, leaving a different person present in the image. “It's not so much the change of uniform, the chest hairs or the stronger biceps that matter. It's the hardening of Olivier's look, the realization that he has acquired authority, assurance and control.” (Michael Kimmelman 2001)
NICHOLAS NIXON
The ability of photography to reflect on the passing of time has been used many times, in particular we can think of the work of Mark Klett, who so elegantly displays the shifts and changes in the landscapes of the American West. But in terms of the body, there are few more elegant examples than Nicholas Nixon’s study of the Brown Sisters.
Click here for more information.
In 1975 Nixon made a photograph of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters, Heather, Mimi and Laurie. Following a further picture made the following year, the sisters agreed to have a group portrait made annually. There would be two rules for the on-going project, firstly, the sisters would always appear in the same order, and there would only be one image to represent a given year. Over the 40 years that this small event has taken place the approach has remained the same, yet the subtle changes start to build as the sequence develops. Faces shift and change, lines appear around the mouths and eyes. “Throughout this series, we watch these women age, undergoing life’s most humbling experience.” (Susan Minot, New York Times, 2014)
For Nixon there is another important aspect here. Growing up as a single child there is a fascination with the bonds of siblings. We see the sisters move together over time, with a synchronicity and trust that shifts and changes from the early images, where each sister tries to express their own individuality. And, as the sisters grow ever closer, there hovers over the series the inevitability of death, all four sisters won’t be there forever, and once again the power of the photograph comes to the fore. The absolute finality of the image, and its recording of this long term transition of the body.
References
Henning, Michelle (2015) ‘The Subject as Object’ in Photography: A Critical Introduction, 5th edition, London: Routledge.
Biographies
Floris Neusüss (b. 1937)
Neusüss is a German photographer, renowned for working with Photograms, as well as being a writer and teacher on camera-less photography. He experimented widely with the photogram, and since the 1960’s has been making Körperfotogramms (or whole-body photograms).
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/c/camera-less-photography-artists/
Fran Herbello (b. 1977)
Herbello is a Swiss photographer who combines aspects of sculpture and everyday life in his work. Much of his work focuses on parts of the human body, manipulated and abstracted so that meaning is shifted from the original context, leaving them to be considered simply as objects.
Gideon Mendel (b.1959)
Mendel is a London based South African documentary photographer known widely for his campaigning and activism. He has spent over 20 years photographing HIV/AIDS, for which he has been recognised with the Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography. As well as this, he spends his time photographing other humanitarian and political topics across the world.
Etienne Jules Marey (1830 - 1904)
Marey was a French photographer doctor and physiologist known for his work on human and animal movement. In 1888, he invented a method of recording multiple exposures of movement called ‘chronophotographie’. Through this method he recorded accurate images of walking, running and jumping; the movement of animals; the trajectories of objects as well as liquid movement and the functioning of the heart.
Hannah Höch (1889 - 1978)
Hoch was a German photomontage artist, particularly known as a member of the Dada movement. Her montages consisted of images from popular culture, and were a commentary on the social change happening in Germany at the time. The images also explored the concept of the ‘New Woman’, with gender and identity being central to many works.
Hans Bellmer (1902-1975)
Bellmer was a German surrealist, noted for his multifaceted practice, mostly involved in erotic fantasy. During the 1930’s he began to work with dolls, drawings and printings, all showing erotic versions of the female body. After leaving Nazi Germany, Bellmer joined the Surrealists in Paris, where he continued to make work, including the illustrations for Oeillades ciselie en Branches and the books Les Jeux de la Poupée and L'Anatomie de l'Image.
Lorna Simpson (b. 1960)
Simpson is an African-American artist and photographer who came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with work about multiculturalism and ethnic divisions. Her most notable works combine words with photographs. These aim to confront the viewer with the underlying racism still found in American culture. Significant works include Guarded Conditions, Square Deal, Necklines, Call Waiting and Corridor.Andres Serrano (b. 1950)
Serrano is an American photographer known for his radical, and often controversial, work. Influenced by Surrealism and Dada, he often constructs tableaux incorporating religious iconography, dead animals, raw meat and human subjects, as well as the recurring presence of blood and other bodily fluids. Serrano reached infamy in 1989 with his photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine, titled Piss Christ.
Rineke Dijkstra (b. 1959)
Dijkstra is a Dutch photographer and video artist known for her deadpan formal portraiture, often working in series. Her work sits in, and references, the tradition of documentary portraiture, with August Sander being a clear reference point. Key works include Beaches, Mothers, Soldier and The Buzz Club.
Chapter 5
Introduction
Chapter 5 continues the focus upon everyday uses of photography through considering commodity culture, spectacle and advertising. Photography is a cultural tool which is itself a commodity as well as a key expressive medium used to promote commercial interests. These links are examined through a series of case studies on global brand identity, and on tourism, fashion and the exotic; sample analyses of single images are also included. Within commodity culture, that which is specific to photography interacts extensively with broader political and cultural issues. Thus we note references both to commercial photography and, more generally, to questions of the politics of representation, paying particular attention to gender and ethnicity. The chapter employs semiotics within the context of socioeconomic analysis to point to ways in which photography is implicated in the concealing of international social and economic relations.
A Survey of Previous Case Studies
Over the 5 editions of this book, Anandi Ramamurthy has produced numerous case studies that go into great depths regarding photography and commodity culture.
Over time, there have been shifts in culture and society, and this can be reflected in the studies. For example, the commodification of social relations and human feelings via social networking has grown immeasurably during this time, and is perpetuated over time and space.
So, included here are previous case studies, so that you can reflect on some of these changes, and how photography has shaped, and been shaped by the passing of time.
Case Studies
First Edition Case Study (PDF 251.4KB)
Biographies
Margaret Bourke-White (1904—1971)
Bourke-White was an American photojournalist. She is particularly known for her work with Life magazine. Throughout her career she worked in many conflict zones, including Germany and the Soviet Union, as well as the Dust Bowl in the American Midwest. She was also heavily involved in covering World War II, where she captured the haunting scenes as the allied forces liberate the concentration camps. She continued to cover many conflicts after that until retirement in 1969.
Cindy Sherman (b. 1954)
Sherman is an American photographer, known for her constructed self portraits. She is widely recognised as one of the most important and influential artists of the 20th Century. Themes that are consistently explored include the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation. This includes a continual critique of imagery from movies, TV, magazines, the Internet, and art history.
Paolo Roversi (b.1947)
Roversi is an Italian portrait photographer working mostly with Polaroid. He works almost exclusively with large format cameras, black and white Polaroid and in the studio, making images that reference those of 19th Century photographers.
Oliviero Toscani (b. 1942)
Toscani is an Italian photographer, widely known for his controversial advertising campaigns for Benetton. For almost 20 years Toscani worked for Benetton, delivering increasingly shocking adverts that focussed on themes such as AIDS, racism, war, religion and capital punishment.
Chapter 6
Introduction
Chapter 6 considers photographic practices in relation to art and art institutions, discussing claims made for the status of photography as a fine art practice, historically and now. The chapter is organised chronologically in three sections: the nineteenth century; modern art movements; postmodern and contemporary practices. This historical division is intended not as a sort of chart of progress so much as a method of identifying different moments and shifting terms of reference relating to photography as an art practice. Attention is paid to forms of work and to themes which feature frequently in contemporary practice, including questions of gender, ethnicity and identity. Illustrations particularly relate to land, landscape and environment. This chapter is principally concerned to trace shifts in the parameters of debate as to the status of the photograph as art, to map historical changes in the situation of art photography within the museum and gallery, and to comment on photography as contemporary art practice.
Documentary on the White Wall
In 1994 Brett Rogers introduced a photographic exhibition, including primarily documentary images, with the statement that documentary photography is “ignored by the art world that favours big pictures and high prices…” and that “…documentary photography has . . . come under harsh scrutiny from post-modern critics…” (Liz Wells 2015: p346). Liz Wells says that this has “clearly changed”, with examples of contemporary photography such as Wall, Gursky, Hofer and Struth. But what of the gallery, and what of the more conventional documentary practices such as photojournalism, how do these fare in the contemporary gallery.
There have long been exhibitions of documentary photography, but they have not always been seen to forward the cause. In 1955, for example, there was the Family of Man show at MOMA. The show, a survey of reportage photography from across the world aimed to show a utopian vision of humanity in harmony. It was hugely popular with the public, but many critics found fault. Allan Sekula describes the show as “…the epitome of American Cold War Liberalism, with Steichen playing cultural attaché…” (Allan Sekula, 1981) The show was seen as a very outdated view of the world, with a tendency towards patriarchy.
MOMA did continue to show documentary practice, with Diane Arbus having a solo show in the early 1970’s, a period defined by the curatorial oversight of John Szarkowski. At the same time, other photographer who were loosely defined as having a documentary practice were seen in art spaces with shows for Frank, Friedlander, Winogrand and others. What defined these artists was their aesthetic and approach that opposition to the humanist photography of Life magazine. And it is this rejection of the conventional forms of photojournalism that have defined the place of documentary photography ever since.
CRUEL AND TENDER
If things were complicated in America, then the situation in Britain was desperate. There were very few spaces that would show photography at all, let alone documentary practice. It was of considerable import then, when Tate announced that they would be holding their first major exhibition of photography at the Tate Modern (it would be another 6 years before Simon Baker would be appointed their first curator of photography), and it would be based on documentary practice.
Click here to see TATE’s information on the show.
From 5 June – 7 September 2003 the Tate Modern gallery in London threw open its doors to the public, with its largest ever display of photography. The show, titled Cruel and Tender, included work from Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Paul Graham, Andreas Gursky, Boris Mikhailov, Nicholas Nixon, Martin Parr, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Thomas Ruff, August Sander, Michael Schmidt, Fazal Sheikh, Stephen Shore, Thomas Struth, and Garry Winogrand.
The list represents some of the most significant photographers form the 20th century, and a list of photographers who work within documentary traditions. This includes some of the founders of the genre itself in Walker Evans and August Sander. The show not only signalled a welcoming of photography into the British institutions, but a welcoming of documentary photography. Once again however, the work represents an alternative approach to the photojournalistic traditions.
Much of the work presented in the show can be described as straight photography, neutral, deadpan or objective, the type of photography that aims to present frank reality. For the photographers in included this means looking at the world around us and avoiding idealised or clichéd imagery. This type of photography is often characterized by a slower working process, with the use of medium and large format cameras. In contemporary photography, this also sees the scale of the images increased, with documentary images being printed at large scales, not looking out of place on the white gallery wall.
So, Cruel and Tender represents an acceptance of documentary photography in the gallery, and on a large scale (100,000 people visited the show in London), however it still does not find a place for photojournalism, with new forms of documentary practice moving further away from this genre all the time.
AFTERMATH PHOTOGRAPHY
A continuation of this pattern sees the growing convention of Aftermath photography. This form of documentary photography sees photographers working around the edges of events, particularly in conflict zones. David Campany has termed this kind of work ‘late photography’, where the photographer concentrates on the traces, the evidence of violence rather than the action itself. The concern for photojournalists is that this kind of photography removes our connection to the human impact of these events. As Christy Lange says, “How does our impression of the war change if we only see ‘traces’ rather than the ‘faces’?” (Christy Lange, 2010). This kind of work however is much more suited to the gallery wall, and it is not uncommon to see large scale imagery of this kind adorning commercial, as well as public gallery walls.
Paul Seawright
Paul Seawright’s project Hidden is an example of ‘Late Photography’. Seawright was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to go to Afghanistan and respond to the conflict there. Using a large format camera, Seawright recorded Afghanistan in 2002 after a great deal of devastation had already happened to the country. The ensuing images are removed from the drama of photojournalism, and offer a subdued response to the landscape. This approach built upon work made in Belfast, and shows a concern for the hidden malevolence of the landscape.
OTHER RELATED ARTISTS
Simon Norfolk
Norfolk comes from a photojournalist background, but has diversified in recent years to produce slower, and more in depth studies. He too has made work in Afghanistan, also with a large format camera and a ‘Late Photography’ approach.
Luc Delahaye
Delahaye makes work that relates much more to photojournalism in its subject than its approach. Often photographing in the midst of the action, he uses large format photography to create detailed large scale images of scenarios.
MAGNUM, LOOKING FORWARDS
The photographic agency Magnum is grounded in photojournalism, having been formed by photojournalists, as a time when the power of photojournalism was at its fullest. Magnum however is shifting its stance, and as new members join the ranks, there is a fresh diversity to the practice. Although all clearly working in the documentary genre, there is a shift to include more contemporary forms of documentary practice, including photographers whose work is equally at home on the gallery wall as it is on the page. Key figures in this respect are Martin Parr and Alec Soth, but also Antoine d‘Agata, Alessandra Sanguinetti and Bieke Depoorter.
OTHER INTERESTING EXAMPLES
Esko Männikkö
Männikkö, makes quiet observations of remote lives in the far north of Finland. His images are documentary in their nature, but are produced with the book, and the gallery wall in mind. The presentation of the images is very important, with framing in particular shaping the gallery experience. All of his images are shown in heavy wood frames, either salvaged, or specially produced to give a certain weight to the modest images.
Walid Raad
Raad is a photographer, artist and academic, and the author of the Atlas Group – an imaginary project looking at the cultural history of Beirut and the Lebanon. The project plays with the authenticity afforded to certain forms of documentary practice, and includes documents, lectures, films and text as well as photographs. The work is most often displayed in the white walled gallery, and works with the implied veracity of the photographic image.
References
Rogers, Brett (1994) in Wells, Liz (2015) ‘On and Beyond the White Walls’ in Photography: a Critical Introduction, 5th edition, London: Routledge.
Sekula, Allan (1981) ‘The Traffic in Photographs’, Art Journal, vol. 41, no. 1
Lange, Christy (2010) ‘The limitations of photojournalism and the ethics of artistic representation’, Freize 132
Biographies
Karen Knorr (b. 1954)
Knorr is a German / Puerto Rican photographer and Professor of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham, Surrey. Her work is concerned with the politics of representation, with projects that include, Belgravia, Gentlemen, Connoisseurs, Academies, Being for Another, Fables and India Song.
Camille Silvy (1834-1910)
Silvy was a French portrait photographer, who established one of the most successful Victorian photographic studios in London. He photographed most of the Royal Family and the British aristocracy. The collection is no part of the National Portrait Gallery's archives.
http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp08115/camille-silvy
Henry Peach Robinson (1830 – 1901)
Peach Robinson was an English photographer, working at the very outset of the medium. In 1857 he opened a studio making portraits, but his real creative drive came from making combination prints, where he would join multiple negatives together to create a single image. His approach was largely informed by Pictorialism, and the aesthetics of painting. Like many photographers from the time, the effect of the chemicals caused severe problems, causing his eventual death in 1901.
http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/artists/1936/henry-peach-robinson-british-1830-1901/
Bill Brandt (1904 –1983)
Brandt was a British photographer and photojournalist, known for his images of British society. Although he was born in Germany, Brandt made much of his significant work in Britain, and is widely considered to be one of the most important British photographers of the 20th Century. Brandt published several books of his work including, The English at Home, A Night in London, Literary Britain, and Perspective of Nudes and the survey book Shadow of Light. As well as this, he was a regular contributor to magazines such as Lilliput, Picture Post, and Harper's Bazaar.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian-born abstract painter, designer, typographer, photographer, film-maker and theorist. He was heavily involved in the development of the Bauhaus in Germany, being particularly involved in experimental photography. In 1937, during World War II, he moved to Chicago, where he was the director of the New Bauhaus, and then his own School of Design.
Edward Henry Weston (1886 –1958)
Weston was an American photographer, recognised as a key figures in the development of Modernist photography, and one of the most important photographers of the 20th Century. His work spans landscapes, still lifes, nudes, portraits, and more, with photographs that are characterised by detailed representations made with a 10x8 view camera. Having spent much of his working life there, it is the landscape of California that is often the location, and the subject.
Lee Miller (1907 – 1977)
Miller was an American model, muse, photographer, artist and war correspondent, and perhaps one of the most exciting figures to have ever existed in Photographic history. Her relationship with photography began as a model for Edward Steichen, Hoyningen-Heune and Arnold Genthe, before she moved to Paris to work with artist and photographer Man Ray. Here she became known for her portrait and fashion photographs, as well as her surrealist images. After this she spent time making long distance desert voyages, setting up her own photographic studio and working for Vogue. In 1944 she travelled to the front lines of World War II with the US Army to make images for Time Life. During this time Miller saw the siege of St Malo, the Liberation of Paris, the fighting in Luxembourg and Alsace, the Russian/American link up at Torgau and the liberation of the Buchenwald and Dachau death camps. Whilst in Germany she famously visited Hitler and Eva Brauns houses in Munich, and Berchtesgaden, where she was photographed bathing in Hitler’s bath. After the war she continued to work as a photographer, and settled in Britain where she made portraits and fashion images until her death in 1977.
Keith Arnatt (1930 – 2008)
Arnatt was a British conceptual artist and photographer. His career began with performance and film, but it was in photography that he found his voice. Much of Arnatt’s work was concerned with the details of everyday life, with his humour and dry wry wit a constant throughout. Key works include, Self Burial (Television Interference Project), Notes from Jo, Brick and AONB.
Guerrilla Girls (1985 - Present)
Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting inequality within the art world. In 1985 the group began, with very public acts of protest, aiming to bring awareness to the sexism present in the contemporary art world. The members of the group are famous for wearing Gorilla masks, and attending high profile events in and around New York.
Jeff Wall (b. 1946)
Wall is a Canadian photographer, renowned for his large-format staged photographs. In his images that range from mundane corners of the urban environment to elaborate tableaux, Wall aims to create suspense in the viewer. The images combine aspects of 19th Century history paintings, as well as large-scale illuminated advertising.
Ingrid Pollard (b. 1953)
Pollard is a British artist and photographer known for her work that challenges traditional views of race and landscape. A key work is Pastoral Interludes, a series of photographs of black people in rural landscapes, considering their primarily urban representation.
Susan Derges (b. 1955)
Derges is a British artist, working primarily with cameraless photography. Having trained initially as a painter her approach to photography does not fit with the conventions of the medium. Much of her significant work has been made at night in the open air. These are often large in scale, and, unlike many photographic works, are unique.
John Kippin (b. 1950)
Kippin is a British photographer, known for his work around documentary photography. Much of his work combines image and text, challenging realist traditions of the genre. Since the 1980’s he has made significant work that looks at the landscape, questioning conventions of pictorial and aesthetic beauty, as well as cultural and political change in Britain.
Edward Burtynsky (b. 1955)
Burtynsky is a Canadian photographer, known for his large-scale depictions of global industrial landscapes. His photographs are concerned with the impact of human activity on the planet, especially the huge industrial systems we have constructed. Key works include, Water, Oil, China, Manufactured Landscapes, and Before the Flood.
Anne Noble (b. 1954)
Noble is a New Zealand based photographer and academic, working with landscape, documentary and installation, with both still and moving image. Her work is known for its conceptual rigour, with series developing over many years. Since 2001 Noble has been making work about Antarctica, exploring the imagined and real experience of the landscape. Anne is Professor of Fine Arts (Photography) at Massey University Wellington.