Week 6

Part 3: Photography and Modernity
Chapter 6- The Great divide 
Mass media and mass markets

Journal Quote 9.
"The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box."
~Henri Cartier Bresson 




Continue Chapter 6:
Naturalistic photography 
Pictorialism 
The Photo-Secession
Stieglitz and the Steerage
Stieglitz and 291 

Edward Steichen
The Nude
Gertrude Käsebier

Paul Strand
Lecture on  SSS (Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand) 


Anthropological Pictorialism - Edward Curtis, The Indian Opera (in class video)

Non-Pictorialism Visions:
Wunderkamera and the Celestograph- August Strindberg

Pictorialism: A Conservative Avant-Garde 
In 1910 Stieglitz staged a exhibition of around 600 photographs as a retrospective of Pictorialism, held for the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY.  

Journal Quote 10.
“Good pictures are the result of long study rather than chance.” ~Edward S. Curtis

Chapter 7- Modern life  
The Modern City
Social reform photography
Jacob Riis
Lewis Hine- National Child Labor Committee
The Ideal City- Chicago 1893, The World's Colombian Exposition

Science and Photography:
The Photography of movement: Edward Muybridge's photo studies on movement and his invention and use of devices such as the zoetrope, the praxinoscope, and the phenskistoscope that acted on the trickery of the eye to perceive movement influence French physiologist, Etienne-Jules Marey  He had been studying human and animal locomotion for a decade and decided after seeing Muybridge's work to experiment with photography.  The advent of dry-plate technology which speed up the exposure time needed to make photographs made it possible for him to invent the process called chronophotography, time photography allowing for the continued movement to be recorded on one plate when studying motion.
Directly or indirectly, chronophotographs influenced art movements at this time, from artists such as Marcel Duchamp's  1912 Nude descending Staircase #2 reflects this fascination with movement during this time.
Moving pictures: Zoetrope and the Praxinoscope influence Edison to create the kinetoscope in 1894, a boxlike structure which used flexible film about 50 feet in length. The film was illuminated from behind a magnified lens and it sped by the viewers hand  at 48 frames per second, generating a show that lasted 13 seconds.

The X-Ray:
Experimenting with electricity and cathode ray tube, William Conrad Rontgen is considered the inventor.  He originally thought the ray, unknown, and then named "X" could pass through the human body and blacken a photographic plate.  X-ray booths showed up in amusement parks and department stores where anyone could operate them to produce an image of themselves, like a photo booth.  However, it was thought that this practice was safe for many years, until it was determined that the rays were harmful if exposed to them too much.  X-rays have a history with the association of the occult, for after all- what is this thing that lets you see through clothing and walls? X-rays influenced many art movements such as Cubism and Futurism, land even literature such as H.G.Well's The Invisible Man.
 Still today photographers are inspired by X-Ray, Nick Veasey.


 The Gilbreths' Time and Motion Studies: excerpt from History of Photography; documenting the worker