Photography

• Documentary photography

• Artistic photography

• Street photography

• Photojournalism

• Landscape photography

• Portraiture

Consider the following elements of composition as you critique a

photograph:

• foreground/background/middle-ground• balance• repetition• lighting• frame• line• exposure• subject-matter• axis/symmetry/asymmetry• focal point• angle of view

Consider how the photograph illustrates the principles and

elements of design• what draws our eye to the image? • how did the photographer think about form and content? • consider the angle from which the photo is taken

– What is included in the frame?– What is not included?– How does the angle affect our understanding of the scene?

• examine the use of mass and shape– What is being emphasized?– What is being de-emphasized?

• what other choices has the photographer made in composing the photo?

• what can you tell about the attitude of the photographer towards the subjects of the picture?

Jacob Riis1849-1914

America's first journalist-photographerknown at the turn of the century as the "Emancipator of the Slums" because of his work on behalf of the urban poor brutal documentation of sweatshops, disease-ridden tenements, and overcrowded schools aroused public indignation and helped effect significant reform in housing, education, and child-labor lawsno real artistic intent"I came to take up photography ... not exactly as a pastime. It was never that for me. I had to use it, and beyond that I never went..”

Bandit's Roost,59 1/2 Mulberry Street

Home of an Italian Rag picker1888

Five Cents Lodging, Bayard Street 1889

Basement of a Pub in Mulberry-Bend at 3:00 am

A Black-and-Tan Dive in "Africa"

Blind Beggar

A downtown "Morgue" (unlicensed saloon)

Police Station Lodger, A Plank for a Bed

Women's Lodging Room in the West 47th Street

Men's Lodging Room in the West 47th Street

Timothy O'Sullivan1840-1882

•documented battlefields of Civil War

•little is known of his life

•career covered barely two decades but produced one of the major bodies of photographic work in 19th century America

•originally worked for Matthew Brady

A Harvest of Death,Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

July, 1863

Group of Confederate Prisonersat Fairfax Court-House, Virginia

General Grant and his General Staff

Dorothea Lange1895-1965

• best known for her Depression-era work for the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration

• her photographs humanized the tragic consequences of the Great Depression and profoundly influenced the development of documentary photography

“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”

Migrant Mother

Ditched, Stalled and Stranded

Plantation Overseer and His Field Hands

Back

Riverbank Gas Station

Margaret Bourke-White1904-1971

• first female war correspondent

• first woman to be allowed to work in combat zones during World War II

• first female photojournalist for Life magazine

A DC4 Flying Over New York City

Fort Peck Dam (1st cover of Life Magazine)

Gandhi

Buchenwald

Germans See Buchenwald

Gold Miners, South Africa

Flood Victim Paddling a Boat Made of Washtubs, Louisville, KY

Hats in the Garment District

Moscow Bombing 1941

Julia Margaret Cameron 1815-1879

•Cameron's photographs are notable for the extreme intimacy and psychological intensity

•these effects achieved by the use of extreme close-up, suppression of detail (sometimes accompanied by peripheral blurring), and dramatic lighting

•was attempting to “convey the inner spirit”

Sadness

The Echo

Mariana"She said I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead"

Carleton Watkins1829-1916

In the last third of the 19th c. one of America's foremost landscape photographersknown primarily for his artistic panoramas of Yosemite and other wilderness areasphotographed throughout the West on field expeditions, carrying huge cameras and other equipmentalso made many memorable images of the rapid development of San Francisco

Coast View Number One

The Wreck of the Viscata

Washington Column, 2052 ft., Yosemite

Alcatraz, from North Point

The Golden Gate from Telegraph Hill

Alfred Stieglitz1864 - 1946

• instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an acceptable art form alongside painting and sculpture

• also known for his marriage to painter Georgia O’Keeffe

• was insistent that "photographs look like photographs," so that the medium of photography would be considered with its own aesthetic credo and and be defined as a fine art for the first time

Winter On Fifth Avenue

•

Icy Night

•

Spring Showers

From the Back-Window

Georgia O’Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe

Gordon Parks1912 - 2006

• Groundbreaking African-American photographer, musician, poet, novelist, journalist & film director

• best remembered for his photo essays for Life magazine and as the director of the 1971 film Shaft

• said that freedom was the theme of all of his work

American Gothic

Red Jackson and Herbie Levy Study Wounds of Slain Gang Member Maurice Gaines

Chain Gang

Ella Watson and her Grandchildren

•

Drugstore Cowboys, Blind River, Ontario

Muhammed Ali in Training

Norman Jr. Reading in Bed

Ansel Adams1902-1984

• best known for his black and white photographs of California's Yosemite Valley

• credited with creating the zone system, a technique which allows photographers to translate the light they see into specific densities on negatives and paper, thus giving them better control over finished photographs, so they have a systematic method of precisely defining the relationship between the way they see the photographic subject and the results they achieve in their finished works

• also pioneered the idea of visualization of the finished print based upon the measured light values in the scene being photographed

Bridal Veil Fall, Yosemite Valley

•

Nevada Fall, Yosemite

Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico

Tree

Mount McKinley,Denali National Park, Alaska

Aspens

Moon and Half Dome

Robert Doisneau1912 - 1944

• noted for his frank and often humorous depictions of Parisian street life.

• “Chance is the one thing you can't buy. You have to pay for it and you have to pay for it with your life, spending a lot of time, you pay for it with time, not the wasting of time but the spending of time.”

Kiss at the Hotel de Ville

Inky child

Sunday Morning in Arcueil

Sidelong Glance

Hell

Picasso and the Loaves

Down to the Factory

Pipi Pigeon

A Musician

Henri Cartier-Bresson1908-2004

• street photography• sought the “decisive moment”• “To me, photography is the simultaneous

recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms that give that event its proper expression.“

• "Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever."

Behind the Gare St. Lazare

Gold Distribution Shanghai

Man Ray1890-1976

• "I do not photograph nature. I photograph my visions."

• master of experimental and fashion photography• also a painter, a filmmaker, a poet, an essayist,

a philosopher, and a leader of American modernism

• interest in minimalism and abstraction carried over to Man Ray's experiments with what he termed "rayographs“: made by placing a three-dimensional object or series of objects on top of a piece of photographic paper and exposing it to light

Le Violin

Tears

Noire et Blanche

rayographs