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New Social Landscape. Photographers. Lee Friedlander. Diane Arbus. Robert Frank. Garry Winogrand. Inspired by Walker Evans. What is New Social Landscape??. Reinvented the Documentary Tradition Documented the “Social Landscape” of America Rejected sentimentality
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New Social Landscape Photographers
Lee Friedlander Diane Arbus Robert Frank Garry Winogrand Inspired by Walker Evans
What is New Social Landscape?? • Reinvented the Documentary Tradition • Documented the “Social Landscape” of America • Rejected sentimentality • Similar to street Photographers, but … • Darker • Objective • Prying approach • Not necessarily to celebrate, • but to document.
The New Topographies New Topographies: Photos of a Man-Altered Landscape Exhibition curated by William Jenkins at International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester NY 1975 http://www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/exhibitions/407 A turning point in the history of photography, the 1975 exhibition New Topographics signalled a radical shift away from traditional depictions of landscape. Pictures of transcendent natural vistas gave way to unromanticised views of stark industrial landscapes, suburban sprawl, and everyday scenes not usually given a second glance.
10 photographers who exhibited: Robert Adams Lewis Baltz Bernd and Hilla Becher Joe Deal Frank Gohlke Nicholas Nixon John Schott Stephen Shore Henry Wessel
Diane Arbus Quote: “I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.” Diane Arbus “Her unrelentingly direct photographs of people who live on the edge of societal acceptance, as well as those photographs depicting supposedly "normal" people in a way that sharply outlines the cracks in their public masks, were controversial at the time of their creation and remain so today.”
Robert Adams Focused on what humans were doing to the landscape. Suburban developments Expansion of the west
‘Deadpan’ approach Unmanipulated Impassive Large Depth of Field Head-on Compositions Image sharpness Detail Large Scale Intensify realism Large Format Camera Detached Neutral Matter-Of-Fact Objective Clinical Typological Approach – examining types
Bernd and Hilla Becher Quote: “Bernd and HillaBecher are among the most influential artists of our time. For more than forty years they have been recording the heritage of an industrial past. Their systematic photography of functionalist architecture, often organizing their pictures in grids, brought them recognition as conceptual artists as well as photographers. As the founders of what has come to be known as the ‘Becher school’ they have brought their influence in a unique way to bear on generations of documentary photographers and artists.”
Stephen Shore Quote: “Each view receives the same impartial treatment, revealing his democratic approach to subject matter. The everyday carton of milk becomes quietly monumental.” Simon Lee
Deadpan approach His work coinciding with the environmental movements of the 1970’s Ironic approach to landscape with the use of color
William Eggleston Quote: "The extraordinary, compelling, honest, beautiful and unsparing photographs all have to do with the quality of our lives in the ongoing world: they succeed in showing us the grain of the present, like the cross-section of a tree.... They focus on the mundane world. But no subject is fuller of implications than the mundane world!"
Richard Billingham Quote: “Billingham's snap shots form a kind of family album no ordinary family member would ever make, let alone show. This is not a family life of fake smiles and awkward calendar events. They're more like a backstage glimpse of the chaotic rehearsals. It's a view that turned Billingham from a would-be painter into a celebrated photographer.”
Nan Goldin Quote: “The main themes of her early pictures are love, gender, domesticity, and sexuality; these frames are usually shot with available light. She has affectionately documented women looking in mirrors, girls in bathrooms and barrooms, drag queens, sexual acts, and the culture of obsession and dependency. The images are viewed like a private journal made public.”
“ The pictures were stripped of any artistic frills and reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion.” -- William Jenkins Focused on the darker side of landscape photography – not the glorified, beautiful vision of the modernist – not pristine! The altered, scared, and changing landscape.
This new way of photographing and documenting people and the landscape would influence generations of photographers to come. The deadpan approach, refusal of the need for beauty, and showing the banal or absurdity of life would be characteristics of Postmodernism and the movements leading up to it.
Postmodernism started 1960’s, 1970’s – Still living in it now! Is it done? Anything goes No visual characteristics – too much of everything. Communicates a specific idea. Taken everything that has come before and mixed it up. Its all things combined. Camera was used as a recording method predominantly – however there are some photographers whose work can be labelled as Post Modern
Postmodernism Irony Inspiration from mass-media Subjective Capturing the everyday Personal Vision All about intentions Intimate, private moments Communicating an idea Photographing personal events Ignoring genre boundaries Intentionally technically weak, to help convey ideas i.e. blurred, casual hand held approach Encourages the combination of ideas with other art forms
PostmodernismThe Snapshot Approach Irony Inspiration from mass-media Subjective Capturing the everyday Personal Vision Humour Intimate, private moments Communicating an idea Photographing personal events Ignoring genre boundaries Intentionally technically weak, to help convey ideas i.e. blurred, casual hand held approach Encourages the combination of ideas with other art forms
Post Modern Art can be: Installation Abstract expressionist paintings Conceptual art - (where the idea is more important than photo itself) Performance Art Environmental art Light art Sculpture
“Term used to characterize developments in architecture and the arts in the 1960s and after, when there was a clear challenge to the dominance of modernism; the term was applied predominantly from the 1970s to architecture and somewhat later to the decorative and visual arts.”
Gregory Crewdson Quote: “The artist has referred the 'limitations of a photograph in terms of narrative capacity to have an image that is frozen in time, (where) there's no before or after' and has turned that restriction into a unique strength.”
