In the early history of photography, I was interested in the way early scientists used photography to capture and observe movement in their world. The early use of photography as a tool of science interested me. I enjoyed how Talbot and other early developers used it as a way to see the details and understand the natural world. The famous Muybridge photographs of a galloping horse answered a question of painters and scientists, do all four legs of a horse leave the ground? The photographs also inspired Marey, who had been studying human movement, to invent “chronophotography” and analyze the movement of a human walking [Figure 1].
His work was made placing a spinning disk in front of the camera, small cutouts in the disk would expose the position of a person walking onto one piece of film. In Muybridge’s work, a sequence of images was would be laid out in a long filmstrip style like animation cells or layered on top of each other to analyze movement. The photographers’ studies of human motion inspired other artists and scientists like Paul Richer and Marcel Duchamp to create artwork about dynamic movement. Muybridge’s image sequences and Marey’s chronophotographs answered their questions about the world and inspired other artists to explore human motion more realistically in their work. These photographs made me understand my interest was in the serial, objective approach to photography to observe the natural and social sciences. The work of August Sander takes a social and economic perspective, he attempted to photograph the German population by profession to analyze their facial characteristics. “Sanders methodical approach indicate his concern for unprejudiced and realistic representation. …he saw the opportunity to bring out typical physiognomy and body languages of different professions…” I was taken by the portraits of the 1940s German population, the way his photographs show a range of personalities linked with specific job types. [Figure 2, 3]
This imagery examines its subjects in is shows the form of the subject, which made me interested in the precise photography of the Bechers. [Figure 4]
The Bechers were interested in industrial architecture because of Bernd’s childhood in the Ruhr area of Germany, and began photographing factory and mine sites. They documented the structures knowing they would soon disappear Germany moved into a new, postwar economic era. Using black and white film and a large view camera, they photographed the architecture from the front, at the same distance, on cloudy days with flat light. Without shadows and with a similar approach, the perception of the buildings is the same, allowing a comparison of the structure’s form. Their approach allows you to see the similarity of the industrial design, the multitude of these structures speaks about the production demands on a capitalist economy. I am interested in how these pictures compare the form of their subject and how the series of images informs us about German society and influenced artists’ ways of seeing.
