Adam Verhoeff
10-26-16
Ruth Eisenberg
First Draft Essay
Edward Curtis was a photographer and ethnologist who photographed Native American tribes throughout the Pacific Northwest. He constructed a 20 volume series of photographs, each volume including 1500, for JP Morgan, documenting his expedition and experience living among the Native American tribes. He took portraits of them in traditional garments using the photogravure process. And although he occasionally photographed backgrounds, he usually took his portraits against a backdrop. The photo series was completed in 20 years, and although it didn’t bring him fame or fortune, he captured the faces of a society of people that city folk had never seen with such detail.
Surrealism is an art movement that covers many types of media. It developed out of the Dada movement in the 1920s, a genre that had established the “anti-art” aesthetic. Surrealism blurs the distinction between dream and reality. It features illogical imagery that appear fake or from a dream. Surrealism photography was pioneered by Man Ray and Andre Breton who created their own worlds through their pictures. Surrealism heavily relies on light and shape to be fully understood. In Man Ray’s photograms, he mixes outlines of light to create a flat background of textural shapes. The result is like a haze you experience during the moment you begin to dream.
Pictorialism was an aesthetic movement that influenced photography in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the 19th century, there was much debate on whether photography should be considered a true artistic medium. Pictorialism set out to prove that photography was not just a captured moment of reality. Pictorialists believed that a photograph was like a painting, a truly one-of a-kind piece of art unique to the artist’s creative center. Pictorialist pictures are often very hazy. They are usually simple, serene and beautiful. They often capture young women at rest or vast fields of farmlands. Pictorialist photographs were made for their beauty, utilising the same inspiration a painter has when he creates a landscape.
The gum bichromate was a photography process in the 19th century that used sensitive dichromates to produce positive images on sheets. The dichromates were mixed in with the gum and a touch of pigment, which means that the photo could be custom colored. The mixture was then painted on the paper, exposed to light and submerged in warm water to wash off areas not exposed by light. This process was often used by pictorialists as it involves lots of craftsmanship. The lasting images had much detail and were quite permanent. Because there is a bit of manual work, photographers like Alfred Stieglitz felt rewarded whenever they produced a gum bichromate image. It is interested to note how customized the whole process can be depending on the type of pigment used.
In the 1910s, around the time of the First World War, the dada movement started to become widespread. Dada was anti-war, anti-establishment, and anti-art. It usually depicted nonsensical doodles or machinery, random letters and numbers, collages from newspaper magazines. The pictures were devoid of meaning and aesthetic, which produced the popular debate over what is truly considered art. If everything is art, then nothing is art. One of the pioneers of Dada, Marcel Duchamp, when he made the first readymade pictures, pictures of readily common objects. His entire scope produced lots of imagery of well-known and omnipresent things, each one challenging the entire history of art. An example of this is his work “L.H.O.O.Q.” which is simply “Mona Lisa” painted with a moustache, and an indirect translation of “She has a nice ass” at the bottom of it. This piece of art took the most well-known image at the time and completely voided its artistic value and its seriousness. Marcel Duchamp created his own aesthetic out of having no aesthetic. He experimented with commodities, usual objects, nothing that wows on the surface, but is grand in how it challenges the history of art and what art constitutes in general.
Jack Goldstein’s “The Pull” is a three photograph series. Each photo consists of a lone figure (a scuba diver, an astronaut, and a falling person). The figures are tiny compared to the vast amount of monochromatic space they are surrounded in. These photos display a unique blend of minimalism and surrealism, two genres that don’t usually co-mingle. The results are photographs that feature a minimal background of space with the hazy, dreamlike feel of a surrealist photograph. The photos are not clear until one puts their face right up to them to see the tiny figures. This produces a feeling similar to waking up from a dream, when one’s mind is at its haziest and most insular. It is fitting then, that the figures are all actions typically found in dreams. The scuba diver and the astronaut may represent desires and goals, while the falling figure represents a nightmare. This idea is augmented by the placement of the faller at the bottom of the frame, making it unknown whatever the man is about the fall into.
