Isms: Understanding Photography

Emma Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000323696
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Photography

Understanding Photography packs an enormous amount of detail into a handy, attractive guide tracing the evolution of photography through a series of interconnected trends, groups, themes and movements – from the invention of the photographic process to the post-internet age. Organised chronologically, this is a uniquely international, comprehensive guide to photography with concise, readable and jargon-free but scholarly insight into major photographers, movements and themes of the past 170 years. In an age where photography is of more resonance and interest than ever before, Understanding Photography offers an in-depth and clear exposition of photography for the interested general reader or student.

2 INTO THE MODERN 1850s—1930s

Early Street

With the advent of photographic processes that made it more feasible for the photographer to work outside the studio, the camera soon played a significant role in documenting, and reflecting upon, street life.

EUGÉNE ATGET (1857-1927); BILL BRANDT (1904-83); BRASSAİ (GYULA HALÁSZ) (1899-1984); HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON (1908-2004); ANDRÉ KÉRTESZ (1894-1985)

archetypes; ephemeral; formalism; urban; voyeuristic

While photographers had made cityscapes since the medium's very earliest days, it was in the late-19th century - with the introduction of smaller cameras, lenses with shorter focal lengths, and film sensitive enough to record in low or fleeting light - that they first began to capture the activity that took place there. Scenes of street life became a major subject.

EUGENE ATGET
Organ Grinder, 1898
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York
Among the 8,000 negatives that comprised the vast archive of images that Atget called his 'documents for artists' were studies of street traders. In most he depicted them as anonymous 'types', but in this image he allows their characters to shine.

Some of the earliest street photography, made in the 1850s by Charles Marville and Charles Negre, featured scenes of Parisian architecture and local characters. Later, street archetypes such as beggars, organgrinders and shoeshiners also became key subjects for photographers including Alice Austen and Paul Strand in New York, Paul Martin in London, and Eugéne Atget in Paris. Their images were often unsentimental, and did not offer sociopolitical commentary. Between 1890 and 1928 Atget created thousands of photographs of old, unmodernised Paris. He intended them to be, as he called them, 'documents for artists'. In contrast, Jacques-Henri Lartigue chronicled the Belle Époque through scenes of upper-class life observed in the public spaces of Monte Carlo and Paris. André Kertész's photographs also became emblematic of a modern approach to the genre of street photography, focusing both on formal beauty and encounters between people and the urban environment. These were often taken at oblique angles, through windows or railings, and with low lighting and action or body parts cropped to reflect the pace of city life and the voyeuristic presence of the photographer.

In the 1930s, Bill Brandt and Brassaï regarded the nocturnal streets as the ideal source for urban dramas: the time when the city is given over to the vagrants, drunks and prostitutes that made up its invisible underworld. Brassaï published his Paris by Night in 1933. Inspired by these dark views of city streets and characters, and influenced by Atget, Brandt made his own photobook, A Night in London (1938).

One of the main motivations for finding subject matter on the city streets was that it provided great scope for formalist experimentation. Photographers used the effects of light, shadow, architectural features and the arrangement of individuals in a frame to create classical, often semi-abstract compositions. In the 1950s, the combination of these aesthetic concerns with the desire to capture the essence of city life led Henri Cartier-Bresson to develop his influential concept of 'the decisive moment': the point at which aesthetic judgement and the narrative peak of a scene coalesce before the lens.

BRASSAÏ
Pont Louise-Philippe Seen through the Pont Marie (Le Pont Louis-Philippe vu a travers le Pont Marie), c 1935
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Brassaïs view is a study in texture, form and composition, but loaded with atmospheric intensity. Here he used a flashbulb to accentuate the light reflected from the water, creating this gloomy and ominous effect.

OTHER WORKS

• BILL BRANDT Policeman in a Dockland Alley, Bermondsey c 1938, printed 1976, from A Night in London, c 1930-38 Victoria and Albert Museum, London
• HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON Behind 6are St Lazare, Paris, 1932 Victoria and Albert Museum, London
• ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ Meudon, 1928 Centre Pompidou, Paris
• JACQUES-HENRI LARTIGUE Le Grand-Prix A.C.F., 1913 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Social Document; Social Realism; The Candid Portrait; Street & Society

Futurism; Dadaism; Conceptualism; Postmodernism; Staged Tableaux

Pictorialism

HENRY PEACH ROBINSON
Fading Away, 1858
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Robinson made this tableau of a consumptive girl from five separate negatives. The constructed nature of the image and the evocative subject matter - Victorians attached a great deal of romanticism to tuberculosis, especially afflicted women - helped introduce the idea of artistic photography, paving the way for Pictorialism.

The dominant photographic movement from the 1880s until the 1910s. Its international practitioners used soft focus and experimented with a broad range of processes and techniques to show that photography was not only a documentary tool, but also a form of visual expression equal to any other art form.

ALVIN LANGDON COBURN (1882-1966); FREDERICK H EVANS (1853-1943); HENRY PEACH ROBINSON (1830-1901); ALFRED STIEGLITZ (1864-1946); EVA WATSONSCHÜTZE (1867-1935)

manipulation; painterly; picturesque; Romantic; secessionist

Precedents for a 'pictorial' - meaning painterly, or picturesque - style of photography were established as early as the 1850s by photographic communities who sought to assert the medium's status as fine art. For them, the clearest way to achieve this was by replicating style and subject matter usually found in painting, such as pastoral, allegorical and religious scenes. One of the most ambitious examples from this time was Oscar G Rejlander's Two Ways of Life (1857), a sophisticated tableau vivant that he made with over 30 negatives. Along with Henry Peach Robinson, Camille Silvy and Gustave Le Gray, Rejlander was among those who used the combination printing method, to varying degrees of complexity, to produce images born entirely from the artist's imagination.

Like many of the leading artistic photographers of his time, Robinson's approach to form, composition and style derived from academic painting. He explained his ideas in the influential Pictorial Effects in Photography (1896), where alongside practical advice he dealt with Romantic concepts such as truth and beauty. Peter Henry Emerson was a vocal opponent of Robinson's approach. He rejected imitation and manipulation in favour of a naturalistic approach, and captured views with one area of the image in sharp focus and the rest softer, to mimic how the eye really sees.

By the mid-1890s numerous secessionist groups formed in Europe among those who advocated artistic expression over documentary photography and the amateur snapshot; and craftsmanship over photography's increasing industrialisation. The most active were the Camera Club of Vienna, the Photo-Club de Paris and the UK's Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, which admitted foreign members, including US photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Clarence H White and F Holland Day. With this level of activity came the shift from 'pictorial photography' (a style) to 'Pictorialism' (a movement), which gathered momentum internationally. In Japan and Australia, the exhibition of works by British and Viennese Pictorialists in the late 1890s helped cohere the inclination towards artistic photography there, and the movement flourished in these countries, as elsewhere, through official societies, amateur camera clubs, journals and annual salons.

In the US, the movement was spearheaded by Stieglitz and likeminded peers including White, Gertrude Kasebier, Edward Steichen and Alvin Langdon Coburn, who broke away from the Camera Club of New York in 1902 to form the Photo-Secession. Stieglitz promoted their vision in his luxurious, subscription-only quarterly Camera Work, and showcased members' work at his Manhattan exhibition space Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (later known as 291).

The prominence of Kasebier, Eva Watson-Schutze and Anne Brigm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Contents
• THE INVENTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE RECORDING OF THE WORLD 1826—1910s
• INTO THE MODERN 1850s-1930s
• SOCIETY & HUMANITY 1930s-70s
• THE POSTMODERN 1950s-90s
• REFERENCE SECTION
• Copyright Page