Discussion of a specific "important" photograph

There are several academics on photo.net. Is anyone willing to lead a forum

discussion on an easily obtained image of a photograph important in the art's

history? Perhaps a new image each month?

Lead, no. Read, absolutely. Contribute, as soon as I don't feel intimidated.

You may need to define Lead. :)

 

A heavy metal object?...or a leash possibly, choker attached?

 

The defining first step of a dance would probably be fine...but...since everybody has a different taste in music...

 

After deciding on those ...you probably need to define.."important" I guess....and then "art" ...and maybe "discussion"..

 

This is not going well is it! :~)

I'm too new to photo.net discussions to lead anything, but I'd be interested in (and would contribute to) the discussion.

Here I have attached one of the famous and though important photograph "Blind Woman" from 1916. Strand was deeply preoccupied with the methods of using his big camera to capture a social sensitive people in the streets without being aware of it. His contemporaries had also questioned the ethics of these actions.

 

http://www.masters-of-fine-art-photography.com/02/artphotogallery/photographers/paul_strand_29.html

Strand's "Blind" was also at the top of my list.

 

An interesting comparison is August Sander's "Blind Children" done ten years later.

 

Other major photographers were greatly influenced by "Blind" (Steichen and W. Eugene Smith?)

 

The concept of casually observing a person who cannot observe creates a tension. The subject cannot return your gaze. How do you connect or do you want to?

 

Non-photographic parallels could not be so intense.

Other photographers who had photographed were also Lewis Hine (who is known through child's labour), Winogrand (known through pictures of a women), Walker Evans, Ben Shahn and Kertezs.

 

The link of "Blind children": http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=40719

 

Walker Evans: "New York": http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=52623

 

"...Evan's subjects were completely oblivious to the fact that they were being photographed. The guard is down and the mask is off, even more than when in lone bedrooms where there is a mirror, people's faces are in naked repose down in the subway..."

Jon, I would suggest that you just start it, if that has not already been done above on the

subject of Sander's "Blind".

 

You don't have to be an "academic" to start such a forum discussion and not even in order to

contribute. Good idea !

<p>Here is some background information on Strand's photograph of the blind woman:</p>

 

<p>All of the below was taken from the book <i>Paul Strand</i> published by Aperture in association with the National Gallery of Art.</p>

 

<p>Between 1914 and 1917 he did three separate series of pictures. The first was studies of movement including pictures such as his well-known <i>Wall Street</i>. The second was abstracts such as his pictures of bowls and cutlery. The third was his street portraits.</p>

 

<p>The street portrait series was made in the fall of 1916. He used, first "a false lens attached to the side of his camera and later a prism lens that took photographs at right angles to the direction the camera seemed to be pointing. "I [strand] wanted to see if I could photograph people without their being aware of the camera,"...While the subject matter is similar to Hine's [considered to be one of Strand's mentors along with Stieglitz], Strand's photographs are radically different in their execution, style, and intention.... The brutal naturalism of these photographs and their closely cropped, frontal depiction gives no sense of environment, no domestic or familiar details soften or dilute the impact of these people. Instead, detached from their surroundings, the people assume monolithic proportions; they have the strength, solidity, singularity, and elegiac quality of tombstones.</p>

 

<p>... by exhibiting them [the street portraits] in 291 and allowing them to be published in <i>Camera Work</i>, he [strand]... emphatically declared them to be works of art. Particularly within the context of 291 where documentary photography had been rigorously excluded from artistic photography, this was a daring act. Yet just as Duchamp, at precisely the same time, stretched the conventional limits of art and sculpture by taking such everyday objects as urinals or bottle racks and through his act of selection declaring them to be works of art and sculpture, so to did Strand boldly appropriate the common photographic document and elevate it to the realm of art. Moreover, when these photographs werer reproduced in Camera Work, they were not given the more sentimental or picturesque titles they have subsequently assumed, but rather they were called simply <i>Photograph</i>. It is these qualities that Stieglitz referred to when he described Strand's work as "the direct expression of today."</p>

 

<p>Below is the last sentence from an essay written by Strand and published in Camera Work in June 1917:</p>

 

<p>"The existence of a medium, after all, is its absolute justification, if as so many seem to think, it needs one and all comparison of potentialities is useless and irrelevant. Whether a water-color is inferior to an oil, or whether a drawing, an etching, or a photograph is not as important as either, is inconsequent. <b>To have to despise something in order to respect something else is a sign of impotence.</b> [<i>emphasis added</i>] Let us rather accept joyously and with gratitude everything through which the spirit of man seeks to an ever fuller and more intense self-realization."</p>

 

 

 

<p>-Julie</p>

Her sign "BLIND" has a lot of impact for me. The word adds a stamp of authority and objectifies her. Sontag's discussion of photographs being inherently surreal would seem to apply here. I don't know if the medallion above the sign is a pin or an official license to beg.

 

Paul Fusco, a Magnum photographer, has published a book of children maimed by Chernobyl radiation. Would the strong photographs have as much impact if Chernobyl wasn't mentioned?

Jon:

 

Can you contact me directly? I might be able to lead on this.

 

Steve Greenberg

Julie, thank you. I wouldn't say it is a brutal naturalism, but rather it is a Social Realism movement.

 

Jon,

Strand's "Blind Woman": "...Around her neck is a badge, Licensed Peddler 2622, and a sign BLIND..."

 

Paul Fusco's photographs of those children would always look disastrously, no matter what title would be written. Disaster is disaster in all kinds of manifestation.

Kristina, I agree with you that "disaster is disaster", however, photographically associating people with a specific event or label, to me, reduces their personal identity (not humanity) and makes them more of a symbol or example.

 

How many people think about what has happened to the Vietnamese "Napalm Girl" (Kim Phuc) running terrified down a road compared to the number solely interpreting Nick Ut's iconic image as an indictment of the Vietnam war?

 

The image as propaganda, for good or bad, can be the result. Sorry if this sounds like preaching.

Jon, you are wright about labeled persons in photographs.

Here I quote: "...The man is a type or emblem...How do you make your subjects blind to your presence? This is another reason why the photograph is emblematic: it provides a graphic illustration of the photographer's ideal relationship to his subject..."

 

These kind of historical and documentary photos are meant to be a symbol of their time, so that future generations could see and learn. Is there other way of showing to people? I don't know.

 

http://www.johnkeating.it/uploaded_images/nick_ut1-770550.jpg

Eugenics was popular in the early 1900s. Did Strand have any public comments on eugenics and physical types?

 

How would reaction to the "Blind Woman" change if someone had altered the sign to read "MURDERESS","INSANE","PARASITE", or "SAINT"?

If you believe what Strand said, himself, about this "Blind Woman" picture, it (and the whole series) were primarily an experiment in candid photography. The following is quotations from a 1971 Milton Brown interview of Paul Strand (all of the following are Strand's own words):

 

"Although Blind Woman has enormous social meaning and impact, it grew out of a very clear desire to solve a problem. How do you photograph people in the streets without their being aware of it? Do you know anybody who did it before? I don't.

 

[He then describes what he was doing prior to that series.]

 

"The third and equally important approach was to photograph people without their being aware that they were being photographed. That was the problem: to make candid photographs long before there were any candid cameras. For the solution, I worked with the Ensign camera, and put a false lens on the side of the camera, screwed it onto the side of the camera's very shiny brass barrel, and then shot with the brass barrel directed at right angles to the person I was going to photograph; but the other lens, the real lens, came out under my arm because it was a long extension. Anyone who knew anything about photography would have known that this was a fraud. Actually, it was a very clumsy solution of the problem. All the portraits that I made at that time, however, were made that way. It was quite nerve-racking because there was always the possibility that you would be challenged either by the person being photographed or by some bystander who might realize that you were up to something not quite straight.... I continued that experimentation with portraits for only about a year because I felt that I had to wait until I had worked out the technical problems." [end quote]

 

In another interview that I have, he says essentially the same thing.

 

-Julie

It was especially easy for Strand to photograph a blind person without her awareness.

 

His "candid" work was in the lineage of today's continuing fad : backs of heads as subjects move away from the photographer, wasted homeless drunks in doorways, "shooting" with out looking through the viewfinder.

 

Eye of beholder :-)

 

Blind beggars have been rendered "unawares," and with more resonance for centuries. Strand brought nothing new to the table. I've always considered that particular photo a ripoff, though I admire most of Strand's work. I hope he paid her.

 

http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p=c&a=p&ID=1129

I like Jon W's comments, above...we probably don't fully agree about the Strand photo, but his point about "humanity" vs "propaganda," in which an individual is reduced to a symbol, provides a way to understand that image.

What's wrong with drunks? I love this Friedlander photo:

 

http://bp1.blogger.com/_AoAZAqhlN0U/RwOozgiOtRI/AAAAAAAAAB0/KtQe3nANUhk/s1600-h/friedlander_drunk_under_vermouth.jpg

 

What's wrong with shooting without looking through the viewfinder? D'Agata, Ackerman, news photogrpahers and many others can't be all wrong.