Professional Photographers Mentioned & Compared
Walt Whitman, Walker Evans, James Agee, Diane Arbus, Edward Steichen, Stieglitz, Paul Rosenfield, Sylivia Path, Riech, Hine, Brassai, Paul Morriessey, Weegee, Robert Frank, Giorgio Morandi
Walk Whitman- Discrimination between beauty and ugliness photography
Actual American experience
All Facts- Incandescent
Edward Steichen (1915)
- Milk bottle/fire escape photo = beauty
1920s Professionals followed his plain, tawdry, vapid material
“Reach precise object or condition or combination or process exhibits a beauty… All that a person does or think is of consequence.” (Whitman)
- Meaning of photograph can be altered
>> (Magazines/celeberty/cataloqued)
>> NO moment is more important than any other moment; no person is more interesting than any other person
Whitman according to Sontag…
>> Was generalizing beauty instead of abolishing it.
“Whitmanesque Vision” ~ now Surrism?
Whitman believed that Americans focus in photography was becoming more complex…hiding reality instead of announcing it.
>>>>
Walker Evan came along and brought back serious topics of Humanism that are idealistically beautiful in a refreshing authentic way.
Pg 31…
Walker Evans is trying to let people see and feel that photography is a way to bring people together though realizations of photographs meaning/cause/development/ purpose.
Pg 32…
(1955) Races, ages, classes, phycial types… “ In Family of Men” by Edward Steichen
Humanity is “one” and that of human beings
Historical understandings of Reality…
Steichen Vs. Arbus
Beauty Vs. Ugly
>> One being chosen over the other defenestrates societies realistic interests…shallow?... selfish?...naive?
Boredom Vs. Fascination
Beauty Vs. Ugliness
Success Vs. Failure
Sontag brings up/Mentions…
Arbus efforts to capture the ideal stereotype of an appalling image, people that except their differences and rebel attitude to another world of reality.
Ex. “Freaks of Nature”
>>Photographers gain confidence in approaching/associating with people different than themselves.
Arbus photographs people despite their state of unconscious or unaware relation to their (own) pain, their ugliness.
>>Meaning; she takes pictures of people’s weaknesses and focus’s on that nature to capture their reality and for the viewer to see.
>>Shows these people “freaks” as cheerful, self accepting- matters of fact – subjects of reality in the photographs.
Pg 38…
Diane Arbus suicide 1971
>> Sontag suggests that her death makes her photographs more meaningful/sincere.
Proves/shows that she took her photography very seriously and how the photos have been dangerous to her mental capacity.
Pg 40…
“The photographer (Arbus) once had to say to herself, Okay, I can accept that; the viewer is invited to make the same declaration” (Sontag).
Pg 41…
“Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do” (Arbus).
I agree and strongly relate to Arbus’s feeling’s of…
“One of the things I felt I suffered from as a kid was that I never felt adversity. I was confined in a sense of reality… And the sense of being immune was, ludicrous as it seems, a painful one.”
>> That I as an individual has had grown up around such a secured/protected/sheltered life that reality (going off to college) has become such a reality check to me, it goes for most college students. I become more and more worried what else will be revealed to me, and now look back and wished that I were more willing to be open to taking others advice- such as my parents, strangers, friends, extended family, teachers.
>> I also have seen people’s lives less convenient than my own and I feel compelled to have sympathy for them and to value my life even more as I do each day because of the opportunities and advantages I have over those who don’t.
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