INTERWAR PHOTOGRAPHYEUROPE AND THE US

Russian & German Interwar Constructivist Photography

How was Russian & German formalism an “Armed Vision”? How, when and where did it become “disarmed”?

NOTE: For the quiz next week be able to: 1) Compare European and American interwar photography.2) Present the theses of Abigail Solomon-Godeau and László

Moholy-Nagy from the two assigned readings

(left) El Lissitzky Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1919-20

(right) Soviet propaganda poster featuring the destruction of White Poland, 1919

Russian Constructivist form versus cartoon realist propaganda:Russian formalism’s “armed vision” failed to communicate to the “masses.”

El Lissitzky, (left) agit-prop panel photographed on the streets of Vitebsk in 1920, reads:"The Machine tool depots of the factories and plants await you. Let's get industry

moving." Compare with WW II Stalinist propaganda poster: “Stalin leads”

Gustav Klutsis (Latvian Russian, 1895-1938), (left) The Electrification of the Entire Country, photomontage,1920; (right) Klutsis, The USSR is the Stock Brigade of the World’s Proletariat, photomontage, 1931(center) October Revolution marks the beginning of avant-garde modern art as part of the government propaganda bureau – “agitation and propaganda” (agitprop)

Lenin in St. Petersburgafter the storming of thewinter palace, 1917Modernist form employed

for political propaganda

Rodchenko, Dance, oil on canvas,1915

Varvara Stepanova (Russian, 1894-1958), declared in 1921: “Technique and Industry have confronted art with the problem of construction as an active process and not reflective. The 'sanctity' of a work as a single entity is destroyed. The museum which was the treasury of art is now transformed into an archive.”

Rodchenko and Stepanova“Art Engineers” and lifetimecompanions, 1920s

Stepanova, Cubo-Futuristpainting, c. 1915

Alexander Rodchenko (left) Spatial Construction / Spatial Object, 1921(right) Rodchenko with spatial constructions, wearing industrial suit designed by Stepanova. Photograph by Mikhail Kaufman,1924

(left) Alexander Rodchenko, Gathering for the demonstration in the courtyard of the VChUTEMAS (Higher Institute of Technics and Art), 1928(right) Vchutemas student constructivist exhibition, 1925

(left) Cover page by Rodchenko for Vladimir Mayakovsky's book length poem, Pro Eto (About This), 1923. Rodchenko’s first photomontage

Shostakovich, Meyerhold, MayakovskyRodchenko, rehearsing Klop, 1929New music, theater, poetry, and art for the revolution

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973) Guitar, Sheet Music and Glass, charcoal and papier collé, November 1912. New media of papier collé and collage pioneered by the cubists in the decade before WWI

Dziga Vertov (Russian filmmaker1896-1954), Still from Man with a Movie Camera, 1929(right) Rodchenko, photomontage poster for Dziga Vertov film, Kino Eye, 1924

I am a kino-eye [film-eye]. I am in constant motion. I draw near, then away from objects, I crawl under, I climb onto them, I move apace with the muzzle of a galloping horse, I plunge full speed into a crowd, I outstrip running soldiers, I fall on my back, I ascent with an airplane, I plunge and soar …. - Vertov

Rodchenko, Poster for film, Battleship Potemkin, by Sergei Eisenstein, 1925

Still from the Odessa steps massacre, famousscene in Battleship Potemkin

Jan Tschichold, poster for Film und Foto exhibition, Stuttgart, 1929

Exhibition of over 1000 photographic works from Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States, including movie stills, and demonstrating reciprocal uses of camera angles, montages, and superimpositions that were rapidly appropriated for mainstream movies.

“What is being stressed is the manifest presence of the means of production, and an implicit rejection of the notion of the photograph as either transparent or neutral.”

- Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Armed Vision Disarmed”

Rodchenko, Chauffeur – Karelia, 1933.

Rodchenko makes his own presence obvious.

Alexander Rodchenko, On the telephone, 1928

1928 Rodchenko, who gave up painting for photography in 1927, bought himself a Leica which, because of its handy format and quick operation, became his preferred tool for his work. This camera enabled him to realize his ideas of unusual camera positions, severe foreshortenings of perspective, and views of surprising details.

"One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again.“

-Rodchenko

Shukhov tower – “a symbol of collective effort” – was designed to be 350 m in height. But it required 2200 tons of steel. Young Soviet Russia did not have enough metal. Thus Shukhov had to decrease height to 150 m. Lenin personally ordered 240 tons of high quality German Ruhr steel from military stocks.

Rodchenko, Shukhov Radio Tower, 1928Vladimir Tatlin Monument to The Third International, l920,

TOWERS OFCOMMUNISTASPIRATION

El Lissitzky (Russian 1890-1941)(left) The Constructor, 1924, photomontage - the new artist-engineer (right) El Lissitzky, Proun 1d, 1922, oil on canvas

(left) Rodchenko, Shukhov Radio Tower, 1928(right) László Moholy-Nagy (American, born Hungarian, Constructivist artist, ca.1895-1946), Untitled (View from the Berlin Radio Tower onto chairs and tables), ca.1928

The “New Vision” =functionalism and technologism

(left) László Moholy-Nagy, Balance study, 1924, wood and metal, reconstruction 1967 (center) László Moholy-Nagy and Lucia Moholy, Portrait of Moholy-Nagy, 1932(right) Moholy-Nagy, AXXV, oil on canvas,1926

“In 1922 I ordered by telephone from a sign factory five paintings on graph paper. At the other end of the telephone the factory supervisor had the same kind of paper divided into squares. He took down the dictated shapes in the correct position.”

Moholy-Nagy, whose last paintings rejected the medium’s ethos of originality and subjectivity.

László Moholy-Nagy as Bauhaus master and “artist engineer”“The New Vision” =

Machine aesthetics

The Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany, designed by German architect, Walter Gropius. In 1923 Moholy Nagy was hired to instruct the metalwork shop, marking a shift from craft to mechanical production. The same year (1923) the school slogan was changed from “A Cathedral of Socialism” based on the Medieval cathedral workshop (bauhaus) to “Art and Technology – A New Unity” based on the machine-production-industrial aesthetic

“The New Vision”

László Moholy-Nagy, Photogram, ca. 1924. The medium is the light-sensitive paper. No camera.

“The photogram, or camera-less record of forms produced by light….opens up perspectives of a hitherto wholly unknown morphosis …. It is the most completely dematerialized medium which the new vision commands.” -

- Moholy-Nagy, “From Pigment to Light,” 1936

“Formalism for Moholy signified above all the absolute primacy of the material,the medium itself.”

Moholy-Nagy’s definition of “Camera Vision”“…the political implications of Russian formalist photography were sheared away from the

body of New Vision photography” in Germany (Solomon-Godeau)

1. Abstract seeing by means of direct records of forms produced by light; the photogram…

2. Exact seeing by means of the fixation of the appearance of things: reportage

3. Rapid seeing by means of the fixation of movement in the shortest possible time: snapshots

4. Rapid seeing by means of the fixation of movements spread over a period of time…

5. Intensified seeing by means of … micro-photography

6. Penetrative photography by means of X-rays: radiography…

7. Simultaneous seeing by means of transparent superimposition: the future process of automatic photomontage

8. Distorted seeing…

Camera vision was privileged because it was deemed superior to normal vision – a prosthetic eye.

(left) Moholy-Nagy, Bauhaus Balcony, 1926(right) Rodchenko, Gathering for the demonstration in the courtyard of the VChUTEMAS (Higher Institute of Technics and Art), 1928

“The New Vision”

Moholy-Nagy, Chairs at Margate, 1935, gelatin silver print diptychMultiples like mass production = machine aesthetic

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/lichtspiel/

(left) László Moholy-Nagy, Light Prop, 1930In 1937, at the invitation of the Chairman of the Container Corporation of America, Moholy-Nagy moved to Chicago to become the director of the New Bauhaus and in 1939, the Chicago School of Design. In 1944, this became the Institute of Design.

Still from Light Display: Black-White-GrayMoholy-Nagy

Rodchenko, White Sea Canal, 1933

Commissioned by Stalin to document the construction of the canal, Rodchenko did not record the use of forced labor, nor the deaths of thousands of workers at the site.

Berlin DadaFirst Dada Fair, Berlin, 1920

Raoul Hausmann (Austrian Dadaist active in Germany, 1886-1971), Tatlin at Home, 1920, photomontage, Berlin Dada

According to Hausmann, the Dadaists agreed on the term “photomontage” because of “our aversion at playing the artist and, thinking of ourselves as engineers … we meant to construct, to assemble our works.”

Hannah Höch (German, 1889 - 1978), Cut With the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919, Berlin Dada Raoul Hausmann & Hannah Höch at 1920 Berlin Dada Fair (right)

An “Armed Vision”

(left) Hannah Höch, Pretty Woman, 1920, photomontage, Berlin Dada(right) Hannah Höch, Dada Ernst, 1920, photomontage, Berlin Dada

John Heartfield (Born Herzfelde, German, 1891-1968) front covers of the newspaper AIZ (Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung / Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper), all 1932-33(left) The Butcher Goering; (center) Millions Stand Behind Me; (right) Hurrah, The Butter is Gone! Berlin Dada

An “Armed Vision”

On 10. May 1933, 20.000 books were burnt in the then Opernplatz, later Bebel Platz, adjacent to the Opera House. Among the authors whose books were burnt were Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Erich Maria Remarque, Heinrich Mann, Albert Einstein, H.G. Wells, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Helen Keller, Andre Gide, Marcel Proust, Emil Zola, Sigmund Freud.

Arthur Kampf (German, 1865-1950)January 30, 1933 (election night in Berlin)

Book burning, Berlin, May 10, 1933

"Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."  -  Heinrich Heine

August Sander (German, 1876-1964), Brick Carrier (left), and Cook (right) 1928from the Face of Time portfolio

August Sander, Wandering People from portfolio, Citizens of the 20th Century, 1930

Sander’s archive of German “types”was censored by the Nazis as “decadent.”

Albert Renger-Patzsch (German 1897 – 1966), New ObjectivityIrons Used in Shoemaking, Fagus Works, c. 1925 (left) and Foxgloves, c. 1925 (right)

Hans Haacke, German, b.1936, "Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time System, as of May 1, 1971" 1971: 142 photographs of New York apartment

buildings, 2 maps of New York's Lower East Side and Harlem with properties marked, 6 charts outlining business relations within the real estate group.

Contemporary German Conceptual PhotographyThat “Imposes Order” = Typology

Bernhard and Hilla Becher (German, born 1931 and 1934 respectively) Conceptual (typological) photography

(left) Gas Tanks, 1963 (right) Water Towers, 1980, 9 b/w photographs mounted on board, 62inH overall

Thomas Struth (Germany, b.1954, student of Bechers) Shinju-ku (Skyscrapers), Tokyo, 1986

(right) Ferdinand-von-Schill-Strasse, Dessau, 1991

Candida Höfer,(Germany, 1944, student of Bechers) (left) Stiftsbibliothek Klosterneuburg III, 2003, C-print, 68 in. H(right) Ca' Rezzonico Venezia II, 2003, C-print, 74 in. Width

Thomas Ruff (German, b.1958), House #9 II, 1991, 72 in. Hone of series taken in early morning, apartment blocks in Eastern Germany

Thomas Ruff, (left) Portrait, 1989, 63in. H(center and right) from Portrait series, 2001, conceptual typologies

“absolute objectivity” like passport photos except for scale

'... Like archetypal passport photos... young people with dead eyes and empty faces.' Ruff

California Modern: Group f/64“The members of Group f.64 believe that photography, as an art-form, must develop along lines defined by the actualities and limitations of the photographic medium, and must always remain independent of ideological conventions of art and aesthetics that are reminiscent of a period and culture antedating the growth of the medium itself.”

- Group f/64 Manifesto

Precisionist aesthetics

Willard Van Dyke (American 1906-1986), Cement Works, Monolith, California, 1931, Gelatin silver print

Van Dyke organized Group f/64

(left) Edward Weston (American 1886-1958), Pipes and Stacks: Armco, Middletown, Ohio, 1922. Co-Founder of Group f/64

(right) Charles Sheeler, Crisscrossed Conveyors, River Rouge Plant, Ford Motor Company, 1927

Precisionist machine aestheticderived from Cubism and Realism

Edward Weston, Neil, 1922, platinotype

A series of photographs of his son Neil

Modernist fragmentation

“seeing of parts – fragments – as universal symbols”

- Weston

Auguste Rodin, WalkingMan, 1906

(left) Edward Weston, Neil, 1922, platinotype. Weston based these photographs on a classical sculpture of a male nude, Eros, made by the Greek sculptor Praxiteles in the 4th C. BCE.

(right) Sherrie Levine, Neil, 1981, By simply making a copy of a pre-existing copy - Levine subverted modernist “originality.” Postmodern appropriation art

Edward Weston, Excusado, 1925, gelatin silver print

“My excitement was absolute aesthetic response to form. For long I have considered photographing this useful and elegant accessory to modern hygienic life…. Here was every sensuous curve of the ‘human form divine’ but minus imperfections…Never did the Greeks reach a more significant consummation to their culture”

Weston, Nude, 1936

(left) Edward Weston, Maguey, Mexico, 1926, gsp(right) Tina Modotti (Italian,1896 -1942), Mexico, 1925, platinum print

Edward Weston, Pepper # 30, 1930, gsp

“To clearly express my feeling for life with photographic beauty, present objectively the texture, rhythm, form in nature, without subterfuge or evasion in technique or spirit, to record the quintessence of the object or element before my lens, rather than an interpretation, a superficial phase, or passing mood – this is my way in photography. It is not an easy way.”

- Edward Weston, 1927.

Edward Weston, Shells, 1927. Gsp.

(right) Henry Moore (British Abstract Sculptor, 1898-1986), Embrace, bronze, c.1925

Seeking the essence of form

Compare Weston with Constantin Brancusi (French, born Romania, 1876–1957):• (left) Brancusi, Bird in Space, 1919, photograph by artist• (right) Brancusi, Golden Bird, 1919-20. Bronze, stone, and wood.

Weston, Shell, 1927

Modernist “purity” or“essence” of formCompare Brancusi’s 19th c. Classical Realism (c.1900)with his modernism of 1915

Brancusi,Newborn, 1915marble

Brancusi’s studio c.1900

(left) Constantin Brancusi, The Muse, 1912, marble

(right) Edward Weston, Nude, 1936, gelatin silver print

"I feel that I have been more deeply moved by music, literature, sculpture, painting, than I have by photography."

- Weston

When Weston saw the work of sculptor Constantin Brancusi for the first time he found one piece "curiously like one of my peppers," but he noted, "I have proved through photography that nature has all the abstract (simplified) forms that Brancusi or any other artist could imagine. With my camera I go direct to Bancusi's source. I find,... select and isolate what he has to 'create.' "

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984) , Golden Gate Before the BridgeSan Francisco, California, 1932

Ansel Adams, Thundercloud, Ellery Lake, High Sierra, California, 1934, gelatin silver print

The picture we make is never made for us alone; it is, and should be a communication….To the complaint ‘There are no people in these photographs,’ I respond, There are always two people, the photographer and the viewer.”

- Ansel Adams

Adams: Sierra Clubphotographer and activist

Ansel Adams, Lake and Cliffs, Sierra Nevada, 1932. Gsp.

Adams’s visual understanding came from being in tune with the changing nature of light and how it moves within the landscape.

To be able to record the visual sensations of a specific quality of light, at a precise location, and at an exact moment, Adams developed the Zone System in the late 1930s.

Half Dome, Merced River, 1938

A zone represents the relationship of a subject’s brightness to its density in the negative and the corresponding tone in the final print.

Adams took the grayscale of a full-tone black-and-white print and refined it into eleven different zones. From Zone 0, maximum black, to Zone X, pure white.

Adams identified the zones with roman numerals to avoid confusion with other numerical combinations used in photography.

Each zone is the equivalent to one f/stop difference in subject brightness and negative exposure.

The zone system is designed to eliminate guesswork and give photographers repeatable control over their materials so that the outcome can be predicted (that is, previsualized).

- Hirsch, pp 246-248

The Negative

The Negative explains the Zone System formulated by Adams and Fred Archer in 1939/40. The Negative covers all topics related to exposing and developing film within scope of the Zone System.

Topics in the book include discussions of philosophical viewpoint, pre-visualization, use of filters, pre-exposure, development modification, special techniques of film development, and darkroom technique.

Appendixes in the back have formulas for classic darkroom chemicals, film testing techniques, and much more. This is one of the finest technical books ever written about photography.

 

Ansel Adams, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941, gsp.

Crocker Art Museum Sacramento

upcoming exhibition:

Yosemite 1938:  On the Trail with

Ansel Adams and Georgia O'Keeffe

February 3 - May 6, 2007

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976), (left) Self-Portrait, 1915, platinum print (Pictorialist)

(right) Two Callas, ca. 1929, gelatin silver print (Precisionist, f/64)

Imogen Cunningham, Roi (Triangles), 1927, gsp.

Imogen Cunningham, Triangles, 1928, gsp.

Imogen Cunningham Agave Design 2, ca. 1930, gsp., f/64 Group

Chicago Institute of Design (I.D.) Formalist Photography“Disarmed Vision” influenced more by American photography and social

situation than by “Armed” Russian and Weimar Formalist visions.

Moholy-Nagy, Still from Light Display: Black-White-Gray, 1930Imogen Cunningham, Agave, 1930

Harry Callahan (American 1912-1999) , Detroit, 1941, gelatin silver print, Chicago Institute of Design

Callahan, deeply influenced by Ansel Adams, was hired by Moholy-Nagy to teach at the I.D. in 1946. “Calahan was as far removed from the machine-age ethic of Bauhaus photography as anybody possibly could be….The ‘interior shape of private expreienc’ coupled with a rigorous concern for formal values effectively constituted Callahan’s approach to photograpy, and this, more than any of Moholy’s theoretical formulations, constituted the mainstream of American art photography through the 1960s.” - Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Armed Vision Disarmed”

Harry Callahan, Eleanor, 1947 and (right) Eleanor, Chicago, 1949

I.D. Formalism: A “Disarmed Vision”

(left) Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991) Jerome, Arizona, 1949, gelatin silver print , Chicago I.D.(right) Max Yavno (American, 1911-1985), Aaron Siskind, Old Yuma Jail (detail), 1947

(left) Aaron Siskind, Jerome, Arizona, 1949, gelatin silver print, Chicago I.D. & Abstract Expressionism (right) Franz Kline (American Abstract Expressionist Painter, 1910-1962), Siskind, oil on canvas,1959

American post-WW II formalism = “disarmed vision”

(left) Franz Kline, Palmerton, Pa., oil on canvas, 1941, Social Realism(right) Aaron Siskind, Boys Playing With Toy Swords, Harlem, New York, ca.1930-1940, Social Realism

“Armed Visions” before the “Disarmament” of post-WW II American art

American Documentary Photography The Great Depression (1929 - c.1939)

The New Deal (1933 – 1938)

The Farm Security Administration (FSA)

“What you’ve got are not photographers. They’re a bunch of sociologists with cameras.”

- Ansel Adams

Walker Evans (American 1903 -1975), two of three photographs for the The Bridge by Hart Crane (1899-1932) 1930. Evan’s first publication and Crane’s major work, the book-length poem, The Bridge, expresses in ecstatic terms a vision of the historical and spiritual significance of America. Crane used the landscape of the modern, industrialized city to create a powerful new symbolic literature. Evans was hired by the FSA in 1935.

Walker Evans, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1936

“Evans believed in finding scenes and objects whose appearance implied a story or acted as a metaphor for an attitude toward life”

- Mary Warner Marien

Walker Evans, Hale County, Alabama (Allie Mae Burroughs), 1936, from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by Walker Evans and James Agee, published in 1941, gelatin silver print

Chronicle of the lives ofthree families of poorcotton-growing tenant farmers in Hale County,Alabama

Walker Evans, Subway Portrait, New York, 1938-41One of series of anonymous New York subway passengers

published in 1966 as Many Are Called

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965), White Angel Bread Line, 1932

“The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects. So that no one would say, ’how did you do it, where did you find it, ‘ but they

would say that such things could be.”- Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange, Ditched, Stalled, and Stranded, San Joaquin Valley, California, 1935The Dust Bowl

1940 movie based on thenovel by John Steinbeck, Grapes Of Wrath

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936

Reading: Paul Taylor, “Migrant Mother: 1936,” 1970

Caption: "Nipomo, Calif. Mar. 1936. Migrant agricultural worker's family. Seven hungry children. Mother aged 32, the father is a native Californian. Destitute in a pea pickers camp, because of the failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tent in order to buy food. Most of the 2,500 people in this camp were destitute.“ - Lange

“Armed Vision”

Lange immediately gave her photos to the San Francisco News. Migrant Mother was published anonymously in newspapers across the US.

Robert Frank (Swiss-born American Photographer, born in 1924), The Americans, 1955

Charleston, South Carolina

Elevator - Miami Beach