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Classic Themes in Photography >
37 - Purity
Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrote:
We believe that labels are important, but mostly for bottles
of wine.1
You may discover that you're in some sort of photographic group.
There are all kinds of groups within photography.
I was coming off a trail when a man and woman, with cameras around
their necks, approached me.
Conversation was made about their cameras.
Mine was still in
my bag.
After a few words, the woman surprisingly, if you believe
the stereotype that men are more interested in equipment than are
women, asked me what brand camera I used.
I received a label of being a Nikon photographer.
They were Canon
photographers.
I didn't care, but I sensed that they did.
They placed me in a camera-brand group, a not very important
group to me.
You may not have thought much of being in the group, or may even
not have known you were in the group, until you read or heard something
disparaging about your group.
We place some people into our group, the in-group. Everyone else
goes onto the out-group.
In-group/out group status is a basic human consideration.
This cognitive categorization often has an emotional valence
of being clean or unclean.
Those in the out-group are felt to be
unclean in some fundamental way.
An aside . . .
Take the
Race
Implicit Association Test (IAT) to learn how we associate certain
traits with white people, and others with people of color.
Back to our story . . .
In the last section, the taking of photographs was contrasted
with the making of photographs.
As described, there is a considerable overlap of the two groups.
For example, Ansel Adams, known for seemingly recording what
was before his camera, a taker of photographs, described himself
as being a maker of photographs.
You don't take a photograph, you make it.2
Adams would pre-visualize the final print, as he was preparing
to make the photograph.
The taker and maker groups were primal in art photography, and
still have memberships today.
The painter Sir William Newton, in 1853, suggested that photographs
would be more like works of art if they were out-of-focus and retouched.3
In the 1800s and into the twentieth-century, the pictoralists
were the popular group.
Their photographs were often out-of-focus
and retouched.
O. G. Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson used combination printing
to create allegorical photographs from many negatives.
Their most
famous photographs are Two Ways of Life and Fading Away.
They sought to do what painting was doing.
The photo-secessionists, or straight photographers, sought to
do what cameras naturally do.
Cameras can record great detail, with objectivity.
Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944), a poet and critic, wrote in 1904:
Why then should not a photographic print look like a photographic
print?4
The photo-secessionist were led by Alfred Stieglitz, who published
a magazine called Camera Work, and had a gallery called
291.
Paul Strand was featured in the last two issues of 1916 and 1917,
and in the gallery in 1916.
Steiglizt wrote that Strand's work was:
... brutally direct.
Devoid of all flim-flam; devoid of trickery
and of any "ism"; devoid of any attempt to mystify an ignorant public,
including the photographers themselves.
These photographs are the
direct expression of today!5
Along with Stieglitz, the photographers in the f/64 Group, including
Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Imogen Cunningham, also left pictorialism
behind.
Adams wrote:
Group f/64 became synonymous with the renewed interest in the
philosophy of straight photography: that is, photographs that looked
like photographs, not imitations of other art forms.
The simple
straight print is a fact of life—the natural and predominant style
for most of photography's history—but in 1932 it had few active
proponents.6
The photography historian, Beaumont Newhall, wrote:
Their aesthetic of straight photography: any photograph not sharply
focused in every detail, not printed by contact on glossy black
and white paper, not mounted on a white card, and betraying any
handwork or avoidance of reality in choice of subject was "impure."7
Don't let anyone, even a straight photographer, tell you that
your photography is not pure (with a few exceptions).
Photography is a big tent.
1 http://christojeanneclaude.net/errors.html.
2
http://web.archive.org/web/20040312172602/http://hayward
education.org.uk/assets/teachpacks/HG-adamspdf.pdf
3 Newton, William. (1853, March 3). Journal of the Photographic
Society, 1, 6.
4 Hartmann, Sadakichi. (1904, March). A Plea for Straight Photography.
American Amateur Photographer 16, 101-109. Reprinted in Newhall,
B. (1980). Photography: Essays & images. New York: Museum of Modern
Art.
5 Stieglitz, A. (1917, June). Camera Work, 49/50, p. 36. Reprinted
in Newhall, B. (1980). Photography: Essays & images. New York: Museum
of Modern Art.
6
http://www.haywardeducation.org.uk/assets/
teachpacks/HG-adamspdf.pdf.
7 Newhall, B. (1982) A history of photography. New York: Little,
Brown & Company.
