Photography History Notes

• American Photography: A Century of Images, a PBS series resource site, features seven one-page essays, transcripts of the documentary itself, and an interactive "Image Lab," with exercises in manipulating both the content and meaning of images.
• You should make time to watch roughly an episode a week before a mid-February test on general knowledge of photo history, styles and famous photographers. The library page for each video has two resolutions; I've put shortcut links here to the higher resolution versions. You need Quicktime.
  1. The Developing Image (library page) | PLAY high-resolution
  2. The Photographic Age (library page) | PLAY high-resolution
  3. Photography Transformed (library page) | PLAY high-resolution
• Even if you can't get to the library to watch the programs and the streaming video doesn't work on your computer, you still should be able to pass the test if you study the text-only transcript and these notes, and search the Web for people and pictures the documentary discusses. For example, you can find Wikipedia pages on people like Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Curtis and Eddie Adams, or Masters of Photography site pages on Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White, or Bourke-White and W. Eugene Smith in Life magazine's archives -- or other sources by searching for people's names in Google.
• Some of the digital imaging tools you are learning mimic techniques from the light-and-chemicals photo darkroom -- cropping, burning, dodging, enlarging, making color corrections, vignetting, retouching. However, "digital" makes them all easier, and makes it possible for you to do much more. So, as you think about these videos and review their transcripts and the notes below, consider the professional, historical and social contexts in which the images you have seen in the programs were made: Digital or otherwise, when would it be unethical or misleading to manipulate or alter an image? When are alterations acceptable?

Review notes

Episode 1

• The early 20th century popularization of snapshot cameras like the Kodak Brownie and how it helped make us a "visual" culture.
• The dawn of photo-illustration in newspapers with "half-tone" process in the 1880s and how that changed news reporting.
• How mass-production of images could change the world.
• National Geographic magazine and "Suddenly, the wonders of the world were on your doorstep."
• Informing, educating, but also delivering subtle social and cultural messages.
• Edward Curtis's documentary photographs of Native Americans and comparison to Frank Matsura's pictures of "the past as it was, rather than how someone dreamed it into being"
• Photography as art: Alfred Steiglitz and "Photo Secession" pictorialists; physical manipulation.
• The power of photographs to create social change: Campaign against child labor, etc.
• The rise of realism or "straight photography" in art, starting with Paul Strand.
• War and photography: World War I censorship -- no dead soldiers for the home audience.
• Tabloids, sensationalism and the composite photograph (composograph) at the Evening Graphic.
• Truth versus fantasy: Photography and advertising in the 1920s and '30s.
  • People believe photographs were true
  • But images could add drama and emotion, make associations
  • "The camera can elevate the most lowly object" (Weston's toilet was art, not advertising; but the lesson was learned by advertisers)
• Magazines, photography and celebrity culture.
• Photography, truth and science; extending human vision.

Episode 2

• Photography, photojournalism and images as truth.
• Millions of people seeing the same image -- a 20th century invention.
• AP and 1930s invention of wirephoto; analog conversion of photo to audio to send over telephone lines and reconstruct at the other end.
• Landmark uses of wirephoto: The Lindberg kidnapping trial, Jesse Owens' Olympic triumphs, Hindenberg crash. (Nice description of taking the picture with a Speed Graphic news camera.) These and other big wirephoto and wire news stories made the U.S. a more unified nation, including coverage of disasters, crime or other horrible things.
• "It lets you see everything. It lets you think about everything."
• Henry Luce's Life magazine (1936) was a force in American culture, "arrived in your home and opened the world to you" -- politics, fashion, advertising, photo-essays about the famous, but also about ordinary people, and delivered to all kinds of families. "It spoke in a language that everybody could understand -- pictures," says commenter David Friend of Vanity Fair.
• Listen to dramatic reading of "Picture magic" essay by Luce, and watch samples of photo-essay technique. "Country doctor" and "Career girl."
• Life and other magazines covered the Spanish Civil War and World War II, united the country in its perception of events, recording everything from iconic battle images (Capa's shots of a dying soldier in Spain and of soldiers wading ashord on D-Day; Joe Rosenthal's picture from Iwo Jima) to pictures that captured public attitudes, from a Japanese soldier's skull to iconic pinup-girl Betty Grable.
• Photos are discussed as truth, but also as symbolism, and as evidence -- strong example being death-camp photos by Margaret Bourke-White and others providing "visual truth of the enormity of the Nazi war crimes."
• 1950s -- from fashion trends, photos creating "a way we wanted to look," Avedon fashion photos to family slide shows of vacation sand other "markers of life," photo magazines, advertising products and creating a vision of the American "good life" with perfectly lighted and composed images.
• Meanwhile, artists like Robert Frank and William Klein experimented with rough street photography rebelling against advertising images and Life's narrative photo essays
• Approach of 1960s: The Black press and visual images that helped shape the Civil Rights movement; visual landmarks of the Moon landing, Vietnam War (transition to next episode).

Episode 3

• As dramatic news photos of police tactics against Civil Rights demonstrators spread around the world, "people of good will had to move out of denial"
• Photographers had greater access in the Vietnam War than in any war before or since; experts discuss their impact
• Apollo 8 photograph of the Earth from the moon as an influence on our perceptions (the Whole Earth catalog and ecology movement)
• Presidents and their photographic images, the "photo op" -- Kennedy, Nixon, Johnson and Reagan
• Persian Gulf War -- back to control and censorship, "managed news" -- and photographers fighting to get images out.
• Digital image manipulation as dishonesty -- taking the cigarette out of someone's hand; fixing teeth; changing skin color
• Journalism has enough trouble maintaining credibility without having competing papers showing different versions of the same picture.
• Digital imaging to help age the photos of missing children
• "We understand the nuance of a picture; we understand when it is telling the truth." David Friend (Vanity Fair)
• Dirck Halstead (Time): "The still image is still the most powerful tool that we have insofar as how we remember things. We're in the memory business."
• "Appropriating pictures" for art: From 1960s to today, turning photos into art through collage and over-painting; Warhol and others changing art; others creating false images and shooting as if true.
• "Artists are clearly aware of photography as always manipulated... If it is a perfectly straight photograph it is a version of a truth; it is not the truth." (Maria Morris Hambourg)
• "When we close our eyes, we see pictures" -- Jerry DellaFemina leading into final photo sequence of most-memorable images. (No captions; no discussion; they sum up the series.)