New Social Landscape

Photographers

Lee Friedlander

Diane Arbus

Garry Winogrand

Robert Frank

Inspired by Walker Evans

Reinvented the Documentary Tradition•Documented the “Social Landscape” of America•Rejected sentimentality

Similar to street Photographers, but … •Darker•Objective•Prying approach•Not necessarily to celebrate, but to document.

What is New Social Landscape??

New Topographies: Photos of a Man-Altered Landscape

Exhibition curated by William Jenkins at International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester NY 1975

http://www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/exhibitions/407

The New Topographies

A turning point in the history of photography, the 1975 exhibition New Topographics signalled a radical shift away from traditional depictions of landscape.

Pictures of transcendent natural vistas gave way to unromanticised views of stark industrial landscapes, suburban sprawl, and everyday scenes not usually given a second glance.

Robert AdamsLewis BaltzBernd and Hilla BecherJoe DealFrank GohlkeNicholas NixonJohn SchottStephen ShoreHenry Wessel

10 photographers who exhibited:

Diane Arbus

Quote: “I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.”

Diane Arbus

“Her unrelentingly direct photographs of people who live on the edge of societal acceptance, as well as those photographs depicting supposedly "normal" people in a way that sharply outlines the cracks in their public masks, were controversial at the time of their creation and remain so today.”

Focused on what humans were doing to the landscape.

Suburban developments

Expansion of the west

Robert Adams

‘Deadpan’ approachUnmanipulated

Impassive

Head-on Compositions

Neutral

Image sharpness

Detail

Matter-Of-FactDetached

Typological Approach – examining types

Intensify realism

Objective

Large Depth of Field

Large Scale

Large Format Camera

Clinical

Bernd and Hilla Becher

Quote: “Bernd and Hilla Becher are among the most influential artists of our time. For

more than forty years they have been recording the heritage of an industrial past. Their systematic photography of functionalist architecture, often organizing their pictures in grids, brought them recognition as conceptual artists as well as photographers. As the founders of what has come to be known as the ‘Becher school’ they have brought their influence in a unique way to bear on generations of documentary photographers and artists.”

Stephen Shore

Quote: “Each view receives the same impartial treatment, revealing his

democratic approach to subject matter. The everyday carton of milk becomes quietly monumental.” Simon Lee

Deadpan approach

His work coinciding with the environmental movements of the 1970’s

Ironic approach to landscape with the use of color

William Eggleston

Quote: "The extraordinary, compelling, honest, beautiful and unsparing

photographs all have to do with the quality of our lives in the ongoing world: they succeed in showing us the grain of the present, like the cross-section of a tree.... They focus on the mundane world. But no subject is fuller of implications than the mundane world!"

Richard Billingham

Quote: “Billingham's snap shots form a kind of family album no ordinary family

member would ever make, let alone show. This is not a family life of fake smiles and awkward calendar events. They're more like a backstage glimpse of the chaotic rehearsals. It's a view that turned Billingham from a would-be painter into a celebrated photographer.”

Nan Goldin

Quote: “The main themes of her early pictures are love, gender, domesticity, and

sexuality; these frames are usually shot with available light. She has affectionately documented women looking in mirrors, girls in bathrooms and barrooms, drag queens, sexual acts, and the culture of obsession and dependency. The images are viewed like a private journal made public.”

“ The pictures were stripped of any artistic frills and reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion.”

-- William Jenkins

Focused on the darker side of landscape photography – not the glorified, beautiful vision of the modernist – not pristine!

The altered, scared, and changing landscape.

Lewis Baltz

This new way of photographing and documenting people and the landscape would influence generations of photographers to come.

The deadpan approach, refusal of the need for beauty, and showing the banal or absurdity of life would be characteristics of Postmodernism and the movements leading up to it.

Postmodernism started 1960’s, 1970’s – Still living in it now!

Is it done?No visual characteristics – too much of everything. Communicates a specific idea.Anything goes

Taken everything that has come before and mixed it up. Its all things combined.

Camera was used as a recording method predominantly – however there are some photographers whose work can be labelled as Post Modern

Postmodernism

Inspiration from mass-mediaIrony

Capturing the everyday

Ignoring genre boundaries

Subjective

Photographing personal events

Intimate, private moments

All about intentions

Encourages the combination of ideas with other art forms

Personal Vision

Intentionally technically weak, to help convey ideasi.e. blurred, casual hand held approach

Communicating an idea

PostmodernismThe Snapshot Approach

Inspiration from mass-mediaIrony

Capturing the everyday

Ignoring genre boundaries

Subjective

Photographing personal events

Intimate, private moments

Humour

Encourages the combination of ideas with other art forms

Personal Vision

Intentionally technically weak, to help convey ideasi.e. blurred, casual hand held approach

Communicating an idea

Post Modern Art can be:Installation

Abstract expressionist paintings

Conceptual art - (where the idea is more important than photo itself)

Performance ArtEnvironmental art

Light artSculpture

“Term used to characterize developments in architecture and the arts in the 1960s and after, when there was a clear challenge to the dominance of modernism; the term was applied predominantly from the 1970s to architecture and somewhat later to the decorative and visual arts.”

Cindy Sherman

Gregory Crewdson

Quote: “The artist has referred the 'limitations of a photograph in terms of

narrative capacity to have an image that is frozen in time, (where) there's no before or after' and has turned that restriction into a unique strength.”

Who are you?!