American History of American Photography

Only Part 1 of Marc Falzon‘s short survey of the history of American photography is currently available (and featured in PDN Pulse), but it’s 8 minutes offers an interesting introduction to the subject, dealing with it through 3 key curatorial figures, Alfred Stieglitz, Minor White and John Szarkowski (part one only deals with Stieglitz) and a few key photographers.

Among those photographers, so far only Timothy O’Sullivan and Walker Evans have been the only to have been looked at in any depth, with a passing mention of a few others.

It’s an introduction that tries to demonstrate what is peculiarly American about American photography and makes some interesting points, while of course minimising or neglecting much European work of the era.

Where it descends to the ridiculous is in suggesting that photographers such as Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson were somehow the product of American advances in the medium and the influence of Stieglitz. What influence there was clearly flowed the other way.

It wasn’t the school around Stieglitz that motivated Walker Evans – except in a reaction which dismissed it as well as the newer modernism of photographers such as Paul Strand, but the vernacular photography of the many unknown American photographers – and the work of Atget which was brought to New York by Berenice Abbott and Julien Levy.

What I find most annoying about this video is however the way that the photographs are shown, generally starting zoomed into a detail and wandering around the image, with only at best a fleeting glimpse of the image as a whole. Framing is so intrinsic to our medium and we need to see and study pictures in their entirety – perhaps occasionally zooming in to view significant details.

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