{"id":8113,"date":"2018-01-31T09:11:49","date_gmt":"2018-01-31T09:11:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=8113"},"modified":"2018-01-30T15:12:12","modified_gmt":"2018-01-30T15:12:12","slug":"american-history-of-american-photography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=8113","title":{"rendered":"American History of American Photography"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

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

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading American History of American Photography<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,2,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photo-history","category-photographers","category-reviews-etc"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8113"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8114,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8113\/revisions\/8114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}