William Henry Jackson - The American West

 

Photographer: William Henry Jackson (1843-1942)

William Henry Jackson was an American painter, Civil War veteran, geological survey photographer and an explorer famous for his images of the American West. Jackson was born in Keeseville, New York, on April 4, 1843, one of seven children. His mother was a talented water-colourist, and Jackson was passionate about painting from a young age; as a teenager he worked in retouching for photographic studios in Rutland, Vermont.

In October 1862 as a 19-year-old private in Company K of the 12th Vermont Infantry of the Union Army, Jackson spent much of his free time sketching drawings of his friends and various scenes of Army camp life that he sent home to his family as his way of letting them know he was safe.
Jackson fought in the Battle of Gettysburg during his nine months participating in the American Civil War, as well as spending much of his time on garrison duty. His regiment mustered out on July 14, 1863, after which Jackson returned to Rutland, Vermont, where he worked as an artistic painter in post-Civil War American society. He broke off the engagement to his fiancée Carolina Eastman, and left for the American West.

In 1866 Jackson boarded a Union Pacific Railroad train and travelled until it reached the end of the line at that time, about one hundred miles west of Omaha, Nebraska, where he then joined a wagon train heading west to Great Salt Lake as a bullwhacker, on the Oregon Trail. In 1867 along with his brother Edward Jackson he settled down in Omaha and entered the photography business, however in Jackson’s own words –‘Portrait photography never had any charms for me, so I sought my subjects from the house-tops, and finally from the hill-tops and about the surrounding country; the taste strengthening as my successes became greater in proportion to the failures’ – less than three years later he left it in the care of his wife and two of his brothers. On ventures that often lasted for several days, Jackson acted as a "missionary to the Indians" around the Omaha region, and it was there that Jackson made his now famous photographs of the American Indians: Osages, Otoes, Pawnees, Winnebagoes and Omahas.

In 1869 Jackson won a commission from the Union Pacific to document the scenery along the various railroad routes for promotional purposes.

Work: The American West

When geologist Ferdinand Hayden discovered Jackson’s work, he asked him to join an expedition to survey the Yellowstone River region.  The following year, he got a last-minute invitation to join the 1870 U.S. government survey (predecessor of U.S. Geological Survey) of the Yellowstone River and Rocky Mountains led by Ferdinand Hayden. He also was a member of the Hayden Geological Survey of 1871 which led to the creation of Yellowstone National Park.
Hayden’s surveys were annual multidisciplinary expeditions meant to chart the largely unexplored west, exploring flora, fauna, geology, and identify likely navigational routes. As Jackson was the official photographer for the survey, he was in a position to capture the first photographs of legendary landmarks of the West. These photographs played an important role in convincing Congress in 1872 to establish Yellowstone National Park, the first national park of the U.S., and his involvement with the survey established his reputation as one of the most accomplished explorers of the American continent.

In 1874, on one of several independent expeditions that he headed, Jackson also became the first to photograph the prehistoric Native American dwellings in Mesa Verde, Colorado.
Jackson worked with the wet-plate collodion process, utilizing a variety of camera and plate sizes. He travelled with as many as three camera-types—a stereographic camera (for stereoscope cards), a "whole-plate" or 8x10" plate-size camera, and one even larger, as large as 18x22". These cameras required fragile, heavy glass plates (photographic plates), which had to be coated, exposed, and developed onsite, before the wet-collodion emulsion dried. Without light metering equipment or sure emulsion speeds, exposure times required inspired guesswork, between five seconds and twenty minutes depending on light conditions. Jackson would use hot spring water or melted snow in his development process, and the weight of the glass plates and portable darkroom, as well as the rifles carried by his photographic division of 5 to 7 men made the project arduous. Jackson’s military experience and his peaceful dealings with Indians were welcomed. He suffered setbacks due to the challenging conditions, including his mule losing its footing, and Jackson a month’s work, resulting in him having to backtrack to remake some images.

Despite the delays and setbacks Jackson returned with conclusive photographic evidence of the various western landmarks that had previously seemed only a fantastic myth: the Grand Tetons, Old Faithful and the rest of the Yellowstone region, Colorado's Rockies and the Mount of the Holy Cross, and the uncooperative Ute Indians.

Jackson continued traveling on the Hayden surveys until the last one in 1878 after which Jackson again opened his own studio, this time in Denver, Colorado. There he continued photographing the West, taking on many side projects photographing for hotels and railroad companies like the Mexican Central, New York Central, and the Baltimore & Ohio. In 1893 many of these photographs were displayed at the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Moreover, Jackson was asked to be the official photographer of the fair, a job he desperately needed after losses during the Panic of 1893. Soon thereafter, Jackson was offered an all-expenses paid trip around the world by railroad publicist Joseph Pangborn as part of the World's Transportation Commission. Jackson travelled to and photographed many parts of Europe, Asia, North Africa, and Australia.  Shortly thereafter he became the cameraman and part-owner of a company in Detroit, Michigan, that bought the rights to the new Photochrom process for printing photographs in colour. He worked there until the company’s collapse in 1924. Jackson moved to Washington, D.C. the same year, and produced murals of the Old West for the new U.S. Department of the Interior building. He also acted as a technical advisor for the filming of Gone with the Wind. From the mid-1920s until his death, he pursued painting in earnest, producing many oils and watercolours, many on themes associated with the American West.

In 1942, Jackson died at the age of 99 in New York City. He was honoured by the Explorer's Club for his 80,000 photographs of the American West. He was also memorialized by the Adventurers' Club of New York, of which he was an active member. The SS William H Jackson steamship was in active service in 1945. Recognized as one of the last surviving Civil War veterans, he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Mount Jackson el. 8,231 feet (2,509 m) just north of the Madison River, in the Gallatin Range of Yellowstone National Park is named in honour of Jackson.

References

Encyclopedia Britannica. (2016). William Henry Jackson | American photographer. [online] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Henry-Jackson [Accessed 29 Jun. 2016].

The J. Paul Getty in Los Angeles. (2016). William Henry Jackson (American, 1843 - 1942) (Getty Museum). [online] Available at: http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/artists/1853/william-henry-jackson-american-1843-1942/ [Accessed 29 Jun. 2016].

University of Chicago Library. (2016). Guide to the William Henry Jackson. Photographs 1870-1878. [online] Available at: https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/scrc/findingaids/view.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.JACKSONWH [Accessed 29 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). William Henry Jackson. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Henry_Jackson [Accessed 29 Jun. 2016].

Timothy O'Sullivan - U.S. Geological Surveys of the West

 

Photographer: Timothy O’Sullivan (1840-1882)

Timothy O’Sullivan was born in Ireland but came to New York City two years later with his parents. As a teenager, he was employed as an apprentice by photographer Matthew Brady (known for his photographs of the Civil War). When the Civil War began in early 1861, he was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Union Army but there is no record of him fighting. He most likely did civilian's work for the army such as surveying, and he took photographs in his spare time. After leaving the army, O’Sullivan rejoined Brady’s team. In 1862 he followed Maj. Gen. John Pope's Northern Virginia Campaign, and joined Alexander Gardner’s studio, thereby having 44 of his photographs published in the first Civil War photographs collection – Gardener’s Photographic Sketch of the War. In July 1863, O’Sullivan made some of his most famous photographs, of the war's anonymous dead, lying bloated in the bloody fields of Gettysburg and elsewhere, which are emblazoned into the consciousness of Americans.

Until the Civil War, photography had been a refined, mostly indoor craft, geared toward people in their Sunday best stopping by the studio for a family portrait. The Civil War changed all that. Its photographers essentially invented photojournalism, though McElroy says they were not always above staging their scenes.

From 1867 to 1869, O’Sullivan was the official photographer on the United States Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under U.S geologist Clarence King, tasked with photographing the West to attract settlers. In 1870 he joined a survey team in Panama to survey for a canal across the isthmus. In 1871 O’Sullivan joined Lt. George M. Wheeler's survey west of the 100th meridian. He spent his last years in Washington, D.C., as official photographer for the U.S. Geological Survey and the Treasury Department, before dying of tuberculosis at the age of 42.

Work: US Geological Surveys

O’Sullivan’s pictures from Clarence King’s exploration of the Fortieth Parallel and Lt. George M. Wheeler’s survey of the 100th meridian made him one of the pioneers in the field of geophotography. Because of his work in U.S Civil War of 1861 to 1865, the organisers of the two geological surveys that he photographed knew that O'Sullivan was made of stern stuff and therefore could cope with the rigors of life outdoors far from home. During the Wheeler survey, O'Sullivan nearly drowned in the Truckee River (which runs from Lake Tahoe to Pyramid Lake, located in north-western Nevada) when his boat named ‘Picture’ got jammed against rocks. Gold pieces, photographic negatives and food were lost.

King’s survey was funded by the War Department, the plan being to survey the unexplored territory that lay between the California Sierras and the Rockies, with a view toward finding a good place to lay railroad tracks while also looking for mining possibilities and assessing the level of Indian hostility in the area. O'Sullivan was famous for not trying to romanticise the native American plight or way of life in his photographs and instead of asking them to wear tribal dress was happy to photograph them wearing denim jeans. He was trying to capture the everyday aspects of life for the indigenous peoples of North America; he did not use a studio to capture imagery of Native Americans, like many other photographers were at the time.

O'Sullivan’s work during Lt. George M. Wheeler's survey west of the One Hundredth Meridian in Black Canyon has been called some of the greatest photography of the 19th century and a clear inspiration for that other great American photographer Ansel Adams who later championed O’Sullivan’s work. The ordeals of the Wheeler survey pushed O’Sullivan to the extremes of his endurance, even as an experienced explorer. As well as surviving the rigours of the environment, O’Sullivan had to make pictures with a cumbersome wet-plate camera, developing the images in a portable darkroom pulled by four mules.

During the winter of 1867-68, in Virginia City, Nevada, he took the first underground mining pictures in America. Deep in mines where temperatures reached 130 degrees, O'Sullivan took pictures by the light of an improvised flash - magnesium wire - in difficult circumstances.

O'Sullivan one of the most intrepid and successful of the U.S. government expedition photographers who roamed the West under appalling conditions in the late 1860s and 1870s. Most of the photographers sent to document the West's native peoples and its geologic formations tried to make this strange new land accessible, even picturesque. Not O'Sullivan. At a time when Manifest Destiny demanded that Americans conquer the land, he pictured a West that was forbidding and inhospitable. With an almost modern sensibility, he made humans and their works insignificant. His photographs picture scenes, like a flimsy boat helpless against the dark shadows of Black Canyon, or explorers almost swallowed up by the crevices of Canyon de Chelly. There's not the sense that people were the equal to or above the landscape. They were not in charge.

O'Sullivan has been described as the right person who was there at the right time as he managed to document the re-birth of the nation through war in the early 1860's and then managed to be at the nexus of the great wave of exploration and migration westwards as the United States assumed what it thought to be its manifest destiny.

References

Cooper, R. (2012). How the Wild West REALLY looked: Gorgeous sepia-tinted pictures show the landscape as it was charted for the very first time. [online] Mail Online. Available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2149899/The-American-West-youve-seen-Amazing-19th-century-pictures-landscape-chartered-time.html [Accessed 28 Jun. 2016].

Regan, M. (2003). The life of Timothy H. O'Sullivan. [online] Tucson Weekly. Available at: http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/the-life-of-timothy-h-osullivan/Content?oid=1071872 [Accessed 28 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Geophotography. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophotography [Accessed 28 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Timothy H. O'Sullivan. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_H._O%27Sullivan [Accessed 28 Jun. 2016].

Albert Kahn - The Archives of the Planet

 

Photographer: Albert Kahn (1860-1940)

Albert Kahn was a French banker and philanthropist, the eldest of four children of Louis Kahn, a Jewish cattle dealer and Babette Kahn (née Bloch), an uneducated homebound mother. In 1878 Kahn became a bank clerk, but studied in the evenings for a degree. He graduated in 1881, and in 1892 Kahn became a principal associate of the Goudchaux Bank, which was then regarded as one of the most important financial houses of Europe. He also promoted higher education through travelling scholarships.

Work: The Archives of the Planet

Kahn initiated the vast photographic project The Archives of the Planet after travelling to Japan on business in 1909 with his chauffeur and photographer Alfred Dutertre. With Jean Brunhes as the project director, he sent photographers to every continent to record images of the planet using state of the art autochrome plates and early cinematography.

For Kahn, photography was a way of cataloguing the human “tribes” of the world and constructing a vibrant, colourful quilt of our shared humanity.  Between 1909 and 1931 the photographers collected 72,000 colour photographs and 183,000 metres of film, forming a unique historical record of 50 countries. They documented age-old cultures on the brink of being changed forever by war, modernization, and Westernization, recording the last years of Ireland's traditional Celtic villages and the late days of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. They photographed First World War soldiers in their trenches as well as the post-war celebrations in London. In the course of their travels, they also took the earliest colour photographs in countries as varied as Vietnam and Brazil, Mongolia and Norway, Benin and the United States. For decades, the collection — which spanned everything from religious rituals to cultural customs to watershed political events — remained virtually unknown, until it was rediscovered in the 1980s.

Kahn became bankrupt during the Great Depression, spelling the end of his project. Today, the archive is housed at the Musée Albert-Kahn, located in the financier’s former garden estate in suburban Boulogne-Billancourt, just west of Paris.

References

 

Amazon.co.uk. (2016). The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn's Archives of the Planet: Amazon.co.uk: David Okuefuna: 9780691139074: Books. [online] Available at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dawn-Color-Photograph-Albert-Archives/dp/0691139075?ie=UTF8&redirect=true&tag=braipick0d-21 [Accessed 27 Jun. 2016].

Popova, M. (2012). The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn’s Catalog of Humanity. [online] Brain Pickings. Available at: https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/02/23/the-dawn-of-the-color-photograph-albert-kahn/ [Accessed 27 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Albert Kahn (banker). [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Kahn_(banker) [Accessed 27 Jun. 2016].

Zeiger, M. (2012). A Trip Through Time. [online] AFAR Media. Available at: http://www.afar.com/magazine/a-trip-through-time [Accessed 27 Jun. 2016].

Richard Billingham - Ray's A Laugh

 

Photographer: Richard Billingham

Richard Billingham is an English photographer and artist whose best known work is ‘Ray’s A Laugh’- a photobook documenting the life of his alcoholic father Ray, and obese, heavily tattooed mother, Liz.

Billingham was born in Birmingham, and studied as a painter at Bournville College of Art and the University of Sunderland. He came to prominence through his candid photography of his family in Cradley Heath which later became Ray’s A Laugh, published in 1996. In 1997 Billingham was included in the exhibition Sensation at the Royal Academy of Art which showcased the art collection of Charles Saatchi and included many of the Young British Artists. In the same year, Billingham won the Citigroup Photography Prize. He was shortlisted for the 2001 Turner prize, for his solo show at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham.

Billingham has also made landscape photographs at places of personal significance around the Black Country; more of these were commissioned in 2003 by the arts organisation The Public, resulting in a book. In late 2006 Billingham, on commission by Birmingham-based arts organisation VIVID exhibited a major new series of photographs and videos inspired by his memories of visiting Dudley Zoo as a child. In the following year he created a series of photographs of ‘Constable Country’, the area on the Essex / Suffolk border painted by John Constable.

Billingham now lives near Swansea, but travels widely. He is a lecturer in fine art photography at the University of Gloucestershire and a third year tutor at Middlesex University      

Work: Ray’s A Laugh

Billingham started out as a painter, but later bought some cheap cameras and films to take photographs of his parents in a very intimate space. His intention was not to make a body of work as a photographer, but to take pictures he could use as the basis of his paintings; it was very difficult to get his father Ray, an alcoholic, to sit still for any length of time. The photographs allowed Billingham to make more detailed paintings from the photographic reference.

 For the project on his parents he was inspired by British post-impressionist and 19th century painters that painted about everyday life. He particularly liked the painters that could situate the figure in an interior really well, almost as if the figures are part of that interior; they really inhabit it, they’re part of it. His mother Liz left to live in a neighbouring tower block due to Ray’s alcoholism which had tormented him since being made redundant. Ray, saddened that Liz had left to live in a neighbouring flat, stayed in his bedroom all day and night drinking; there was no structure to day or night. There was around 18-24 months of never going out. A neighbour in the tower block made homebrew and delivered it to Ray. He also cashed Ray’s giro at the post office and paid his bills, and gave Ray the change. Billingham thinks Ray possibly drank so much during this time because he thought Liz would feel sorry for him and come home.

Billingham didn’t care if the images he took were blurred as long as they gave an idea for a painting. There were also mistakes in several of the frames, like black on one edge where the flash didn’t sync with the shutter speed.  The composition of the images came from looking at the work of other painters, and he was always thinking formally about composition, and trying to make a picture. He would also sometimes place his thumb over the lens to create an area of black to balance other elements in the frame. During the time of making this work he never looked at the work of other photographers. He didn’t particular take care of the negatives, which were frequently covered in scratches and dust. He did however experiment with different types of film.

As well as his parents, and later his brother who returned to live in the flat after being in foster care, Billingham also took advantage of items in his father’s room and around the flat. He became aware of how his parents placed objects, and their juxtaposition. On one of his trips home during his painting studies at Sunderland University, he found his father had moved into his mother’s flat. It was full of pets and opulent colours. With a portrait you have to see someone’s identity, but in this picture (Liz with jigsaw puzzle) you can’t really see what she looks like, but you can see what she’s about.

Editor Michael Collins started showing Billingham books of photographs; he didn’t know they existed before then. After this he realised the work he was doing would make a good a photo book.

References

 

Chobi Mela, (2016). Richard Billingham: Artist Talk@ Chobimela VII. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu8XLg0Zskc [Accessed 21 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Richard Billingham. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Billingham [Accessed 21 Jun. 2016].

Robbie Cooper - Immersion

 

Photographer: Robbie Cooper

Robbie Cooper is a British artist working in various media, including photography, video and video game modifications. Cooper studied media production at Bournemouth College of Art, and in 2002 embarked on long term project Alter Ego, which explored the identities people created within virtual online worlds. The images from the project have been exhibited internationally, and were published as a book in 2007.

     

Work: Immersion (2008)

In 2008 Cooper began the Immersion project, in which he records the expressions on people’s faces when they are watching TV, playing video games and using the internet. As a viewer of the project, you can’t see what the participant sees, only their facial reaction to what they are experiencing. For the project, Cooper uses a technique developed by filmmaker Errol Morris called the Interrotron method; a modified autocue using a one-way mirror to reflect an image towards the viewer whilst they gaze into the camera. As well as capturing the participants ‘immersion’, Cooper created a studio environment which he called ‘anti-shoot’, in which the attention of the participants is diverted away from the purpose of the activity.

The aim is to build up a portrait series that begins with babies and ends with the very old, taking in every type of media content along the way. Screen time takes up an increasingly large part of our lives: babies being born right now arrive in a landscape where computers, smartphones, the internet, and social media already exist, while the oldest generation alive today can remember a time before TV was a fixture of our living rooms.

The idea came to Cooper while working on his project Alter Ego in China and Korea; in those countries there are huge internet cafes with row upon row of kids playing virtual world games. It got Cooper thinking about our interaction with the screen. The first media he used for the Immersion project was video games but wanted to expand this to as many different subjects as possible; comedy, sports, religion, literally any subject we interact with through screens. Immersion was filmed with very high resolution video from which still images are lifted. With video you are shooting between 25-30 fps, and it’s amazing how the human face changes; an expression can pass across a face in less than a second. Much research has been done into micro-expressions, such as when someone is trying to hide something. Those kind of emotions will come out very quickly. Cooper initially considered shooting Immersion with an environmental background, but he wanted it to be something that’s completely removed from that so you just concentrate on the person and their headspace and psychological world rather than their social world. As soon as you’ve got a room you’ve got a whole bunch of other information that’s coming over that’s maybe unnecessary. He wanted it to look a bit like advertising or something in a really off-kilter way. On average people look at a screen for 8 hours a day. The project is trying to capture authentic emotional life.

References

 

National Media Museum, (2010). Robbie Cooper Immersion. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jXpvGBP0U0 [Accessed 16 Jun. 2016].

Thom, E. (2013). Do You Spend A Lot Of Time Screen Watching? Collaborate With Robbie Cooper On His Immersion Project - National Media Museum. [online] National Media Museum. Available at: http://blog.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/robbie-cooper-immersion-mass-collaboration-kickstarter/ [Accessed 16 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Robbie Cooper. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_Cooper [Accessed 16 Jun. 2016].

Robert Frank - The Americans (1958)

Photographer: Robert Frank

Robert Frank is a Swiss-born American photographer and documentary filmmaker. His most well-known work is The Americans, first published in France in 1958. Partly to escape the confines of his business-orientated family and home, Frank turned to photography and trained under a few photographers and graphic designers before creating his first hand-made book of photographs, 40 Fotos, in 1946. 40 Fotos incorporated original photographs in various genres, and displays Frank’s early recognition of the power of presenting multiple photographs in a single page spread or in a bound series.

In 1947 Frank emigrated to the United States, and worked for Harper’s Bazaar in New York City as a fashion photographer. He then travelled around South America and Europe before returning to the states in 1950. In that same year he met photographer Edward Steichen, and participated in the group show 51 American Photographers at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Frank was initially optimistic about the United States society and culture, but this quickly changed when confronted with the fast pace of American life, and his perception of their overemphasis on money. He now thought America an often bleak and lonely place, a theme that would become evident in his later photography. He and his family briefly moved to Paris, then returned to New York in 1953 to work as a freelance photojournalist for magazines including McCall’s, Vogue, and Fortune. Along with other contemporary photographers such as Saul Leiter and Diane Arbus, he helped form what Jane Livingston has termed The New York School of photographers during the 1940s and 50s.       

 

Work: The Americans (1958)

Photographer Walker Evans was a major artistic influence for Robert Frank, and with his help Frank secured in 1955 a Guggenheim Fellowship; a grant awarded to established professionals to allow blocks of time in which to have as much creative freedom as possible, spending the money as they see fit. Frank’s project was to travel across the United States with his family and photograph all strata of society. Over the next two years he took 28,000 shots. 83 were selected to be included in his book The Americans. Shortly after returning to New York in 1957, Frank met Beat writer Jack Kerouac, who would go on to write the introduction to the U.S. edition of the work. 
   

Frank’s photography in The Americans was at odds with what was considered a ‘good photograph’ at the time, due to his unusual focus, low lighting and cropping. Because of this divergence from contemporary photographic standards, Frank initially found difficulty securing a publisher. The work was first published in Paris in 1958 by Robert Delpire, and published a year later in the United States. It received substantial criticism, where the tone of the book was perceived as derogatory to national ideals. This criticism also came from Popular Photography who derided the technical quality of Frank’s images, citing ‘meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness. Sales were poor at first, but popular Kerouac’s introduction helped it reach a wider audience.

The Americans was a huge influence on future artists, and over time became a seminal work in American photography and art history, becoming Frank’s most famous work.

The Americans is considered a fresh and nuanced outsider’s view of American society, and are notable for their distanced view of both high and low strata of American society, laying bare the anxieties that the chrome and the advertising jingles obscured. Sean O’Hagan writing in The Guardian said ‘[Frank’s] aim was to photograph America as it unfolded before his somewhat sombre outsider’s eye’. It presented a different viewpoint of the United States, and forced them to look at themselves in a very different way than they were used to. It was more truthful, but less glamorous and wonderful than they were used to thinking about themselves.

The images weren’t just representational, you felt and emphasised for these people. It’s raw; there’s a certain life to it that didn’t seem like a set up photograph.  America was a country in transition, beginning to feel that it had a lot of potential, a lot of world power and that everyone could work towards a really fantastic life. But the reality was closer to what Robert Frank was showing – a country that was segregated by race and class.

The term snapshot aesthetic is often used in reference to Frank’s work in The Americans – it feels informal. But it really was more than just the snapshot; he was very deliberate and fully aware of what he was photographing, making very conscious choices. He wanted his photographs to be more ambiguous, like poetry, so that the viewer would fill in the blanks. It’s visual poetry; you want to embrace it, you want to look at it again and again because there are so many layers of information and you want to experience that to its fullest extent.  

 

References

 

Museum of Photographic Arts, (2016). Streetwise - Robert Frank and The Americans. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_xJAd0piCM [Accessed 15 Jun. 2016].

Smithsonian Magazine, (2016). Inside Photographer Robert Frank's The Americans. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHtRZBDOgag [Accessed 14 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Guggenheim Fellowship. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guggenheim_Fellowship [Accessed 15 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Robert Frank. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frank [Accessed 15 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). The Americans (photography). [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Americans_(photography) [Accessed 15 Jun. 2016].

The Genius of Photography. (2009). [DVD] BBC.

Robert Howlett - Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1857)

Photographer: Robert Howlett

Robert Howlett was a pioneering British photographer who is best known for his iconic picture of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The image was part of a commission by The Times to document the construction of the world’s largest steamship, the SS Great Eastern.

After inheriting £1000 from his Grandfather, he moved to London, and rose to prominence working for the Photographic Institution, where he undertook a number of commissions for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. These commissions included copying the works of Raphael for Prince Albert, and making a series of portraits of heroic soldiers from the Crimean War; the latter of which were exhibited in 1857 at the Photographic Society of London’s annual exhibition.

Other commissions included making photographic studies of the crowd at the 1856 Epsom Derby for painter William Powell Frith who used them in his 1858 painting The Derby Day.

Howlett died in 1858, aged 27. His death was probably a result of over-exposure to the arsenic and mercury used in the photographic process.

Work: Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1857)

The image is an environmental portrait, as opposed to the usual studio setting. Howlett’s camera produced negatives using the wet-plate collodion process, which necessitated a range of portable darkroom equipment. Brunel is pictured in front of the giant chains of the braking mechanism of his latest project; the Great Eastern, a gigantic ocean-going iron steamship. The entire picture is one of strength; Brunel standing tall and confident with his stovepipe hat and cigar, with the mighty and enormous chains as a backdrop. His shoes and trousers are mud-spattered, suggesting a hands-on approach to his projects. It is as if the photograph is trying to give us a physical experience of the man. A painting of Brunel from the same year by John Callcott Horsley shows the designer at his desk, representing the intellectual; a conventional representation of the intellectual that could have been painted any time since the mid-18^th century. In Howlett’s image, Brunel is freed from this tradition, and displays his power to us directly, as he displayed it to the men in his shipyard.

This confident image of Brunel gives no clues to the problems that would later plague him. Shortly after this picture was taken, he tried to launch the Great Eastern, but it was stuck in its dry moorings. Several attempts later the ship was waterborne, but on the eve of its first sailing Brunel suffered a stroke. The ship was also plagued by further problems, and was relegated to being a cable-laying vessel, rather than the promised passenger ship.    

References

Wikipedia. (2016). Robert Howlett. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Howlett [Accessed 14 Jun. 2016].   

Jones, J. (2000). Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Robert Howlett (1857). [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2000/jun/17/art [Accessed 14 Jun. 2016].

Clark, D. (2011). Isambard Kingdom Brunel by Robert Howlett - Iconic Photograph - Amateur Photographer. [online] Amateur Photographer. Available at: http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/iconic-images/isambard-kingdom-brunel-by-robert-howlett-iconic-photograph-15974 [Accessed 14 Jun. 2016].

What Is Documentary Photography?

In the video, Miranda Gavin of Hotshoe Magazine gave a five minute talk on documentary photography today. For someone new to documentary photography like myself, the video gave an awareness of the flexibility and liquid state of the genre. Miranda made a point of stating how the photographer’s circumstance and environment is directing their work, for example how the topics are changing in documentary photography due to a large increase in women adopting the medium. I found this an interesting point, and realised that as well as telling somebody else’s story (coverage of conflicts, events, etc.), documentary photography can be used as a vehicle for the photographer’s own story, and issues that are directly relevant to them.

Also intriguing was seeing how the way people are consuming the medium has changed in recent times, and continues to change. Printed newspapers and magazines are becoming less and less relevant, with online services picking up the slack. As Miranda pointed out, this has created a technical issue with regards to things like colour. When the photographer knows the final media his or her image will be printed on, they can take steps to control the final output. With the majority of the public’s computer monitors and phone/iPad screens uncalibrated, this creates a much less certain final product.

I find it interesting that Miranda’s experience is that the line between documentary image and fine art image is often blurred, as in my own mind I want my documentary images to also look attractive. If someone saw my print and commented that they found it nice to look at, I’d like to be able to then create a conversation around the image’s origins.

Ultimately, perhaps the word documentary in a photographic context is becoming a meaningless word. To use a musical analogy, the word jazz is in danger of becoming meaningless as it has expanded and assimilated elements from so many musical genres that to say that you like to listen to 'jazz' warrants further explanation to clarify exactly what you mean.  

Introduction

Welcome to my blog for the Open College of Art's level 2 photography course Documentary. This is my first level 2 course, and my 4th course in total, having completed Music 1: From the Present to the Past, Music 1: Start Composing Music and Photography 1: The Art of Photography. Simultaneously with this course, I will be starting another level 2 course - Music 2: Moving on with Composition.

In those previous courses I found other student's blogs invaluable as a guideline, especially to make sure I was aiming my own work at the same level or higher than others. I have my own blogs likewise can help other future students.

In this course, Documentary, I have several things that I'd like to gain from the course, and improve on what I did in earlier courses. Firstly, I want to build a much greater awareness of the history of photography, major players in the field, and what is happening today in photography. My previous courses were much more practical based than this one, thus I found it hard to dedicate time to reading books. This time I'm going to seriously ramp up the amount of reading I do; partly due to necessity because of the nature of the course, but mostly because I'm excited about building a physical (and mental) library of knowledge with a subject I find intensely interesting. I usually find 'art speak' very difficult to interpret, but hopefully practice is going to help with that.

I found choosing my level 2 course very difficult, as I wasn't sure on the exact direction I wanted to take. I came back full circle to my first instinct: Documentary; mainly I expect because I like to travel and document those travels. I also enjoy history, and creating a photo-documentary on the long history of the town I live in for example I think would be an exciting project. In my last photography course I touched a little on documenting an event (Birmingham's Frankfurt Christmas market), and a theme (street performers), both of which I found very enjoyable to do.

Finally, I give the name of my blog as a quote relevant to the discipline I am studying. This time I chose one by Richard Avedon:

'All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.' - Richard Avedon

I think this is particularly pertinent to documentary photography. After all, the only truth you see is what the photographer has allowed you to see.