Essay: Constructing the View.

Now that the dust is settling on the symposium, it's time to write about some of the themes that have come up in our discussions preparing for and after it.
To complete the seminar, each student will write a 3,000 -3,500 word essay to be submitted in print  (formatted and designed to suit the subject matter, as a booklet) and soft copy as pdf by 1pm on December 16th.
The title of the essay is 'Constructing the View'. In it, each student will explore an aspect of what photography can offer architecture.
The first draft of 1,000 words with selected images is due to be published on the blog by each student by the end of the day on 23rd November.

Here are four ideas about photography that have come up in discussions that may help you develop the course of your essay this week.

1) Photography as a way of knowing the world.
When writing about his exhibition at MOMA, 'New Documents', Szarkowski describes the work of the photographers in the exhibition: (Arbus, Friedlander and Winogrand): 'Their aim has been not to reform life, but to know it, not to persuade, but to understand. The world, in spite of its terrors, is approached as the ultimate source of wonder and fascination, no less precious for being irrational and incoherent...' (see full press release here).

There is also a great documentary on Winogrand at work available partly on youtube:




2) Form and Pressure
In this essay (full text here), Shore discusses a quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet in relation to his understanding of photography:
'but then there is this final line: "[To show] the very age and body of the time his form and pressure." This is within the realm of photography. A photograph can aspire to this.'

You can listen to Shore discuss how he makes his photographs  and watch him at work here:



You can also listen to a lecture he gave for the Architectural Association in London by following this link: Photography and the Limits of Representation - Stephen Shore, The Photographer's Gallery London, 13/10/2010/

3) Photography as a way of being in the world:
In the first session of the symposium, 'Lived Space', Mark Pimlott spoke about why he takes photographs 'in this perpetually unfolding present':
'I make photographs as a kind of necessity: I want to be in the World, I want to be open to its expressions.' He quotes Shore:
'And so the pictures are reflective of the condition of a self, paying attention'.
He goes on to say:
'More than documenting, or remembering, then, the photographic attention might serve to bind us to the World, regardless of whether that attention pertains to making or looking: constructing the view is constructing the bond between the self and the World.'

4) Photography as a way of representing an idea of built space - both before and after construction

'A great building, in my opinion, must begin with the unmeasurable, go through measurable means when it is being designed, and in the end must be unmeasurable.' - Louis Kahn

4a) The Vkhutemas School in 1920s Moscow, and the student exercises using models and photography.
This work was curated by Thomas Demand for the 2012 Architecture Biennale in Venice, and he exhibited these alongside his photographs of sketch models by John Lautner, a series entitled 'Model Studies' that was also exhibited at the Graham Foundation and is discussed here.

4b) Hélene Binet's lecture at Harvard: Composing Space:



4c) House: After 5 years of living by Charles & Ray Eames:

Nicholas Nixon: Friendly, West Virginia, 1982

This apparent family portrait appears in the 'depictive' section of Stephen Shore's book 'The Nature of Photographs'.

'... a photographer solves a picture, more than composes one.'

Shore inisists that Nixon's photo 'solves' the scene it captures. He seems to be suggesting that a photograph recreates the world as a more coherent version of itself; a photographer doesn't simply 'compose' its elements into a certain arrangement, but selects the ideal point of view. In the case of Friendly, West Virginia, Nixon's photo is clearly referencing Walker Evans' photos of the victims of the Great Depression. We duly make the comparison between depression-era sharecroppers and the poor of Nixon's own time. This perhaps makes the photo more of a complication of than a solution to the world it depicts.

Common Colour

I propose to investigate the role of colour in showing the vitality in the banality of everyday life in America with particular focus on the work of the “new colour” photographers of the 1970s. 

Hot Sauce, William Eggleston

In an effort to explore the above, I have identified the themes below as potential areas of interest to explore further.  These themes could then be further supported and augmented by primary research in the form of a series of photographic projects investigating the applications of colour on everyday subject matter.

Acceptance. Investigate the change of attitude towards the use of colour in photography in the 1970s. Although invented in 1907, it took until the 1970s for colour photography to be accepted seriously into the photographic world. 

Black & White are the colours of photography – Robert Frank

Once upon a time there were jobs, Robert Frank, 1955

What were the underlying barriers to its acceptance? What was the tipping point (or points) that leads to its acceptance? What was the role of art movements such as abstract expressionism and pop-art, in its renaissance?

Advocates. William Eggleston was the first proponent of colour photography to be truly accepted by the art world when John Szarkowski showed his work at MOMA in 1976. The publication, William Eggleston's Guide, in which Szarkowski called Eggleston's photographs "perfect," focus on everyday, umdane and trivial subjects.

William Eggleston's Guide, 1976

Perfect? Perfectly banal, maybe…perfectly boring, certainly – Hilton Kramer, New York art critic 

The research aims to focus on Eggleston’s work as well as the other  “new color” photographers of the 70s and 80s such as Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld.

Ginger Shore, Stephen Shore, 1977

Uncommon Places, Stephen Shore, 1982

Uncommon Places, Stephen Shore, 1982

Joel Sternfeld

Application. What tangible attributes does colour bring to a photo (life, focus, emphasis, energy etc.)? What were the various processes used and why? (e.g. Eggleston’s discovery of the dye-transfer process in 1973) What meaning (psychological) can be attributed to the use of colour in photography?

Subject. What effect did the application of colour have on the representation of daily life in America?  How did it change the perception of everyday life in America? 

William Eggleston

Revisiting the New Topography

Robert Adams, Tract Housing, North Glenn and Thornton, Colorado, 1973

Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, Henry Wessel Jr.


New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape was an exhibition originally held in 1975 at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. Despite being seen by a relatively small audience, and having a very limited catalogue run, this exhibition has come to be recognised as seminal in redefining landscape photography. The exhibition was revived, toured again in 2009-2011, and a new catalogue was released, bringing renewed attention to its importance and influence.

Britt Salvesen has noted in her catalogue essay that, “we can see New Topographics as a bridge between the still-insular fine-art photography world and the expanding post-conceptual field of contemporary art, simultaneously asserting and deconstructing the medium’s modernist specificity, authority and autonomy” (1). All the artists involved in New Topographics were from what was a relatively small photography scene, and had some connection with George Eastman House, or with each other as fellow artists, students and academics. William Jenkins, curator of the 1975 exhibition, originally discussed with Joe Deal the idea for the exhibition as a show about architecture. This idea developed into a realisation that what they were looking at putting together was “primarily about landscape”(2). Deal’s own work evolved in the lead up to the show to include less subjective detail and more of the surrounding environment.

Joe Deal, Untitled View (Albuquerque), 1974

Joe Deal, Untitled View (Albuquerque), 1974

The by-line in the title signals the shift in focus that this exhibition marked — a move from the idea of the pristine landscape and glorification of the natural wonder, as epitomised by Ansel Adams or the landscape images of Edward Weston — to the everyday reality of the landscape in which people actually dwell. The mundane and the banal in photography had already been seen with the snapshot aesthetic which had existed in photography since cameras became widely accessible, and was mimicked in the 60s by photographers like Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander and brought to prominence by John Szarkowski. The works in this exhibition shift their focus to the banal and mundane environment — bringing to the man-made world the same photographic attention the natural world received. Another nod to the snapshot, and a further step away from previous landscape photography, is Steven Shore's work — the only colour photographs included in the show.
  
At the time the images were seen as confronting as there is no obvious beauty or narrative to hold onto. The work of Lewis Baltz is especially true of this, as he photographs the blank walls of industrial buildings, generic architecture and construction sites.

Steven Shore, Wilde Street and Colonization Avenue, Dryden, Ontario, August 15, 1974

Lewis Baltz, South Corner, Riccar America Company, 3184 Pullman, Costa Mesa, 1974

Lewis Baltz, Foundation Construction, Many Warehouses, 2891 Kelvin, Irvine, 1974

Lewis Baltz, North Wall, Semicoa, 333 McCormick, Costa Mesa, 1974

Similarly, Frank Gohlke frames some of his images with the foreground object centralised and background disarmingly split across both sides of the image, or have large expanses of ‘empty’ foreground. This framing is similarly unconventional to that adopted in the snapshot aesthetic. Gohlke’s images are also all provocatively titled Landscape, followed by their location. 

Frank Gohlke, Landscape Los Angeles, 1974

Frank Gohlke, Landscape Los Angeles, 1974

Nicholas Nixon, Buildings on Tremont Street, Boston, 1975

The general demeanour of the exhibition is that the photographers have just photographed what is there — as it is. A number of the artists cite Walker Evans and his ‘Documentary Style’ as an influence on this detached approach(3), which aims to withhold judgement and present the landscapes as found. Many of the works included are shot from a fairly natural eye height, or views from hills and other buildings, giving the sense of being present in the location. A notable exception is the typologies work of the Bechers - which is shot from a higher vantage point, but still gives a sense of a kind of objective eye which is looking at the industrial specimens without attachment.

Bernd, and Hilla Becher, Pit Head, Bear Valley, Pennsylvania, USA, 1974

The influence of New Topographics is particularly evidenced in the way that the term itself transformed from simply being the title of the exhibition to a description of a particular attitude or style, a concept which implies a social conscience, and a term then appropriated for further exhibitions.(4) It is only in retrospect that the latter conceptual framework has been attached to the exhibition, and now themes of land use, environmentalism and urban sprawl are commonly also cited, despite these not being present in the original curatorial intention. This is perhaps the consequence of critical theory and postmodernism’s tendency toward contextualisation as a means of understanding, and the growth of academia into new territory. Edward Relph’s Place and Placelessness was only released the following year, and academia began turning its attention to the study of the urban environment as a subject in itself.

Since 1975, further fields of urban theory have emerged, along with an increasing social consciousness of the environment — and it is easy to look back on this exhibition and see it as a harbinger of this new perspective, even if it wasn’t aware of this at the time. Photography itself during this same time also increasingly became seen as a valid source through which social concerns are manifest.



(1) B. Salvesen, “New Topographics” in New Topographics. (2nd. ed), (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl Publishers, 2010), 12. 
(2) B. Salvesen, “New Topographics” in New Topographics. (2nd. ed), 18. 
(3) B. Salvesen, “New Topographics” in New Topographics. (2nd. ed), 17. Gohlke, Nixon, Schott and Shore are all quoted as influenced by Walker Evans.
(4) See discussion in A. Nordström, “After New: Thinking about New Topographics from 1975 to the Present” in New Topographics. (2nd. ed), 69-79.

Space Framed 2013 - Week 5

This week we will be looking at projects that survey the American Landscape:

Timothy O'Sullivan - Survey of the 40th Parallel (in the book Framing the West)
Various Photographers - New Topographics
Stephen Shore - Uncommon Places, American Surfaces
Richard Misrach - Desert Cantos, Chronologies.

We will be reading the essay by Britt Salvesen in the book New Topographics, on temporary reserve in the Richview library.

Space Framed 2013 - Week 2

Walker Evans - Houses and Billboards in Atlanta, Georgia, 1936

"As a way of beginning, one might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing. All of us, even the best-mannered of us, occasionally point, and it must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others.
It is not difficult to imagine a person...who might elevate the act of pointing to a creative plane, a person who would lead us through the fields and streets and indicate a sequence of phenomena and aspects that would be beautiful, humorous, morally instructive, cleverly ordered, mysterious, or astonishing, once brought to our attention, but that had been unseen before, or seen dumbly, without comprehension...we would be uncertain ... how much of our pleasure and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed to and how much from the pattern created by the pointer"
- John Szarkowski, excerpt from catalogue essay for The Work of Eugene Atget: Old France, MOMA, NY, 1981.


Over the next two weeks, we will be looking at four major American photographic works.
This week, we will be reviewing Walker Evans' book American Photographs and Robert Frank's work The Americans
There is an interesting essay on the two photographers by Tod Papageorge here.


At the same time, we will be reading Stephen Shore's book The Nature of Photographs (on temporary reserve in Richview library). We will also look at this lecture - Photography and the limits of Representation given by Shore in London in 2010 that explores further the themes introduced in the book.

Stephen Shore

Stephen Shore

Stephen Shore is best known for his pioneering use of colour in art photography, at a time where colour was only used by the press. His work generally documents seemingly banal scenes taken while on the road exploring North American culture.

From a young age Shore showed a passion for photography. By age 9 he owned his first 35mm camera. 2 years later he was given Walker Evans' American Photographs and by age 16 he was selling prints to Edward Steichen, then curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). He never went to University, instead started spending time at the factory with Andy Warhol in New York where he gained an interest in photographing everyday culture. There he learned of the benefits of working consistently in series, something that translated into viewing his journeys as photographic sequences.

Shore’s early work in American Surfaces consists of quick point and shoot pictures taken by a 35mm Rollei, generally on small Kodak size paper (something which was very untypical for art photographers of the time) and gave an account of his activities as a traveller. They were spontaneous and un-mediated documenting everything from hotel rooms to the pancakes he would have for breakfast.

In the follow up publication Uncommon places we notice a shift in style. His work becomes more deliberate, calculated and precise. Shore puts this down to a conversation with his friend and curator of MoMA John Szarkowski in 1973 where he questioned the viewfiender of his 35mm camera. Shore took this as a criticism of his framing of photographs. He began using 4x5 and 8x10 format cameras which were associated with press photography of the time and generally required a tripod. He describes being “fascinated with the subconscious or conscious decisions that go into a photograph that working with a view camera would produce”. This led to a change of subject from people and moving objects to scenes that lent themselves to an 8x10 plate camera like buildings, empty streetscapes and carparks.

Photographers discuss their work

Garry Winogrand



Stephen Shore


Robert Adams


William Klein

Week 4 - New Topographics

This week we will be looking at New Topographics, edited by Britt Salvesen. The essay in the book is particularly important.
We will then look at four photographers from the exhibition and their work in more detail:
Stephen Shore - Uncommon Places
Robert Adams - What we Bought
Louis Baltz - The new Industrial Parks near Irvine, California
Bernd & Hille Becher - Basic Forms of Industrial Buildings