William Klein's New York

In 1954 William Klein returned to New York from his adopted country France and began to photograph it in a “new way”.  He was an American returning home for eight months after spending six years in Europe and as such was like a foreigner arriving to a new land.  This alienation from the streets and the people he grew up with allowed him to reassess them as an outsider while his familiarity allowed him to relate to them as a local.

'I was a make believe ethnographer: treating new yorkers like an explorer would treat zulus - searching for the rawest snapshot, the zero degree of photography.'

William Klein, Pepsi and Moves, Harlem, New York, 1955

Klein was returning as an artist using photography as his medium and not just a photographer looking to art for inspiration.  The work was coarse, raw and full of energy.  It resonated with the spontaneity and immediacy that American art was showing at the time. Its primitive and gestural characteristics echoing the “action paintings” of Jackson Pollock.

Klein's presence was evident in all his images.  His physical presence felt through his engagement with his subjects, his vivid technique and style or simply through the angle he would hold the camera.  It was action photography. His images lunged and arrested sometimes feeling like stills ripped from a movie reel and re-presented in their raw state.

William Klein, Vertical Diamonds 1953 (Abstract Art)

Jackson Pollock at work, 1950

Klein rejected conformity.  His shots were often blurred or out of focus. He used fast film and wide angles.  He was transferring abstract art techniques to the real life streets of New York.  He applied a visual filter of movement, blur and haziness to the exuberance of life on the street and in doing so amplified its inherent intensity.

Candy Store, William Klein, New York, 1955

Without any formal photographic training Klein had now created his own style. His technique and approach shocked the photography world.  He had captured life on the streets like no other photographer before.  The subjects were always engaged and engaging. Klein wasn’t capturing life as it went by but was capturing life as it unfolded and wrapping it up in its own aura of visual energy.  Klein then added an extra layer of vitality to every frame through his experimental techniques with flash, blur, close-ups, wide-angle, grab shots, abstraction, noise, and grainy textural qualities.

St. Patricks' Day, 5th Avenue, William Klein, 1955

The city Klein portrays was one of multicultural and social dynamism.  There was little of today's skepticism in the faces of its subjects. The people and the streets of New York were willing and active participants in Klein's portrayal. He showed the underlying exuberance of the city and its sense of fun.  Where there was evidence of darkness there was never threat or menace.  Even his most disturbing and iconic photo from the series turns out to be theatre.

"...it's fake violence, a parody. I asked the boy to point the gun at me and then look tough. He did, and then we both laughed…"

Gun #1, William Klein, New York, 1955

Along with Robert Frank's book The Americans (1958), Klein's New York (1955) would eventually become recognised as one of the the most ground breaking works on street photography in America. Both men took a real, honest and sometimes harsh look at life while also rebelling against the traditions of aesthetic formality prevalent in photography to that date. Frank's images were more distant and less violent than Klein's. They both showed America as it had never been shown before but it was Klein that pushed more aggressively the filter through which we saw this "new" America.

Elevator, Miami Beach, Robert Frank, 1955

In Klein’s New York life stopped for no-one.  There was no time to focus, no time to stop and look…just time to glimpse or catch the world as it went by. It was instinctive and in your face.

lsa Maxwell’s Toy Ball, William Klein, New York, 1955

References

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/06/theory-indecisive-moment-frank-klein.html
http://www.masters-of-photography.com/K/klein/klein_articles2.html

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 - Main Assignment

Space Framed - Photography and the Social Landscape

Identify and research a photographic project or projects that looks at social landscape in some way.

Research in the library and online. Propose what you think the project is communicating and how it is doing so. Refer to relevant discourse and projects both within photographic and architectural discourse and beyond. Aim to produce a piece of original research on the topic.

Write about this describing the project, the photographer, the work method and the subject matter.

Your writing and research could take the form of an essay, an interview or series of interviews with introductory essay etc.

Produce a short book illustrating your work with relevant images. The book should be of a size and design that communicates or is suitable to your subject matter. The written work will be between 3000 and 3500 words, with all references listed in  Harvard Style.

Prepare an introductory 500 word blog post and presentation on the 25th of March.

There will be a series of written submissions and presentations before the final submission of the assignment at the end of term.

A Question of Privacy

tc53

Michael Wolf and Philipa Lorca diCorcia are two artists and photographers whose work confronts and interrogates people’s expectations of privacy, coupled with human voyeuristic tendencies. In the series Transparent City (2008) Wolf displays beautiful images of skyscrapers in Chicago, juxtaposed with selected grainy blown up details from those images. Whilst in Heads (2000-2001), diCorcia has captured candid images of individuals as they pass through Times Square.

Wolf obtained a degree in Visual Communication, and worked for many years in Germany and Hong Kong as a photojournalist, before seeking a new direction with his own artistic projects. He admits that his photography satisfies his inherent curiosity about other people’s lives - he discusses this in Peeping, a profile piece and interview by FOAM.

This Chicago project, follows his previous body of work, Architecture of Density, which was shot in Hong Kong - and where Wolf established a particularly graphic representation of buildings without sky or ground. The result is an almost scale-less impression, where the buildings feel like they could go on forever. Wolf has noted that Chicago has more architectural variety, and is also more layered and geometric, with flat surfaces compared to Hong Kong (he discusses this in his talk at Aperture), and this lends a slightly different abstract graphic quality to this series.

tc01

tc25

Interestingly, Wolf notes that the images in The Transparent City could only have been shot in Chicago. As a result of the zoning, there is space between the buildings in a way, that for example, doesn’t exist in New York.  He also speculates on how decisions about planning and the built environment influence the kind of photographs which can exist now, and into the future (1). Geoff Manaugh's essay in The Transparent City further draws comparison between Wolf’s photographs and JG Ballard’s novel High-Rise - speculating how a building can change the inhabitant psychologically and behaviourally. The images also create an interesting relationship between the inhabitants on different floors - highlighting in the process the very lack of relationship that exists between occupants who are spatially close-by, but often almost unknown to each other.

tc87a

It was the following blown-up section of an image, with a man gesturing back to the camera, which prompted Wolf to investigate his images further, and search out other fragments to enlarge. As he says, it was a moment of clarity that the subjects could be looking back too, as well as a realisation that there was another whole world of detail in each of the facade shots initially shot. Perhaps this speaks as much about the perceived invisibility that the photographer often feels they have in the world - somehow external to it - as much as a premonition of the kind of reaction the work might provoke, or recognition of the response the subjects who, if they realised they were being photographed, might have. Wolf was also inspired to take his telephoto lens and where possible shoot high definition details of the goings-on inside the buildings too.

tcd241

Ultimately though, most of the blown-up fragments and the details Wolf features are not of anyone ‘looking back’, but serve to reinforce the position that we are looking in. We are viewing people captured unawares in private moments - even if they do turn out to be far less exciting than Wolf initially imagined they’d be. In fact he was struck by the sheer banality of what he saw.

tc32

tcd061

tcd041

tc121

There is an obvious voyeuristic element to the work, and the issues of privacy and the border between public and private space is interrogated. How the matter of privacy is valued, or eroded; its flexibility and how expectations adapt in the face of increased density say something about the society in which they occur in. Wolf, having lived in Hong Kong for years witnessed how a blurring of public-private space occurs, with private lives spilling out of windows and into streets - a classic demonstration of Walter Benjamin’s notion of porosity. Whilst in Chicago Wolf stares directly into private space to capture the traces of the human detail he seeks. The title of the series contrasting the glassed visibility of the Chicago buildings with the visual impenetrability of the Hong Kong buildings.

Head #9

Head #24

To shoot Heads diCorcia set up a strobe light which he could trigger from a distance to capture any subject he wished as they strayed into the target area of the photographic trap he laid in the middle of Times Square. The result is pristine captures of mostly isolated people against a darkened background. Apparently he took thousands of images, of which only around 20 made the cut for the exhibition.

It was a very conscious decision for diCorcia not talk to the people he photographed, and therefore he never obtained their permission to use the images he took. The powerful images are left to simply stand on their own.

The Transparent City is somewhat a meditation on how buildings make a place, and a peek into how people respond to and exist within that space. In contrast Heads casts its gaze on the public demeanor, and simultaneously exposes the contradictions of trying to maintain privacy whilst stepping out into the public realm.

Both artists’ work has attracted legal attention, and in the case of diCorcia it went to court, where it was dismissed on a technicality and the legal implications his work stirred were never truly tested. Their work stands to highlight the issue of privacy in a world where virtually everyone has their image captured by countless security devices every single time they leave home. The controversy the work incites is not surprising, and forms a necessary critique on privacy and the public realm, including the role that the photographic medium itself has in the debate.





1. Discussed in Geoff Manaugh, “The Transparent City”, in Wolf, M. Michael Wolf: The Transparent City (New York: Aperture, 2008).

The Americans

The Americans

Robert Frank

This book portrays a personal account of America by Robert Frank through a catalogue of 83 black & white photographs, taken across 48 states of America, with Franks’ handheld 35mm Leica Camera. Robert Frank, born in Switzerland, moved to the US in 1947 and became a photojournalist. His main Influences where Walker Evans and Bill Brandt. Robert Frank is indebted to Walker Evans for making this iconic book. Not only did Frank use Evans book "American Photographs" as precedent but also it was Evans that pushed him forward to achieve the Guggenheim Fellowship of Photography. This Fellowship enabled Frank to take a road trip with his wife and child to document the everyday life of America over a two year period.

These black and white images represent Franks’ personal vision of America. One can feel the emotion that has gone into each snap Frank has taken, whether it is witnessed through a stare, a glance, a pursed lip or a hand gesture.  He finds a way of always ‘showing what is invisible to others’.

The book is laid out with the photographs on the right hand page, with the use of the white space on the left page, leaving an empty message to let the viewer depict their own thought from the image. The Images are set in certain sequence, each image relating in somewhat to the next. One has to read into the image to understand what is being captured. This is achieved through the blurring of the photograph and leaving the subject clear, the use of available light and cropping of a frame, and sometimes a message in the background.  The image of the lady at the movie premier, shows the lady in the foreground slightly out of focus. It is the women in the background that are the subject with the sign saying ‘squires’ behind them.

This romantic work of art was caught through Franks’ quick responsive reaction to snap mysterious, strange and sad portraits of America, giving a darker meaning to the ‘American Dream’.

Sensing the divide in the cultures, Frank captures this by using symbolism.  A bus is representative of a Prison, a car is representative of a Casket, and the American flag as a Shroud. 

The critics did not always give positive reviews of this book, they felt possibly threatened that it may portray a disrupted view of this new world and upset the vision people may have of the American dream.

It is in the later book ‘Looking In’ that gives us a glimpse of the negatives taken on this trip that tells us more of the story behind the one frame that Frank chooses carefully for us to see. 

Born in Switzerland in 1924, Robert Frank travelled to New York in 1947 where he worked briefly as a photographer in the fashion industry before returning to travel around Europe.  His return to the United States in 1950 marked the beginning of a decade that would see his work become iconic of a new, contemporary America.  With the help of his friend Walker Evans, Frank secured a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation in 1955 to travel across the States.  Almost two years and 28,000 shots later, Frank produced a set of 83 photographs entitled The Americans.  Received with caution and even resentment at first by critics, this set of photographs has come to be recognised as one of the most iconographic pieces of work of all time.

The photographs were decidedly different from anything previously produced.  Frank gave the viewer a new way of looking at the world as seen through the eyes of the man on the street.  Many of his shots display characteristics of unusual focus and low lighting, but it is through these qualities and good composition that Frank reveals the beauty of the mundane, that which is inherent of the United States at the time – the barber’s chair, the lunch counter, the jukebox.  All of these ordinary things reoccur throughout to compose something extraordinary. 

The subject of much of the work displayed in The Americans is people.  Frank captures the fundamental quality of life in each place he drives through on his extensive journey, often pausing only for a moment to capture a handful of frames before continuing on his way with his wife and two children in tow.  This new style of snapshot photography differs greatly from previous masters who constructed the subject of their photographs carefully.  It may also part be attributed to the evolution of the camera which allowed for greater flexibility for the user.  Frank used this new freedom as a form of expression.  Often, what may appear as a coincidental misalignment of focus or frame reinforces the subject matter and can be appreciated as something meaningful, a burst of sunlight through a darkened sky provokes images of something celestial for example.  Another reoccurring image is that of the US flag which often encroaches the primary subject matter, although not the focus of the shot, still representing something iconic and truly American.

 

 The technique of bringing people to life and forming a relationship with the subject is of greatest appeal to me.  The unidentified girl in a Miami elevator, caught glancing upwards in what appears to be a poorly captured shot as other more distinguished looking people pass by.  Frank captures the ordinary, what he recognises as an American.  Previous photographs of this moment would undoubtedly be of a staged image, perfectly framed and lit with the well-dressed patrons ready and rehearsed.  Here, Frank reverses all of these practices, not without critique, to photograph iconic America.  The same technique is used to photograph the Hollywood star at a movie premiere.  Once again the focus shifts to the unexpected, coincidental inhabitants of the frame, the smiling faces of the public (the squires) in the background and away from the sultry pose in the foreground. Another example includes Frank’s iconic image of rooftops from a window in Bozeman, Montana where the obvious image of choice, a street shot, is overlooked in favour of rooftops framed by the curtains of his hotel room. 

 

The strength of this style of photography for me is the personal engagement these decisions induce, a feeling of connection to a place and the photographer having experienced neither previously.  Frank identifies the ordinary, captures it in a light which reveals its true significance and beauty before moving on to his next iconic image.