Photography
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Documentary photography
Artistic photography
Street photography
Photojournalism
Landscape photography
Portraiture
Consider the following elements of
composition as you critique a
photograph:
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foreground/background/middle-ground
balance
repetition
lighting
frame
line
exposure
subject-matter
axis/symmetry/asymmetry
focal point
angle of view
Consider how the photograph
illustrates the principles and
elements of design
• what draws our eye to the image?
• how did the photographer think about form and content?
• consider the angle from which the photo is taken
– What is included in the frame?
– What is not included?
– How does the angle affect our understanding of the scene?
• examine the use of mass and shape
– What is being emphasized?
– What is being de-emphasized?
• what other choices has the photographer made in composing the
photo?
• what can you tell about the attitude of the photographer towards the
subjects of the picture?
Jacob Riis
1849-1914
America's first journalist-photographer
known at the turn of the century as the "Emancipator
of the Slums" because of his work on behalf of the
urban poor
brutal documentation of sweatshops, disease-ridden
tenements, and overcrowded schools aroused public
indignation and helped effect significant reform in
housing, education, and child-labor laws
no real artistic intent
"I came to take up photography ... not exactly as a
pastime. It was never that for me. I had to use it, and
beyond that I never went..”
Bandit's Roost,
59 1/2 Mulberry Street
Home of an Italian Rag picker
1888
Five Cents Lodging,
Bayard Street 1889
Basement of a Pub in
Mulberry-Bend at 3:00 am
A Black-and-Tan Dive in "Africa"
Blind Beggar
A downtown "Morgue"
(unlicensed saloon)
Police Station Lodger,
A Plank for a Bed
Women's Lodging Room in the
West 47th Street
Men's Lodging Room in the West
47th Street
Timothy O'Sullivan
1840-1882
•documented battlefields of Civil War
•little is known of his life
•career covered barely two decades but
produced one of the major bodies of
photographic work in 19th century America
•originally worked for Matthew Brady
A Harvest of Death,
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
July, 1863
Group of Confederate Prisoners
at Fairfax Court-House, Virginia
General Grant and his
General Staff
Dorothea Lange
1895-1965
• best known for her Depression-era work
for the New Deal’s Farm Security
Administration
• her photographs humanized the tragic
consequences of the Great Depression
and profoundly influenced the
development of documentary photography
“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate
mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how
I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do
remember she asked me no questions. I made five
exposures, working closer and closer from the same
direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told
me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they
had been living on frozen vegetables from the
surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She
had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There
she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled
around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might
help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of
equality about it.”
Migrant Mother
Ditched, Stalled and Stranded
Plantation Overseer and His
Field Hands
Back
Riverbank Gas Station
Margaret Bourke-White
1904-1971
• first female war correspondent
• first woman to be allowed to work in
combat zones during World War II
• first female photojournalist for Life
magazine
A DC4 Flying Over New York
City
Fort Peck Dam
(1st cover of Life Magazine)
Gandhi
Buchenwald
Germans See Buchenwald
Gold Miners, South Africa
Flood Victim Paddling a Boat Made of Washtubs,
Louisville, KY
Hats in the Garment District
Moscow Bombing 1941
Julia Margaret Cameron
1815-1879
•Cameron's photographs are notable for the extreme
intimacy and psychological intensity
•these effects achieved by the use of extreme close-up,
suppression of detail (sometimes accompanied by
peripheral blurring), and dramatic lighting
•was attempting to “convey the inner spirit”
Sadness
The Echo
Mariana
"She said I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead"
Carleton Watkins
1829-1916
In the last third of the 19th c.
one of America's foremost landscape
photographers
known primarily for his artistic panoramas of
Yosemite and other wilderness areas
photographed throughout the West on field
expeditions, carrying huge cameras and other
equipment
also made many memorable images of the
rapid development of San Francisco
Coast View Number One
The Wreck of the Viscata
Washington Column, 2052 ft.,
Yosemite
Alcatraz, from North Point
The Golden Gate from
Telegraph Hill
Alfred Stieglitz
1864 - 1946
• instrumental over his fifty-year career in making
photography an acceptable art form alongside
painting and sculpture
• also known for his marriage to painter Georgia
O’Keeffe
• was insistent that "photographs look like
photographs," so that the medium of
photography would be considered with its own
aesthetic credo and and be defined as a fine art
for the first time
Winter On Fifth Avenue
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Icy Night
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Spring Showers
From the Back-Window
Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia O’Keeffe
Gordon Parks
1912 - 2006
• Groundbreaking African-American
photographer, musician, poet, novelist,
journalist & film director
• best remembered for his photo essays for
Life magazine and as the director of the
1971 film Shaft
• said that freedom was the theme of all of
his work
American Gothic
Red Jackson and Herbie Levy Study Wounds
of Slain Gang Member Maurice Gaines
Chain Gang
Ella Watson and her Grandchildren
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Drugstore Cowboys, Blind
River, Ontario
Muhammed Ali in Training
Norman Jr. Reading in Bed
Ansel Adams
1902-1984
• best known for his black and white photographs of
California's Yosemite Valley
• credited with creating the zone system, a technique
which allows photographers to translate the light they
see into specific densities on negatives and paper, thus
giving them better control over finished photographs, so
they have a systematic method of precisely defining the
relationship between the way they see the photographic
subject and the results they achieve in their finished
works
• also pioneered the idea of visualization of the finished
print based upon the measured light values in the scene
being photographed
Bridal Veil Fall, Yosemite Valley
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Nevada Fall, Yosemite
Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico
Tree
Mount McKinley,
Denali National Park, Alaska
Aspens
Moon and Half Dome
Robert Doisneau
1912 - 1944
• noted for his frank and often humorous
depictions of Parisian street life.
• “Chance is the one thing you can't buy.
You have to pay for it and you have to pay
for it with your life, spending a lot of time,
you pay for it with time, not the wasting of
time but the spending of time.”
Kiss at the Hotel de Ville
Inky child
Sunday Morning in Arcueil
Sidelong Glance
Hell
Picasso and the Loaves
Down to the Factory
Pipi Pigeon
A Musician
Henri Cartier-Bresson
1908-2004
• street photography
• sought the “decisive moment”
• “To me, photography is the simultaneous
recognition, in a fraction of a second, of
the significance of an event as well as of a
precise organization of forms that give that
event its proper expression.“
• "Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is
gone forever."
Behind the Gare St. Lazare
Gold Distribution Shanghai
Man Ray
1890-1976
• "I do not photograph nature. I photograph my
visions."
• master of experimental and fashion photography
• also a painter, a filmmaker, a poet, an essayist, a
philosopher, and a leader of American
modernism
• interest in minimalism and abstraction carried
over to Man Ray's experiments with what he
termed "rayographs“: made by placing a threedimensional object or series of objects on top of
a piece of photographic paper and exposing it to
light
Le Violin
Tears
Noire et Blanche
rayographs