fine art photography

Fine Art Photography

• “Photography is not art, but can be made into art” - De Zayas 1913

•Reaction against photography's use by painters (i.e. Courbet) to help them paint•Reaction against the documentary tradition of late 18th and 19th C – move away from a Humanist or people/societal centred approach•Linking the aesthetic ethos of art (fascination with form, tone, light, colour)

Fine art takes in all other genres!

• Photos began to develop own codes as art; no manipulation of reality-straight-pure-form-no reference to the subject as such

• Composition is more important than context

• Alfred Stieglitz; driving force behind fine art photography

• Photographer does not record, but creates

• Landscapes, as popular theme link to higher ideals

• Stieglitz’s Equivalents series seek ideal form and were displayed in wide white mounts to emphasise purity of their vision

•Stieglitz was committed to the gallery as an ideal•Gallery’s contextualised art photographer against the wider history of art •An art print gains value from being hung in an opposite way to a documentary imaged that is mass produced•Art photography is often envisaged as such

• “The fullest realisation of the potential of the subject through the use of straight photographic methods” - Paul Strand

• Edward Weston: Emphasis on form

• Body transcends into natural shapes

• No longer a human or cultural product but part of the wider metaphysical (almost spiritual) world of shape and form that artists aspired to

• The nude continues to be a seminal subject for fine art photographers

Ruth Bernhard Sylvie Blum

• Ansel Adams keeps fine arts concern with purity and form and makes the ordinary into something unique

• His landscapes follow formal conventions of painting whilst giving unique photographic intensity

• John Paul Edwards & William Van Dyke were contemporaries of Adams and Weston and together were some of the members of f.64; a group dedicated to intense scrutiny of the world through the lens and in a way that moved against earlier pictorial or painterly styles

• Imogen Cunningham

Once photographed, the object transcends everyday to become art

• Other art photographers do focus on culture

• Paul Strand: works within active world of human meaning – a documenters approach?

• Movement (implied sometimes) and subject fit into larger structure of society

• Paul Strand Wall St 1915

• Minor White: Expressionist; A movement in the arts during the early part of the 20th century that emphasized subjective expression of the artist's inner experiences

• Aaron Siskind: Abstract expressionism• Taking reference from painterly forms yet still

focus on transforming the ordinary

• Ernst Haas Nature and Machine 1975• Colour begins to get used in art photography• B&W seen by purists as truer to intention of capturing form

Harry Callahan Kansas City 1981

• Martin E Newman Coney Island 1 1953

• Andreas Gursky

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• Gregory Crewdson from Beneath The Roses• Contemporary fine art can include the dramatic and staged and

create a sense of narrative that does refer to society

• Jeff Wall A Sudden Gust Of Wind

• Wall often recreates paintings, as such his style is very formal still

• Philip Lorca DiCorcia's hustler series

• alternates between informal snapshots and iconic quality staged compositions

• Masahisa Fukase's Ravens• Example of how contemporary art photography can be a personal

reference point

Summary

• Fine art photography began as reaction against how photography was used in the art world and as a reaction against the documentary ethos of social engagement

• Focus on form (shape, pattern, line, texture etc)• B&W holds elitist status (still?)• Context of viewing is important• Fine art can include other genres, even docu!• Contemporary images often attempt to engage the

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