Ch 4 Photography

Dorothea Lange’s classic photo, Migrant mother, and the previous sequence of photos (above in the header).[/caption]

From early woodcuts to modern photographs, the visual revolution changed the way people see the world. This chapter describes the invention and development of photography, the questions of art and copyright, the photographic movements, the uses of photography for social reform, the advent of digital photography and the ethical issues that photography presents.

Discussion questions

  1. Gift to humanity: Louis Daguerre gave away his patents to photography. How did this inspire other inventors in the history of media?
  2. Social reform and photography: Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine used photography to expose suffering and spur reform. Sebastião Salgado is documenting child labor today; Carol Highsmith and ThisisAmericaFoundation is carrying on the work of Dorothea Lange. Can you find others who are carrying on from the work of past photographers?
  3. Technology and change: How did the invention of celluloid film and flash photography influence the social uses of photography?
  4. Images are everywhere: Today, how can we imagine anything if it’s already been imagined for us? That’s what actor Adrian Brody asks in this clip from the movie Detachment. What is the message of this clip? The same idea with a deeper historical focus is found in Rise of the Image: Fall of the Word by Mitchell Stephens (Link to the preface from the book). Compare Brody’s talk with Stephen’s preface.
  5. “Stranger things” has a scene in which two journalists are working with images in a “red room.” Were you confused? What is a red room?

People & Events

Louis Daguerre, Joseph Niepce, Matthew Brady, Roger Fenton, Edward Steichen, Joseph Steiglitz, Paul Strand, George Eastman, Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Sebastio Salgado, Henry Luce, Gordon Parks, Robert Capa, Joe Rosenthal, Ansel Adams, Jacques Cousteau

Invention by Daguerre, copyright and photography, celluloid film, flash photography for indoors, Pictorialist movement, Straight photography movement, Farm Security Administration, Life and other photo magazines, war photography, digital photos, ethical issues, future of photography.

Documentary Videos

  • American Photography: A Century of Images, a three-part PBS documentary, introduces most of the major movements and US figures such as Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams and Annie Liebowitz.
  • History of photography: Colores series, New Mexico PBS, features Beaumont Newell, historian and photographer who assembled the 1938 New York Museum of Modern Art exhibit of 100 years of photography.
  • Annie Liebovich: Life through a lens
  • Darkness and Light: Richard Avedon
  • American Masters: Alfred Steiglitz

Before photography:

The image before photography (has its own page now … )

About Photography

19th century photography

A strangely prophetic quote from Virginia Woolfe –

“The easier it becomes to convey a message in a certain medium, the less selective we grow about what that message contains, and soon we are conveying the trifles and banalities of our day-to-day life, simply because it is effortless to fill the page (or feed, or screen, or whatever medium comes next).”

  1. Edgar Allen Poe thought that real life was better than photography.
  2. Roger Fenton’s Crimean War photo mystery — were the cannon balls originally ON or OFF the road? Did Fenton throw cannon balls on the road to make it appear more dangerous? Or did someone clear off the cannon balls to reduce the danger?
  3. PBS American Photography — Home page for the excellent documentary series.
  4. Photo history quiz –– Can you recognize the photographer?
  5. Daguerreotypes — Library of Congress
  6. Civil War Photos — Library of Congress collection —
  7. JHistory 124 podcast 16:30 -Andie Tucher:

    Oh, that’s an interesting one, but it’s also very typical of the coming of many new technologies that have to do with communications. In many cases, a new technology makes everybody excited, makes everybody feel, “Oh, it’s gonna bring us all together, it’s gonna show us a deeper truth, it’s going to be more democratic.” Um, and it also often finds its way into nefarious hands that, that figure out, very quickly, how to manipulate it and how to – as people are trying to figure out how this new technology works, how you figure out how to trust it, what it can do, what it can’t do, what it should do, what it shouldn’t do, as people are figuring all of that out with this new technology, there is always somebody on the, uh, standing there on the outskirts figuring out  how to manipulate it. And with photography, one of the very first of those manipulators was a man named William Mumler, who was a photographer based in Boston and New York in the 1860s.

  8. Spirit photography and the Brown Lady of Raynham
  9. Interview with Matthew Brady 1891
  10. How the Other Half Lives, by Jacob Riis. Published in 1890, this is about social work and photography in the slums of New York. Riis was remembered in a 2013 article noting that Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio, who relentlessly brought home the message of “the tale of two cities” in his campaign, was not the first New Yorker to sound that theme.
  11. The Gibsons of Scilly have been photographing shipwrecks since 1869.
  12. Layla Deen Dayal, India’s premier 19th century photographer, is remembered by a foundation dedicated to preserving his work.

20th century photography

  1. The image of the Hindenberg is a major issue for developers of hydrogen fueled vehicles. (As well it should be).
  2. W. Eugene Smith’s photos coming to light, Paris Review, April 2016.
  3. A great trailblazing photographer of the early 1900s, Jun Fujita, the first great Asian-American photographer, managed all this while being a shunned minority.
  4. Carolyn L Kitch – and Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media:

    “From the Gibson Girl to the flapper, from the vamp to the New Woman, Carolyn Kitch traces mass media images of women to their historical roots on magazine covers, unveiling the origins of gender stereotypes in early-twentieth-century American culture.”

  5. From industrial photography, to globe trotting, to being the first foreign photographer of the Soviet Industry, Margaret Bourke White was renown as one of the best photographers of her time.
  6. Lewis Hine — The early 20th century crusader against child labor is remembered in a US National Archives site.
  7. Dorothea Lange interview 1960 – 1961 oral history interview by University of California Berkeley’s Suzanne B. Reiss. Extraordinary pdf download from Internet Archive. Interesting comments on the Japanese relocation camps and Ansel Adams’ “shameful” approval of it. (Note: An Adams photo from those camps is on p. 133 of the printed version of Revolutions in Communication.)
  8. “Bound for Glory” — Library of Congress collection of 1930s – 40s photos in color.
  9. “The Mexican Suitcase” — Lost photos of Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David “Chim” Seymour taken during the Spanish Civil War were found in Mexico City, among the belongings of the Mexican ambassador to Vichy France and finally returned to Cornell Capa, the younger brother of Robert Capa and the founder of the International Center of Photography in New York City.
  10. Photographing the Mexican Revolution, by John Mraz, considers the problem of how images are used to reconstruct societies in conflict.
  11. WWII photographer Lee R. Miller worked for Vogue fashion magazine.

    Lee Miller, WWII photographer

  12. Iconic photo of Nov. 24, 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald killing was taken by a Dallas News photographer who had run out of film two days beforehand.
  13. Ellen Fried, Images that endure — From Pearl Harbor to Elvis, National Archives Prologue magazine, 2004
  14. Archive of Life Magazine
  15. Facing Change is a new photography project in the tradition of the FSA of the 1930s. And here’s a Washington Post article about Facing Change.
  16. A collection of peaceful protest photos by Roland Scherman.
  17. Masters of Photography — Commercial site that gives a good overview of the variety of photojournalists and photographic artists.
  18. Repaired data drives restore original Lunar Lander images. (2008)
  19. Rare color photos of WWII — Time Magazine, 2013.
  20. A very short documentary (4 min) on Robert Capa’s infamous D-Day photo.
  21. On Robert Capa’s 100th birthday, Magnum asks photographers to get closer. Time, Oct 22, 2013.
  22. Iconic photos and the editing process at Magnum photos. Petapixel, Sept. 12, 2013.
  23. New York Journal American (Hearst) photo collection, UT Austin.
  24. Robert Frank, one of America’s most influential photographers, New York Times, July 2, 2015.
  25. Video of Nick Ut’s Pulitzer-winning photo from Vietnam.
  26. The ‘Shirley’ — Color photography’s racist technology. Upworthy, Sept. 2015.
  27. Black photographers, Buzzfeed, Feb. 2021
  28. Gordon Parks collections coming to light –
    1. New York Times 2014
    2. Daily Mail 2016
    3. YouTube video
    4. the Village Voice, Feb. 2021: Gordon Parks photographed America’s hate while creating beauty.

21st century photography

Taking pictures of the brain
Taking pictures of the brain.
  1. Sebastiao Salgado’s new book Amazonia. Interview with The Guardian. June 21, 2021. He lived to tell stories of environmentalism – “I was transformed into an environmentalist.”
  2. Lens. A New York Times blog about photography and visual journalism.
  3. Seized by the military and not published till 2006, Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photos.
  4. Rachel Nuwer, A Photographic Call to Action, New York Times, October 25, 2011, noting the idea that photography could rally others to work together to save nature’s places of spiritual sanctuary for future generations.
  5. Friedlander, Benson, Christenberry, Eggleston, Evans, Szarkowski, and Winogrand – The men behind the camera
  6. London Photographers Gallery show summer 2012: Burtynsky’s petroleum-deformed landscapes.
  7. April, 2011: The EPA is calling for documentary photos of environmental issues. Here are links to the AP Story and also EPA Flickr site.
  8. Almost everything you thought about the famed Fall of Saigon photo isn’t true
  9. Why the Lytro camera is a ‘game changer’ for photography – Washington Post, March 1, 2012.
  10. Gigapixel camera may revolutionize photography, LA Times June 21, 2012.
  11. Witness is a powerful HBO series produced by filmmaker Michael Mann and documentarian David Frankham that profiles war-zone photographers at work in Mexico, South Sudan, Brazil and Libya.
  12. Toothbrushes, rosaries, pocket Bibles, water bottles, keys, shoelaces, razors, mix CDs, condoms, contraceptive pills, sunglasses, keys: A collection of migrant belongings.
  13. Richard Mosse’s “Heat Maps”: A Military-Grade Camera Repurposed on the Migrant Trail
  14. Stacy Pearsall, combat photographer profiled by the New York Times May, 2013.
  15. Photos of an underwater rescue – When seconds seem like hours.
  16. Parody of AP’s Iwo Jima photo raises hackles among opponents of gay marriage. ABC News, July 2, 2015.
  17. A descendant of slaves sued Harvard over slave photos, claiming that the profits from the photos should go to the family. A court initially allowed the lawsuit to proceed, then a judge ruled in favor of Harvard.
  1. State of news photography, Reuters Institute, Oxford University, Sept. 2015.

The end of Kodak and ‘wet’ photography

  1. Five reasons for Kodak’s bankruptcy, Feb. 24, 2012, Wall Street Journal.
  2. Seven lessons from the demise of Kodak, Jan. 12, 2012, Forbes.
  3. Steve Sasson, inventor portrait, Vimeo, 2012.
  4. Kodak employed 140,000 people. Instagram, 13. Digital visionary Jaron Lanier says the Web kills jobs, wealth, the middle class — even democracy. Salon. May 12, 2013.
  5. Kodak’s digital moment, New York Times, Aug. 13, 2015.

Sports photography, photo technology, and hoaxes