PHOTOGRAPHY

You've already been introduced to a few photographers in these lessons: Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol (also a painter), Alfred Stieglitz and others. And if you take a look at the list of American photographers on Wikipedia, you'll find hundreds. In this lesson we'll study four major American photographers, with the understanding that we haven't even scratched the surface of this topic.

But before we begin, how much do you know about the Great Depression? Photographers in the 1930s were instrumental in bringing the plight of poor people to the attention of the public during the Great Depression.

OBJECTIVES

• Explain how Depression-era photography helped call attention to poverty.

• Identify and discuss the work of Ansel Adams.

• Describe the career and style of Annie Liebovitz.

VOCABULARY

THE DEPRESSION AND THE FARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION

Economists still debate the factors that led to the stock market crash in October 1929. But no one argues about the result: the start of the Great Depression. Initially, people thought the economy would recover quickly. They were wrong. In 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as president, approximately fifteen million people were unemployed, and the gross national product had decreased by about 50 billion dollars. Drought conditions in the Midwest only aggravated the situation.

The poor suffered the most, but many middle class people also lost everything they owned. Suicides increased. Farmers had to abandon their farms and live in migrant camps. School hours were cut. Banks and businesses closed.

When Roosevelt became president, he decided that the government should try to intervene by creating work and relief programs as part of the New Deal. One of the programs was the Farm Security Administration (FSA), established in 1937. The program's purpose was to help farmers get through the hard times. Within the FSA, there was a special photographic section headed by a man named Roy Stryker. Stryker hired fifteen photographers, among them Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, to record the relief efforts.

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965)

"You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera." — Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange's work helped establish modern documentary photography. Her photographs stood out because of her eye for the ordinary and the obvious concern she felt for her subjects.

Lange documented the terrible conditions of the migrant workers like the Joads in the movie The Grapes of Wrath. These former farm-owners were now homeless. They traveled by the thousands to California during the Great Depression to find work. Living in migrant camps, they were often subject to abuse by local authorities. Lange's photographs brought their troubles to the attention of the public. Her pictures motivated government and citizens to do something to change this terrible situation.

Her most famous picture is Migrant Mother. The woman whose image was captured by Lange's empathetic eye was a widow with seven children in California. The family survived by eating frozen peas from the fields and birds the children caught. Though the family was obviously destitute, the mother saw her relationship with Lange as one of equality. Notice the clarity of the details and the stoic expression on the woman's face. Read about the photo and note Lange's account of the experience.

Here is another powerful photo by Dorothea Lange that shows the same family's living conditions.

In addition to her work documenting the lives of the migrant farmers, Lange also took photos of the Japanese internment program for the War Relocation Authority. Lange photographed Japanese neighborhoods, processing centers, and camp facilities, and quickly realized the injustice of the internment program. Many of her photographs of that era were censored by the federal government.

Walker Evans (1903-1975)

Walker Evans was also a photographer for the FSA. He had a long career as a photographer and writer. He created experimental images, photo-essays and Polaroid color prints as well. With writer James Agee, he produced a book called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, documenting the lives of three families of sharecroppers. The book was ignored when it first came out, but later became acknowledged as an important historic record of the twentieth century.

This is one Evans' famous photos from the Depression.

But not all of Evans' work focused on despair. A retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art displayed many of his other photos including the one you can see at this link: Couple at Coney Island, New York. 

NATURE PHOTOGRAPHY

If you've ever perused a National Geographic magazine, then you know the power that photography has to capture nature. With a telephoto lens, photographers can show us wildlife in ways we would never be able to see otherwise. We live increasingly isolated from nature, but photography has the ability to remind us of its importance and majesty.

Ansel Adams (1902-84)

Ansel Adams was the most famous American photographer of landscape in the twentieth century. He was born in San Francisco, Calif. In 1916, Adams took a trip to Yosemite where he took black-and-white pictures of the mountains, deserts, clouds, and trees. He was inspired by the images he captured on his camera, a Kodak No. 1 Box Brownie that his parents had given him. It was the beginning of his lifelong love with nature and photography.

In 1939, he had his first exhibit in San Francisco and then later started the first college of photography. He also published a series of books on photographic techniques. Some notable works include:

• Taos Pueblo (1930)

• Sierra Nevada (1948)

• This Is the American Earth (1960)

Like Dorothea Lange, Adams also photographed Japanese who were forced out of their homes during World War II and moved to internment camps.

But it is for his nature photographs that Ansel Adams is most famous. His work is known for its tonality and universal appeal, and his unique style can be seen in the photograph Monolith, The Face of Half  Dome.

Notice the sharp focus in this work. The dramatic effect of the sky is created by a red filter.

A striking example of the tonality of his work can be seen in Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake.

Notice the brilliant whites and the dark blacks of the landscape, as well as the gradations in between.

Arguably his most famous photo is Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico. Part of its beauty is that it captured an ordinary event—the moonrise—in such an extraordinary way. Notice how the light of the setting sun, which would have been to Adams' back, illuminates the town and white crosses. Because the sun was setting, Adams had only one shot at capturing the photo with the perfect light. He was somewhat panicked because he couldn't find his exposure meter. But, as he would later recount, he realized he knew the luminance of the moon, so he was able to correctly set his camera to capture the image he sought.

Adams' black-and-white photos, which he made with a large-format camera, are not realistic documents of nature. Rather, he said, they are an intensification and purification of the experience of natural beauty.

"When I'm ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my mind's eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I'm interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without," he said.

Adams believed that a photographer should be able to anticipate the right moment for a shot. To do this, he created a complex zone system. By controlling and relating exposure and development, he could creatively visualize an image an produce a photograph that matched and expressed the visualization. It was a system that he shared with others through the ten volumes of technical manuals on photography.

At one point during his career, Adams responded to a viewer who described his photos as abstract: "I prefer the term extract over abstract, since I cannot change the optical realities but only manage them."

Adams was a great believer in nature conservation and put his fame as a photographer to good use, promoting conservation efforts. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter presented Adams with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

PHOTOGRAPHING THE RICH AND FAMOUS

Celebrity photographs are everywhere — from the supermarket tabloids to art museums. The paparazzi risk their lives (and the lives of their subjects) chasing down famous people to photograph. But there's one photographer who doesn't have to chase down anyone. They come to her.

Annie Leibovitz (born 1949)

Annie Leibovitz came to prominence as a photographer for Rolling Stone magazine in 1970. She started out taking photos of famous rock stars, including a 1975 Rolling Stones concert tour. She moved on to Vanity Fair and broadened the scope of her subjects, creating photographic portraits of movie stars and ordinary people.

In 2007, she was asked to photograph Queen Elizabeth II in preparation for her visit to the United States for the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown. It was quite an honor, as Leibovitz was the first American to be asked to make an official portrait of the queen. Leibovitz asked to photograph the queen around Balmoral Castle in Scotland or on horseback during one of her rides at Windsor Castle. Both ideas were rejected, and the photo shoot took place at Buckingham Palace. The queen's publicists chose Leibovitz to be the photographer because they wanted to launch the American state visit with a striking set of images. The resulting photos show the queen as regal and detached, as well as unshakeable. They all have a dark, foreboding background.

Her work is generally highly composed, each element being extremely important, with deeply saturated color. Leibovitz's books include 1983 and 1991 collections, Olympic Portraits (1996), Women (1999), American Music (2003), and A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005 (2006).

Go to the Annie Leibovitz photo gallery at the PBS website and choose one of the photos to enlarge and include in your online art journal. Do you recognize a famous political figure and former movie star?

Notes

Now browse through the Women photo gallery.

LET'S REVIEW!

In this lesson you covered the following subjects:

• Photography serves many purposes: it helps us understand the lives of others and calls attention to the beauty and grandeur of nature, and it can be a work of art in its use of color, tonality, and composition.

• Dorothea Lange created haunting portraits that moved a nation.

• Walker Evans documented several eras during his career and created memorable images.

• Ansel Adams took the images he saw in nature and created artworks in black and white.

• Annie Leibovitz helped us to see celebrities in a whole new light.

Complete the following quiz before moving on.