history of photography postwar era History Photography

history of photography postwar era

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 02:18:37 | History Photography

There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough—there has to be vision and the two together can make a good photograph. It is difficult to describe this thin line where matter ends and mind begins.

(Robert Frank 1962)

At the end of World War II, the world's vision of itself had been shattered, and it had to reconceptua-lize the idea of ''humanity'' in order to face new issues and concerns that were arising in the postwar era. Photography, which, in the interwar years, had been highly experimental, even in some of its practical and commercial applications, also changed to fit the new times. During WWII, photojournalism, with Europe as its primary arena, had captured the horrors and traumas of the war. In the postwar years (roughly 1945-1959), the recognition that photographers could use their cameras not just to record events, but to influence the way in which the public responded to these events, changed the way in which the art of photography was conceived. Insurrection in India, poverty in the United States, the war in Korea, and the new social elite in Europe were just a few of the subjects that would come to dominate the work of postwar photography. These new subjects, combined with the more critical support and sponsorship of photographers, led artists to realize that they could shape attitudes and history through their concerns and a commitment to the medium. The concept of the independent photographer as a lone individual with a personal vision, and not connected or obliged to anyone, took shape during these years in which the photographer began to explore the world and the self. These years are remembered as a time when photographers such as Robert Frank, William Klein, and Minor White among others, would carve out an important niche in the new world order, initiating a wide variety of developments.

There are three main shifts that occurred in the photographic world after 1945. The first was physical. Up to and during WWII, Europe, especially the capitals ofFrance and Germany, had been the lively and energetic nexus of the photographic and artistic world. It was known as the place artists went if they were serious and wanted to fully develop their talents. The onslaught of war only emphasized the importance of going overseas, and many Americans left their homeland in the late 1930s and early 1940s to go abroad and follow the events in Europe, Africa, and Asia. After the war, European photography continued to be important as we can see in the postwar work of such talented men as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau, but the center of the photographic world had shifted its focus west to the United States as expatriates returned home and American photographers began to experiment with light and form. European photographers, aroused by this demographic shift, also left their homeland to search out new subject matter in America, which had happened only infrequently prior to WWII.

The second shift that occurred was stylistic, and grew out of the renewed interest in what is called ''straight photography.'' It was originally conceived by art critic Sadakichi Hartmann who, although he highly praised the 1904 exhibition of the Photo-Secession at the Carnegie Institute, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, called for a return to a photography that was untouched and left as the eye had originally seen it. ''To work straight'' according to Hartmann was to ''[r]ely on your camera, on your eye, on your good taste and your knowledge of composition...'' In other words, the goal should be to produce ''photographs that look like photographs'' as opposed to the more abstract photography that was prevalent in the first half of the twentieth century. The postwar photographers answered Hart-mann's call as is evidenced in many images of the time by artists such as Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, Robert Capa, and Ruth Orkin.

The third shift was social. The ''humanist movement,'' as it is now called, was perhaps the greatest innovation in the postwar years and hit its apex in the photographic work of the 1950s. Up to the end of the 1940s, photographers had primarily worked for the sake of society, to inform it, if not to improve it, or to declare some sort of personal truth as we see, for example, in the work of Alfred

Stieglitz. Up to the 1950s, photographers, especially in the United States, attempted to promote some sort of social message. After the 1950s, photographers in the United States continued to focus on and question nature and society, but there was a turn toward a more personal viewpoint. Many famous names from the war, such as Margaret Bourke-White, continued to work, but they shifted from photojournalism to a more humanistic approach. Individualism was encouraged and the image of the solitary photographer traveling alone around the country became the stereotypical image of the artist/photographer.

Thus conceptions of subject, method, and style began to radically shift in the late 1940s. The mood of this moment is perhaps, surprisingly, encapsulated in the development of tabloid journalism from the 1930s to the 1940s in the work of the man who is perhaps the most famous of these photographers, Arthur Fellig, more commonly known as "Wee-gee." The Austrian-born photographer is best remembered for his macabre images of New York City in the late 1930s and 1940s, which culminated in the publication of his book Naked City in 1945. The book includes photographs of murder victims as well as of the curious crowds that gathered on the streets of New York during and after the war years. Weegee's obsession with the grotesque side of urban life led to his stark but memorable photographs of life in seedy bars and the alleys behind them, filled with prostitutes, famous gangsters, conspicuous dwarfs, freaks of all sorts, and their voyeuristic onlookers. Weegee had a fascination for photographing the other end of the spectrum as well. His images of the rich and famous—Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Jayne Mansfield—are also well-remembered. Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic for which Weegee is known is that he slept with a police radio next to his bed (and also had one in his car) and was often the first to arrive at a crime scene. This was the basis for the rumor about how he must have used a "Ouija" board to divine the future—hence, one theory for how he got his name.

Most important is Weegee's style, which is fundamental to an understanding of how photography after 1945 materializes in the work of artists such as William Klein and Robert Frank. Weegee's signature was a strong flash with a starkly contrasting black and white image. His style is often confrontational with a flash going off in the face of those he was in pursuit of. Given that most of his images are of night scenes in the city, this brash lighting only adds to the uncanny atmosphere of his portrayals of New York nightlife. Transvestites being taken into the police station, women crying outside a burning building, automobile crashes, and dead bodies revealed a different side of America than was generally seen. Yet not all of Weegee's photographs involve death and destitution. There are also images filled with joy, humor, and a touch of the burlesque, such as the memorable image of water-soaked children gathered in the sunny summer street watching warily as a policeman turns off the fire hydrant—perhaps their only form of amusement—in Police End Kids' Street Shower— Under Orders, August 18, 1944. Weegee also celebrates the diversity and paradoxes of the United States in his vibrant images of church gatherings and jazz concerts in Harlem and intimate shots stolen of people sleeping or kissing in movie theaters. Thus, although he would never gain the artistic prominence of the photographers he inspired in the 1950s, Weegee's artistry and influence is notably present in the next generation.

One of the artists that represents the bridge between the photojournalism of Weegee's era and the more individualistic aspects of the late 1940s and early 1950s was William Klein. Although his work was starkly different than the brazen images of Wee-gee, Klein's work is considered to border on the grotesque and to echo the black-and-white photos in Naked City. Although American, Klein was first a sculptor, and began his career in France, where he worked in the studio of Fernand Leger while also concentrating on other media such as painting and abstract photography. Returning to New York in the 1950s, Klein quickly gained a reputation for his ''bad'' photographs of city life. This was further emphasized when he was noticed by American Vogue and hired as a fashion photographer in 1954. Uncomfortable with the workings of a photo studio, Klein took his models out onto the streets of New York, where he developed a unique look and pioneered the creative use of the wide-angle lens.

In the pages of Vogue and in his own work, Klein violated all of the rules of photography by deliberately distorting and blurring his figures, and his subject matter was also extreme images of children with toy guns pointed at the camera. His ''in your face'' style became a trademark and would be something we would later observe in, for example, the efforts of Diane Arbus. Yet although his images seem random and hasty, one can find a certain symmetrical balance to them. Klein's genius is summed up in his publication New York, New York (1956), which draws on all of his talents (and the influences of Weegee).

Another photographer who made the transition between WWII and the postwar era is Robert Capa. Known for his photography of the Spanish Civil

War and WWII in Europe, Hungarian born Capa's (born Endre Friedmann) career lasted up to the moment he was killed by a landmine in Indochina in 1954. Capa, who considered himself to be a journalist rather than an artist, was the quintessential mid-century photographer. He was both a straight photographer and a humanist and had an eye for amazing portraiture. Paradoxically, he first entered the world of photography for economic rather than artistic reasons as a darkroom assistant. Yet, influenced by his relationships with some of the great photographers of his time, such as Cartier-Bresson and Andre Kertesz, Capa became one of the most sought-after photographers of the 1930s and 1940s. Technically speaking, Capa was never a master in the darkroom. His editors remarked that he seemed to have installed a device on his camera that intentionally scratched his film. Thus, although Capa never did quite master the technical side of his art, such as the use of his flash, his style and ability to capture the emotion of a moment are virtually unsurpassed in the photographers of his generation.

After WWII, Capa continued to photograph and make an impact on the world of photography both artistically and professionally. As a man of his era, Capa understood that ''professionalism'' was becoming more individualistic in late-1940s Europe, where the art world was still buzzing with energy. The photographers who were working and living in Paris banded together in 1947 to create Magnum Photos. Named for its dictionary definition as a ''two-quart bottle of spirits,'' ''Magnum'' was an agency formed to support a commitment to ''concerned'' photography and to serve as an international forum for professional photographers and a training ground for young up-and-coming artists. Owned and operated by the artists themselves, the agency's founding members included Robert Capa (who was at the center of the activity) and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Their goal was to improve the lives of photographers and at the same time to allow full artistic license. It was meant to be a collective enterprise in which photographers could develop individually and be free to roam the world and choose their own subjects.

While he was still establishing Magnum, Capa continued to travel the world. He created a portfolio of images from the USSR in 1947, the building of the newly founded State of Israel in the late 1940s, the social elite of Europe in the 1950s, and haunting images of Japan and Indochina in 1954. Capa was also capable of capturing the essence of everyday life of the rich and famous: his photos of Picasso and his family at the Golfe-Juan in 1948 are best remembered in the photo of the artist holding an umbrella over Francoise Gilot while walking on the beach, and another of him cradling his young son in his arms. We find the same atmosphere present in Capa's photos of Matisse at his studio in Nice and Alfred Hitchcock at work on a film set.

Although Capa was influenced by Cartier-Bres-son's theory of ''the decisive moment,'' the two had very diverse approaches to their subject matter. While Cartier-Bresson was noted for his ''cool detachment'' from his subjects, Capa became intimate with the people he photographed and immersed himself in the whole experience. This commitment to his subjects is tragically marked by the fact that while marching with the Vietnamese army near Thaibinh on a last-minute assignment for Life magazine in May of 1954, Capa was killed climbing a dike. His last images show the very spot where he lost his life moments later.

Women also made an impact on postwar photography and one of these was another photographer who had become famous during WWII—Life photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White. Though Bourke-White gained a reputation for such firsts as being the first female photographer to fly on a bombing mission during the war, and the first western photographer allowed to enter the Soviet Union, some of her most impressive and touching images were created after 1945. For example, she was sent to India and Pakistan to capture the turbulence of the era and from this produced one of the most striking photos ever taken of Gandhi, Mon-handras Gandhi at His Spinning Wheel (1946). For that photo she was asked to first learn the art of the chakra, the spinning wheel, in order to better understand the man. She successfully spun some wool and was let in and allowed three photos. The first two failed technically and her only shot turned out to be the one. Whenever Gandhi later saw her he would joke, ''There's the torturer again.'' She was also the last one to interview Gandhi before his assassination. In the early 1950s, she went on to photograph other important social issues such as South Korea and apartheid South Africa where she documented the life of poor blacks living behind barbed wire such as in Shantytown Dweller (1950) and Gold Miners in Johannesburg (1950).

The shift from the 1940s to the 1950s was not just noted in the work of individual photographers such as Bourke-White and Klein but was perhaps best illustrated in one of the most important artistic events of the 1950s. The Family of Man exhibition that took place at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1955 influenced and defined the shape of the future of photography. Billed by its promoters as ''the greatest photographic exhibition of all time'' it was organized by Edward Steichen and was a compilation of

503 images by 273 photographers from 68 countries selected out of over 2 million photographs submitted from all over the world. The title was taken from a poem by Carl Sandburg who wrote in his introduction that ''Everywhere is love and love-making, weddings and babies from generation to generation keeping the Family of Man alive and continuing... alike and ever alike we are....'' Steichen wanted to explore photography's universal themes such as love, childhood, family, work, play, suffering, and death. He aimed to convey the dynamism of photography and how it could help explain ''man to man'' and act as ''a mirror of the universal elements and emotions in the everydayness of life—as a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.''

The exhibition was seen as an international and communal effort to heal the wounds still left over from WWII and it toured Europe (including Russia), Africa, and Asia. It was an attempt to disseminate the ideas of these commonalities and included photographs from the Farm Security Administration, the National Archives, and files from Life Magazine. Images included scenes from middle America, the Indian subcontinent, Java, Europe, Cuba, Pakistan, and the Belgian Congo. Well-known names such as Bill Brandt, Robert Capa, Robert Doisneau, Ruth Orkin, Irving Penn, Dorothea Lange, and Allan and Diane Arbus graced the pages of the exhibition catalogue, which is sprinkled with philosophical quotes from such diverse personalities as Montaigne, Thomas Jefferson, and a Sioux Native American.

The Family of Man exhibition said many things about mid-century photography but one of the most interesting was the discourse it prompted regarding the shift in the treatment of the African American as a subject from before and after WWII. The exhibition included images of African Americans by photographers such as Consuelo Kanaga, Helen Levitt, W. Eugene Smith, and Wayne Miller, in whose work we see portraits of intimacy between family members, children playing in the streets, and the American jazz scene.

One of these is often defined as one of the least-known American photographers, though Consuelo Kanaga's (1894-1978) career spanned 50 years and she is now credited with having pushed the subject of the African American towards a less romanticized and more realistic viewpoint. A photographer during the Depression, by the 1940s, Kanaga focused her camera on the power of the individual subject most likely inspired by the photographs of the Appalachian residents made in the 1920s, and 1930s by Doris Ulmann. Equally indebted to the Photo-Secessionists (Stieglitz and Steichen) Kana-

ga's work blended commercial photography and social documentary with a hint of abstraction. Her balance between aesthetics and social issues explores this interaction between the camera and the subject that was such a central theme in the postwar era. Perhaps Kanaga's most significant contribution to postwar photography developed from her trips to Tennessee and Florida in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the marshlands of Florida she took her most memorable image of an African American migrant worker protecting her two small children with her arms. The photograph "She is a Tree of Life to Them'' was so named by Edward Steichen when he placed it in The Family of Man exhibition in 1955. Kanaga said that this striking image was influenced by Sargent Johnson, an African American sculptor from San Francisco.

Another group of photographers who rose to prominence after WWII were African-Americans, who played a significant role in the way that the world viewed them as both subject and artist in the postwar years. Along with other great names such as Richard Saunders and Gordon Parks, Roy DeCarava is now remembered as one of the most influential photographers of the mid-century whose collection of work spans three decades and gives us some of our most memorable images of DeCarava's native Harlem. In a time when the art world was dominated by the White male, African-Americans were kept on the sidelines and had worked largely in journalism and commercial photography, the most well-known being James VanDerZee who was a studio and portrait photographer. Yet things rapidly changed after 1950 and this was partly due to DeCarava.

DeCarava began his career as a painter who worked early on as a commercial artist. In 1947, having exhausted the medium, he turned to photography as a mode of expression. He liked the directness of the camera. With help from Edward Steichen, DeCarava became the ninth photographer ever to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1955 co-authored his famous book The Sweet Flypaper of Life with poet Langston Hughes. The book won much critical acclaim and marked a turning point in African-American photography as an art form. With DeCarava we find sensitive portrayals of life in Harlem with images that are often mere shadows of form. His photos reflected the move away from the harsh political motifs of the 1930s and a general postwar shift towards a more personal, more abstract view of things. Perhaps his most notable contribution to African-American photography is DeCarava's representation of the Black community, and of greats such as singer Billie Holiday and musician John Coltrane, which communicated a newly found independence that has continued in postwar African-American photographic art.

Three other photographers who carried the photography of the 1940s into the 1950s and influenced photographers for many years to come were Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Minor White. Harry Callahan's career began in the mid-1940s. He was a self-taught photographer who was greatly influenced by Adams, Stieglitz, and Laszlo Mo-holy-Nagy (at Chicago's Institute of Design, where Callahan taught in the 1950s) but who forged his own identity and style that was much more personal than many of his peers. Having worked in the darkroom at General Motors Photography Department during the war, it was during a four-month period in New York in 1946 that he met Nancy and Beaumont Newhall who were impressed by his work and showed it in the 1946 exhibition New Photographers. His photographs followed in the tradition of modernist experimentation of the 1920s and 1930s but have a much more humanistic and personal quality. Callahan's talent shows in his incredibly fine images such as Cattails against Sky (1948) and Weed against Sky, Detroit (1948), but his most famous and profound photographs are of his favorite models, wife Eleanor and daughter Barbara. Very intimate works, some of the photographs show his wife nude in a domestic interior such as in Eleanor, Chicago 1948, others are of her emerging from still water, in shadow, or are ''snapshots'' of his family going about their daily lives.

New Yorker Aaron Siskind (1903-1991) is remembered as one of the most noteworthy mid-century photographers whose art is centered primarily on one subject: the picture plane, a subject that is also known as one of the most important aesthetic issues in modern art. Although he was actively engaged in the world of documentary photography in his early years of work, from the moment of his first exhibition in New York in the late 1940s his contribution to modern art only grew. Practicing in the tradition of the ''straight'' photographers he is associated with New York School Painting and his subject matter is reminiscent of the surfaces of a painting by Franz Kline or Clyf-ford Still. Rather than taking traditional subject matter as his central concern, Siskind often focused his camera on a wall and engaged with the picture plane. Geometrical forms and flat planes became his object of study. Although he produced well-known images such as Terrors and Pleasure of Levitation (1954) and facades of Chicago streets, Mexican pyramids, and abstract designs on walls in Rome, he is relatively unknown compared to other photographers of his time. Yet his impact was great. A radical by nature, his work did for photography what abstract expressionists such as Kline and de Kooning did for their own medium. In addition he was a great teacher who was in residence at the Chicago Institute of Design alongside Harry Callahan in the 1950s-1970s and later went on to the Rhode Island School of Design.

Minor White was perhaps the most influential photographer of these three men and of the postwar era. Having worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression, White is remembered for his haunting images of the natural world but also as one of the founding members of Aperture quarterly and as a great teacher who helped advance the careers of many burgeoning artists. White's meticulous ''straight'' photographic style was formed during his exchanges with such masters of the prewar era as Edward Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, and Ansel Adams. His conversations with Stieglitz, in particular, spurred his ''meditations'' about photography as a way to translate visual form into something he called the ''suprasensual.'' For White, the photograph was a ''mirage'' and the camera was a ''metamorphosing machine.''

To get from the tangible to the intangible...a paradox of some kind has frequently been helpful. For the photographer to free himself of the tyranny of the visual facts upon which he is utterly dependent, a paradox isthe only possible tool. And the talisman paradox for unique photography is to work ''the mirror with a memory'' as if it were a mirage, and the camera a metamorphosing machine, and the photograph as if it were a metaphor.... Once freed of the tyranny of surfaces and textures, substance and form can use the same to pursue poetic truth.

White developed the theory of the ''accidental,'' and his essay Found Photography is a profound description not only of his approach, but of his spiritual process. While he saw photography as something sacred and spiritual, White was also a master technician which just added to the exquisite-ness of his craft. Photographs such as Pacific, Devils Slide, California, 1947 and the stunningly majestic Barn and Clouds, In the Vicinity of Naples and Dansville, NY, 1955 are perhaps some of the most outstanding illustrations of his aesthetic theory in practice.

Apart from Minor White, Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank is probably the most influential of the postwar era. Unlike the abstract planes of Siskind or the intimate familial portraits of Callahan, Frank's work framed the mundane moments of loneliness, boredom, racial strife, and the banal, everyday life of America in the 1950s. On his arri val in New York in 1946 Frank found work with Harper's and Junior Bazaar. After Harper's closed its doors a year later he left New York and traveled through the Americas to Peru and Bolivia before returning to Europe in 1949. For the next five years he continued to travel between Europe and the United States and published his stunning yet somber collection of images in the book Black and White Things.

The postwar photographic era perhaps culminated in Robert Frank's landmark project—The Americans (1959). This is probably the most influential single photo book published between 1945 and 1959. Having begrudgingly returned to the United States in 1953, Frank spent the years 1955-1956 traveling across America on a Guggenheim Fellowship, capturing scenes that revealed an America driven by racial conflict, politics, loneliness, and boredom. Using a 35-mm manual Leica he shot 500 rolls of film, which unfold for us his version and vision of America in the 1950s. His images are of public space and public life—streets, post offices, Woolworth's, cafes, small hotels, bus stations, parks, hospitals, elevators, diners, and gambling casinos. His subject matter runs the gamut from 4th of July picnics to cowboys to interstate highways. Even the design of the text was somewhat revolutionary. Reflecting Walker Evans's book American Photography, Frank's book was sparse and the photographs were only printed on the right-hand side of the pages. The left-hand side was blank except for the page numbers. Thus, from Frank we get a vision of a foreigner's response to his adopted country that is a kind of ''anguished visual poetry rather than graphic art.'' Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road, wrote in the introduction to the book ''he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.'' Frank is merely a ''poetic'' observer whose photographs revel in the voyeuristic rather than participatory pleasure of the image. It was not just his choice of subject but his unique style that included closely cropped scenes, that also draws the eye. In addition, Frank is known for frequently photographing directly into the glare of the light, and often framed his subjects off-center or on a tilted horizon. This skewed sense of balance along with his use of the small, handheld 35-mm camera greatly influenced the way that photographers worked from that time on. Thus, Frank deliberately breaks the rules of ''good'' photography. Yet in doing so he also closes off a great and productive era in postwar photography but, more importantly, looks ahead to the 1960s and 1970s in which photographers such as Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, and

Garry Winogrand will carry on his tradition in their own vision.

In Europe, the important group fotoform became the nucleus of 1950s modernism; Peter Keetman, Otto Steinert, and others showed both the continuity and disruption with the previous photographic styles, especially in Germany. ''Subjektive Fotografie,'' a style that focused on abstraction, design, and close observation was emerging, codified in a series of three exhibitions in the early 1950s.

Around the world, in Japan, which had its own postwar era, but also in countries not directly affected by the World War, there was a general boom in photography as societies increasingly modernized and standards of living increased. Japan's postwar photographers, including Ken Domon, Hiroshi Hamaya, Kikuji Kawada (whose famous black and white picture of the Japanese flag, laying on the ground, soaked and wrinkled, is a symbol of an essential part of Japanese reconciliation with their war years), Shomei Tomatsu, and others reflected the introspection and independence that characterized western photographers. Photojournalism and social depiction predominated as Japan's postwar photographers dealt with the aftermath of their defeat and the devastating physical and psychological consequences of the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

In the USSR and countries under communist rule, policies dictating ''official'' styles constrained photographic innovation even as they codified photographic genres such as Socialist Realism.

Stephenie Young

See also: Adams, Ansel; Arbus, Diane; Bourke-White, Margaret; Brandt, Bill; Callahan, Harry; Capa, Robert; Cartier-Bresson, Henri; DeCarava, Roy; Dois-neau, Robert; Domon, Ken; Frank, Robert; Hamaya, Hiroshi; History of Photography: Interwar Years; Institute of Design; Kawada, Kikuji; Keetman, Peter; Klein, William; Levitt, Helen; Life Magazine; Magnum Photos; Museum of Modern Art; Newhall, Beaumont; Penn, Irving; Siskind, Aaron; Socialist Photography; "The Decisive Moment''; Ulmann, Doris; War Photography; Weegee; White, Minor; Winogrand, Garry

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