Week 4: Phototgraphy in the Urban Milieu, 1930s-50s

One of the defining moments in the history of American photography to come into its own as being considered a true medium as an art form is during the beginning of the 20th century, both pre and post-World War II. Curator and art historian, Jane Livingston, argues that the sixteen different photographers who make up the 'New York School', share a number of different subjects, influences as well as clear aesthetic assumptions and clues. With existential values, but ambitions not as clearly defined, Livingston makes a direct comparison to abstract painters of the same time block. Her point rooted in the fact that many of the New York School Photographers began their careers as painters, or attempted painters.

Looking to influences of the New York School Photographers, all appear to share and identify with the film noir movement. The stylistic choices in film noir seem to point to the shared photographers' desire to express a sense of "presentness" within their work. With more modern artistic movements and conventions to rebel against than seemingly nurture the New York School aesthetic, the group of photographers react strongly against Pictorialism and the giant role of the artist Alfred Stieglitz. Although the Pictorialism movement disappeared quickly after it began, the ideas it formed around as to what photography as an art form should align with and run parallel to lasted much longer and served as a jumping-off point to the New York School theories. Below are 2 different images of New York City, made roughly 8 years apart from one another [1892 and circa 1900 respectively].



[Photo credits: Alfred Stieglitz [top] and Detroit Photograph Co. [bottom]].

Also, a small selection by Life magazine of "Portraits of New York".

When Roy Stryker culled a group of photographers to work under the Farm Security Administration, the FSA, to document the conditions of rural America, a new idea of a "straight" approach to making photographs emerged, helping documentary photography of Depression-era America quickly redefine its way of looking. One of the forerunners of the "straight" way of looking in photography, was Berenice Abbott. She aligned herself with making images that were not manipulated when approached, formed and developed. Her images of New York in the 1930s, while hired by the FAP [Federal Arts Project] not only lend themselves to visual cues of a new approach to documentary photography, but also make linear literature connections to critical essays of the period, especially Lewis Mumford's writings and musings of cities and urban life, summarized in part by his 1939 film, The City.




[Photo credits: Berenice Abbott]

So many of the New York School Photographers looked at an approach to image making from many disciplines, such as film noir and painting, but also much in step with students and practitioners of the New Bauhaus movement planted at the Institute of Design in Chicago. The multidisciplinary approach headed by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy at ID resonated in many of these photographers arsenal of visual cues to the creative process. In the same breath, many artists at this time were striving to form a less literal, "more metaphoric" language, while still wrestling with social looking: Could artists and artworks change the way a society functions? Photographers like Jacob A. Riis and Lewis Hine would have informed a romantic notion and mentality of social equality related to their period and the future.

Helen Levitt, one of the photographers associated with the New York School, who was born and lived her entire life in New York City had her book, in collaboration with friend James Agee, A Way of Seeing: Photographs of New York published in 1965, [although the photographs were from the 40s and the book started taking form in the 50s]. The book was a representation of "photo-journalistic concerns...while being removed from the confines of the magazine...and picture story". The layout of the book is narrative, although not completely story telling in nature as the sequencing of the images and their style is alternative with cropped images using negative space or even full bleed and some spilling across the gutter. Levitt's style was highly influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, as well as Walker Evans. She, with many other photographers and artists, had a high level of interest in the everyday street life of New York and made this her central vision. Like photographer Aaron Siskind [of the ID], Levitt found a sense of beauty in the everyday language of street life: street vendors, children moving about to and fro, public communication and transportation devices, etc.





[Photo credits: Helen Levitt]

Notably figured within the New York School Photographers is Robert Frank, whose entrance into the realm of modern photography can be greatly credited to the publication of his book The Americans. His photographs pointed to something "fundamentally new" having a "untameable...raw power" states Livingston. Robert Frank's photographic style is romantic, straight and curious especially encapsulated around the embarking of photographing a post-war America that was swirling all around, but may have been too pedestrian for anybody to take real notice, let alone make a photograph of the seemingly ordinary and the every-person. His business of looking by use of available light, the 35mm format and choice of subject formed the tenor of his style and is "widely thought to have changed forever the very grammar of the medium of photography".


[Photo credits: Robert Frank]

One of Frank's contemporaries was William Klein, whose original aspiration was to be a painter, seemed to focus early on in his career to a more "serious education in avant-garde art". Although both Klein and Frank have similar features in the careers [film making ventures, creating ambitious books], Klein is quoted to see Frank as someone "who is part of the establishment", which from Klein distanced. Although Robert Frank in Klein's eye may have been part of something more not in-line with what Klein gravitated towards, Frank seemingly was able to blur the lines better as completing commercial assignments with the same level of artistic voice and freedom to anything he wanted to accomplish within his own "personal" work, he very well could blend the two.

When Klein returned to New York after traveling in Europe, he wanted to venture into a book, one of intimacy, focused around a diary-like mode. His investment in the ideas of The New Landscape, [filtered through Leger, from Gyorgy Kepes book, who heavily shaped Kevin Lynch's ideas in The Image of the City], was to direct his focus to "gathering evidence". Klein's tabloid-like approach to having glaring headlines and a sense of urgency for "the dumbest, most ordinary stuff" was rejected by editors in New York. He brought his wide-angle approach of "grain, blur, contrast and accidents..." to publishers in Paris instead and the book New York was born.


[Photo credits: William Klein]

William Klein's approach to photography by likening it to painting in a sense can be conjured even through Levitt and Frank, simply looking through of lens of chiaroscuro. Although one of the photographic approaches found in the New York School was to be informed of straight looking and the use of available light, the creation of shadows and dimensionality for figures and shapes within the compositions of these photographers is legible.