Trunk Disdéri's Legs Of The Opera

A single photo can tell thousands of stories about people that have been silenced in the past or those who are still silenced today. This is the case for the photograph titled “Oppression” by Luke Moore. In such a simple picture, the author is giving voice to the women who have been mistreated, killed, raped and oppressed. This treatment against women is not new and has been implemented all over the world. Moore uses line, character, and color to appropriately demonstrate the fight women have against oppression and the responsibility society has on this oppressive system.

In Jennifer Baichwal’s The True Meaning of Picture, she focused on the subject of American photographer Shelby Lee Adams’ works. Adams’ pieces emphasize the culture people in poverty from the Appalachian Mountains. Baichwal also spends some time focusing on the controversy of the photographer’s images. The documentary shows direct quotes from Adams himself, the subjects of his pictures, the subjects’ family, and even art critiques. The film collides the views of all these people so that we may learn more about the Appalachian people. Throughout the course of the documentary, the

Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother is a photograph that documents a moment of distress within American history. The image works as a visual representation of suffering for those who were lucky enough not to live within the Dust Bowl region. To many it is uncertain if Lange’s image became an American Icon because of the struggle it presented or because of the eye capturing composition of it. However, with this image came forth the issue of a photos validity after photo manipulation, as Lange edited the image by removing the thumb of the mother who was a large subject. Despite the slight manipulation in Migrant Mother, the photograph still presents the situation truthfully, making the photograph function as both a work of art and a historical document.

As New York photographer James Maher quoted from A World History of Photography, “photographs used in campaigns for social reform not only provided truthful evidence but embodied a commitment to humanistic ideals” (361). Moreover, as shown in the article Documenting the Social Scene, the powerful photography that Hine and Riis have captured of immigrants encapsulate the need for change; furthering the separation of their photojournalism from illustrative and recreational art. From Hine documenting much of the practices of child labor, to Riis exposing the harsh living conditions of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, (Maher) both photographers comply to a code of ethics and sense of journalistic integrity— Riis and Hine showcase the truth behind the photos in a way that attempts to humanize the subjects on film as much as it attempts to engage a moral debate of the situations at hand. In addition, to exemplify the impact of photojournalism, we must consider the perspective of the Gilded Age

In representing female subjects, both Pablo Picasso’s oil painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) manipulate the formal techniques of composition and perspective to create new ways of seeing their subject, emulating their contemporary society’s shifting views of women and the individual. Les Demoiselles depicts five naked prostitutes, flaunting their bodies, and some wearing tribal masks. In comparison, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère represents a female, who may also be a prostitute, tending a bar. The depiction of previously ‘hidden’ female subjects alone was an innovation of the perception of the artist, however, the formal treatment in representing these subjects was an important break from tradition.

Notably, McCurry’s neat and predictable photographs of India, taken over the course of 40 years, are more popular than Singh’s more realistic, chaotic and exciting images. Cole argues that this popularity is because of McCurry’s portrayal of places and people due to orientalism, based on conventional preconceptions of historical India. They are our colorful fantasies of old India realized on glossy

The 1930’s were filled an enormous sense of vulnerability and angst because of the horrifying events of the Great Depression and its impact that it had on the society and economy of the United States of America. People of all classes, races, genders, and heritages were struck by the tragedies of the Great Depression. However, with new advancements in the technology of photography came a new hope and outlook for the future of Americans. The introduction of colored photography along with organized photographic groups and their impact took the World by storm as the realization of normal citizens being impacted by the Great Depression set in.

Before starting this project, I knew very little about photography, photographers, or exactly how much impact photographical images have had on our society. I have never taken a photography class, or researched too in depth about specific pictures or photographers. This project has allowed me to delve deeper into the world of photography in order to understand just how much influence pictures can have over society’s beliefs, emotions, and understandings’. I have have chosen two highly influential photographers, Diane Arbus and Dorothea Lange, who I have found to both resonate with me and perfectly capture human emotions in way that moves others.

The first thing I will write about is a person, Jacob Riis. A esteemed author of the book “How the other half Lives”, published in the 1890s. Riis was a pioneer in the time when photography was first starting to catch on. In Riis’s photos he took pictures of people who lived in the slums of the major cities and how they lived. He was termed a Muckraker by our late president Theodore Roosevelt, because journalists like him would, as he would say, rake through all the good things and bad on the ground and only report the bad of the world. But Riis was one of the men of his era

I was drawn to this time period as well as these two sculptures. As I researched both sculptures I was fascinated by how much respect the people of that time had for their women. Not only for what they could do for them, but also for what they looked like. They didn’t see the weight and size as a grotesque thing; but more as a thing of beauty. In

Although Sturken and Cartwright claim it is quite easy to fall for the misconception that photographs are “unmediated copies of the real world” (Sturken & Cartwright, 17), this is no longer true, if it ever was. While cumbersome, even before the advent of image editing software, it was possible to modify photographs. Furthermore, in contemporary society, we have completely lost faith in mass media representation; rarely do people expect images to be completely unmodified anymore. This is especially visible in western culture since people are pressured to conform into highly specific aesthetics where even a “natural” look is artificially crafted with makeup and digital filters. Even disregarding direct manipulation to a print through methods such as Photoshop, photographs are manipulated in such obvious ways, it almost seems absurd to point it out. The framing, lighting, and positioning are always adjusted by the photographer. Therefore, people themselves are a type of manipulation; a representative filter through which biases are imbued. In effect, Sturken and Cartwright’s conclusion that all camera-generated images bear an “aura of machine objectivity” (Sturken & Cartwright, 16) stemming from “the … legacy of still-photography” (Sturken & Cartwright, 17) is

Winogrand took photos of everything he saw; he always carried a camera or two, loaded and prepared to go. He sought after to make his photographs more interesting than no matter what he photographed. Contrasting many well-known photographers, he never knew what his photographs would be like he photographed in order to see what the things that interested him looked like as photographs. His photographs resemble snapshots; street scenes, parties, the zoo. A critical artistic difference between Winogrand's work and snapshots has been described this way, the snapshooter thought he knew what the subject was in advance, and for Winogrand, photography was the process of discovering it. If we recall tourist photographic practice, the difference becomes clear: tourists know in advance what photographs of the Kodak Hula Show will look like. In comparison, Winogrand fashioned photographs of subjects that no one had thought of photographing. Again and again his subjects were unconscious of his camera or indifferent to it. Winogrand was a foremost figure in post-war photography, yet his pictures often appear as if they are captured by chance. To him and other photographers in the 1950s, the previous pictures seemed planned, designed, visualized, understood in advance; they were little more than pictures, in actual fact less, because they claimed to be somewhat else the examination of real life. In this sense, the work of Garry Winogrand makes a motivating comparison to Ziller's

Paula Modersohn-Becker was a female artist whose self portraits opened up a new path of self expression of European female self portraitures within the 20th century. For years, nude portraits were created primarily for male gaze; female models were purchased by male artists and were painted as sex objects. Paula Modersohn-Becker rebels against this sexist norm by simply being her own muse. Modersohn-Becker’s use of the female nude was a powerful reclaiming of her own body. A new trail was blazed in 1906, with her painting Self-Portrait, Age 30, 6th Wedding Day. In the painting, for the first time, the partially nude model is the artist herself. She stands there, looking at the

The question of “why feminism?” has been presented to a number of female artists who deal with strong constructions of gender in their work. The answer, overwhelmingly, has been the desire to modify stereotypes about women that have prevailed in male-dominated art history. In the 1960’s, women who explored “feminist” issues in their art were criticized, causing mass mobilization and conscious raising as to what, exactly, was the purpose of feminist art (Crowell, 1991). Since that time, women have been trying desperately to overturn the art world and rescind the traditional stereotypes and images that have plagued them. Feminist artists created somewhat of a unified front during that

In “Ways of Seeing”, John Berger, an English art critic, argues that images are important for the present-day by saying, “No other kind of relic or text from the past can offer such direct testimony about the world which surrounded other people at other times. In this respect images are more precise and richer literature” (10). John Berger allowed others to see the true meaning behind certain art pieces in “Ways of Seeing”. Images and art show what people experienced in the past allowing others to see for themselves rather than be told how an event occurred. There are two images that represent the above claim, Arnold Eagle and David Robbins’ photo of a little boy in New York City, and Dorothea Lange’s image of a migratory family from Texas; both were taken during the Great Depression.