OUGD401 - Lecture Notes: Photograph as Document

• Killburn - 1848 - documenting a social event - protest

• 'Window to the past'

• Photographer is an invisible observer - not commenting, just documenting

• 'How the other half live' - Jacob Riss 1890

• Lewis Hine - 1908 - his work makes changes to the law - especially children - reports conditions - doesn't try shock the viewer

• Margeret Bourke-White - 1937

• Not subjective - should be objective - photography was trusted to be this

• Sharecropper home - dramatic creative - very directive - contrast

• Russel Lee - 1939 - Interior of a black farmers home - less composition - no human presence - recording - no manipulation

• Dorothea Lange - Migrant Mother - 1936 - manipulation of the viewer - image becomes more important than poverty & the people
• Her other images provide some context & conditions

• Walker Evans - 1936

• Modernism style of photography

• Bill Brandt - 1937 - UK - work class life

• Robert Frank - 1958 - Travels through America & photographs - redefinition of document - uses titles to contradict image - 'Parade' - shows observers, not the parade.

• William Klein - 1954/55 - Acknowledgement of the photographer - known for use of blur - 'Dame in Brooklyn'

• Magnum group - founded in 1947 by Cartier-Bresson & Capa - ethos of documenting the world - not fixed nationally.

• The decisive moment - photography achieves its highest distinction

• Document & War - Robert Capa - The falling soldier 1936 - Normandy France 1945

• Robert Haeberle - 1969

• George Rodger

• Hung Cogut - 1972

• Lee Miller

• William Neidich - 1989 - purposely constructed

• Edward Curtis

• Rodger - More document in the middle of a wrestling competition

• Bruno Barney - 1972

• Jeremy Dour - 2001 - Reconstructs history in present day with people who originally took part - preserving the memory of political struggle