Possible facts to use in personal study essay:

• Statistically, the Portuguese are the 3^rd most hard working nation on average working nine hours per day.
• A study was carried out by the University of Southampton showed that the Portuguese immigrants in Jersey who  first began as farm workers are more able to become successful business-owners without learning very much of the language.
• According to the States statistics unit there were 5,500 people in Jersey last year who were either born in Portugal or Madeira.
• On average one Portuguese worker works about 1,852 hours per year.
• Portugal was also among the five biggest foreign working communities in Britain.

Photography: A Critical Introduction Third Edition Edited by Liz Wells 

In 1939 a Documentary photographer called Dorothea Lange, was working on a government run project called Farm Security Administration.  Dorothea had stopped on the road to investigate a group of people who were employed to pick peas. Within less than 15 minutes she had photographs of the ‘migrant mother’ and her children. This photograph went on to become the most reproduced photograph in history, it was reproduced on stamps to represent the ear of 1930’s and used for cartoons.

One of the main principles of this photograph was that it should remain untouched free of photo shop even any minor changes so that the photograph could maintain it’s accuracy and genuineness.

What the photograph shows/ represents?

• Mother and child – maternal symbolism
• Poverty during the depression
• Lack of presence in the mothers expression
• Absence of the farther
• The human condition at the time
• Social and historical evidence
• Resistance against the depression
• Gender roles – femininity

Dorothea Lange – The Assignment I Will Never Forget  

Essay to go with the photograph of Migrant Mother

“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, she was thirty-two. “She and her children had been living on frozen vegetables from the field and wild birds the children caught. The pea crop had frozen; there was no work. Yet they could not move on, for she had just sold the tires from the car to buy food. There she sat in that lean in tent with her children huddled around her, seemed to know that my pictures might help her, so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”

Ways in which the photograph can be analysed:

• Relation to politics and ideology
• Process and technique
• Class, race and gender
• Psychoanalysis
• Aesthetics and traditions in art
• Context
• Essay to go with it

In 1978,  they were able to track Migrant Mother, they found her living in a trailer in Modesto California, however they said that she was an ordinary dull woman who was no longer able to be the icon of the depression.  In an interview with ‘Migrant Mother’ Florence Thompson held by the United Press 50 years after the photographs were taken Florence said that she was proud to be the subject of the photography however she didn’t make any money out of it and so it had done her no good.

Before I start my Personal Study, I want to do some simple research into all of the photographers I am going to write about within my essay.

The New Topographic Photographers:

“With shots of disused warehouses and eerily empty streets, the New Topographics photographers trained their cameras on the creeping urbanisation and industry of 1970s America.” – The Guardian

“New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” was an exhibition curated by William Jenkins in which he selected eight young american photographers; Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr. Each photographer was represented through ten pages in the exhibition, all except for Stephen Shore worked in Black and White. Jenkins chose these photographers because their images all had a similar ‘banal’ aesthetic, but were formal images.

“The pictures were stripped of any artistic frills and reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion.”

Of The New Topographics, I have chosen to look at Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz, as their work is very strong and well know for being part of the new topographic movement.

Robert Adams

Adams is an American Photographer who was part of the New Topographic’s movement. “His work is largely concerned with moments of regional transition: the suburbanization of Denver, a changing Los Angeles of the 1970s and 1980s, and the clear-cutting in Oregon in the 1990s.” 

His work demonstrates the vastness and the beauty of america and whilst have the banal aesthetic that made Jenkins chose him for the exhibition, his images are very interesting and of good quality.

Lewis Baltz

Baltz is a photographer I first studied last year when looking at Landscape photography, and although at the time i had very little interest in his work, I have come to appreciate it and enjoy his images much more now.

Photographers who influenced the Bechers:

Albert Renger-Patzsch

In 1925 Renger-Patzsch was a German photographer, who began to pursue photography as a full-time career in 1925. He rejected both Pictorialism, an imitation of painting, and the experimentation of photographers who relied on startling techniques. His photographs record the exact detail of objets. In his book Die Welt ist schön (“The world is beautiful”), his images showed both nature and industry in his style of photography, which was very clear and transparent. These images were closely related to painting of the Neue Sachlichkeit (“The New Objectivity”) movement.

August Sander

During military service, August Sander was an assistant in a photographic studio in Trier and By 1904 he had opened his own studio in Linz. When he moved to a suburb of Cologne in 1909 he began to photograph the rural farmers who lived nearby. Around three years later Sander left his urban studio so he could continue photographing in the field, finding subjects along the roads he traveled by bicycle.

Karl Blossfeldt

Photographers who the Bechers have since influenced:

Bernd and Hilla Becher have influenced a large number of photographers, who are mainly German, including Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, and Roswitha Ronkholz, who joined the first year of the new photography class run by the Bechers in 1976.

Thomas Struth

Struth is a German Photographer known for his images of urban scenes, jungles, and portraits.

“Much of his early works are black and white photographs of urban scenes, particularly industrial spaces and deserted streets, which reflect the changing conditions of contemporary society in his observations of architecture and urban development.”

This kind of edge to his work is what shows the influence of the Bechers work and teaching.

Andreas Gursky

“Gursky studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in the early 1980s and first adopted a style and method closely following Becher’s systematic approach to photography, creating small, black-and-white prints. ” – http://whitecube.com/artists/andreas_gursky/

His current work is known for its scale and colour, with his images looking at the effect of capitalism and globalisation on contemporary life.

Candida Hofer

Hofer i a german photographer, best known for her large format images on architectural interiors. Her images greatly show the influence that the Bechers had, with her images all being taken in the same way, like the typologies that the Bechers produced.

Laura Mulvey | Born 1941

Mulvey’s main theory was entitled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and she made great political use of the theory Freudian psychoanalytic theory:
– in a patriarchal [society dominated by men] society ‘pleasure in looking’ has been split between active male and passive female. In other words the females are there to be looked at while the males are the ones doing the looking.
Mulvey believes that Hollywood not only traditionally focuses on a male protagonist but also assumes a male spectator. They expect that males are the only ones in the cinemas actually watching these films and that women would have no desire to be a lead role such as James Bond. Mulvey coined the term ‘the male gaze’ presenting ‘woman as image’ [or ‘spectacle’] and man as ‘bearer of the look’. This basically means that women are there to be looked at and visually enjoyed by men who are there to objectify and watch the women. In film women should be shown as sexy and more of a love interest or to be sexualised rather than a character with a proper background and personality, she is only there to be looked at and so doesn’t need to have a name or personal story or background.
– the narcissistic process of identification with an ‘ideal ego’ is given to both men and women. For example, the man will identify with the lead protagonist who is a strong and independent male that uses women and is cool, his comes across as the most masculine. The females will identify with the pretty love interest and happily watch her and see themselves in the position of the beautiful woman.
– men identify with the man who is using the woman as a fetishistic [the focus of an obsession] object.
– women gain pleasure from identifying with the beautiful woman in the film.

David Gauntlett | Born 1971

Gauntlett’s is a sociologist and media theorist who’s work expresses that creativity stems from self-identity and self-expression. He was a media professor at Bournemouth University and in 2006 he joined the School of Media, Arts and Design at the University of Westminster as Professor of Media and Communications. Gauntlett uses the depictions of masculinity, femininity and sexuality in a variety of media such as men’s and women’s magazines, television, film, popular music and self-help books. This is in attempts to explore how these representations impacts women’s and men’s self-identities in both the UK and the USA. Gauntlett presented debates on the power of the media providing an overview of past and contemporary representations of gender and sexuality in the means of media coverage; advertising, magazines, television and film.

A David Gauntlett essay:

Anthony Giddens | Born 1938

Anthony Giddens is a British theorist. He grew up in a lower middle-class family in London. Giddens completed a Bachelor’s degree in sociology and psychology at the University of Hull in 1959 and completed a Master’s degree at the London School of Economics and he got a Ph.D at the University of Cambridge. Giddens came up with the theory of structuration exploring the connection between individuals and social systems. He is a prominent contributor in the field of sociology and has 34 published books that have been translated in at least 29 languages. From 1998 to 2003 Giddens was the Director of the London School of Economics and still remains there as a professor. Giddens suggests the theory of structuration, a social theory of the creation and reproduction of social systems. This is based in the analysis of both structure and agents. Meaning that peoples social lives are more than just random individual acts and that there is in fact a social structure. This is in the traditions, institutions, moral codes and have established ways of doing things but it also means that these social standards can be changed when people start to ignore them, replace them or reproduce them in different ways.

Structuration theory: http://www.britannica.com/topic/structuration-theory

Judith Butler | Born 1956

Butler is a professor of Comparative Literature and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She is well known as a theorist of power, gender, sexuality and identity. Butler came up with the “Queer Theory”, this grew out of feminism and gender studies in the 1990s. Her work combats negative representations of gay sexuality in the media and challenges the idea that gender is a fixed, immovable part of the essential life, as male or female. She suggests that male and female gender or sexual preference does not control all aspects of our identity, or how we perceive other peoples identity. Someones sexuality shouldn’t be/isn’t the most important aspect of a person and should not define what kind of person they are.
I agree with this theory as I think that stereotypes tend to scare people and make them think in a narrow-minded way. This theory develops stereotypes and simply states that this side of a person doesn’t define them and that audience’s shouldn’t judge someone just because of their sexual preference, this isn’t a definitive aspect of a persons personality, nor should it be.

Michel Foucault | Born 1926

Michel Foucault was a French historian and philosopher and is associated with the structuralist and post-structuralist movements. Foucault has had strong influence not only in philosophy but also in a wide range of humanistic and social scientific disciplines. Foucault was a major figure in two successive waves of the 20th century. The structuralist wave in the 1960s and then the poststructuralist wave. His work can generally be characterised as philosophically oriented historical research. Towards the end of his life he insisted that all his work was part of a single project of historically investigating the production of truth. Foucault tried to find a way of understanding the ideas that shape our present not only in terms of the historical function but also by tracing changes in their function throughout history.

About Michel Foucault: http://www.iep.utm.edu/foucault/