http://www.emptykingdom.com/featured/ek-interview-lissy-elle/
Harvard System of referencing
Bibliography – Downie, L. (2006) “Don’t kiss me”. London: Tate trustees by Tate Publishing
Quote inside your text
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah critic Louise Downie says, “From 1932, Cahun and Moor were increasingly involved with political issues (Downie 2006 ; 14) then comment on her statement…
Art Movements & Isms
PICTORIALISM
Time period : 1880s-1920s
Key characteristics/ conventions
From the 1880s and onwards photographers strived for photography to be art by trying to make pictures that resembled paintings e.g. manipulating images in the darkroom, scratching and marking their prints to imitate the texture of canvas, using soft focus, blurred and fuzzy imagery based on allegorical and spiritual subject matter, including religious scenes.
Pictorialism reacted against mechanization and industrialisation. They abhorred the snapshot and were also dismayed at the increasing industrial exploitation of photography and practices that pandered to a commercial and professional establishment. The Pictorialists championed evocative photographs and individual expression and they constructed their images looking for harmony of matter, mind and spirit; the first was addressed through objective technique and process, the second in a considered application of the principles of composition and design, and the last by the development of a subjective and spiritual motive.
Artists associated
Julia Margaret Cameron (one of the first socially accepted photographers during this period)
Peter Henry Emerson ‘naturalistic photography’ – book he wrote on the romanticism of photography with rural landscapes and figures within landscapes
The Vienna camera club (Austria)
The brotherhood of the linked ring (London)
Photo secession (New York)
Key works
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1979)
Julia Margaret Cameron was a photographer in the Victorian era. The bulk of Cameron’s photographs fit into two categories – closely framed portraits and illustrative allegories based on religious and literary works. In the allegorical works in particular, her artistic influence was clearly Pre-Raphaelite, with far-away looks and limp poses and soft lighting. Cameron’s photographs were unconventional in their intimacy and their particular visual habit of created blur through both long exposures, where the subject moved and by leaving the lens intentionally out of focus.
Peter Henry Emerson
In 1889 Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) expounded his theory of Naturalistic Photography which the Pictorialist used to promote photography as an art rather than science. Their handcrafted prints were in visual opposition to the sharp b/w contrast of the commercial print.
REALISM / STRAIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY
Time period: 1920s
Key characteristics/ conventions
Went back to photography origins, with detail and purpose not recreating paintings. (closely associated with ‘straight photography’) photography grew up with claims of having a special relationship to reality, and its premise, that the camera’s ability to record objectively the actual world as it appears in front of the lens was unquestioned. This supposed veracity of the photographic image has been challenged by critics as the photographer’s subjectivity (how he or she sees the world and chooses to photograph it) and the implosion of digital technology challenges this notion opening up many new possibilities for both interpretation and manipulation. A belief in the trustworthiness of the photograph is also fostered by the news media who rely on photographs to show the truth of what took place.
Artists associated
Paul Strand
Walker Evans
Key works
Dorothea Lange
Lewis W Hine
Laura L. Letinsky (born 1962) is a Canadian contemporary photographer, born in Winnipeg, best known for her still life photographs.
From her early photography of people, she shifted to still life photography for which she is now known. Her 1990’s series, Venus Inferred, of couples were informed by representations, visual and other media, about love and how photography is used to convey our ideas about romantic relationships. Her photographs chip away at normative expectations as depicted in mainstream culture. Impetus for her investigation of the still life was its associations with femininity, the minor arts, and its imbrication within the home as the space of intimacy. Letinsky says that still lifes provides her with the potential to explore the false dichotomy between the personal and the political. Vital to this is the selection/orchestration of objects depicted in her images as well as her photograph’s presence as object. Hence scale and surface is important to understanding these photographs. Rather than their being seen on a digital screen, she is invested in the experience of viewing her actual prints. She says that her work “is in part about the relationship between looking at something and other bodily experiences.”
Letinsky’s still lives are described as “Elegant, subdued and gently but relentlessly off-putting, her large-format photographs have an arresting presence that seems out of step with time. At the same time, though, art history suffuses her meticulously constructed scenes as fully as the softened daylight does the sparse interiors she photographs.” Letinsky’s still lives are reminiscent of Dutch still lives, they bring together “freshness, ripeness and decay.”[4] Although they nod to Dutch still lives, they are more modernized, using “Crumbled Coke cups, styrofoam to-go cartons” instead of the upper-class, lush food of the Dutch still lives.
Letinsky’s large scale work becomes purposeful and melancholy, not about the food itself but more of the photography. “Peaches aren’t metaphors for anything; they are simply peaches, peach-shaped, peach-colored.” Her work is all about the line, shapes, and light interacting and how the view is experiencing the work. These fabricated scenes remind viewers of the ability to be real or fake within a photograph. Just as the 17th century northern European painters were not simply painting lemons and goblets, Letinsky’s work speaks to the value of objects, but more, the valuing of their representation with photography conveying much about what and how to see and look.
Stenram deliberately focuses on the lower body or arms while removing the reciprocal gaze from the subject by veiling the head and torso. Through the impossibility of eye contact we are free to leer, unmediated as voyeurs. We can survey the details in each image unencumbered by conscious relations or responsibility to the other, thereby objectifying the body and the potential for fetishism. Simple graphic and inanimate hands, feet, ankles become more tantalising when isolated for examination.
Vintage, pin-up photos are the inspiration and direct material for the series, the title of which, Drape, interprets the work in relation to the subjects in the images – the women who literally drape themselves around the set but also in terms of the curtains that conceal them. All of the images are subtle,black and white interiors shot in a similar style with each woman, or so we assume, positioned in front of a window. The artist’s intervention in the image is to extend the curtains to conceal the head and torso. The images remind me in someway of certain works by Louise Bourgeois, namely the disaggregation of body parts, controlling the material and the information that is exposed. They especially recall her drawings where she would combine half woman-half house, a birdcage with legs and so on.
Born in Sweden, Eva Stenram studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal College of Art. She has exhibited internationally, including shows at the V&A Museum, Zendai Museum of Modern Art (China), Museum of Contemporary Art Teipei (Taiwan), Seoul Museum of Art (South Korea) and Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum (India). Her work has featured in several magazines including Architectural Review, Blueprint, Source, Succour and The New Statesman. Eva Stenram worked as a lecturer in Fine Art, Photography and Video Art at the University of Bedfordshire from 2006-2010 and has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Creative Arts, Derby University, Glasgow School of Art, Southampton Institute and the Arts Institute at Bournemouth.
OCCUPATION
LIBERATION
ZINE AND BOOK MAKING
