When examining American photography you must discuss the Farmer Security Administration-Office of War Information, also referred to as the FSA/OWI. This administration was the single and most significant documentary photography project in the history of United States. Photographs taken by members of the FSA/OWI all display and represent American society in different ways to help give a better understanding of major historic events occurring in the United States at this time. The members of the FSA use many formal elements to help illustrate society and its cultural that will enhance our understanding of the FSA/OWI project and United States. In addition, these formal elements such as lighting, framing, subject matter, and detail are used …show more content…
The first photograph I am going to discuss is photo of Ellery Shufelt with his children in Albany County, New York. Arthur Rothstein took this photograph in 1937, which was when the Great Depression was taking place in the United States. This photograph depicts many of these formal elements and techniques such as, framing, lighting, composition, and space to help portray the true meaning of the image. Arthur Rothstein uses the technique known as composition, which can be defined as the organization of the photograph by inserting elements in particular places and sizes. This assumption can be made because Rothstein places the Ellery Shufelt and his children in specific areas of the photograph to help capture an emotion or option about how people live and work American society at this time. Also, the framing and position of the door and chair outlines the photograph asymmetrically for the viewer. The door offsets the image by dividing the image with a vertical line. This basically crops the photograph making the viewer focus on the father and his children rather than the background itself. In addition, the level the camera intensifies the feeling and framing by making you feel eye level with the subjects. The use of framing allowed the photograph to make you focus and control how you perceive the image.
Another element I have noticed
After a steady progression, pictorial photography as a movement emerged. Pictorial photographers believed that their field is more than just an objective, mechanical media. Photography was not just about capturing the documentation and information contained by an image, but rather, about the effect and the mood they translate. The images began to have meaning and a reason for their capture, completely transforming the images produced.
To begin with, description is utilized to show that pictures are worth more than words. In Lange’s image, the woman looks exhausted and the children seem saddened. Viewers of the image see this by their facial expressions. For instance, two of the children are looking away from the photographer and the woman has no smile on her face. Moreover, onlookers observe how people lived during the Great Depression in the west coast. Viewers of the image see this by their clothing. For example, the woman and children are wearing tattered, dirty clothing. The overall picture represents what people went through during the Great Depression without ever telling the audience it was taken during this
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
While emotions were extremely high in the sense of angst for a better life, photography provided a new sense of reality to Americans and for others around the World. Photography all around the World is unlike anything else of its kind. People are able to tell stories and elicit emotions that bring the audience to that desired response. Throughout the 1930’s, photography from governmental institutions or advancements alone brought a new beginning to the end of a terrible time that Americans all around the nation
You Have Seen Their Faces by Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell is a photo documentary of life in the South during the Great Depression. After reading You Have Seen Their Faces along with critiques of it by Rabinowitz and Snyder, I found myself more interested in the topic of how motherhood was depicted in the book. Rabinowitz brought up that middle class women felt the need to regulate the poor women because they weren 't feminine enough or motherly enough which is the main attitude involved in slumming. By observing Margaret Bourke-White’s photos I found two distinct classes of these types of images: positive and negative. I was curious as to the deeper meanings behind these two classes of photos and what this meant about Bourke-White’s perspective of her subjects. Another point of interest is how and if the captions of these photos of mothers cause the images to be interpreted differently.
The reader is able to construct his or her thoughts by observing the small keys in each photo. Some of these keys are the use of color, setting, expression and focus in the scenery and objects around.
These photos do an excellent job of showing how just how bad the times were in the early 1900’s during the depression. They also show just how bad race relations were during this time in our country’s history as well. With that being said these photos can be taken and learned from in multiple ways. Because these photos are reminders they will forever live in history and are ones that I hate talking about because I would never want to experience either one of these situations nor walk in these people's shoes. I am so lucky to live in a free and thriving country that many people including myself take for granted at times.
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.
Images gain their power from the factors and decisions surrounding the site of production, site of the image, and the site of audiencing (Rose). If an observer takes an image and considers the effects each of these sites has had on their own reading of the image’s meaning, the viewer’s resulting analysis of the image will be more a more complete evaluation. The image of “Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir at Glacier Point, Yosemite” captures a time and place in such a way that even a century after the image’s creation, students of visual studies can still use it to better understand how and where an image develops its meaning.
This report will give historical information about Dorothea Lange, who photographed the “face” of the Great Depression. The project will audit her early life and photographs. It will also examine her role during the Great Depression. Dorothea Lange took pictures of anything that caught her eye, which is why her photographs do not have a particular classification. If her technique did have a vague analysis, it would be social realism, which is a style of painting, used in the 1930s, in which the scenes showed political protest.
I believe these contribute to the reader’s understanding of the conditions that people were living in at the time and it’s very easy to compare their lives and ours. For example, on page 36, there is a photo of a family alongside their house. The photo is relevant to the topic of discussion in that chapter and can give a visual to the conditions of each average household during America’s Great Depression. From this photo alone, without much of any context, you could analyze that the average household for a family is one to two rooms, and money is scarce even among the wealthy. Personally, I think the visuals are useful for further understanding the story and gaining an image of what the average life was
This essay will investigate the work of contemporary photographer Tim Walker, and historical photographer Ansel Adams. This essay will examine the many changes of how photography has evolved through the decades from the photographer’s style, use of equipment, techniques and what photography is used for. These changes will be seen by looking at the contemporary photographer and comparing them to the historical photographer.
“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still” said Dorothea Lange. This quote is shown to be true in the time of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression and is captured by all the breathtaking photographs that were taken during this struggling time. In the 1930s large dust storms began to occur due to severe drought and farming techniques. During this time millions of tons of topsoil were moved (Cox). This impacted hundreds of thousands of farmers in the great plain region. Unfortunately, the conditions left the farmers with little choice and many of them had to foreclose on their homes
Sally Mann’s style incorporates black and white photographs of her children, which are presented with “ordinary moments of childhood, suspended in time and transformed into aesthetic objects, takes on a distorted, even uncanny quality” (Arnason and Mansfield 719). Sally Mann photographed The New Mothers in 1989. This photograph’s most dominant elements are value and space. Having the photographs black and white really enhances the visibility of values. Most of Mann’s work is outside and has a define depth of field to blur out the background and emphasize the focus of the children. This compositional style helps to identify the high and low key values within the photos. The clothes, the reflection of the sun on the girls’ hair, and the girls fair skin are the part of the image that show high-key values, while the rest of the photo in more middle and low-key values. The intense depth of field increases a feeling of space for the viewer. In the photo you can see that the two young girls and their stroller is all in a line horizontally. Behind the girls you can notice they are outside in a open area because of the blurred grass and trees behind them. This photograph’s most dominant principles are movement and variety. The depth of field and lack of distraction in the background of the photo allows your eye to focus and move around with the subjects in the photo. The height of the subjects forms a triangle shape, which is
Set against the backdrop of World War II and its aftermath, the episode examines how photographers dealt with dramatic and tragic events like D-Day, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, and the questions their often extraordinary pictures raise about history as seen