From: Pam Niedermayer (pam_pine@cape.com)
Date: 02/11/01-02:54:29 PM Z
It's been a long while since I've studied who did what vis a vis the
movement away from pictorialism; but I recall that it was the west
coast f64 group who were instrumental in that move, that Stieglitz
wasn't all that involved or important in the move. I thought
Stieglitz's primary contribution was the ennobling of photography as
an art.
Also, maybe the market had a lot to do with the move, that probably
more people bought sharp prints than unsharp, that the sharpness was
seen as being more "photographic", better representing our world as we
see it, perhaps seemingly "without human intervention", some sort of
post WWII machine age movement?
Pam
shannon stoney wrote:
>
> In regard to sneering dismissals of Pictorialism: I think this is still
> taught in colleges and universities, in my experience. I am a photo major
> , and the mainstream view at my university seems to be that Pictorialism
> is silly and Modernism rules. This is more the case with teachers in the
> photo dept than with the art history people, though, I think. It may take
> a while before people stop making fun of Pictorialism. It's weird that
> even some people who consider themselves thoroughly post-modern in their
> sensibility still sort of act as mouthpieces for Modernism in their
> complete contempt for Pictorialism. But Steiglitz was a very powerful
> personality, and a rather arrogant one for all his greatness, and his
> eventual conclusion that the perfectly focussed, perfectly sharp gelatin
> silver print was the apotheosis of photography may take a long time to go
> away. (let's just be glad we weren't married to him, like O'Keefe!)
>
> --shannon
-- Pamela G. Niedermayer Pinehill Softworks Inc. 600 W. 28th St., Suite 103 Austin, TX 78705 512-236-1677 http://www.pinehill.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 03/06/01-04:55:38 PM Z CST