From: Sandy King (sanking@clemson.edu)
Date: 10/05/03-10:49:35 AM Z
Shannon,
In fact I do believe that Neo-Pictorialism is a form of Modernism.
Let's remember that the major bone of contention between the
pictorialists and the advocates of straight photography was over
process, not content. Most of the advocates of straight photography
continued to photograph the landscape, which had been the most
important pictorial subject, and the picturesque style, based on
embellishment or idealization of the subject, continued to dominate.
And for sure the ideas about pictorial composition continued in the
work of even documentary workers like Dorothea Lange and Eugene Smith.
In any event I am of the impression that there is far more in common
between Neo-Pictorialism and Modernism than between either off these
tendencies and the extreme ideological intellectualization of the
image making process that we see in the post-modern conceptual work
of people like Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Ann Wulff, Barbara
Kruger, just to mention a few artists of this bent who emerged out of
the 80s.
So what we have with Neo-Pictorialism and Modernism are movements
that place greater importance on a self-referencing formalism that
often places more value on the medium itself than what the image is
about.
Sandy
>Sandy wrote:
>
>>
>>Why has this taken place? Well, from my perspective much of it is
>>due to a kind of academic formalism that has resulted from the
>>teaching of photography at the college and university levels.
>>Academic formalism evolved from an attitude that places minimal
>>value on the thing being photographed (from whence the term
>>"nominal subject matter") and maximum importance on the freedom of
>>the photographer to make maximum use of the possibilities of the
>>media, thus the recuperation of historical printing processes and
>>the return to antiquated art strategies (surrealism, etc.)
>
>
>That's interesting. Do you see neo-Pictorialism, then, as a kind of
>modernism? I associate formalism with modernism, which is the
>reason I ask. It would be ironic if Pictorialism, which was once
>seen as the opposite of photographic modernism in the early 20th
>century, turned out to be its logical extension in the late 20th
>century.
>
>--shannon
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