W1: notes from video, Genius of Photography

Everything changed: Horrors of war
Machine age - 'holding the future', 'a contemporary being'

Documenting what it means to be human

Role of photography in art and society in 1920s? Who did it serve? masses/individual. operator of rules or free reign.

Systematic records of people and places. 'Removes photographer', factual style, mechanical reproduction of same shooting conditions. Early uses: botanic-like images of flora. Police mug shots.

Germany, Sander. Documentation of occupation, human typology of 7 types. 'sense of world pregnant with things that cannot be spoken' ie conditions in Germany and the fall of he Weimar Republic eg the notary - 'i am not less that what i was' - a subtle sense of solidness but his fine coat has not been replaced recently. Qualities of expression 'in what way can you help me?'

USSR, Alexanda Rodchenko. Art is dead, free of bourgeoiuse degeneracy. 'tool of the new man'. new society needs new ways of seeing. New compact cameras eg Leica, 'freed from tripod' and 'bellybutton' photos - can use any angle, 'photograph world differently' and alter perception. eg montage, cues form cinema. Collectivising their individuality. Meaning remains fluid, ambiguous - 'mute documents' - therefore can be harnessed to causes such as propaganda. Both techniques used in shooting the building of the White Sea Canal with its reeducated labour.

'Amplified human vision and the inability to see'

Paris, Eugene Atget: documenting city's inner core before redevelopment. Used old-fashioned equipment into the 1920s. Geometric, almost abstract, people are small. Documents were personal, but allowed 'everyone to see the same thing'. constantly photographs things in a way that does not document eg a tree cross Notre Dame, 'documenting a different range of reality'.

Technique for critiquing a photo: turn it up-side-down.

Paris, Man Ray. the territory of the unreal: the unconscious mind, dreams and desires. 'a natural maverick...discovered ways of being a photographer that were new' eg solarisation - aluminium look, robotic. On ground floor or Surrealism. Friends with Duchamp eg photographed dust over Duchamps' glass work. Reality does not need to be documented as a 'sober reality'.

Meets Atget in 1926. Surrealists like 'found objects' used out-of-context to project one into another consciousness. 'the great broth of detail that the world offers at any given moment'. Highly appropriated.

1929, Stuttgart - defining show of film and photography.

1934, Stalin, great terror, USSR - heroes declared enemies - even records liquidated. Rodchenko had to doctor books, ones he'd created to make 'unpeople'. Blacked out faces, clothes and shoulders remain 'proclaiming the human being'.

In Germany 1933, Sander fell foul of Nazis. They wanted racial types to be documented: 'highly idealised version of what its people should be'. Didn't want his ideosyncracy. Books banned. Photographed Nazis instead and passport photos of those trying to migrate. He had a category called 'the lost people' - included his son's death mask.

USA, Walker Evans - studied in Paris, influenced by Atget. Images of democracy - same sized portraits? rigid, imprisoned in cells? Dissonant voice in an age of utopias 'human society is a failure'. Seem simple: 'saying less forces subject to say more'. Used old fashioned camera - forced him to look.

Commissioned to take propaganda images related to Depression to portray government positively and idealise relief recipients. eg Ally May against weatherboard, 1936 - eyes and weatherboard are creased. All composition, no production methods.

Documentary - thought of as delivering truth and social agent - Evans hated both uses, 'just looks like the facts...not objective'. When he photographed poor houses he would arrange objects, minimise squalor and elevate objects to iconic status - clarity and beauty to better represent American life. Not sufficient for FSA who sacked him.

UK, Bill Brandt - human vulnerability. worked for photo magazines and worked in Man Ray's studios. 'a picture can be like a sculpture representing only what a photographer want to be represented'. Inventor of 'half way house between truth and fiction' eg photographed London in Blitz by moonlight.

Concluding thought: is photography a mirror or a window?