Classic Essays on Photography ed. by Alan Trachtenberg (1980)

(Introduction by the editor)

Photogrpahy is still a discipline which lacks a critical tradition, a tradition of serious writing. What the medium also lacks is the intellectual history of the medium, a history of ideas about photography. History of a medium can be defined as documentations / records of thinking about the medium, its evolving character, functions and its limits, and its social and cultural properties. The evolution of the medium also needs to be read against a larger sociological background in which photography plays a part.

In its earliest moment of development, photogrpahy was considered primarily a new means of communication about what reality was like. Its second stage of development has to do with the medium could be seen as fine arts in a traditional sense. The medium with its capacity for being mass reproduced and consumed was recieved and adopted differently in various cultures and socieites. However, the dominant style among different countries was pictorialism which sought after a picturequse effect in painting. Pictorialism can be seen as an extension of the aesthetics applied to painting, it ignores the unqiue characteristics of the medium. The counter-reacting style is straight photography which eschewed any manipulation of any post-shooting alterations on photographs. one of the parctioners was Paul Strand whose photographs both abstract patterns while the objective identity of the object is preserved.

Also at this stage that application of photography for different purposes expanded. Lewis Hine, following the footstep of Jocab Riis, continued to crusade for children's right with photography. Such an application of photography for socail purposes presaged the FSA projects in late 1930s.

I was reading the article by Sylvia Chan, "Realism or Socialt Realism?: The "Proletarian' Episode in Modern Chinese Literatire 1927-1932"

Realism as a method, methodology --- the author tries as much as possible to avoid imparting personal emotions and feelings in his / her description of the reality. The description should be as truthful to reality as possible. Realism in this sense is both the tool and the goal.

Socialist Realism concerns primarily the ideological content of realism with which the author uses realism as a vechnical to achieve educating the readers of some prescribed ideas.

Social realism as a style prioritizes social contents as the most important aspect among other dimensions of a piece of work.

The debates revovled around contending definitions of what realism is, and whether realism is only a vechicle to achieve some larger goals.

Charles Sheeler's cross media creation of art is the theme of the current exhibition at National Gallery of Art through August. http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/sheelerinfo.shtm

Stieglitz named Sheeler, Morton Schamberg and Paul Strand as the "Trinity of Photography"

Sheeler saw photographs as preparatory drawings to help study and plan out composition for his paintings.

As a reference to Sheeler's cross media creation, Ben Shahn's use of photography both as inspirations for and studies for his paintings may strike a similar chord.
(Ref: Laura Katzman's Deconstructing Documentary: Ben Shahn's use of photography.)