Today I would like to introduce for photographic analysis Post-Modernist photographer Renee Cox, who like Walter Evans engaged an audience that had been denied inclusion in the cannons of photographic art, Afro-Americans.

    Today I would like to take liberty with an essay by John Berger, Ways of Seeing by re-appropriating his idea of vanity as expressed in painting and transfer it to photography;" You have photographed a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you published her photograph and entitled it Kate Middleton, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure".

     The question is for who's pleasure was this photograph taken, given the slumping European economy does the consumer have a desire for this form of consumption or is it driven by another element? The answer to this question might be found in the accompanying video.

    Photographer Renee Cox, offers not only a re-appropriation of a classic nude but is both author and subject of the "gaze".

                 

End of Innocence: Questioning Photography

     Susan Sontag, in her essay America Seen through Photographs, Darkly explores the evolution of photography in the twentieth century through Walt Whitman's vision of America as expressed in the publication Leaves of Grass; "If each precise object or condition or combination or process exhibits a  beauty, it becomes superficial to single out some things as beautiful and others as not".

     Sontag's argument, "To photograph is to confer importance.  There is probably no subject that cannot be beautified; moreover there is no way to suppress the tendency inherent in all photographs to accord value to their subjects".

     A photograph from Edward Steichen's Family of Man.  Steichen is credited with being the first fashion photographer of the twentieth century as well as one of the highest paid. Later he become the Director of Photography for MoMa.  Sontag's criticism;"Steichen set up the show to make it possible for each viewer to identify with a great many of the people depicted and, potentially , with the subject of every photograph: citizens of World Photography all".

     Fashion photographer Diane Arbus took a different approach.

 

     Sontag's argument, "The Arbus photographs convey the anti-humanist message which people of good will in the 1970's are eager to be troubled by just as they wished, in the 1950's to be consoled and distracted by a sentimental humanism".

     "American photography has moved from affirmation to erosion to finally, a parody of Whitman's program".

Photography as Business

      Photojournalism has evolved to a business and as a point of social awareness and often leading to the path of Paparazzi.  The public's consumption of these images has drawn a fine line between Photojournalism and Paparazzi.  Photojournalist Weegee aka Arthur Fellig gained a reputation for arriving at the scene of a crime even before the police enabling him to sustain a career from the 1940's until his death in 1968

   Pulitzer Prize winning Photojournalist Kevin Carter had a much shorter career

Photography as Art

     Critic Solomon-Godeau states in her article, Living with Contradictions: Critical Practices in the

Age of Supply-Side Aesthetics; "the institutions and discourses that collectively function to construct the object "art" are allied to the material determinations of the  market place, which themselves establish and conform the commodity status of the work of art".

     Today the work of artist will be given to explore this contradiction in the evolution of photography, Walter Evans and Damon Lewis.

Walter Evans took a series of candid photos on the New York City Subway using the technology available to him which enabled him to conceal the camera in his coat.

     New York Times Photojournalist Damon Lewis won third prize for Picture of the Year International, unknown to the judges at the time was that the photos were taken on an iPhone with a Hipstamtic app.:

   Each photographer used the technology available to him yet one is Art and one is not, can you guess which one?