History of Photography

A detailed Summary of History of Photography

I chose for my term paper three extremely different photographers, who lived in the same era, yet they had contrary set of ideas. As I was analyzing which photographers I was going to write my term paper on, I ran into Robert Mapplethorpe. The reason why I wanted to analyze him was because I realized that such a talented photographer began experimenting his first photographs in the early 1970s with a Polaroid camera, by that time this camera was novelty and was being mass-marketed. I also realized how he becomes a product of his own time, ignoring what he called a photograph, yet becoming a well-known photographer. He did not feel a strong ideological commitment to photography; rather it simply became the medium that could best convey his statement. But he realized that photography had a history, and he set out to educate himself about it.

Mapplethorpe began mastering his technique, which made him different from all of the other photographers. Mapplethorpe did not consider himself a photographer, and did not aspire in any way to become one. Ironically, he became well known, although his idea was to take his own pictures rather than use someone else's from magazines. The Polaroid was popular, unfussy and r

Arbus liked using a flash in daylight, which gave an unnatural feel to the pictures. It gave her subjects a certain circus freak presence, picking up the shine on faces in a way that made them awkward and ugly, even grotesque, or that brought a careworn quality to them. The flash also casts a bizarre light on the account you just gave of how she worked, how she insinuated herself into someone's life. The flash creates an image that looks more like a confrontation than the seduction Avedon wants to describe in his photographs.

Richard Avedon is a chameleon adapting himself to different eras in photography and fashion. Avedon's portraiture of "ordinary" westerners is on the whole darker and more cutting than his earlier work. It's essential to the effect of the current subjects that they are presented as unaware of his designs on them. For Avedon's program is supraindividual. He wants to portray the whole American West as a blighted culture that spews out casualties by the bucket: misfits, drifters, degenerates, crackups, and prisoners-entrapped, either literally or by debasing work. Pawns in his indictment of their society, his subjects must have thought they were only standing very still for the camera. Commercial photography is meant to make the object photographed more desirable than it often is. But one expects that haute couture will not suffer by comparison. That it does in this exhibition attests, most satisfyingly, to the magic of photography.

What Avedon did with his style was to add allure into his photography. Although Avedon and Arbus worked in the same field, their idea of beauty towards society was completely different. What Avedon did to fashion photography was to add elegance. This elegance was not real, but it determines what beauty is in our society. Both Avedon and Mapplethorne used Andy Warhol as their iconic photographic image. No matter what else goes on in Richard Avedon's portraits, it is the white backgrounds what caught my eye. Especially in his older collections from the 1960s and '70s, when he began photographing celebrities and politicians, in a way resembling to what Annie Leibovitz's style.

Robert Mapplethorpe and Diane Arbus were all a product of sixties photography. The concept of beauty was not to photograph a perfectly coifed up woman wearing lots of makeup and barely any clothes. Mapplethorpe liked photographing men's bodies and transvestites. This caused controversy, society could not accept seeing naked men's bodies. We all grow up thinking that the human body is something natural and beautiful. Now I believe, have double standards. It is beautiful to photograph a naked woman, but you would never photograph a naked man, especially if you are another male. This also has to do with homophobia, men do not want to glimpse at men's bodies and say, "Wow, it is beautiful."

Arbus on the other

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Approximate Word count = 1924
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Arts