Genius Of Photography Part 2

What are Typologies?
Typology is the study of types. In photography, typology is a suite of images or related forms, shot in a consistent, repetitive manner. The work is about comparisons, and can only be fully understood when the images are viewed as a complete series. Anna Atkins and Karl Blossfeldt are examples of artists who work with typologies.


What was the 'face of the times'?
August Sander is a commercial portrait photographer who did a typology of people. He published a selection of his portraits onto the all encompassing title ‘The Face of the Times’. By collecting people and fitted them into a frame but photographed them using a method of placing them in various social types such as Farmers, young farmers, Mother and farmer etc.


Which magazine did Rodchenko design?
Rodchenko designed a magazine called 'USSR en construction'. A showcase of political propaganda, glorifying the acheivements of the soviet system. 


What is photo-montage?
Photo-montage is a graphic technique that took its cue from cinema montage, mastered by Rodchenko who had treated photographs as royal footage. By cutting, joining, retouching, and re- photographing them to conjure up dizzying visions of the future. Photomontage shows photographs for what they really are, mute documents whose meaning remains fluid.


Why did Eugene Atget use albumen prints in the 1920's?
Eugene Atget continued to use albumen prints due to his skill in the technique, and found it difficult to use modern materials, as he didn't know how to use them.


What is solarisation and how was it discovered?
Solarisation was discovered by Man Ray in the late 1920’s. He had made the people in his photographs look as though they’re faces are made of aluminium, which gave it a sleek and metallic look that portrayed them as super people, slightly inhuman and robotic. Dark areas appear light or light areas appear dark suggesting that the photographic print is wholly or partially reversed in tone.


What was the relationship between Bernice Abbot and Eugene Atget?
Bernice Abbott was a young American photographer and one of Man-rays many assistants, who pictured Atget as a kind, living, breathing found object in 1927. Abbott became the largest collector of Atget’s work when she purchased his estate, bringing 5000 of Atget’s negatives to America popularising the work.


Why was Walker Evans fired from the FSA?
Walker Evans had been commissioned to produce propaganda images for the Farms Security Agency set up to ease the effects of depression in rural America. Evans’s understanding of documented photography was much more complex, but when Evans readily moulded reality to fit his personal vision he couldn’t make that vision conform to the propaganda requirements of the FSA in 1937 and was therefore fired.