By 1900 cameras were cheap and easy (Kodak's slogan was "You press the button, we do the rest"), and millions of people took snapshots. Some photographers asked whether photography could be an art as serious as painting. Others used it to show the public truths it had not seen. Both paths grew from the early photography of Daguerre, Talbot and Cameron.
In New York, Alfred Stieglitz (1864 to 1946) led the fight for photography as art. He founded the Photo-Secession in 1902, published the magazine Camera Work, and ran a gallery known as "291," where he showed both photographs and modern painting, including some of the first American showings of Picasso and the work of Georgia O'Keeffe, whom he later married.
Looking closely: The Steerage
Describe. On an ocean liner, passengers crowd the lower, cheapest deck (the steerage) and an upper deck, divided by a white gangway; a man in a straw hat leans on the rail above. Analyze. Stieglitz saw the scene as shapes: the diagonal of the gangway, the round straw hat, the funnel, the stairway, the slanting mast. He said he saw "a picture of shapes" and ran for his camera. Interpret. It is a picture of modern life and of class, upper deck and lower, and also a composition as ordered as a painting. Stieglitz published it in Camera Work in 1911 and considered it one of his best photographs.
Key idea
Documentary: Migrant Mother
In the 1930s the U.S. government's Farm Security Administration hired photographers, among them Dorothea Lange (1895 to 1965) and Walker Evans, to record rural poverty during the Great Depression and build support for aid. In March 1936 Lange stopped at a pea pickers' camp near Nipomo, California, where crops had failed. She made a series of exposures of a mother and her children, moving closer each time. In the best known, the mother looks off into the distance, one hand at her chin; two children turn their faces into her shoulders and a baby sleeps on her lap. The photograph appeared in newspapers, and the government sent food to the camp. The mother, Florence Owens Thompson, was identified decades later; she said she was never paid and wished the picture had not made her a symbol.
Common mistake
Why it works
Worked example: What was chosen?
- Moving closer removes distractions and fills the frame with faces and hands.
- The children turning away put all the focus on the mother's face.
- Lange chose which exposure to release, and she chose this one.
Answer: Because of the photographer's choices of distance, framing and which print to show.