THE NEW ATOMIC ERA
We had entered a new Atomic Age. A new direction and a new threat to mankind were at at hand,and the possibilities of physics and chemistry were almost unlimited.Two World wars had scared the earth, and in 1949 both Western and Eastern Europe were a shambles of ruined structures and disorientated men and women. `a `European resurrection had come to pass, a coming of new energy and thought, and new and better ways of communication had to be established. Photography had documented both the wars, the depression between them and a;almost every aspect of the "post-atomic-bomb" civilization. The age old phrase "seeing is believing" had never been more true,and its true-to-nature medium was photography in printed matter. The images of Hiroshima after the detonation of the atomic bomb caused both those
responsible and the general public to ask the fearful question "What have we done?
What have we made?", and this, combined with information and images about the German Holocaust which followed Germany's surrender forced the younger generation to think seriously about the situation of mankind, the future of civilization and the implications of the new technology. Robert Oppenheimer said at an MIT lecture that "the physicist has learned to sin", and this stressed once again the philosophical question of man's responsibility to man which had become so burning through the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos which in turn resulted in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The threat that hung in the air was clearly undersigned by Edward Teller's idea and the eventual manufacturing of the Hydrogen Bomb: man had found the elements to destroy himself and eradicate all life from the planet earth. Rachel Carson's books
The Sea Around Us and The Silent spring made the public for the first time aware of the ecological imbalance of our planet and the future problems of household products and DDT on our hemisphere. She painted a desolate future that wasn't acknowledged until two decades later.
The FOOTPRINTS or FLOOR PLANS for the structure of the world that was to be built in Politics, Science and the Arts in the Fifties and years to come were created by and composed of individual actions and collective events of the time, and the post-war technology which had taken centuries to develop had a determining influence on the course of events. Right or wrong, true or false, right or left the fifties established ideas, concepts and ideologies that have affected our lives and will continue until the end of this century and into the next.
Criteria,Research into the mid-century period makes it possible to trace our progress, establish our position today, and maybe even gain an insight into our future
What we are doing here is revisiting the photography of the mid-century, and in doing so we cannot fail to realize how important it was to display, exhibit and publish the work o the creative photographers who were left behind by the avalanche of commercial photography after the second world war.
In making this selection from photography of the 1950's, I have adhered largely to the same criteria that i followed during my work as editor-in-chief of Camera magazine in the 1960's,1970'sand the beginning of the 1980's. There is in fact no infallible criterion for what makes a master, and the qualities which make up the artistry of one photographer may vary considerably to those which constitute another's skill. For me,however, there are four basic elements: intention,inventiveness, craftsmanship and contribution; and although the percentage of each element varies from case to case, the sum total is always 100%
Intention:
The photographers purpose and aim in the pursuit of his ~medium~. his motive, plan, ambition and desire.
Inventiveness:
The photographers concept, originality, inventiveness of style and technique~e.
Craftsmanship:
The photographers skill, art, technique and procedure in
his approach to his medium.
Contribution:
The photographers art of contributing and donating to the historical and pedagogical areas of the medium.
At the turn of the century, in 1900, photography was just 61 years old. Interested persons from neighboring or entirely distant professions started to occupy themselves with the medium and create an art form which was to change dramatically the visual art of this century.While periodicals institutions and historians were busily expounding on the history of the new art and the modern movements, a new visual form, for the most part excluded from museums, was being developed by primarily~ anonymous individuals. But it was not until after World War II that a position of any real and international importance was allotted to photography, and at the turn of the century the prospects for those who had set their sights on this new medium were far from encouraging.
Social Influences on Culture
The 19505 produced new social tendencies, and the medium of photography - which was still not regarded as an authentic art form - recorded the~rends and idiosyncrasies of the time in still photographs, film and. video,.while the world of painting opted for abstraction, photography documented the era with a hitherto unprecedented exactitude and realism. The philosophic and social structures of the time had entered a new phase, and new patterns were in the process of creation
In an interview with Franz Kline, Frank 0'Hara described the new abstract expressionist movement in painting as follows:
"The painters of this movement, so totally different from each other in aspect, so totally without the look of a school, have given us Americans an art which for the first time in our history we can love and emulate, aspire to and understand, without provincial digression of prejudice~. The Europeanization of our sensibilities has at last been exorcised as if by magic, an event of some violence which Henry James would have hailed as eagerly as Walt ~Whitman and which allows us as a nation to exist internationally. We have something to offer and to give beside admiration on the one hand. and refuge on the other."
Evergreen Review, Autumn 1958
And, in the same interview, Kline said:
"Criticism must come from those who are around it, who are not shocked that someone should be doing it at all. It should be exciting, and in a way that excitement comes from, in looking at it, that it's not that autumn scene you love, it's not the portrait of your grandmother.
Which reminds me of Boston, for some reason. You know I studied-there for a while and once later I was up there for a show and met this Bostonian who ~ thought I looked pretty Bohemian. His was someone's definition of a Bohemian artist was someone could live where animals would die. He also talked a lot about the 8th Street Club and said that Hans Hofmann arid Clem Greenberg ran it, which is like Ruskin saying that Rowlandson and Daumier used up enough copper to clad the British Navy and it's too bad they didn't sink it. * Why was he so upset about an artists club in another city? You get classified as a New York painter or poet automatically. They do it in Boston or Philadelphia, you don't do it yourself.'1
Franz Kline
* Hofmann - a painter; Greenberg - a critic; Ruskin - also a critic; Rowlandson and Daumier - etchers.
This refers to the fact that an international school of painting had been created in New York for the first time in America after centuries of domination by European culture. America was in search of itself and, in addition to painting and music, photography was the mirror of the times. The new literature also played a very big role, and the Bohemian style - influenced by Europeans like Kirkegaard, Sartre and Hegel as well as some Eastern philosophies - carried on into the Beat Generation.
The Beatniks
"America
America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, l956~6.
I can't stand ~ my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem until I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
Allen Ginsberg HOWL No.4, The City tights Pocket Book
The rebellion taking place in all the arts really took hold, and an influence on photography was inevitable. In his book on the Beat Generation, Bruce Cook writes as follows:
"But the sudden, spontaneous, and enormously wide appeal of the Beats could not easily be dismissed. It vexed the Partisan Review people and caused interest and concern among the editors of the mass media.- as well, in both instances, it should have. It was the first truly popular literary movement to take hold among the American young since the Lost Generation of the 1920s. And at its height, interest in Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, et al., reached down further in society than it had with Hemingway;~y and Fitzgerald~d thirty-five years before. And to older Americans and those of the young who were of more conservative disposition, the Beats were at least an interesting disruption in what even they had come to regard as an all too placid period. Thus the "Beat coffee shops that opened in nearly every American city over a 100,000; thus the spate of Beatnik ~jokes that celebrated the casual perversity of their attitudes in the old-fashioned jive talk - lots of "cool" and "crazy" - that was the popular version of Beat jargon; and thus, too, the butchered movie version of Jack Kerouac '5 "The Subterraneans" and an even worse film titled "The Beat Generation"; and thus, finally, the Beatnik characters that showed up in "The Romance of Helen Trent" and "Popeye", and the rent-a-Beatnik fad that ran its course in the classified columns of the Village Voice."
Beat Generation, by Bruce Cook Charles Scribners Sons, 1971
It was a chaotic renaissance of a kind.Khaki trousers or blue ~jeans worn with tennis shoes and a torn ~~shirt~were the new fashion. The art student was ?in!t, and the philosophy of the moment was based on an existentialism derived~ from a nihilism resulting from man's threat of self~destruction through the hydrogen bomb and the unknown quantities of nuclear waste which could retain its lethality for some thousands of years buried deep in the earth. The other side side of the coin was the carelessness of the new post-war carefree society which produced petticoats, bobbysocks, girlfriends, big, fast,chrome ornamented and streamlined cars, drive-in cinemas, car-hops, soda pop and whisky, coffee bars and a new "we only live once attitude which troubled post~war parents in America and elsewhere. Education became The University as High ~school was no longer sufficient, and the ~new Left lived in luxury with Saarinen, Eames and Bertoia chairs, and Naguchi kidney shaped tables, Braun radios, Japanese lanterns and all the other design orientated products bearing the stamp of approval of the Architecture Department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And in all this, photography played an important role as part of all the social changes a role which it was to continue to play in the decades to come.
Choice
Although there are a number of styles which merge into one another, there are also some photographers who, while excelling as artists in photography, seem to have created new categories, either with or with~t reference to the existing groups. And whereas they could be referred to with equal justification within the framework of Objectivity, subjectivity or Aesthetics, their work is not usually categorized until later in their lives. ~his was a phenomenon of the fifties, and some of these photographers who have only recently been recognized have become the mentors who have guided many members of the younger generation by virtue of their vitality - and perhaps also due to their direct and somewhat idiosyncratic relationship to the human condition. these photographers include Weegee, ~Lisette Model, Christoph Stromholm, William Klein and Ed Van Der Elsken, to mention some of the names which have demanded attention in recent times.
When we look back over their work, we observe a consistency of style from the fifties up till today. ~hey may have been at odds with the accepted standards of the time, but this is no rare thing in the cultural development of the past hundred years, and particularly since the beginning of modern art.
Color in Photography
The introduction onto the market of Kodachrome in l935~ may be regarded as the beginning of color photography as an article of mass consumption. The First Generation of color photographers was active between approximately l956~8 and 1968, a period of thirty years of which the modes, manners and styles are well known, and in which those working in color were very dependent on books, magazines, journals and commercial enterprises. ~his was a period in which experimentation was at its peak and important developments were taking place in the color film. It was also a period in which photographers were obliged to use whatever material was commercially available, although the results were not always as satisfactory as could have been desired. The technical side lagged behind the aesthetic aspect, and the problems of colorfast systems made the area of color photography undesirable to both galleries and museums. In spite of evidence of outstanding talent, color photographers were regarded as step-children of the medium, except by the publishers who created and displayed the best qualities of color photography in their publications.
The problem of colorfastness cropped up again and again, although it is my contention that color photography was no less viable than watercolors and aquarelles~, and certain manufacturers maintained that the problem of color fastness was solved by color dyes devoid of oxidizing materials such as silver nitrate.