Miah Johnson MFA works: February 2013

Miah Nate Johnson

Oliver Wasow

MFA Residency Semester 1

2nd paper

Abstract street photography makings of Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand.

Street photography is life of its own, Simply put it is a vision of the unknown and unexplained on a piece of paper or now a digital screen. It is a voyeuristic look into our culture and how one perceives values of social dynamics of the world with a camera. Street photography could be the argument of the discipline of the snapshot.

Large picture magazines from America to Europe begin to appear on the newsstands during the 1920’s to around 1960‘s. Photo essays brought the world to the common person with their editorial stylized format. This was a movement of showing the climate of todays life. During the Depression Era the Roosevelt administration formed the FSA, a government program to photograph the life of Americans. The archives of images mostly show a record of the times, with architecture and immediacy of daily life.. but there are some rare abstract images of Walker Evans, Ben Shahn and Dorothea Lange that begin to show a spontaneous style.

As John Szarkowski stated “ Most of those who where called documentary photographers a generation ago... made their pictures in the service of a social cause to show what was wrong with the world, and to persuade their fellows to take action and make it right... A new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward a more personal ends. Their aim has not to reform life but to know it”

(Joselit

)

America would see drastic changes in, art, music, literature, science and economics after World War Two it was the era of modern world.

Abstract Expressionism which was on the forefront with Pollock, Klein, Rothko and De Kooning conveyed a impulsive style in form, composition and color in the art world. It was the act of being, of expressive self awareness.

In 1952, Henri Cartier-Bresson published The Decisive Moment. It was a first where the camera told the story of the geometric world of definite moment. The Family of Man opened at MOMA in 1955 curated by Steichen. It was the largest collection of photos ever compiled. Its stylized manner looked into the everyday life of people. The photos where traditional in formal framing and composition, but some images where very free in style.

In 1954 Robert Frank who was influenced by Walker Evans and Bill Brandt.

was awarded with a Guggenheim fellowship which was to create an "observation and record of what one naturalized American finds to see in the United States."

"I was absolutely free just to turn left or turn right without knowing what I would find."

With 27,000 images Frank made he chose just 83 images for the final portfolio. Grove Press published The AMERICANS in 1959. The freestyle beatnik poet Jack Kerouac wrote the opening text.

Robert Franks work showed an America which was a dark, lonely, a naked look into ourselves as a new America. Gritty grainy photographs with strange angles and tilted horizons it gave the viewer a sense of tension a perception of immediacy. The work was impulsive and unforced in style, which broke the rules of the composition. It was a veil uncovered on a proud nation which won a war. While working on The Americans Frank became more relaxed with a state of grace of the experience with a gestural move that captured the moment. Frank compared many of his photographs or state of mind with numerous writers that expressed their awareness or consciousness of the times.

Frank wrote: I thought of something Malraux wrote: “ To transform destiny into awareness”One is embarrassed to want so much for oneself. But how else are you going to justify your failure and effort.

The critics and art reviewers gave the book vexed reviews, Critics stated Franks work as anti-American, contempt for any standards of quality, meaningless blur, grainy images, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness.It was described as a sad poem by a very sick person.

Two shows came out of the work but it faded out of the art world till APERTURE press reissued The Americans in 1968.

The Americans soon became the textbook for freedom of the frame, composition and subject matter. To know life is what mattered. It still holds as the one of the most important photography books today.

Numerous photographers of the 1970’s took The Americans and its sense of freedom to the next level in the world of photography. Garry Winogrand, Lee Freidlander, Joel Meyerowitz, Charles Harbutt,and Burk Uzzle to mention a few.

Garry Winogrand style was influenced by Walker Evans and Robert Frank and the New York Photo League. Winogrand is the most influential photographer where The Americans broke off and a new form of street photography was created. Winogrand realized the importance of Robert Franks work the “lyrical deception”

. Winogrand realized the images breathed with a unconscious informal style.(Szarkowski 7)

Garry Winogrand used the photograph not as a political platform of discussion but rather a notebook to sketch the world in front of him. Turning his camera onto the streets of New York and LA , he showed a look into how we interact in society. With a urgency and somewhat strange twist on irony the photographs showed an ugliness of Americas society. The images enticed the viewer with titled horizons, a willing suspension of belief, and strangeness of curiosity.

“I remember how he drank his coffee- almost attacking the cup, as if he wanted to chew it”

This was very much like Warhol who was showing America in its dematerialized rawness, with his silk screens and paintings. This exposed America to a new form of design and thought in works that where considered to be mundane in nature, such as Serra and Oldenberg.

In 1966 Toward a Social Landscape exhibited at the George Eastman House.

The exhibition showed Lee Friedlander, Duane Michals, Bruce Davidson, and Danny Lyon. MoMA exhibited New Documents the works of Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, curated by Szarkowski. It was the era that made the world transparent the expression of full freedom.

“I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs” Garry Winogrand once said.

Each of these photographers has lead me onto my path of seeing the world. The traditional sense of the frame. Working quickly with the eye so the camera and hand become one. The off style composition and subject matter where it leaves the viewer with a story, but one the viewer must see themselves. Some of my images look into the social conditions we face as a culture. Loneliness, politics, race, depression, humor, love companionship all fall into my photographs with a subtle push. My aim is to pull the viewer into the frame and make them think, to feel and to question their surroundings and themselves.

Whether I succeed in this realm of the viewers subconscious through my images of perception and description, I will have to battle.

My work PERCEPTIONS a black and white series that juxtaposes parallel or mirroring images that subtly bring the viewer into relationship with seemingly contrasting elements. In these images, relationships emerge slowly and sometimes bestow themselves with a finality.

My work explores the relationship between the constructed backdrops of modern society and the individuals who play out their private, human dramas within and against these public spaces.

The images are typically ordinary moments between ordinary people; nothing special, as they say. But for me there is beauty in such experiences and an instinctual need to look rather than look away. Why should we care about the every day mundane? It is because through the act of bearing witness, we transform the mundane into art.

MIAH