aqert.blogg.se - Cubism photography

His Vortographs thus represent a pronounced turn towards avant-garde approaches later in his career, following his interactions with the artists and writers of the English Vorticist movement - primarily Ezra Pound - and his publication of "The Future of Pictorial Photography" in 1916. He was also a noted portrait photographer, whose 1913 publication Men of Mark contained prints of a raft of venerable authors, artists, and statesmen. Prior to his work as an abstract photographer, Alvin Langdon Coburn was associated with the Pictorialist movement, which sought to bring to photography the impressionistic and atmospheric qualities of late-nineteenth-century painting. A sense of dynamic movement is generated, as light is embodied in multilayered planes which seem as tangible as the fractured object from which they are thrown off.

Converging towards the top of the photograph, they contrast with the compact crystalline shapes to the lower left. This image, one of a number by Coburn seen as the first truly abstract photographs, consists of an intricate pattern made up of sharp diagonal planes.

Garnett began to photograph tract housing and machine-harvested fields from the wing of his domestic aircraft, the idea of photographing the earth from above was new and strange, in many cases producing surreal images which seemed totally disconnected from the subject-matter they represented.

It is impossible to evoke the spirit of abstract photography without mentioning the specific development of aerial photography, a method which now has a much wider currency across commercial and popular art.

Instead, it focuses on the irregular forms and impressions which can be generated by representing familiar objects in new ways: from Alvin Langdon Coburn's Vortographs, made using a camera lens adapted with fragments of broken mirror, to contemporary works by Walead Beshty, Liz Deschenes and others.

As a general rule, abstract photography has tended to avert its gaze from extraordinary and arresting subject-matter.

Rather than capturing an image by the passage of light through shutters onto photosensitive paper, the paper itself is directly manipulated and treated - often brought into contact with other objects - allowing for a potentially endless array of effects.

Since the early advances of Schad, Man Ray et al, abstract artists have continually returned to the "photogram" - the cameraless photograph - as a medium allowing for uniquely self-reflexive and creative interventions into the photographic form.In the early twentieth century, artists such as Christian Schad, Man Ray, and László Moholy-Nagy began to create bricolage-style works by placing found objects directly onto photosensitive paper, generating graphically-arresting images in which the everyday detritus of modern life is rendered luminous and strange. One of the key advances of abstract photography has been the realization that cameras are not required to make photographs.