ITAP Part 2-Genius of Photography Questions Part 2

Genius of Photography Questions Part 2


1.What are Typologies?


Typologies refer to a methodical image- making approach that summarizes a group of images in retrospect by anticipating the style that a given artist will utilize to record a particular subject. It can be compared to earlier photographs or a type of subject matter that an artist would be likely to portray; it’s used so that a viewer can get to know something better if it is compared to something else. Typologies discipline photography’s tendencies in order to create pure documents, just the facts and nothing else.

2.What was “The Face of the Times”?

August Sander a commercial portrait photographer sis a typology of people, when he became a modernist in 1929, 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 etc.

3.Which magazine did Rodchenko design?

Rodchenko designed the photography magazine called the USS en construction; it was a showcase of political propaganda glorifying the achievements of the soviet system that portrays radical photographic styled work combined with cutting- edge graphics.

4.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, suppressing their individuality collectivizing their energies. By cutting, pasting, 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.

5.Why did Eugene Atget use albumen prints in the 1920’s?


Eugene Atget another commercial portrait photographer had created albumen prints during the 1800’s and all the way throughout to the 1920’s because he was skillful in it but found difficulty in using modern materials for photographs as he didn’t know how to use them.

6.What is solarisation and how was it discovered?

Solarization was discovered by Man Ray in the late 1920’s, the use of it was through placing objects in a darkroom onto photographic paper and exposing it briefly to create interesting and unique patterns on the paper. H e had made the people look as though they’re faces are made of aluminum  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 darks suggesting that the photographic print is wholly or partially reversed in tone. 

7.What was the relationship between Bernice Abbott 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 popularizing the work Eugene Atget.

8.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 the ease of the effects of depression in rural America. Evans’s understanding of documented photography was much more complex, but when Evans readily molded reality to fit his personal vision he couldn’t make that vision conform to the propaganda requirements of the FSA in 1937 and was sacked.