THE WEST AND THE COLD WAR
- Battle-toughened photographers such as Larry Burrows (1926-1971), Carl Mydans (1907-2004) and David Douglas Duncan sent back close-up photographs of ordinary soldiers suffering cold, privation, and the death of friends.
- The Korean War ended in 1953, but international tensions continued to rise.
- Artist and photographer Ben Shahn (1898-1969) , who had made images for the Farm Security Administration, summed up the parallel changes in photographic practice: "during the thirties art had been swept by movement toward abstraction . Not only was the social dream rejected, but any dream at all."
- Perhaps the best example of the shift from social documentary to abstraction is provided by Aaron Siskind's work.
- Surrealism and abstraction became international visual languages, not only in advertising but also for a younger generation of artists.
- Federick Arizona (1905-1999) blended Surrealism and abstraction in psychologically disturbing images.
- He photographed still lives made from the desiccated corpses of desert animals, fusing formal beauty with frightening decay.
- Surrealism and abstraction were among a number of strategies for contesting the notions that photography must record the external world, or that it was obliged to support the humanitarian task of social betterment.
TELEVISION, PHOTOJOURNALISM, AND NATIONAL EVENTS
- Despite increased sales of television sets by the mid-1960's , national television news did not surpass newspapers and picture magazines as the public's major source of current events information until the early 1970's.
- Americans also learned about the post World War II Civil Rights movement, which started in the late 1950's to protest racial segregation in the South and too secure voting rights for African- Americans, from a mix of photography and other media.
- In the early 1960's, photographers such as Bruce Davidson and Danny Lyon traveled through the South, picturing events and confrontations.
- From 1955 to 1975, television and photography combined to disseminate images of war and conflict.
- While Life magazine's photographs never approached the patriotic fervor expressed in Joe Rosenthal's images of the flag-rising in Iwo Jima during World War II, they did repeatedly communicate the average person's experience of the war, an approach pioneered by W. Eugene Smith.
PHOTOGRAPHY IN ART
- During the postwar decades, while photography gained a greater presence in international art movements, photojournalism emerged as a new source fir artists interested in topical issues.
- The wider use of photography also owed to the fact that artists in many media increasingly employed the camera to record their work.
- British Pop art was anti-academic, rejecting the traditional themes and subjects taught in art school.
- Warhol urged portrait clients to visit public photo-booths, commonly called Photomat for their brand-name.