THE GREAT DIVIDE
MASS MEDIA AND MASS MARKETS
- By 1880, photography had been quietly absorbed into the texture of everyday life.
- In the late 1880's , there were more than sixty photographic journals and 161 photographic societies around the world.
- The increase on amateur photography promoted newspaper editors to run camera columns that served the people sometimes jokingly called "photophiends".
- Art photographers were compelled to engage modern life.
- Pictorialism- a kind of photography that rejected industrialization for evocative, often hand-painted photographic images.
- Experiments in photomechanical processes led to the development of the half-tone process, which allowed publications to reproduce photographic images directly, rather than through engravings.
- During the 1890'2, it became cheaper, easier, and faster to use half-tones than to hire artists to make sketches, or to translate photographs into gravings.
- The half-tone invested modern life with visual information to an unprecedented degree.
- Specialized press photographers, agencies, and networks emerged, and pages were redesigned to include more photographs in place of descriptive text.
- Rather than wait for news to happen, news photographers were sent around the world to places where incidents were likely to occur.
- For news and features stories, editors sought unusual, candid, or dramatic pictures.
- The images were routinely cropped, retouched, and sequenced without the photographer's prior knowledge or permission.
- The popularity of illustrated newspaper, as well as magazines, all of which engaged in intense rivalry for original pictures.The competition for pictures to sell to the press spurred photographers to invade the privacy of public figures, such as German statesman Otts von Bismarck, who was clandestinely photographed on his deathbed by photographers who climbed on a window.
- Advertisers began using photographs to sell an ever-increasing number of products.
" YOU PRESS THE BUTTON- WE DO THE REST"
- In 1888, the Eastman Dry Plate Company in Rochester, New York, began manufacturing the Kodak camera.
- The fist of many cameras intended for casual use by middle-class consumers.
- The camera had a fix focus- that is, the photographer did not focus the lens, nor look through a viewfinder.
- The camera came loaded with film containing 100 exposures.
- When all the pictures ad been taken, the entire camera was sent back to the company, where prints were developed and the camera was reloaded.
- Kodak invented a customer- friendly photo-finishing business, as well as an uncomplicated camera.
- Small cameras were not merely intended for casual shooters.
- Manufacturers slimmed down cameras and experimented with roll film to create compact lightweight hand-held devices such as Hawkeye, P.D.Q. ( Photography Done Quickly), and of course, Kodak, to be used by professionals and amateurs alike.
THE POSTCARD CRAZE
- Picture postcards evolved in Europe and the United States authorized a simple, undecorated card with message to be mailed.
- Photographic postcards began to appear in large numbers.
- Cartes-De-Visite and stereograph images were both collected and sent to others.
- Before long-distance telephoning became common, when radio and the movies were infant technologies, people wrote often to each other.
- Notes jotted on postcards were casual hellos, like e-mailed friendship cards.
- Photographic postcards depicted tourist spots as well as ethnic types and news events.
- The Unites States Post Office reported that from June 1907 to June 1908 more than 67 million postcards, many of them picture postcards, were sent.
- The postcard vogue faded after World War I (1914-18), in part because of new postal regulations that discouraged it.
PICTORIALISM
- Pictorialists adopted Emerson's disgust with industrialization and mass- product goods, as well as his belief in photography as a fully fledged modern art form.
- Pictorialists valued their symbolic control over the growing photography industry, and they cultivated a sense of superiority over the snap shooters, who did not even develop their own film.
- Pictorialist writing encouraged a self-image of cultural heroism, striking back at the worst of the modern world.
- Pictorialism's emphasis on mature and the natural gave rise to studies of the male and female nude, created by White, Steichen, Demachy, Puyo, and Anne Brigman (1869-1950), among others.
- Since boys customarily swam nude, the beach was a likely place to photograph them.
- Wilhelm von Glosten (1856-1931) mixed the exoticism of earlier nineteenth- century sexual photographs with Pictorialist themes.
- Von Gloeden's less explicit photographs were popular with educated American and European viewers, who sought them out for their evocation of Classical times.
- His nude photographs were sold as postcards, though they were seldom put in the mail.
- Anne Brigman portrayed women as spirits or souls of trees, rocks, water and even photography.
- Portraiture was thought to be done better by women, who were considered to possess a more intuitive grasp of the sitter's personality and a wider range of emotional response than men.
- Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952) ran a successful business, branching out from flattering Pictorialist portraits of prominent people in Washington, D.C.
- She photographed architecture and industrial sites, and documented the activities of the Hampton Institute in Virginia, where young African-Americans received training in the trades.
- Together with Pictorialism, the international Arts and Crafts movement, with its emphasis on hand-crafted art objects and on home life,provoked an interest in Native American peoples.