The Genius of Photography - Part Two.

In the 1920’s the camera was seen as part of the future, it was a piece of equipment central to the evolvement of the technologies. It changed the way people wanted the world to be seen after the first world war, from now on everybody expected everything to be more machine like and robotic. It was now that cameras became involved in propaganda, they were used to document everything that happened, there job was to “record, not think”. The use of photographs also showed that artists could now play their part in the dictatorship of many things.

Karl Blossfeldt was a still life photographer, famous for his images of plants and vegetables. However in the frame they do not look natural enough to be a plant, or a vegetable, they look more as though they have been sculpted out of iron. As a teacher as well he used his photographs to teach his students. He very often said “you don’t know anything until you have something to compare it to”.

This image by Blossfeldt is one of his most recognised pieces of work, it was appreciated by everybody receiving no criticism from either the public or art critics. It has been framed perfectly and the lines and curves of each leaf direct your eye to another which makes the very simple image look more complex and interesting for the audience. I would image a small aperture and a long shutter speed have been used to capture this because of how much detail is evidenced.











August Sanders work was very different to that off Blossfeldts despite it being the same time. He was a portrait photographer and worked using glass negatives. The people he photographed he also stereotyped, as he divided them up in to different groups. Behind his images lies a message of chaotic society yet this is hidden.

This photograph of a miner is very eye catching, it looks as though it has been taken in a studio though I am not completely convinced it was. The outline of his body and shelf of bricks is soft yet the facial area is very harsh. The way he is glaring at the camera, to the audience, shows he is fearless and I personally find it very intriguing.












Alexander Rodchenkos approach at photography was again, very different. He would retouch his images (the old fashioned way - not on Adobe) to give them more of an impact. He would cut up and paste different parts of an image and then retake the photo.

This image is perhaps his most recognised piece of work. As you can tell, it is very hard t notice where the image has been cut up and glued back together, it genuinely looks like an original. The photograph actually shows a group of criminals and “social undesirables” that were issued labour work to give back to the community instead of serving a sentence in prison. Their job was to build a canal, or dig it out which ever. This was huge in the soviet union and the first time such a thing had been done.


The 1920’s was also the era that the first handheld camera was invented. This camera changed the way the world could be seen. Photographers would now able to move the frame to look up or down, or in angles they could not have done earlier. It also meant a tripod was no longer needed, photography became more lightweight and easier to transport.

In the 1930s Nazis only wanted photographs and typology to prisoners and catalogue them.
Rodchenko was forced to destroy a lot of his images, in order to do this he blotted black ink over the faces of the people. In my opinion this was a very artistic way to do such and it makes the image more mysterious.
August Sanders work was also not what the Nazis wanted so his book was refused. As of now he also changed his style of photography to suit them.

Walker Evans however was a photographer whose work was appreciated by the Nazis. He an American documentary photographer. He wanted to be a writer but failed to write due to absorbing so much photography. He was commissioned to produce propaganda as his work seemed to isolate a person in a cell (the cameras frame). Occasionally he would rearrange the scenes to change them from being a document to being a piece of artwork. Simplicity and beauty are the best representatives of Americas beauty he said.

This image is perhaps his most famous, taken in 1936 the woman is the wife of a sharecropper. Her face is weathered, just as the wood is. The woman isn’t smiling which suggests she possibly had bad teeth. There is little contrast apart from the shadow under the planks of wood but it works better this way.













In the 1940’s a lot of photography became directed towards the war as the second world war began. The age of machines went back to the 19th century in order to improve the photography.

Bill Brandt was a photographer that documented the war from “no mans land”. Though before this he worked in commercial photography, more dominantly within a studio. Very often he would ask people to participate in his photography so that he could still document the scene he found but in a more artistic manner.

At the time it was taken this image would have been an incredibly scary, yet real image. During the war the idea was that people had to be careful of what they were saying as even the walls had ears. The harsh shadow outlines the fact that somebody is whispering information to another person.












There we have it, information based on the genius of photography, all sourced from the programme. Apart from the mages of course, I used google to get those.