Modernity week1 session 2

Modernity is a word to describe the ever-changing times of modern life from the growth in towns and cities to the evaluation of technology.  These changes can reflect on how we start to see things differently. The change of a major cities can been see in artist work dating back from the 19th century to the present day

It would start with painters showing their views through their work of what a growing city was doing to the environment of the hustle and bustle of working life. Then along came the printmakers and eventually photographers and they would also be apart of displaying modernity.

Photography had gotten more and more portable, unlike when a camera use to be a wagon. You could now buy them in regular shops for about $1. People were starting to photograph all sorts rather than just portraits and static documentary images. It was easier to photograph in the street without being obvious due to the smaller cameras. In most street photography photos they are automatically showing the growth and effects of expanding places even if it wasn't the artist intentions, it is just something that can't be helped as it's all around us. Even if it's not showing the buildings and the actual growing structure of the towns and cities, instead it can show how society has changed due to places getting bigger and overcrowding brings different statuses together. As wealthy people wouldn't have been seen mingling with the poor but now you don't have the option as everyone has been forced to live amongst each other.  

Alvin Langdon Coburn 

Langdon was a photographer in the late 1880s and 1900s, He played around a lot with double exposures in his portraits that look rather ghostly but with his street/ documentary photography is show's the rise of London with it's gritty streets and think smog hanging over tall buildings. In lots of his images there is maybe one subject that even though they are in this big crowded city they look lonely and isolated, he even manages it with inanimate objects like a single lamppost in the corner of his frame.

COBURN, ALVIN LANGDON, 1882-1966
St. Paul's From Ludgate Circus | London | 16.5 x 22.7 cm | 1910

                                                                                                      COBURN, ALVIN LANGDON, 1882-1966

Regent's Canal | London | 17 x 21.5 cm | 1910

COBURN, ALVIN LANGDON, 1882-1966

Wapping | London | 17 x 22.7 cm | 1910

COBURN, ALVIN LANGDON, 1882-1966
The Bridge, Venice | Camera Work | 20.8 x 16.5 cm | 1908   

COBURN, ALVIN LANGDON, 1882-1966

From Westminster Bridge | London | 17.1 x 22.6 cm | 1910

http://www.photogravuregallery.com/inventory/results.php?artist=Coburn%2C+Alvin+Langdon&publication=all&sort=null&keyword=&submit.x=25&submit.y=14&submit=Search

The Image as Network Nan Golding 4

Nan Goldin has a very unique body of work that is captured in a snapshot type of fashion. Her main focus on her work is not how well it is produced but how well the narrative comes across. The volume of work that she has produced is huge as she has been photographing herself and her friends for over 20 years.

Through her work you can see how it starts out with a positive energy because all these people are in the same situation by taking drugs having unprotected sex and having a fun time being free from parents and having very little to worry about. They were experimenting with drugs and also their sexual preferences. In the photos that Nan was taking she is obviously very close to her subjects and a lot of the time if the people in her photographs were taking drugs, having sex or laughing she was doing the same. So by her being in the same situations she is able to get this close and be a part of the images she is taking.      

Goldin and her friends were trying to get clean and even more important they were coming to terms with member of her communal style family being diagnosed with the HIV virus. Goldin did what she did best and photographed her friends as slowly more and more of them were being tested positive. She would document how Aids would attack the human body and what affect it had on loved ones. All the way through her life you can see these friends of hers and you begin to get use to seeing these people although you don’t get to know them through the photographs you get comfortable seeing them. Then out of nowhere you they are in a hospital bed or photos of a funeral and then the photos of them just stop as she carries on photographing her life.

Figure 1 Gotscho kissing Gilles, Paris, France. 1993. Nan Goldin Phaidon. P. 78

The image above is just one of many of Goldin’s friends that past away from Aids. In the photograph you can see a males lover kissing his face on his deathbed. Although these times were difficult for Goldin as well it was clear by these more emotional images nothing would stop her documenting her life, even the deaths of her friends were not to be missed out in her archive of snapshots.