Contextual Studies: 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.