MPC 203 Lecture Notes - Lecture 41: Aaron Siskind, Charis Wilson, Guggenheim Fellowship
Document Summary
In 1922 weston made his seminal photographs of the armco. Steelworks in ohio: his break with pictorialism is evident in the simplicity and clarity of his sharply focused image of a row of smokestacks. He continued to concentrate on broad, dramatic landscapes towards the end of his life and took his last photographs at point lobos in. Post war us was marked a transition in culture. The us had done very well by ww2 commercially (selling arms), and their country had not been destroyed by war, as parts of europe were. This was the development and marketing of consumerism. From that, a sense of alienation developed. All the zeal of the new prosperity and materialism left many feeling empty. Perhaps abstraction was a turning inward, out of disillusionment. Rather than looking at the world to change it, as the pre-ww2 depression era fsa photographers had, they looked at abstract formal elements, that were devoid, supposedly of meaning.
