Photography as a Way of Life
John Wyver writes: For the second Sunday running I have simply been too busy to compile the Sunday dozen. Apologies. But the preparations for The Cultures of Early Television conference next Thursday and Friday at the University of Westminster have rather taken over my life.
I think those attending are in for a treat, with a host of exceptional scholars and archivists talking about television before the Second World War in Britain, the United States, Italy, Hungary and the Soviet Union. I will post responses and thoughts arising over the coming days, and tomorrow I will introduce the full conference programme [click to download a .pdf]. There are still a very few tickets left, which are free – you can sign up here.
I aim to return to compiling the Sunday dozen next weekend, but at the same time I want to try to enhance the blog with more short posts, like this one, with reflections on stuff that I have read or seen or just thought about. I am not intending that these will be full, considered reviews, but rather brief scratchings about things that have interested or engaged or enriched me. And today I want simply to celebrate Photography as a Way of Life: Minor White, Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, written by Brendan Fay.
This substantial volume from Princeton University Press is admittedly expensive, but it is a gorgeous object packed with brilliant images by the three American photographers noted in the subtitle, together with an extensive and richly detailed text about mid-century American photography, higher education in the US, museums and mysticism, and much more.
It is simply one of the most illuminating books about classic photography that I have read in a long time, and it has led me to chase down more work by each of the photographers. I have encountered Harry Callahan’s urban images in several shows, and this provides exceptional context, while I had less sense of Siskind and White, but whose photographs I have come to appreciate from reading this book.
Here’s the blurb from the Princeton University Press web page:
Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan carved out a new role for photographers and their art in the decades after World War Two. Photography as a Way of Life traces how these influential teachers and theorists reimagined the medium as a livelihood and a life’s work.
Together with growing markets for snapshots and photojournalism, the postwar years saw the emergence of photography as an established field of study in higher education. In this beautifully produced book, Brendan Fay takes readers from the late 1940s through the 1970s to explore how White, Siskind, and Callahan transformed the ways photography was taught, shown, and understood. Inclined toward abstraction and personally expressive images, they modeled a commitment to art in the face of commercial and professional pressures. In classrooms and private workshops and through exhibitions, photobooks, and magazines—including Aperture, with White as its founding editor—they offered training and inspiration while building a devoted audience for their pictures.
And note if you are on the east coast of the United States, there is a related exhibition at the Princeton University Art Gallery until 7 September.
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