University of Louisville
with e r an exploration of decay
Cheyenne Nolan ARTH 397 – History of Photography Prof. Mitch Eckert November 17, 2016
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table of contents P4
Thomas Annan
P6
Jacob Riis
P8
Dorothea Lange
P10
Shomei Tomatsu
P12
Ken Domon
P14
Daido Moriyama
P16
Shelby Lee Adams
P18
Joel Sternfeld
P20
Greg Girard
P22
Miru Kim
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about wither When I began considering a theme for my exhibition project, I first wanted to create something centered around Appalachia, my home. As I continued browsing online and through other exhibition catalogs, I decided it would be better to work around a theme related to rurality rather than making rurality the theme. As a result, this exhibition is an exploration of decay. In my home in eastern Kentucky, and especially along Highway 421 there, there are numerous old, abandoned, and decaying houses and store fronts. They are out in the open, sometimes alone in a field and sometimes surrounded by other
homes. To me, they are both a little creepy and mostly melancholy – a house is an expensive thing, so the story behind the owner’s abandonment is fascinating to me. While the decay of rural buildings sparked this idea, I am also interested in the decay of urban areas and degradation in general. Contained in this exhibit are photographs of abandoned structures, displaced people, impoverished people, and the aftereffects of war.
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thomas annan
Thomas Annan, active in the 1860s, was a Scottish photographer based in Glasgow hired by the city government to document the poor quality of life in the slums that had formed around the recentlyindustrialized areas of the city. Annan was one of the first to record the unsanitary and unsafe conditions that affected the urban poor. Close No. 80 High Street is a photogravure, and plate 11 in Annan’s book “The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow.” It depicts an alleyway of Glasgow with a great range in tones; it is lit from the back and is darker closer to the viewer and the edges of the frame in a vignette-like effect.
There are doorways and windows along the alley walls that are darker in tone and puddles of water on the right side of the street that reflect the light. Above, there are street lamps and clothes hung out to dry from apartment windows – below, the poor of the area lay and lean against the alley walls and appear to huddle together for warmth.
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Annan, Thomas. Close, No. 80 High Street. 1868-1871. Albumen silver print. Canadian Centre for Architecture, MontrĂŠal.
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jacob riis
Jacob Riis was a Danish photojournalist based in New York City, known for documenting the conditions of the poor, similar to Scotsman Thomas Annan. In 1890 he published his book How the Other Half Lives showing the brutal conditions poor immigrants to New York City lived and worked in. The book, when seen by then NYC Police Commissioner and future President Theodore Roosevelt, led to social reform in the United States.
Children Sleeping on Mulberry Street is one example of Riis’ work that shows the state of poor, industrialized New York. It features three young boys in hats and coats with bare feet, almost centered in the composition, huddled together against the wall of a small brick alcove. They are below street level and have a drain near their feet.
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Riis, Jacob. Children Sleeping on Mulberry Street. 1890. Museum of the City of New York, NY.
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dorothea lange
Dorothea Lange was an American photojournalist during the 1930s. Lange took photographs for the United States Farm Security Administration in order to record the struggles of Depression-era forgotten folk of the western US and bring their poverty to national attention. Migrant Mother is perhaps the photograph Dorothea Lange is best known for. It is a black and white portrait of Florence Owens
Thompson, then thirty-two years old (1936), with two of her seven children at her sides, resting their heads and hiding their faces. Thompson is seated with her hand touching her face and looking worriedly into the distance with her brow furrowed. It is considered iconic of the Great Depression.
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Lange, Dorothea. Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California. 1936. Gelatin Silver Print. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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shomei tomatsu
Shomei Tomatsu was a postWorld War II photographer from Japan. His photography was raw and expressionistic rather than direct. His style of photography and examination of the rapidly changing Japanese culture and uncertainty of national identity influenced a number of Japanese photographers after him, including his peer Ken Domon and pupil Daido Moriyama, both featured in this exhibition. Melted Bottle, Nagasaki depicts exactly that – a glass beer bottle that has been melted and distorted from the heat of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki August 9, 1945. It is a black and white silver
gelatin print with a wide range of tones. The background is likely a mix of scorched and un-scorched cement, creating a high contrast background to the bottle. The glass of the bottle is twisted and warped into a less recognizable form; it curves from top to bottom in a way more characteristic of contorted muscles than melted glass. Tomatsu intentionally used lighting that would make the bottle resemble a “skinned animal carcass.� It takes an everyday object and makes it grotesque in both appearance and history.
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Tomatsu, Shomei. Melted bottle, Nagasaki, 1961. Printed 1965. Silver gelatin print. Michael Hoppen Gallery, London.
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ken domon
Ken Domon, like Tomatsu, was at the forefront of the photography movement in postwar Japan. In 1958 he published his photobook Hiroshima, which examined the survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshoma in 1945 without restraint. Hiroshima became the best-known account of the bombing to his native Japan.
The photo to the right, from Domon’s Hiroshima, is a grainy, candid shot of one woman and two young girls. The woman in the middle is looking to her right and laughing; the girl on the right is sitting with her mouth open and eyes shut in a scream or crying fit; and the girl on the left has entirely white, pupil-less eyes, appearing to be blind, and gazes calmly through the viewer rather than at.
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Domon, Ken. From Photobook Hiroshima. 1958. Photograph. International Center of Photography Library, New York.
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daido moriyama
Daido Moriyama is yet another photographer of postwar Japan. He is younger than Tomatsu and Domon, and while other postwar photographers worked toward a brighter future, Moriyama lingered on Japan’s turbulent social change, and attributed it to Japan’s defeat in World War II and its subsequent “Americanization”. His work is typically expressionistic and somewhat disconcerting, in much the same way as Tomatsu’s Melted Bottle.
Yokosuka is a photograph of a woman in a short, white dress and bare feet. Her back is turned to the viewer and her body seems to contort in order to better balance as she walks through an uphill mound of debris in a cramped alleyway or crawlspace. The beams of the walls create vertical movement, and the transition from light (near the viewer) to dark (near the woman) helps to draw the eye towards her. The composition is askew and not dead-on, which creates a sense of uneasiness and even vertigo.
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Moriyama, Daido. Yokosuka (from “Another Country�). 1971/2005. Gelatin silver print. ClampArt, New York.
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shelby lee adams
Shelby Lee Adams is an American photographer best known for his photography of his home, the Appalachian region. In college, Adams was introduced to the photographers of the Farm Security Administration who documented the poverty rife during the Great Depression. Adams related the pictures to his childhood in Appalachia, and was inspired to record the people of his home. His photographs show the good and the bad of extreme rurality, contrasting beautiful landscapes with worn buildings and people, with an underlying contrast of the happiness of the people despite their assumed poor positions.
Children at Topmost, KY is a black and white photo of three adults and seven children against a background made up of mountain forest scenery, a barren yard, and old cars and car parts scattered around. The people in the photo are spread across it: at the photograph’s center is a young girl in shorts and a baggy t-shirt looking into the camera while resting her hands on the handle of a plow. She is the lightest portion of the photograph and appears to be the focus area. Most of the other children in the background are also looking into the camera, and they all appear to be barefooted.
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Adams, Shelby Lee. Children at Topmost, KY. 1991. Silver gelatin print. International Center of Photography, New York.
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joel sternfeld
Joel Sternfeld is an American landscape photographer whose work helped spread the use of color photography as a fine art. In his book American Prospects (1987), he explores landscapes that have been affected by human habitation. He photographed plain, everyday things such as abandoned buildings. McLean, Virginia, December 1978 is a color photograph of a small farmer’s market in West Virginia, taken spontaneously by Sternfeld. In the foreground are several pumpkins, both whole and busted open, scattered about in a field of dry, dead grass. In the middle ground and to the left is a small, raggedy-
looking building with a vernacular “FARM MARKET” sign above its roof; its owner or a guest is standing in its front dressed in a coat and examining neatly arranged rows of pumpkins. In the background is a line of small trees with dying leaves, and then a line of taller trees with bare branches and a lone pine right behind the farmer’s market. On the right side of the background is a house with its second story ablaze with fire fighters attempting to put the flame out.
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Sternfeld, Joel. McLean, Virginia, December from American Prospects. 1978. Dye transfer print. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
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greg girard
Greg Girard is a Canadian photographer currently based in Shanghai, China. He has spent most of his career in Asia and his photographs examine the myriad of changes that have affected the continent. In 1993, he published his photographs of the incredibly dense and decrepit Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong in his book City of Darkness.
Kwong Ming, Kowloon Walled City depicts a dimly lit, barren alleyway in the Walled City lit in blue. There are puddles and debris scattered throughout the hall, as well as signs and/or graffiti on its walls and pipes and wires hanging from the ceiling. To the right is a doorway that likely leads into a residence or business, or possibly both. The alleyway appears dark and damp.
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Girard, Greg. Kwong Ming, Kowloon Walled City. 1989. From photobook City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City.
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miru kim
Miru Kim is an American-Korean photographer currently based in New York. Naked City Spleen, her first series, is the focus of this exhibition. In it she explores abandoned structures such as factories and catacombs, taking nude selfportraits of herself in the settings. Richmond Power Station, Philadelphia, PA depicts Kim crouched nude on a pipe of a rusted structure in a power station. There
are pipes surrounding her on all sides; the structure behind her is a rust-orange circle with a mesh-like texture, many pipes sticking out of it and a capital T-shaped structure crossing its middle. It is very darkly lit except for Kim’s body, which is off-center and to the right.
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Kim, Miru. Richmond Power Station, Philadelphia, PA, #1. 2008. Digital photograph. Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, Korea.