Modernisms, Postmodernisms, and the Psychological Gesture in Documentary Photography

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Modernisms, Postmodernisms, and the Psychological Gesture in Documentary Photography Modernism, as a movement, is often discussed in relation to painting, but what of the other visual arts? There exist works by modernist sculptors, modernist filmmakers, and of course, modernist photographers. Modernism in photography, however, eludes easy definition. While the guru of modernist art, Clement Greenberg, discussed photography as well as painting, even he seemed to struggle with what, precisely, photography “should” be. In her book Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940-1959, Lisa Hostetler says that “given Greenberg’s insistence elsewhere that modern art frankly acknowledge and take as its subject the characteristics unique to its medium, Greenberg’s comments on modern photography are ironic” (2009, 75). In particular, Greenberg “describes photography’s key features as depth and volume, even though a piece of paper is as flat or flatter than stretched canvas,” and furthermore, he “defines good photography in terms borrowed from another art form (literature)” (Hostetler 2009, 75). Debates about figure/ground relationship and medium specificity cannot solve this problem, since even Greenberg failed to address what, truly, is the medium—light, paper, or something else? Approached from another angle, style and subject matter illuminate the question of photographic modernism and postmodernism, but here, too, exists a problem. In short, there was not one photographic modernism. On the one hand, the post-WWI photographers like Berenice Abbot and Charles Sheeler who created artistic, documentary images of urban scenes firmly broke from the Pictorialist movement. In Masters of Photography: Berenice Abbot, Julia Van Haaften tells how “in New York’s photography community, still engulfed by Alfred Stieglitz’s dominating personality and influence, Abbott’s appreciation of temporality and change found little favor” (1997, 7). At a time when hazy, emotional portraits of the human body dominated photography [figures 1 and 2], Abbot and her cohorts turned to the streets with sharp focus. Rather than continuing to emulate 19th-century painting, this wave of photographers focused on the urban landscape, documenting the sometimes abstract forms of bridges, factories, and skyscrapers popping up around them with crisp technical proficiency [figures 3 and 4]. On the other hand, post-WWII photographers returned to a visual relationship with painting, with some of their work considered an extension of abstract expressionism. To be sure, the Pictorialists were not modernist, but with what criteria should viewers decide which of


the work growing in Pictorialism’s wake was modern in the sense critics like Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg discussed? Continuing to examine this question through the lens of subject matter and style, the psychological gesture emerges as one clear yardstick by which to measure modernist photography. One clear example of the break between pre-WWII modernists and post-WWII modernists was the New York Museum of Modern Art’s “The Family of Man” show. Beginning in 1955 and traveling the world for the next decade, it was “a benevolent, sentimentalized view of humanity,” as conceived by Director of the Department of Photography, Edward Steichen (Hostetler 2009, 114). It included many now-famous images from government-sponsored Farm Security Administration projects and subsequent work by that group of documentary photographers. According to Diane Arbus: A Biography, this ideological vision for documentary photography “was not shared by the younger, more rebellious photographers in the exhibit” or by up-and-coming documentary photographers like Robert Frank and Louis Faurer, who “went totally against the Steiglitz philosophy” (Bosworth 2005, 114). They considered such work, with its lack of psychological realism, overly shallow. Faurer, in particular, created images like 1949’s Freudian Handclasp [figure 5] that referred directly to psychology and psychoanalysis. According to Hostetler, “Just as the surrealists had sought to expose the role of the subconscious in human behavior, Faurer understood it as a principal player in the everyday activity of Times Square” (2009, 76). This aesthetic ran “totally counter to” pre-WWII documentary photographers, “who had tended to be almost benevolent to their subject matter and serene in their technique” (Bosworth 2005, 228). Instead, the new modernist documentary photographers sought to use their cameras to pry into the psyche of anyone who passed before their lenses, for better or worse, mining subjects for links to the rich but turbulent collective unconscious. Even within this group, however, there existed important differences. Some modernist photographers were among the Tenth Street Group, and they followed a specific aesthetic philosophy. The group included Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Harold Rosenberg, and Ad Reinhardt, to name a few. According to Hostetler, “at the heart of [this] aesthetic philosophy was a firm belief in art as an activity rather than a product—a verb rather than a noun” (2009, 112). Documentary photographers in the group, like Ted Croner, used aspects of the


photographic medium to abstract the image [figure 6]; in some of his work, “the grain in the image coincides with the precipitation, creating an all-over atmospheric pattern,” and these images look “as though a subjective fog has enveloped the scene” (Hostetler 2009, 97). Similarly, Saul Leiter took on color photography while most documentary photographers kept to black and white, using bright yellows and vivid blues much as color field painters did [figure 7]. Sometimes in Leiter’s work, weather patterns on windows evoke the gestural quality of Jackson Pollock’s paintings [figure 8]. For the Tenth Street Group photographers, the world was an arena in which to make images with the camera, and the psychological gesture was theirs to imprint upon the final work of art. Meanwhile, others took a different approach. Robert Frank’s images “eschewed [FSAstyle] classicalism for something far more fugitive and ephemeral” and “his pictures reflected both the ironic complacency of the 1950’s and their undercurrent of despair,” but it was not accomplished through the artist’s gesture--Frank “could snap images in the energetic, responsive spirit of the Abstract Expressionists, but without any painterly effects” (ibid, 14-145). In his work [figure 9], the psychological gesture of the subject set the tone for the image, allowing him to capture “urban oblivion,” point out “the chaos of real human lives,”and reveal the “existential dilemma” through “repudiation of detail” rather than through abstraction (Hostelter 2009, 147). Another of this group, William Klein, produced work with a sense of “anxiety and restlessness,” while his “subject matter charges his images with an undeniable psychological tension” (ibid, 137). These subjects are generally in focus, deliberately framed to emphasize psychological gesture, and marked by pared-down tonal detail rather than a deep, lush range of grays [figure 10]. Also, Lisette Model’s photography [figure 11] “echoes Surrealism’s insistence on the presence of psychic meaning in the often-overlooked, humble details of everyday life” and does so “without the ideological associations of FSA-style documentary photography,” but her works are unpainterly and focused on the subject’s gesture rather than that of the photographer (ibid, 49). Each of these photographers utilized the snapshot style for some or all of their work, in direct opposition to the same Pictorialist tendencies Abbott and Sheeler rejected yet also to the formality and emphasis on technical precision of those earlier modernists. Despite these important differences, both groups of post-WWII modernists demonstrated “a perceivable link between form and feeling,” and “their work materializes what might be


termed the ‘psychological gesture’ of mid-century American life” (ibid, 165). The psychological gesture would continue, however, to mark documentary photography past the era of modernism and well into the era of postmodernism. Because of the multiplicity of modernisms and postmodernisms, however, the importance of formal ties to psychoanalytic or psychological function may be the only marker useful for such comparisons. Indeed, “postmodernism came to mean a rejection of themes and subjects that interested modernist artists, such as abstraction,” according to Mary Warner Marien’s Photography: A Cultural History (2006, 245). Postmodernist artists “in many media reintroduced the human figure,” and photographers “dwelled on the body.” Many modernist photographers, as we have seen, did not embrace abstraction or eject the human figure and representations of the body from their work. How, then, can the greater concepts of postmodernism apply to photography? How can a movement reject another movement that is diverse, multiplicitous, and on close examination, torch-bearer of many similar concepts? By continuing to view photographic history through the filter of psychology and psychological gesture, we can see that in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, documentary photographers wed many ideas about modernism with what would become key aspects of postmodernism. For example, consider the work of Diane Arbus [figures 12 and 13]. She “abandoned the idea of ‘the decisive moment’” so that “all her subjects became equivocal” (Bosworth 2005, 87). Later, postmodern photographers “accused the ‘decisive moment’ of being an intellectually and visually reductive technique that diminished photography to a mere anecdote” (Marien 2006, 459). This also reflects the rejection of a master narrative deciding the worthiness or unworthiness of subjects that is a hallmark of postmodernism, while at the same time preserving the post-WWII documentary photographer’s view of the contemporary world as “without preconceived notions of value and certainty” (Hostetler 2009, 22). Her style combined the snapshot aesthetic with the conventions of classical portraiture, borrowing from multiple sources as the postmodernists would, but in doing so Arbus also explicitly rejected certain ideas. PreWWII documentary photographers wanted to “honor humanity” or “use their images for social reform;” instead, Arbus “would pose her subjects like a portrait painter and then record them in a snapshot structure” to explore psychological issues like identity, self-reflection, isolation from society, and archetype (Bosworth 2005, 240). The sometimes confrontational way Arbus


photographed her subjects documented “personal and psychological obsessions,” “heightened psychological drama,” and “seemed to be able to suggest how it felt to be a midget or a transvestite” (ibid, 172). These precursors to identity politics in postmodernism tie them to modernism with psychological gesture, prioritization of the subject over the photographer, and stylistic emphasis on subjectivity. Likewise, the early work of Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki utilized psychological realism in ways both modernist and postmodernist [figures 14 and 15]. His work from the 1960’s fits squarely within “the discourse of ‘street photography’” as practiced by “1960s New York street photographers as Garry Winogrand, William Klein, and Robert Frank,” according to the press release accompanying a 2009 showing of the work at Anton Kern Gallery (antonkerngallery.com). The confrontational nature of many of his and Arbus’ images, the tension apparent within many of his subjects, and the emphasis on external revelation of an interior state on the part of the subject would all be repeated in the works of postmodernist photographers like Nan Goldin [figures 16 and 17] and Philip-Lorca diCorcia [figure 18]. While there are notable differences between Goldin’s or diCorcia’s images and those of Arbus and Araki, the importance of psychological gesture as an entry into the emotional life of the image proves important in all of their bodies of work, particularly when documenting unconventional gender expression and transgressive sexualities. Through the confusing tangle of modernisms, postmodernisms, and works that are not quite either, psychological gesture and the influence of Freudian/Jungian psychology run like a bright thread. We can track it through documentary photography and sometimes use it to interpret both the intent of the artist and the mind of a subject, if not an era. Whether it pertains to post-war existential crisis or the effect of AIDS on a community, psychological gesture unites and enriches broad swaths of documentary photography.


Bibliography Anton Kern Gallery press release. “Nobuyoshi Araki: 1960’s Photographs.” Anton Kern Gallery. http://www.antonkerngallery.com./press/40.pdf (accessed December 2010). Bosworth, Patricia. Diane Arbus: A Biography. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005. Hostetler, Lisa. Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940-1959. New York: Prestel Publishing, 2009. Marien, Mary Warner. Photography: A Cultural History. Syracuse: Laurence King Publishing, 2006. Van Haaften, Julia. Masters of Photography: Berenice Abbot. New York: Aperture, 1997. Additional Image Sources Arbus, Diane. Revelations. New York: Random House, 2003. Brock, Charles. Charles Sheeler: Across Media. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Frank, Robert. The Americans. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2008. Google Image Search. Luigi Loir. (Accessed December 2010.)

Images


Figure 1: A Parisian Street Scene with Sacre Coeur in the Distance. Luigi Loir, 1890.

Figure 2: Wet Day on the Boulevard. Alfred Stieglitz, 1894.


Figure 3: George Washington Bridge. Berenice Abbott, 1936.

Figure 4: Ford Plant, River Rouge. Charles Sheeler, 1927.

Figure 5: Freudian Hand Clasp. Louis Faurer, 1948.

Figure 6: Taxi, New York Night. Ted Croner, 1948.


Figure 7: NewYork, 1960. Saul Leiter, 1960.

Figure 8: New York, 1957. Saul Leiter, 1957.

Figure 9: Trolley, New Orleans. Robert Frank, 1955.


Figure 10: Baseball Cards, New York. William Klein, 1955.

Figure 11: Broadway Singer, Metropolitan CafĂŠ New York. Lisette Model, 1949.


Figure 12: Grenade Boy. Diane Arbus, 1962.

Figure 13: Two Men Dancing at a Drag Ball. Diane Arbus, 1970.


Figure 14: Untitled, 1960’s. Araki Nobuyoshi, 19601969.

Figure 15: Untitled, 1960’s. Araki Nobuyoshi, 1960-1969.


Figure 16: Black Eye. Nan Goldin, 1983.

Figure 17: Gotscho Kissing Gilles, Paris. Nan Goldin, 1993.


Figure 18: from Heads series. Philip-Lorca diCorcia,2000.


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