Post war years

During the war Joe Rosenthal took a photo named ‘Marines raising the flag on iwo jima’ which is one of the only photographs that has been made into a sculpture. This photograph shows determination, struggle and independence; Rosenthal saw this event take place but couldn’t capture the moment in the time it happened so he asked the marines to repeat the putting up of the flag which has created one of the most famous photographs and sculptures from the war. The theme of having a grand narrative became common in photography; the vision of the Utopia ending and becoming a dystopia was easy to photograph as the war wasn’t a hard thing to find. Henri Cartier-Bresson took a photo in 1947 called ‘John- Paul Sartre’ which shows that we are all responsible for our own actions and individuals and no God so the rejection of religion is strong in this photograph at this time.

Street photography after the war

                A collection of photographs by Robert Frank titled ‘The Americans’ in 1958 showed how American really was like and not what it intended and wanted to be seen as. He used flags and symbols all the way through the book to keep them tied in together; it also showed the division that was taking place between the rich and the poor, these photographs show this well even if it wasn’t wanted it showed what was really happening at that time. During the civil rights movement photographs taken of Martin Luther King showed the rest of the public what was going on as radio and television weren’t big yet. Photographs from the Vietnam war that were shown in newspapers shocked people at how bad the conditions and actions that were happening as they didn’t back  up what people were being told. Diane Arbus, who is a commercial and art base photographer, took photographs of people who were on the fringes of society; she concentrated on people who looked strange or different and some that looked the same like twins or triplets.

                Other people took similar photographs about strange people on their habitats; Gary Winogrand, Joel Melferwitz and Tony Ray- Jones documented people as if they were animals as they were all influenced by each other. By catching people in action in incidental moments doing things out of the ordinary makes the photos quirky and more interesting to look and explore the actual photo to realise that maybe we as humans aren’t that far away from the animal world when we are in public.

Portraits

                David Bailey took photographs of famous people who made their names through their talent and not just by their contacts. He used a twin lens camera which cuts off the tops of peoples’ heads even though when he looks through the view finder it looked as though it framed the whole of the person, this became his signature photographic style and anyone can recognise his photos because of it. Richard Avedon took photographs of people when he was on a road trip; by putting a white background up and placing the subjects in front of it mad you focus on the people as they had been taken out of their environment. This shows how America became morally corrupt and isolated by isolating the one person from everyone else.