Critical & contextual perspectives.

The City of Ambitions (1864) - Alfred Stieglitz Midnight at the Bowery Mission Breadline (1906 -7) - Lewis Hine In this blog post I want to discuss the contrast between 2 city themed photographs taken with less than 50 years between them. The first is by Alfred Stieglitz titled ‘The City of Ambitions’ (1864) and the second image is by Lewis Hine titled ‘Midnight at the Bowery Mission Breadline’ (1906-7), both images are of New York but tell 2 very different stories. The titles themselves immediately give clue to their respective photographer’s views on society which is more than likely backed up by the feeling of society itself at the time. The first title instils a feeling that New York is an up and coming metropolis where all your life’s ambitions are there to be realised. The second title presents us with the stark reality, that the people who helped create this city were now struggling to survive in such a busy district. I believe both images also reflect ...

The American sculpture Hiram Powers is one of many quoted as saying ‘The eye is the window of the soul". But interestingly, since the birth of the Daguerreotype photographers have seen the power in shooting portraits without the subject’s face (see example below) and even going as far as taking a portrait photograph without a single person present in the shot.   [Button] circa 1940s-50s It is this understanding of portrait photography that interests me the most. The aim of a portrait is to portray one's character, in the example above the buttons signify the political presence of the subject. Over time this practise has evolved to the degree that photographers now understand they are trying to give an account of their subject in a portrait and this can be done in many other ways. Although the above images could be pigeon holed as still life, when you read the images with a wider understanding of the world these images become bold statements a...