Hannah Reed

2/28/17

Period 7

To what extent did photography bring about change?

Many artists whose work was motivated by social or political concerns used their art to

inspire a more ideal future or to criticize conditions in the present. Photography, from its

beginning, had excelled in the documentary recording of physical reality, and many of these

artists were photographers, although some painters also sought to capture qualities of the neutral

urban scene. Photographers and painters wanted to heighten viewer awareness of the

environment around them, sensitizing them to both the beauty and the variety of nature and the

industrial/urban setting.

Alfred Stieglitz believed in making "straight, unmanipulated" photographs. To do so, he

photographed whatever he saw around him from the busy streets of New York, to the faces of

friends and relatives. Stieglitz specialized in photographs of scenes he found around him in his

environment. He saw subjects in terms of form and the colors of his black and white materials,

and the arrangements of form stirred his deepest emotions. His photograph The steerage, was

taken during a voyage to Europe with his wife and daughter in 1907. There were men and

women and children on the lower deck of the steerage. There was a narrow stairway leading up

to the upper deck of the steerage, a small deck at the bow of the steamer. The Steerage suggests

that photographs have more than just a documentary voice that speaks to the truth-to-

appearance of subjects in a field of space within narrowly defined slice of time. Rather, The

Steerage calls for a more complex, layered view of photographys essence that can accommodate

and convey abstraction. The Steerage is not only about the significant form of shapes, forms

and textures, but it also conveys a message about its subjects, immigrants who were rejected at
Ellis Island, or who were returning to their old country to see relatives and perhaps to encourage

others to return to the United States with them.

Lewis Wickes Hine's photography is somewhat similar to the composition of The

Steerage. Hine began taking photographs to aid his teaching. In 1904, he started making pictures

of immigrants as they arrived in the United States and struggled to establish lives in their new

land. This is similar to Stieglitz's photograph because he also captured the life of

voyagers/immigrants as he traveled. Hine later became interested in the grim world of children

who worked. His photograph Breaker Boys captured a group of children who went to work at

very young ages to help their families. The helpless look captured on the boys' faces emphasize

the poor work conditions they endured. Through his photography Hine was able to show that

such practices stunted the development of children, who should be able to grow healthily into

productive adults.

The human eye, unaided, cannot resolve the details of fast motion. Eadweard Muybridge

and his experiments with motion photography, such as this series of pictures of a horse's gait

helped solve this mystery. In 1872 he was hired by Leland Stanford to photograph horses.

Stanford reputedly had made a bet that for a moment, all four of a racehorse's hooves are off the

ground simultaneously, and he hired Muybridge to take the pictures to prove him right. This was

difficult to do with the cameras of the time, and the initial experiments produced only indistinct

images. He set up a row of cameras with tripwires, each of which would trigger a picture for a

split second as the horse ran by. The results settled the debate once and for all: all four hooves do

leave the ground at once, as the top middle image in this sequence demonstrates.

Muybridge spent the rest of his career improving his technique, making a huge variety of motion

studies, lecturing, and publishing. As a result of his motion studies, he is regarded as one of the
fathers of the motion picture. Just as Nipce's First Photograph had, Muybridge's motion studies

showed the way to a new art form.

In conclusion, photography helped to change the views people had by exposing them to

the unhappy reality of child workers, the lives of immigrants as they prepare for their voyage,

and whether or not a horses hooves were lifted off the ground all at once. Photography and the

ability to capture life in a photo has advanced substantially. The composition can greatly affect

the viewer, allowing them to also feel the emotions the photographer was trying to convey and

create a realization of the natural reality of situations.