The U3AC course on Mid Century New York I’m doing is primarily focussed on poetry. In my post of 13th November I drew a line between the poetry of John O’Hara and street photography. The course has also embraced aspects of painting from the same period, particularly the Abstract Expressionism practiced by artist such as Jackson Pollock, Wilielm de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. This made me to wonder if there is an analogy with the photography of the period.
The United States has been preeminent in developing the full potential of photography as a creative medium in a wide range of genres throughout the 20th Century. The overriding philosophy was perhaps best summed up by John Szarkowski. Curator of photography at MoMA, in 1971 when he said, ‘…photography’s central sense of purpose and aesthetic [is]: the precise and lucid description of significant fact’. Given this mission, which dates back at least to the straight photography work of Paul Strand before 1920, is there a significant body of work that can be related to abstract expressionism? From the mid-century period the work of Aaron Siskind, pictures of peeling paint, wall textures and so on, come closest and his was somewhat of a lone voice.
Depending on how you define it, there is abstract photography that predates the abstract expressionists. Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966) was producing vortographs in 1917 and Man Ray (1890-1976) made rayographs in the 1920s. More recently Barbara Kasten (b. 1936) and Marco Breuer (b. 1966) have produced work in an abstract tradition. Another strand is the surrealist in the work of photographers like and Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969), Hans Belmer (1902-75) and Dora Maar (1907-97). This doesn’t escape altogether Szarkowski’s definition, the images are most often made up of ‘significant facts’. Overall, I don’t think there is a significant body of photography that is contemporary with the Abstract Expressionists.
