The Larger Picture

Last night was the fifth and last Exposing the Mead of this semester. Although we plan to pick up where we left off next Spring semester (Spring 2012; and we hope you’ll join us again), the end of this semester’s run is still bittersweet. I imagine the students must feel how sweet it is, what with finals fast approaching, but I’m admittedly on the bitter end.

For me, and judging by feedback I’ve received, for others as well, this series has been extremely enjoyable and enriching and it's something I'll miss during the summer and fall hiatus. Thea, Alice, Perry, and Alex brought considerable insight to the discussions they facilitated, and our audience members really rose to the occasion with their own contributions.

Each discussion built on the previous ones in subtle but significant ways. Abstraction cropped up again in city photography, and bodies were important in our conversation on text and photography. Bodies, architecture, and text all made appearances when discussing age. Certain questions persisted as subtext throughout the series, such as “Can there be such a thing as an abstract photograph?” and “Is it possible to capture the essence of a particular subject?”

As a result, many of us left each conversation with fresh ideas about individual photographs, thematic groupings of photographs, and even about “the larger picture.”

 

What have you thought of the Exposing the Mead series and blog? Have any particular photographs or themes resonated strongly with you? Have you come to any conclusions on the "larger picture" questions I mentioned above? Has the series raised more questions for you?

We look forward to seeing you back at Exposing the Mead next Spring!

Youth, Adolescence, and Old Age

Larry Clark

Untitled, from "Tulsa" series, 1980

AC 1994.4.2

Like usual, last night’s discussion was inspired by Mead photographs but unlike the others, it was focused on your submissions. Three photographs from the Mead’s collection were featured: Wendy Ewald’s A group of the neighbor children standing in the street - René Jansen Van Vuuren, 1992, Larry Clark’s Untitled from the Tulsa portfolio, 1980, and Mary Ellen Mark’s Man in Suit on Beach, Miami, 10/1986, 1986, which inspired our theme of age. On display beside these were six submissions, two focused on youth, two on adolescence, one on old age, and one on death.

Alex, Thea, Perry, and Alice grouped the submissions together with the Mead photos into groupings of youth, adolescence, and old age and death. These groupings elicited discussion on concepts commonly associated with the different ages. For instance, we wondered why, even though they all featured solitary figures, we used words like “freedom”, “nonchalance”, and “rebellion” when describing adolescents in the photos but words like “isolated” when describing the older people. And we wondered why the photograph of a tombstone was associated with the photographs of older people, even though the tombstone marked the grave of a two year old.

How do you think photographs can or do reinforce or subvert these common associations?

I'd also be interested to hear your thoughts on other questions relating to photographs representing age:

How do the subjects in the photographs “act” or represent their age? How do we recognize and how do we discuss age? Do you think family photos differ significantly from fine art photos in how they describe age?

 

Thank you so much to everyone who participated in last night's event, either by submitting your excellent photographs or by joining in the conversation!

Call to Artists

A group of the neighbor children standing in the street - René Jansen Van Vuuren, 1992.
Wendy Ewald
AC 2008.83

Now it's your turn:
 
Submit a photograph of your own capturing your thoughts on youth, adolescence, or advanced age to be displayed and discussed alongside photographs from the museum's collection during this semester's fifth and final Exposing the Mead, April 26th at 8:00 p.m.

Submit work by April 25th to:

Amherst College

Attn: Exposing the Mead

AC #124, Keefe Campus Center

Amherst, MA 01002

Revisit the website for more information.

Recap of Tuesday, April 5

Sunday Night, 40^th Street, New York, 1925,

Edward Steichen

AC 1985.59.9

Our fourth installation of Exposing the Mead was our final discussion that was focused solely on photographs from the collection. The founder of the series, Alex Strecker, led an engaging conversation on photography and the urban environment. Most of those in attendance were our regular audience, who’s devoted following we really appreciate, but there were some new faces as well. Before beginning his discussion, Alex explained the student-work component of the final installment of Exposing the Mead. He asked the student photographers in the room to submit photos inspired by three photographs from the collection that represent different stages of aging. The fifth and final discussion will be focused on these submissions

Alex prefaced the discussion by asking the audience what we think the essence of New York City is because it is the subject of both photographs. People seemed to reach a general consensus that Alicia Keys did a pretty good job capturing the essence of the city, but Alex filled in the rest of the picture with his idea of New York. He left us with a quote: “If you’re extraordinarily lucky, you might just be able to capture the essence of a city in a single photograph,” to keep in mind as we proceeded. Can you truly capture the essence of an entire city, especially one as immense and multifaceted in a single photograph? This question served as a base for us to return to and ground our conversation in.

After giving the audience the opportunity to get up and examine the photos up close, Alex reconvened the discussion, focusing first on Steichen’s photograph. We agreed that the subject of the photograph was the space created by the buildings and turned our attention to the very geometric shapes created by the straight lines. The ambiguous light emanating from the street stimulated extensive speculation, with many audience members commenting on its strangely soft, organic quality. Thinking about the unique perspective from which Steichen captured the image—aerial yet not from the very top of a building—led us to the conclusion that Steichen presents his point of view of the city to create a specific state of mind.

Moving onto Paulin’s photograph of Times Square, we immediately picked up on the transience of the captured moment. The discussion took a turn when we started talking about the presence of humanity, or lack thereof, in the photographs. Though Steichen’s photograph seems at face value to be more cold and removed, many people felt that there was less humanity in Paulin’s photograph in spite of the hustle and bustle it portrays. Though the Paulin is full of bright lights and advertisements that are clearly constructed by humans, it does not show any faces or any interaction between people, giving it an impersonal quality.

Alex read a quote from Paulin about his desire to produce images that border on surreal and asked the audience to compare the reality and surrealism of the two photographs. The intense contrast between the dark and light of the Paulin makes it appear impressionistic, but many people thought that Steichen’s photo is more surreal because it is more focused on the shapes created by the buildings than the actual buildings themselves. Jumping off of Steichen’s rectangular shapes, we talked about how the straight lines contributed to a sense of stillness and quietude in his photo whereas the circular lines in Paulin’s photo created a feeling of dynamism and chaos. We wrapped up the discussion by concluding that it is impossible to capture the city completely in any medium, but photography allows us to capture particular perspectives and single moments that represent important qualities of the city.

Modern Building

The Modern Building

Shirin Neshat

1999

AC 2007.02

This striking photograph was taken by Iranian-American photographer Shirin Neshat. It depicts the back view of a woman cloaked in traditional Muslim hijab, walking alongside a starkly white modern building. To provide you with a little context on Neshat’s work, I will start off with a little background information on her life and artistic career. Neshat was born and raised in Iran, to a family that was open to Western values. As a result, she was encouraged to be an independent, free-thinking woman from an early age and was sent to the United States for her college education. She did not begin to practice art until she returned to Iran in 1990 and felt compelled to visually express the change she witnessed as a mechanism for coping with the discrepancy between the culture she now experienced and that of the pre-revolution Iran in which she was raised. Her work refers to the social, cultural, and religious codes of Muslim society, but she actively resists stereotypical representations of Islamic society.

The lone figure is in the foreground of the photo, just barely contained within the frame. By capturing her back turned to the camera, Neshat transforms her from the subject of the photo to a portal through which to engage the viewer. The viewer is facing the image in the same direction as the figure, allowing him or her to transplant him or herself into the figure’s position. By doing this, Neshat is perhaps encouraging the viewer to look at the building from the figure’s perspective, evoking the viewer to think about how this figure may perceive the extremely modern, Western building. The building dominates most of the composition, forming an imposing presence that seems worlds away from the displaced figure despite their physical proximity. The figure is parallel to rather than facing the building, emphasizing the unbridgeable disconnect between them. The two sets of spiral staircase have a strangely organic shape that breaks ups the linear, geometric configuration of the building. The first staircase juts out, looming over the figure as if threatening to swallow her.

The most important feature of the photo is the contrast between the dark, isolated figure and the monolithic building. Neshat also emphasizes this contrast through her use of sharp lighting. Instead of utilizing gentle lighting that would soften the contrast between the light and shadowed elements, Neshat highlights the building’s geometric sterility. As a result, the figure, dressed in all black, is even more pronounced against the almost blindingly white building.

In Modern Building, Neshat uses composition and lighting to create a provocative photograph that explores the tension between a globalizing world that is becoming increasingly dominated by Western modernity and traditional Islamic culture. Time appears to be suspended in the stasis of this scene, in which historic and modern forces come into contention.

--Alice

Exposing the Mead -- Photography and Text

Looking Back
Tom Young
1995
AC 1995.7


On Tuesday night, March 22, the Mead hosted the third installment in the Exposing the Mead Series. Alex, Perry, Alice and I really appreciated the support shown by students and the Mead’s faculty by both their attendance and their lively participation in the discussion. To those who could not make it, we hope to see you in a couple weeks, and in the meantime would be glad to catch you up on our in-depth discussion on text and photography, and how language can affect our visual experience.

Perry De La Vega ’13 eased us into the discussion by asking the audience to consider what the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” meant to us, and then to think about where we generally see text within images. While at first the audience mainly brought up advertising, Perry demonstrated how rarely we actually experience images without words, pointing to captions next to works of art, titles, artist’s statements, and even credit lines in online search engines. The question then becomes, as Perry articulately stated, how does the relationship between typographic semiotic and the rendered image impact our experience? Or, how linguistic signifiers, for example words that are dependent on their social and cultural contexts, and the arrangement of these signifiers affect the audience’s visual experience?

The hope was that through the examination of the photographs in front us we would start to see this interplay between the visual language, image, and physical and social contexts in which they both exist, and how this interaction creates a complex system of meanings, which together form the piece as a whole.

To make these ideas a bit easier to swallow Perry related this process to code breaking. As he explained, since we already know that words are a code, we simply have to transfer what we know about reading codes to the photographic image. The layers we have to work through are: the one created by the words and their accepted meanings and the adjacent images; the mental images that the word evoke combined with the actual image; the meaning of the images and how that alters the words; and finally the words called to the viewer’s mind by the images.

First, we looked at Lesley Dill’s “A Word Made Flesh: Throat” (1994), which is a stunning photograph printed on mulberry paper. It depicts a woman looking skyward with her throat exposed to the viewer, on which is scrawled the words “I am afraid to own a body, I am afraid to own a soul”, which were originally penned by Emily Dickinson. The audience immediately picked up on the physicality of the work, and especially of the words, which are handwritten in an almost violent manner. People used words such branded, tattooed, and inscribed to describe the lettering, which Perry related back to the placement of the words on the women’s throat. He argued that the words could be a physical representation of the woman’s emotions as she struggles to speak. People also picked up on the careful placement of the words, and how the artist had matched them to the contours of the women’s neck to both elongate its shape and also simultaneously depict the woman’s almost choking on the words. Ultimately, the audience agreed that without the incorporated words the piece would be much less powerful, and would lose its darkness. Furthermore, as Perry brought up, this tension highlights the conflict that communicating our fear of owning a body by using an actual body creates.

The second photograph we considered was Tom Young’s “Looking Back” (1995), which depicts a mental institution. The piece is mounted on aluminum, and a small rectangle, in which the image of a woman obscured by a layer of words is suspended, projects from the plane of the photograph. The words, which seem to restrain the woman, unlike the Dill piece are narrative and come from her description of her time at the mental institution. The audience responded to the layering of text over a protruding image, which creates an eerie sense of the woman reaching out but ultimately unable to connect with the viewer. The aluminum and the murkiness in the photograph created by a double exposure add to this cold, spooky, detached feeling. Perry ended the discussion of the photograph with a reference to the physical size of the lettering, which requires the viewer to get extremely close to the image, and thus adds to the sense that the viewer is trying to decipher a whisper is coming from inside the dark walls of the building.

Unfortunately at this point we had run out of time and Perry ended the discussion. During the course of the evening he had led the audience to consider not only the images in front of them nor only the words in front of them, but also the relationship between the two. And we left with a greater appreciation for both photographs, as well as a better understanding of how language can shape a visual experience and how many layers are involved in that relationship.

We hope to see you next time, when Alex Strecker ’13, will be leading the discussion.

-Thea

Science, Art and Photography

.30 Bullet Piercing an Apple
Harold Edgerton
1964
AC 1996.64.7


Harold Edgerton was a professor of electric engineering at MIT who combined scientific laboratory tools with his love of photography. Most famously, he introduced the stroboscope, or strobe, to photography. The strobe slowed down or completely stops the apparent movement of an object, and by synchronizing an electronic stroboscope with a high-speed motion-picture-camera Edgerton was able to expose six thousand to fifteen thousand frames per second. A normal camera only exposes and projects twenty-four frames per second, so when Edgerton's photos are projected, high-speed events appear in extremely slow motion. The resulting images are visually stunning simply because of the unique events they capture, but their careful composition and the artist's attention to color transform scientific studies of motion into works of art.

.30 Bullet Piercing an Apple is a prime example of Edgerton's mélange of science and artistry. By placing the composition off center, Edgerton leads the viewer to interact with the composition as a whole. Neither the bullet, nor the apple, nor the explosion itself is the central focus, but rather Edgerton leads you to focus on the entire moment of explosion. Furthermore, in the photograph Edgerton plays with dimension. The strong and competing vertical and horizontal lines formed by the bullets ground the photograph with a two-dimensional plane, which the apple's stem then breaks out of, reminding the viewer of the fruit's three-dimensionality. Against these strong lines, the motion of the apple's explosion and its chaos are even more pronounced. Edgerton carefully balances the grid of the bullet with the diagonals of the explosion to emphasize the splatters motion versus the apple's stillness.

Edgerton also has an expert understanding of light and color. The composition is organized into light and dark areas, with shadows and highlights adding structure and balance to the piece. The use of light also adds drama to the piece as the bullet speeds from the darkness into the light. Furthermore, his use of light to highlight the apple and bullet contrasts the glossiness of the apple and bullet with the matte white of the explosion. Adding to this contrast is Edgerton's decision to only use white in the explosion while the rest of the colors are bright and saturated. Ultimately, Edgerton uses light and color to accentuate the moment of explosion.

In .30 Bullet Piercing an Apple, Edgerton uses his artistic skill to capture and highlight a moment captured by science. Through his eyes, a simple moment of stillness and movement becomes a balanced composition that plays with our sense of time and dimension. In the end, we are not only left with a unique shot of a normally unperceivable event but also with a piece that stands independently from the process that created it as a work of art.


-Thea

Second Exposing the Mead -- Photographs of the Abstract

Backyard
Aaron Siskind
1940
AC 1985.79.8

On Tuesday, March 1st, we hosted our second Exposing the Mead discussion. Like the first event, it brought together a diverse crowd of students, faculty, and Amherst residents for a night of stimulating discussion and artistic stimulation. For everyone who was able to make it, thank you for showing your support and your interest in photography. For those who couldn't, hopefully this summary will show you how much you missed out on so that you'll make it to the next one! The topic for this week’s discussion was the role of the abstract in photography, as demonstrated in two works by Aaron Siskind and B.A. King. The discussion was led by Thea Goldring, a photography and modern art enthusiast, who began her talk with some contextualization of the Abstract Expressionist movement and then began the discussion.

We began by talking about whether a photograph can really be abstract. Since photography is usually marked by its ability to capture the world exactly as it is, to represent what is in front of the lens, it seems strange to think that the camera would have the ability to make an image that was not representational and had no context.

Thea then revealed that the name of B.A. King's photograph was "Abstract Thought" while Siskind's is titled "Backyard." We agreed that Siskind's appeared less abstract and more representational: we could tell what it was showing and even the title tipped the hand a little bit. But we were hard-pressed to determine what the physical subject of the B.A. King photograph was, so perhaps photography did have some ability to create something outside of context, outside of rational understanding?

B.A. King transformed his photograph into an abstract image in several ways. The perspective of the photographer was disembodying and impossible to imagine, transferring the objects from the physical world to an imagined one. The background was monochromatic and undescriptive, it was also almost impossible to tell it was water (if not for the tiny ripples that could be seen on its surface when the photograph was examined closely). And the work had a distinct, black frame around it, which further separated it from the world and made it truly seem like an abstract thought, floating in King's head, that did not actually exist in the world.

Despite initial appearances, we eventually uncovered all sorts of ways that Siskind's photograph was also abstract on its own right. Siskind's background approached King's in its flatness, particularly with the almost infinite background of bricks. Both works used lines to order their composition: "Backyard" has strong symmetrical diagonals that frame the photograph. Although we can tell that these lines are created by real objects, we begin to forget that as Siskind employs them more and more geometrically. Finally, the dramatic angle that Siskind shot his photograph from also contributed greatly to the objects in the frame losing their meaning as regular objects.

The talk concluded with a new definition of photography: in Siskind's words "a set of relationships between shapes and tones." Siskind's work, despite its literal trappings, was very much headed in the direction that B.A. King's image embodied: an abstract thought, captured in a photograph.

All in all, the discussion was a successful one and a great continuation of our series Exposing the Mead. Please attend our next discussion on the first Tuesday after spring break, March 22, in which we will be discussing the role of text in photography.

-Alex

The Abstract in 1916?

Untitled from "Camera Work" (plate 9, vol. 49, 1916)
Paul Strand
1916
AC 1989.17

Although Aaron Siskind was certainly a key figure in the move that photography made towards the abstract in the 1950s, abstraction did played a role in the medium from much earlier. For example, in the 1910s, under the influence of Modernist painting, photographers began to make use of formal abstractions in their photographs -- focusing less on the subject material and more on the shapes, tones, and lines in the frame. Paul Strand, influenced strongly by Alfred Steiglitz and Edward Steichen, made this shift in the 1910s as well, making photographs that were much less representative than his predecessors. This famous photo by Strand, titled "Wall Street" is a good example.

http://iconicphotos.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/wall-street-1915-paul-strand.jpg

The Mead holds another example of early abstract photography in the photo above. At first glance, this untitled work appears like a purely mundane object: a white picket fence, a front lawn, a row of houses. One could hardly imagine a more idyllic and representative picture of our land. But look a little closer and the subject material starts to fall away. The background appears fuzzy and indistinct. Nothing about it seems to jump out at the viewer. Instead, the blindingly white fence posts dominate the picture. And not just as fence posts, which they are, but more and more as abstract shapes and forms against a dark backdrop. Squint a little bit, and you see definite white shapes framed by the darkness behind them; the fact that the photo is showing a fence, and a lawn, and a house becomes much less important. The top third of the picture maintains its reality pretty firmly, but if you cover that with your hand, the photo really becomes almost a complete abstraction.

Strand achieves this effect very intentionally. He chose his aperture to have little depth of field so that the fence would be in focus and the background would be indistinct. Similarly, he used the focus on his lens to make the fence sharp while de-emphasizing everything behind it. He picked his exposure, either in the camera or in the darkroom, to make the pickets of the fence as sharply bright as possible, making them stand out more as forms than as what they really are. In sum, Strand did not stumble across this abstract presentation, he knowingly crafted it.

Like the Siskind photograph that we discussed on Tuesday, the nod towards the abstractions that are to come are evident, even though Strand was working decades before Siskind picked up a camera.

-Alex

Our First Exposing the Mead

Knees and Arms

Ruth Bernhard

1976

AC 1989.121

As many of you know, this past Tuesday the 15^th, we had our FIRST Exposing the Mead discussion and to put it plainly, it was an amazingly successful affair jam-packed with insight, beauty, intrigue, and cookies. For those of you who were able to attend, thank you for showing your support and your interest in photography. For those of you who were unable to attend, we know how sad you are that you couldn’t make it and that you’ll try hard to come next time! The topic for this week’s discussion was the male gaze in photography as shown through three selected works by both female and male photographers. The facilitator for the talk, the lovely Alice Wang, prefaced her presentation with informing the audience that at least one of the makers of the photos was a woman. Before revealing the identity of each photographer, Alice let the crowd examine the photos and proceeded to give a short lecture on what exactly the “male gaze” is.

According to feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, the “gaze,” which is more than looking and involves a psychological relationship between the power of the gazer being asserted over the object of the gaze, is an intrinsically male act. Being gazed upon, on the other hand, is an intrinsically female act. Additionally, the male gaze is voyeuristic, fetishistic, and objectifying as it relates to the passivity and inactivity of the female form.

The first photo for discussion was by Brassai and depicted the artist Henri Matisse sketching his 19 year-old model, Antoinette. Compositionally, Matisse’s central placement and bright white clothing makes him the dominant force in the photo. His model Antoinette, whose lowered head and body are cast in shadow, is conversely the submissive object of his stare in that she looks at neither the viewer nor Matisse. The versatility of the photo is due to the multiple gazes that are occurring simultaneously. The viewer is permitted a voyeuristic perspective of Matisse’s creative process as he exerts his gaze over his model which is captured by Brassai through the use of his camera. Ultimately, all the occurring gazes focus on the beholding of the model’s passive female form as an object.

The second photo, entitled Knees and Arms by Ruth Bernhard, shows the abstracted representation of the lower body of a female model. Although the soft and dim lighting makes the female form appear to be sensual and delicate, the firm and stylized position of the model’s arms and legs convey a sense of strength. The composition of the photograph can be described as showing the assemblage of appendages culminating in a mountainous formation towards the top-center of the image, imparting a sense of power not found in Brassai’s woman. Bernhard’s woman possesses the qualities typically associated with the female nude, such as sensuality and fragility, but also typically masculine features like fortitude and active force.

The last photo was an untitled piece by Merry Alpern that belonged to a series in which she clandestinely photographed prostitutes through the window of a brother from across the street. In this photo, a prostitute clad in only underwear and a wristwatch is counting money as she stands in front of the window. The dynamic of the photo is due not only the controversial subject matter of a sexual transaction taking place but also to the voyeuristic perspective the viewer is given. Because the prostitute is unaware of the viewer, she is not self-conscious of anyone’s gaze, which makes her posture unassuming and natural. Some of the audience thought the watch the woman was wearing made her appear masculine, along with her rugged pose and way her musculature is emphasized by the lighting.

Essentially, the talk concluded with the audience pondering how the female photographers challenged and reinterpreted the ideals of the male gaze. Regardless of gender, the three photographers chose to represent the female form is various ways: Brassai’s woman was very passive and subjected to the gaze of her viewer; Alpern’s woman was masculine, not sensual, and a domineering figure in the photo; and Bernhard’s woman was a reconciliation between the sensuality and elegance of the female form along with the firmness and strength typically reserved for the male body.

All in all, the discussion proved to very stimulating and everyone seemed comfortable sharing their opinions and sentiments about the photos. It was a picture-perfect beginning to what I’m sure will be a fruitful semester for Exposing the Mead. Please attend our next Exposing the Mead discussion March 1^st, the topic of which is the Representation of the Abstract, led by Thea Goldring.

Perry De La Vega

Brandt's Nude in Chair

Nude in Chair

Bill Brandt

Circa 1950s, printed late 1970s

AC 2002. 352

In order to round out our discussion of the male gaze in photography for this past week's Exposing the Mead, I would like to discuss the rather provocative image above, made by master photography Bill Brandt.

In 1929, at the age of 26, Brandt moved to Paris from Vienna and became an assistant to Man Ray where he learned many of the techniques Ray had been developing at the time. Determined to become an independent photographer, Brandt moved to England in 1931 so he could document the extreme social disparities of the pre-War years. One of his most famous works during this time was a photograph of a loose-coal searcher that emblematically captured the mass unemployment and social hardships brought on during the industrial depression in England.

Yet as the war was coming to a close, Brandt's style changed significantly, as he himself felt " Documentary photography had become fashionable. Everybody was doing it...the poetic trend of photography, which had already excited me in my early Paris days, began to fascinate me again." At this point Brandt began shooting landscapes, portraits and nudes, the last of which is our focus for today.

The photo pictured above belongs to a series of indoor female nudes made during the Fifties. Generally, in these photos Brandt made the room or space a significant interlocutor in the conveyance of the drama that for him was the female body. The same can be said for this photo--the distorted perspective of the room, coupled with the dim lighting directed toward the back end of the space as it illuminates the model, create a menacing atmosphere imbued with emotional agitation.

The physical distance between the viewer and the model, emphasized by the looming chair, hints at an emotional distance which the model conveys through her downward and resigned expression. Because she is so far and is not making any eye contact, the model's expression is difficult to interpret--is she sullen, contemplative, tired? Something that her expression and posture are not, is seductive. If we allow the theory of the male gaze to inform our interpretation, then we could say the model's aloof and enigmatic persona disrupts the male observer's desire to possess and assertively behold that which is the female nude. The tension arises as the actuality of possession gives way to an actual or perceived estrangement from the model.

While the model's equivocal pose could not be described as being actively closed off, it could not be viewed as being inviting. The silhouette of the model's breast caused by the shadow of her own arm alludes to the female sexuality, but again is obscured by a reluctance on her part to be exposed completely to the viewer. In this sense, the model does not act as a completely passive object to be subjected to the desire of the male gazer, but neither does she defiantly prevent the viewer from considering her female form and sensuality. Another "reminder" of her lacking sexuality is the way the chair in the foreground and the chair that she is sitting on echo the curvature of her figure, making me personally reflect on how I might similarly regard an inanimate object and a living woman.

One should not assume that Brandt exhibited efforts to control, subordinate and objectify the female nude in this piece as prescribed by the theory of the male gaze. But one can still consider the photographer's innate male desire to possess and control the female nude, and the possible psychic crisis in this photograph that emerges because of an unfulfilled attempt to do so because of the model's reticence and disinterest?

Hine's Glass Works

Lunch Time, W. Va. Glass Works
Lewis Hine
1908
AC 1994.144

This photograph was taken by Lewis Hine, an American photographer active particularly in the 1920s and 1930s. Because of his background as a sociologist and reformer, his work was not only intended to portray something beautiful but impart a moral suasion on its viewers for change. This particular photograph comes out of a set taken in 1908 on behalf of the National Child Labor Committee. Through this series, Hine hoped to aid the fight to end child labor. Some of his more famous photos in this series portray the children in an even more crushing light: young boys with dusty faces next to heavy machinery, young girls who look worn beyond their years.

This photograph on the other hand, seems a bit less raw. What I enjoy about it is how it manages to be incredibly beautiful while simultaneously imparting its message. Perhaps though, the aesthetic, formal beauty of the photograph overwhelms the social reform element. I cannot help but admire the perfect composition of the photograph -- the straight field of straight, parallel lines with the boys framed perfectly in the middle -- while forgetting that it shows two young boys on break from what must be backbreaking work. Hine would probably not appreciate my sentiment, but perhaps he should have made a less beautiful photo then? Let me know your thoughts on the balance between these two contrasting features in the work!

For more information on Lewis Hine, you can check out this incredibly comprehensive website on his works:
http://www.morningsonmaplestreet.com/aboutlewishine.html

And more of Hine's photography is owned by the Five College museums, including his Men at Work Holyoke series at Mount Holyoke College. The city has a long, beautiful, and heartbreaking history as an industrial town that Hine had the opportunity to capture.

Well, that's all for now, see you next week.

-Alex

A Brief Introduction

Hello there,

Welcome to Exposing the Mead's weekly blog! First, I suppose a little context is in order.

Beginning Tuesday, February 15^th, the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College will host a series of five informal discussions inspired by photographs from the Mead’s collection. Organized by Alex Strecker, Class of 2013, of Amherst College’s Marsh Arts House, the discussions will be facilitated by enthusiastic students with a passion for photography. Each session will highlight a pairing of photographs from the collection, exploring questions of subject matter and the unique influence of the photographic medium on artistic choices.

Accompanying our photo series will be this blog. The blog has several functions: to chronicle and recap our series events as well as highlighting additional photographs from the collection. We also hope to offer a forum for participants to share their own work inspired by Mead photographs.

In short, the main purpose of these conversations is to expose the Mead's impressive photo collection. Beyond that, we're hoping to raise awareness about photography on campus in general. Through our conversations in the Mead itself and then on this platform, designed to show off more of the museum's collection as well as display student's artwork, we hope that all of our college's photography will have the exposure it deserves.

So, I hope you enjoy the blog and I can't wait to meet you all at the talks!


-Alex