Theoretical Study on Straight Photography.

So I've look at New Objectivity and now next its the turn of Straight or Pure Photography, this movement came about much earlier then New Objectivity and in a way is connected to it because of similar principles. Straight Photography is defined as "Photography that attempts to depict a scene as realistically and objectively as permitted by the medium renouncing the use of manipulation" in other words the photo that you produce should be an exact or near perfect reflection of what the original scene look like and that no kind of alteration has been used to alter it.Here you can see the similarity to the New Objectivity movement because in both the photographer strived to produce an accurate representation of the subject, yes i know its only a slight similarity but its there. What makes Straight Photography different to other forms is that when you think about it there is very little forward planning involved because you're just shooting exactly what you see before you, not looking and thinking this landscape would look better in a few hours time under different light conditions because with this movement its not about making something look its best its more about capturing the moment.

Alfred Stieglitz.


He is considered by many to be the first so called Modern Photographer because he took the medium and saw the endless possibilities that were available if you moved away from the compositional practices that were common place at the time. In his early years he work like many of his counter parts by arranging scenes in a similar manner to paintings but unlike others he began to question whether photography was a art form in itself and in which case shouldn't follow the same rules and practises used in painting. From this point Straight Photography was born, he began to promote the idea of a process where you capture the scene as it appeared without any staging and then in the printing stage used very little retouching or cropping processes. When you consider the documentary style of photography at this time this was a large leap in the opposite direction because photographers just weren't capturing the everyday scene in this way, if anything it was a revolution in the way we see the world. With his gallery he was able to get his work into the public domain giving it more of the wider regonisition that it deserved while also encouraging others to follow in his footsteps, he was more then happy to exhibit other peoples work thus giving them the exposure they need if he thought there work was good enough. What made his work so good was the fact clearly as you can see he wasn't afraid to get out there in any conditions and get right up close and personal with the world and the people regardless of how things appear. He was interested in how  the aesthetics of the view he just wanted to show real life.

 Paul Strand.


Paul Strand was one of the people that followed Stieglitz and took on the idea of Straight Photography and could be seen to even have taken the idea a step further. Again some one who came from the background of more artist based photography his view was said to have been changed on a visit to Stiglitz's New York gallery when he became convinced that he could use the camera to produced images that were both aesthetically pleasing while at the same time be documentary in purpose, so with the help of Stieglitz's gallery and magazine his work was introduced to the world. What made his work stand out was the sharpness and definition that he produced while his subjects tended to be rooted in reality but at the same time had a very abstract nature about there composition which others work didn't have. As the year went by his style did evolve and move away from the abstract and became if anything more natural and calm as he perfected his style but he never moved far away from the idea of straight photography that he'd learned in his early life. Some of the best descriptions of his style and work come from Stieglitz and himself, Stieglitz said of his work " His work is rooted in the best traditions of Photography, his vision is potential. His work is pure. It is direct. It does not rely upon tricks of process. In what ever he does there is applied intelligence. In the history of photography there are few photographers who from the point of view of expression, have really done much work of importance. And by importance we mean work that has some relatively lasting quality, that element which gives all art its real significance". As for Strand himself he said of his work "I've always wanted to be aware of what's going on around me, and I've wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into this and report on the life of my own time", while also saying " Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees". This was a man with clear ideas who's only aim would appear to show people the world through his eyes.

 Edward Weston.


Edward Weston was again born in America towards the end of the 19th century and to begin with was an award winning Photographer in the  Pictorial style that the majority of his counter parts practised but this all changed in 1915. Weston said that " The camera should be used for a record of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh" this idea began to grow after a visit to an exhibition of modern art, he was becoming more and more disaffected about his work in the Pictorial style and from this visit it lead him to begin experimenting with a more strongly focus semi-abstract style that distanced him from his earlier work. In the 1920's this change of style had the inevitable effect of leading him to New York and meeting Stieglitz and Strand as these were the people leading the race to make photography a more excepted art form in its own right with there own brand of work, from this point his career and out look changed for ever and with his images taken at the ARMCO steelworks he was set on the idea of strong focus photos that reflected the true essence of the subject. From here on he became famous for his natural form close ups, nudes and landscape that he capture using large format cameras and natural light, what i think best describes his work is that it has far more life to it, it feels somehow more natural compared to say Strands where he sometimes seems more focus on the abstract nature of the subject. By 1932 Weston had form Group F/64 with fellow photographer Ansel Adams and Willard van Dyke and together they set out there manifesto stating " The members of Group F/64 believe that photography, as an art form, must develop along lines defined by the acualities and limitations of the photographic medium, and must always remain independant of the idealogical conventions of art and aesthetics that are reminiscent of the period and culture antedating the growth of the meduim itself", in other words they were telling the pictorial photogrphers in no certain terms that their approach to the medium was wrong and would do nothing to increase it as an art form ompared to there's which was the true purpose of the camera. Clearly they were brave men to take this stand but they believed truly and completely in the approach they were taking and it paid off greater then they could ever have foreseen.















As a group of photographers we now know them as the Modernist but at the time as I've already said they could never have seen how influental there work would become and the amount of photographers who they've effected over the years, even as far as the 1970's alot of there beliefs were still held by the majority of people practising in same fields.