History of Photography — Module 07: Social Reform, Science, and the Modern City
At the turn of the twentieth century, photography became a pivotal tool for documenting modern life, driving social reform, and expanding scientific understanding. As urbanization and industrialization accelerated, photographers like Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine utilized the medium to expose societal inequalities and advocate for the working class. Concurrently, scientific advancements such as X-rays and chronophotography fundamentally altered human perception, revealing invisible realities and the mechanics of movement. These innovations not only enhanced governmental and industrial control through archives and motion studies but also profoundly influenced avant-garde art movements like Cubism and Futurism, redefining the boundaries between objective record and artistic expression.
Scientific Innovations: Motion and Time
Chronophotography: Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey pioneered stop-action photography, capturing the sequence of animal and human movement on film to resolve scientific queries.
Industrial Efficiency: Frank and Lillian Gilbreth applied these motion studies to industrial labor, creating "chronocyclegraphs" to trace and standardize efficient worker movements.
Futurist Art: Anton Giulio Bragaglia and the Italian Futurists adapted motion studies into "photodynamics," intentionally blurring motion to capture the world's "invisible vital energy".
The X-Ray and Altered Perception
Shattering Traditional Vision: The 1895 discovery of the X-ray allowed viewers to see through solid matter, sparking both public anxieties about decency and associations with the occult and a "fourth dimension".
Aesthetic and Artistic Influence: Chemists Eduard Valenta and Josef Maria Eder explored the aesthetic delight of X-rays, while the multiple perspectives and monochromatic palette of the technology heavily influenced Pablo Picasso's Cubist paintings.
Photography as Archive and Control
Criminal Identification: Alphonse Bertillon revolutionized police work by inventing the mugshot, breaking down physical appearances into standardized units to create vast, controllable government archives.
Eugenics: Francis Galton utilized composite mugshots to attempt to show general hereditary laws and "pictorial statistics".
Imperialism and Anthropology: Photography documented indigenous peoples in Africa and the Pacific Islands, often reinforcing Western stereotypes; however, widely circulated postcards of Africans by François-Edmond Fortier directly influenced European artists like Picasso
War and Photojournalism
The "Living-Room War": The rise of half-tone printing and photojournalism allowed the public to heavily consume up-to-date imagery of the Spanish-American War.
World War I Censorship: Governments strictly managed and censored photographic output during WWI to maintain morale, leading to a discrepancy between sanitized official photos and the horrific reality of the trenches
The mugshot established what professional portraiture still does today: create a controlled, purposeful image used to evaluate a person in a specific context. scottparkerphoto.com/headshots.
Module 08:
Modernism, Dada, Surrealism, and the Birth of Fashion Photography