History of Photography — Module 11: Cold War Photography, Street Photography, and the Rise of Color

The postwar American mood had a specific texture, and photographers found it before sociologists named it. The country had won the war, built the suburbs, bought the televisions, and produced the cars. What it had not resolved was the question of what all of it was for. Robert Frank arrived from Switzerland in 1947 as a commercial and fashion photographer. He made his own work on the side, which Steichen noticed when selecting images for "The Family of Man." Steichen put one of Frank's pictures in the show. Frank spent the next several years driving across the country on a Guggenheim fellowship, making pictures that were rejected by every American publisher before finding a French edition in 1958. The Americans was not a comfortable book. It showed flags obscuring faces, jukeboxes glowing in empty rooms, lunch counters where black women served food they were not permitted to eat. The tilted frames and grainy exposures were not accidents. They were the appropriate visual language for a subject that did not resolve into clean compositions.

The photographers who followed Frank onto the streets were not all making the same argument. Lee Friedlander was interested in what the camera itself does: the way a frame eliminates everything outside it, the way a reflection adds a layer to a scene, the way a shadow connects the photographer to the image. His pictures are less about alienation than about the peculiar mechanics of photographic vision. Garry Winogrand wanted to photograph the United States in the wake of Kennedy's assassination, and his street pictures home in on body language and interpersonal tension with an abruptness that suggests something has just gone wrong or is about to. Diane Arbus photographed people at the edges of social legibility. She was not interested in them as sociological subjects. She was interested in them as mirrors. When she photographed children, she made them look like compressed adults. When she photographed people society had categorized as marginal, she showed them as more fully inhabited than the people who had done the categorizing.

While the street photographers were working, fashion photography was expanding in a different direction, one that turned out to be equally significant for the visual culture of the era. Richard Avedon was filling Harper's Bazaar with images where the energy came from the model's movement rather than her stillness, from fashion as action rather than fashion as display. Hiro isolated figures against deep saturated color, removing models from any recognizable context into something closer to abstract space. Deborah Turbeville constructed scenarios for her models to perform in, creating a mood rather than a product presentation. The fashion photograph had moved well beyond illustration into a discipline with its own visual intelligence, and the magazines where it appeared were the most widely seen showcases for photographic ambition in the culture.

Color was the running argument of the period. Walker Evans called it vulgar and screeching, and art photographers largely agreed with him. The fine art world stayed with black and white well into the 1960s while advertising, fashion, and photojournalism adapted to color as quickly as the technology allowed. What resolved the argument was not a philosophical shift but a series of images compelling enough to make the resistance seem arbitrary. William Eggleston photographed ordinary objects in suburban Memphis with the dye-transfer process, whose saturated pigments gave everyday American color the intensity of something from another world. John Szarkowski, who ran the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art with the authority of a monarch and the program of a theorist, called it the discovery of color photography. The declaration was overstated, as such declarations tend to be. But Eggleston's photographs were genuinely new: color treated not as decoration or description but as the primary formal element of the picture, as unavoidable and as deliberate as composition.

Vietnam changed what war photography could demand of an audience. Larry Burrows mounted a camera on a machine gun to record a soldier's facial expressions during combat. Eddie Adams photographed a South Vietnamese general executing a handcuffed suspect at point-blank range on a city street. Nick Ut photographed children running from a napalm attack, their clothes burned off them. Ron Haeberle photographed the massacre at My Lai on army-issued black and white, then kept his private color film, and when he was demobilized he began showing the color images, which found their way into a poster that the Museum of Modern Art helped produce and then refused to sanction. The photographs did not explain Vietnam. Szarkowski argued explicitly that photography could not explain it. What they did was make certain facts undeniable and certain rationalizations impossible. That is a different thing from explanation, and it is not a small thing.

Pop Art entered the conversation by treating the photograph not as a special object but as the most ordinary thing in the world, something produced by machines in vast quantities and read at a glance by anyone who had grown up in media culture. Warhol appropriated celebrity photographs, tabloid images, and publicity stills and made them into paintings that were about the reproduction of images rather than the images themselves. The repetition was the point. Richard Hamilton's 1956 collage built a domestic interior entirely out of advertising imagery. Robert Rauschenberg embedded magazine photographs into paintings that simultaneously contained real objects. None of these artists were photographers in the conventional sense. All of them were making work that was fundamentally about photography's relationship to the visual world. The conversation between photography and the other arts had been going on since 1839. In the postwar period it finally stopped being a negotiation about status and became a serious exchange between equals.