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History of Photography
Introduction
History of Photography
A World History of Photography
The Story Behind the Pictures 1827-1991
Photographers' Dictionary


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THE STORY BEHIND THE PICTURES 1827-1991
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1 Nicephore Niepce. View from the Study Window, 1827
2 Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre. Boulevard du Temple, 1838
3 Eugene Durieu/Eugene Delacroix. Nude from Behind, ca. 1853
4 Duchenne de Boulogne. Contractions musculaires, 1856
5 Auguste Rosalie Bisson. The Ascent of Mont Blanc, 1862
6 Nadar. Sarah Bernhardt, ca. 1864
7 Francois Aubert. Emperor Maximilian's Shirt, 1867
8 Andre Adolphe Eugene Disderi. Dead Communards, 1871
9 Maurice Guibert. Toulouse-Lautrec in His Studio, ca. 1894
10 Max Priester/Willy Wilcke. Bismarck on his Deathbed, 1898
11 Heinrich Zille. The Wood Gatherers, 1898
12 Alfred Stieglitz. The Steerage, 1907
13 Lewis Hine. Girl Worker in a Carolina Cotton Mill, 1908
14 August Sander. Young Farmers, 1914
15 Paul Strand. Blind Woman, 1916
16 Man Ray. Noire et blanche, 1926
17 Andre Kertesz. Meudon, 1928
18 Robert Capa. Spanish Loyalist, 1936
19 Dorothea Lange. Migrant Mother,
Nipomo, California, 1936
20 Horst P. Horst. Mainbocher Corset, 1939
21 Henri Cartier-Bresson. Germany, 1945
22 Richard Petersen. View from the Dresden City Hall Tower, 1945
23 Robert Doisneau. The Kiss in Front of City Hall, 1950
24 Dennis Stock. James Dean on Times Square, 1955
25 Bert Stern. Marilyn's Last Sitting, 1962
26 Gerard Malanga. Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground, 1966
27 Helmut Newton. They're Coming!,
1981
28 Sandy Skoglund. Revenge of the Goldfish, 1981
29 Robert Mapplethorpe. Lisa Lyon, 1982
30 Joel-Peter Witkin. Un Santo Oscuro, 1987
31 Sebastiao Salgado. Kuwait, 1991
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see also:
Skoglund Sandy
Chapter 28
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1981
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Sandy Skoglund
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Revenge of the Goldfish
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The Mellowest of
Nightmares
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Since the 1980s, photographic
artists have increasingly taken to 'designing' their pictures. Consciously
following the trail blazed by advertising, they have used imagination and
wit to overcome the strictures of the Classical Modern. Rather than
seeking themes in reality and 'taking' it straight, they invent new
pictorial worlds. They often manipulate their pictures in the name of
brilliant and outrageous ideas, and thereby take up the challenges posed
by the Postmodern. Along with Cindy Sherman and David LaChapelle, Sandy
Skoglund numbers among the outstanding exponents of this so-called 'staged
photography' - al-though the New-York-based artist also wishes her
constructed environments to be understood as art in their own right.
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Revenge of the Goldfish:
it's impossible not to fee! the contradiction in the name given by Sandy
Skoglund to the work she created in 1981. Her later tableaus would feature
foxes- or dogs. The viewer may well be overcome by disgust on seeing Germs
are Everywhere (1984), or succumb to a sense of discomfort in the face of
the shimmering green felines in Radioactive Gats (1980). Even the fidgety
squirrels in Gathering Paradise (1991) somehow seem more threatening than
the over-sized goldfish that have some-how found their way into a
middle-class bedroom. In fact, the two protagonists of the scene - mother
and son (or is it brother and sister?) -seem to not even have noticed the
arrival of the fish. The woman is sleeping, the boy is dozing as he sits
on the edge of the bed. The scene oscillates oddly between the real and
the surreal. What sounds threatening in the title reveals itself in the
picture to be markedly peaceful and relaxed.
At most, it is the mass of the reddish-orange creatures taken as a whole
that creates a rather alarming effect - fish that somehow have mistakenly
wandered into an environment where they really do not belong. Much easier
to understand is the room, in which we find everything that a conventional
bedroom ought to offer: bed, dresser, lamp, mirror, latticed window.
Admittedly, everything has been dipped into a swampy green wash - in fact
the whole scene is somewhat reminiscent of an oversize aquarium. Can it be
that the picture is thematizing the reverse of a standard assumptionP
Namely, that the people have becomes captives of nature, caught as it were
in a foreign environment, just as in a 'normal' household aquarium, nature
has been imprisoned by people?
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Sandy Skoglund
Revenge of the
Goldfish
1981
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Sculptures of papier-mache,
plaster, or polyester
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Anyone confronting the
photographic works of the American artist Sandy Skoglund for the first
time - anyone who has recovered sufficiently from the trompel'oceil
effects of her minutely detailed installations to make out her goldfish,
squirrels, cats, dogs, or babies for what they in fact are, namely
sculptures made from papiermache, plaster, or polyester - will inevitably
ask how she does it. In other words, once viewers realize that the scenes
are amazing theater sets, located somewhere between fact and fiction,
reality and artifice, they inevitably inquire after the technical and
artistic processes she employs. To set the cards straight right from the
beginning: Sandy Skoglund is responsible for all the creative steps
involved in her work; she is consummately the author of her photo-graphs,
in the sense introduced by the French nouvelle vague. Skoglund develops
her ideas and constructs her worlds in her gigantic Soho studio located in
the midst of New York's art district. Here she designs and models her
figures from photographic patterns that she has abstracted from magazines
and other printed matter; she sets up her 8-by-io-inch large-format
camera, checks the development of her 'scene' through the focusing screen,
arranges the lighting - and then takes her photograph.
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Sandy Skoglund
The Green House
1990
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A plethora of photographic
'power acts'
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According to her own
understanding, Skoglund is neither sculptress, nor painter, nor
photographer. Douglas Crimp once denoted the phenomenon of her work as a
'hybridization' of the arts. More precisely, Skoglund belongs to the
generation of artists who are applying academic skills originally acquired
in the areas of sculpture or painting to what has become known since the
beginning of the 1980s as 'staged photography'. The photographer may
either find or invent what appears before the lens. The resulting picture
may be a documentation, or a reaction to a situation specially created or
arranged for the camera. "Document and discovery" - thus Jorg Bostrom has
termed (1989) the two fundamentally divergent paths that photography has
unconsciously pursued ever since Niepce's View Out of the Window (1827),
on the one hand, and Daguerre's Stilt Life (1837) on the other. Whereas
the Classical Modern apotheosized Paul Strand's definition of absolute
objectivity as the ultimate task of all photography, including 'artistic'
photography, the Postmodern photographer has in contrast shown a
fascination for design. "Right now we are experiencing a plethora of
photographic 'power acts' within the original medium of photography,"
Gottfried Jager points out concerning the trend. He enumerates "staged
works, montages, decollages, expansions of every sort that run directly
and completely against the original intentions of the photographic
process, and begin to undermine it, dissolve it. The picture's
truth-to-reality is thus shaken and confronted with radical questions that
make this 'truth' itself into the theme." Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, and
Teun Hocks 'stage' themselves before the camera; Joel-Peter Witkin and Joe
Gantz on the other hand create narrative tableaus of sometimes shocking
character. Arthur Tress and David Levinthal have meanwhile specialized in
miniature stages; Calum Colvin and Victor Schrager, in still lifes. In a
highly respected analysis published at the end of the 1980s, Michael
Kohler comprehensively addressed these various approaches to staged
photography, and brought Sandy Skoglund's work to the attention of a
European audience, which in fact tended to be surprised, particularly by
the fineness of the details. In America, Skoglund's work has been praised
as towering over anything else being done in the pictorial field. Skoglund
herself admits that her work demands much effort- not only on her part,
but also on that of her viewers. "Obsession and repetition in the process
of making things is one constant element in my work," the author has
noted.
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Sandy Skoglund
The Green House
Preliminaries to her work finished in 1990. The artist only
began in the late eighties to document the growth of her elaborate
installations.
Still more or less alone at the time, Sandy Skoglund now has her
own team which helps her in the realization of her complex ideas.
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Traces of the American horror
film
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Oscillating as it does between the
witty and the ridiculous, Skoglund's ceuvre has been hard to place.
Critics have variously attempted to locate
t somewhere between dream and
nightmare, or within the art-historical tradition of Duchamp and Magritte,
or under the categories of Dada and Surrealism. But strictly speaking,
Skoglund's oeuvre reveals the inspiration of much more trivial influences.
Disneyland and the colorfulness of American West-Coast photography in
general have made their mark on Skoglund. Also present are traces of
American horror films and, naturally, the anxieties of middle-class
America, which Skoglund handles with ironic flair. A breath of suburban
tristesse wafts unmistakably through her work. She admits that mediocrity
interests her, and "My own background is middle class, and class
perceptions in terms of taste are at the root of a lot of the choices that
I make."
Skoglund, the descendant of
Swedish immigrants, knows what she is talking about. Born in Quincy in
1946, she grew up in California and went to school in the Midwest. 'Middle
America' - the petty-bourgeois underside of the U.S. - is thus as familiar
to the artist as the back of her hand. Hitchcock sent forth his flocks of
gulls and crows in an attempt to crack open deadening small-town
assumptions; Skoglund does the same with the cats, foxes, squirrels, and
new-born babies that swarm forth to transform petty-bourgeois dreams into
nightmares. Skoglund has been strongly influenced not only by American
cinema, but also by European. As a nineteen-year-old art student, she
spent a year in Paris, where she became fascinated by the possibilities of
film. She acquainted herself with the nouvelle vague, watched movies by
Chabrol and Godard, and flirted with the idea of film herself, but the
division of work and responsibility in film-making contradicted her
perfectionist impulses. Sandy Skoglund requires absolute control over
every step, every detail. She ended her studies in the U.S., moved to New
York, and took up minimalist painting. After years of searching and
experimentation, she finally turned to photography: She found herself
thoroughly bored by the work of traditional masters such as Steichen,
Stieglitz, or Weston: even commercial art seemed preferable to that! She
discovered the work of Ed Ruscha, terming it "the first photography...I
really related to. I loved the anti-aesthetic - the dust, the scratches,
the stupidity of the repetition..." What she basically values in
photodesign is the calculability and manipulability of the end product -
the contradiction between being and seeming, reality and artificiality.
Skoglund feels that turning to natural images for stimulation is deeply
embedded somehow in the American culture.
With her first, full-colored still life in hand, Skoglund approached a
gallerist. Marvin Heifermann, at the time director of photography for
Castelli Graphics. In spite of his interest in color photography, he
initially found the artist's work exaggeratedly shrill. Skoglund did not
give up, however, and Heifermann soon found himself fascinated and
genuinely amused both by the detailed realism and the eclectic content he
discovered in Skoglund's photographs - everything from Walt Disney to
horror films. With Ferns and Radioactive Cats at the end of the 1970s,
Skoglund had in fact discovered an art strategy for herself that
corresponded equally to her affinity for painting, film, and photography.
Now she could successively take on the role of script-writer, stage
designer, painter, sculptress, director, and, ultimately, photographer.
"In this approach," remarks Michael Kohler, "the whole point is to use
photography as an aid in presenting imaginary worlds, inventing pictures.
Out of this, an interesting double-layered base is called into existence,
because observers assume that what has been photographed is real, but by
looking more closely, they notice that they have been fooled. This whole
trend plays with this reverse, or flip-flop, effect."
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Sandy Skoglund
Breathing Class
2000
An example of Sandy Skoglund's more recent work. Once again live,
performers become part of a surreal staging.
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Environments with unparalleled
attention to detail
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As mentioned earlier, Sandy
Skoglund is by no means the sole exponent of staged photography, but she
is the only artist who conceives, constructs, and sells her installations
as works of art alongside their photographic representations. The critic
Ann Sievers speaks of the "interdependence and equal status" of the two
forms. Carol Squiers explains; "The photo and the installation arc
nominally the same and yet they are different in both obvious and
maddeningly subtle ways." Skoglund's procedure is correspondingly exact;
she is not satisfied to make a sham just for the camera, but instead,
creates complete environments with unparalleled attention to detail,
working a half year to produce a single scene. Her work is extremely labor
intensive, requiring far more effort than would be needed to produce a
photograph alone. Today, viewers may respond to Skoglund's elaborate
tableaus with fascination, shock, or amusement, but in the early days, her
scenes chiefly elicited confusion and irritation in the art world. Diane
Vanderlip, curator of the Denver Museum of Art, recalls a conversation
with Lucas Samaras and Philip Tsiaras in the early 1980s in which she
asked for their opinion of two of Skoglund's works. They pronounced it
highly intelligent, but questioned whether it was serious art. Vanderlip
let the works go; later she discovered her errors and purchased Fox Comes
for the Denver Museum of Art - at a price of $40,000.
Cindy Sherman has staked out media
and cultural criticism as the special areas for her self-stagings.
Skoglund, by contrast, does not pursue any similarly identifiable
intention with her pictures. The artist denies that her works reflect a
single intention. Nonetheless, many viewers sense a connection between
Radioactive Cats and the debates on the atom, or interpret The Green House
as a contribution to the discussion about the greenhouse effect, and take
Maybe Babies as a comment on the abortion debate. According to the artist,
however, similarities with contemporary problems are, so to speak, merely
accidental. She defends a less narrow approach, arguing: "If the politics
are open rather than closed, the piece adapts to the envi¬ronment rather
than the other way around."
Skoglund's works appeal more to
the senses than to the intellect. As an artist, she relies upon the
emotional intensity of her work and finds a similarity between their
effect and the manner in which Hollywood films manipulate emotions.
So-called 'high art' does not interest her. In a moment of epiphany early
in her career, she realized "the idea of making [conceptual] art was not a
good way to approach things... Instead, I saw myself as trying to make
something that my relatives could understand." This direct approach has
been her trademark through the decades.
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Sandy Skoglund
(born 11 September 1946) is an American photographer and
installation artist.
Skoglund creates surrealist images by building elaborate sets or tableaux,
furnishing them with carefully selected colored furniture and other
objects, a process of which takes her months to complete. Finally, she
photographs the set, complete with actors. The works are characterized by
an overwhelming amount of one object and either bright, contrasting colors
or a monochromatic color scheme.
Born in Quincy, Massachusetts, Skoglund studied both art history and
studio art at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, graduating in
1968. In 1967, she studied art history at the Sorbonne and Ecole Du Louvre
in Paris, France. After graduating from Smith College, she went to
graduate school at the University of Iowa in 1969, where she studied
filmmaking, multimedia art, and printmaking. In 1971, she earned her
Master of Arts and in 1972 a Master of Fine Arts in painting.
In 1972, Skoglund began working as a conceptual artist in New York. She
became interested in teaching herself photography to document her artistic
endeavors, experimenting with themes of repetition. In 1978, she had
produced a series of repetitious food item still life images.
One of her most-known photographs, entitled Radioactive Cats, features
green-painted clay cats running amok in a gray kitchen. An older man sits
in a chair with his back facing the camera while his elderly wife looks
into a refrigerator that is the same color as the walls. Another image,
Fox Games has a similar feel to Radioactive Cats and is also widely
recognized. A third and final oft-recognized piece by her features
numerous fish hovering above people in bed late at night and is called
Revenge of the Goldfish. The piece was used as cover art for the Inspiral
Carpets album of the same name.
Skoglund was an art professor at the University of Hartford between 1973
and 1976. She is currently teaching photography and art
installation/multimedia at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Skoglund has recently completed a series titled "True Fiction Two". This
recent project is similar to the "True Fiction" series that she began in
1986. This series was not completed due to the discontinuation of
materials that Skoglund was using. Kodak canceled the production of the
dye that Skoglund was using for her prints. Each image in "True Fiction
Two" has been meticulously crafted to assimilate the visual and
photographic possibilities now available in digital processes.
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Fresh Hybrid
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Landscape in Roses
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Picnic on WineI
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Raining Pop Corn
2001
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Radioactive Cats
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Walking on Eggshells,
1997
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Fox Games
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Ferns, 1980
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Babies at Paradise Pond, 1995
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Untitled
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Germs are Everywhere, 1986
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Cats In Paris
1993
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A Breeze At Work
1987
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The Invisible Web
1986
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The sound of Food (True Fiction)
1986
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The Cocktail Party
1992
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The Wedding
1994
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Laws of Interior Design
(True Fiction)
1986
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Gathering Paradise
1991
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