Post-World War II photographers and their work

Post-World War II Photographers

Because post-modernism does not have a standard definition or set of common characteristics it is basically best described as the rejection of modernism (http://members.tripod.com/ambro32/postmod.html).The world has been changing in terms of politics, economic and social systems since World War II as it rapidly moves into the Information Age (http://members.tripod.com/ambro32/postmod.html).Modern photographers recorded life from their perspective, while advocates of post-modern photography claim that photographs simply confirm the power relationships in a society (Norfleet 1995).

Post-World War II modern photographers challenged the "existing notions of what a photograph should look like, what it could contain and what it might mean" (Turner 1987). Gone were "all the woolly, successful photo-sentiments about human-family hood" of the previous half a century of photography. Modern photographers were not replacing the old, they merely had a new landscape to view, one that was of "concept, where what was photographed took on a lesser role when set against the fact of how it looked as a photograph"(Turner 1987). Photography of the 1960's and 1970's was based "less on judgmental views of society or an unraveling of the human condition and more on the act of photographing itself" (Turner 1987).

Diane Arbus once said, "I think there are things that nobody would see unless I photographed them" (Turner 1987). Arbus drew attention to how the average "American might seem when subjected to photography's undiscriminating record, how bizarre were the ritual of Middle America and how divided was society" (Turner 1987). Her portraits of nudists, sideshow performers, transvestites, crying children, gave one a reason to pause and realize "her pictures of 'them,' her pictures of 'us' - something of consequence is at stake here" (Lacayo 2003). Arbus' work caught one's attention, and not from sentimentality or sympathy for the subjects, for she worked at the point "where the voyeuristic and the sacramental converge" (Lacayo 2003). One could not help but be drawn into her photographs, whether it was a small child with a toy hand grenade or a Jewish giant at home with his parents (Lacayo 2003). No matter what she photographed, "Arbus was situated between complicity and awe, a place where irony is beside the point and mere compassion has been left behind for something like mordant communion" (Lacayo 2003). There is nothing false about Arbus's work, it is life in its rawest form. She is "quintessentially modern" and was a pivotal force in the era of modern photography (Lacayo 2003).

By the 1980's post-modernism had arrived and with it the an acknowledgment of all the "complexities that social scientists had long known about photographs" (Norfleet 1995). These ideas came from philosophers, psychoanalysts and semioticians from Europe, believing that all photographs were a lie and that no truth could be found in photographs (Norfleet 1995). Therefore, post-modernists decided that there was no reason to photograph the real world, since all documentaries were lies, and moreover, everything had already been seen and there was no such thing as originality (Norfleet 1995). Moreover, they felt that it was "impossible to make a photograph that isn't really supporting the existing power relationships in a society, regardless of the photographer's intentions" (Norfleet 1995). Words used by the post-modernists were complex, such as "simulacrum, deconstruction, and structuralism" (Norfleet 1995).

Perhaps no photographer pushed the buttons more than Robert Mapplethorpe. Said one critic, "When you are in an art setting you want to appear sophisticated and broad-minded... It's like the emperor's new clothes. You have to prove that you're unflappable" (Young 1995). Mapplethorpe gained notoriety by documenting the era of pre-Aids homosexual hedonism, when gay aesthetic was being adopted by the mainstream icons and the Studio 54 crowd (Young 1995). Moreover, photography was beginning to be accepted as a serious, collectable art form (Young 1995). Initially his work was relatively saleable and inoffensive, such as "society portraits and flowers, uptown, and the leather-hooded bondage boys in a downtown gallery" (Young 1995).