Humanist Photography, also known as the School of Humanist Photography, [1] manifests the Enlightenment philosophical system in social documentary practice based on a perception of social change. It emerged in the mid-twentieth-century and is associated most strongly with Europe, particularly France, [2] where the upheavals of the two world wars originated, though it was a worldwide movement. It can be distinguished from photojournalism, with which it forms a sub-class of reportage, as it is concerned more broadly with everyday human experience, to witness mannerisms and customs, than with newsworthy events, though practitioners are conscious of conveying particular conditions and social trends, often, but not exclusively, concentrating on the underclasses or those disadvantaged by conflict, economic hardship or prejudice. Humanist photography "affirms the idea of a universal underlying human nature". [3] Jean Claude Gautrand describes humanist photography as: [4]
a lyrical trend, warm, fervent, and responsive to the sufferings of humanity [which] began to assert itself during the 1950s in Europe, particularly in France ... photographers dreamed of a world of mutual succour and compassion, encapsulated ideally in a solicitous vision.
Photographing on the street or in the bistro primarily in black‐and‐white in available light with the popular small cameras of the day, these image-makers discovered what the writer Pierre Mac Orlan (1882-1970) called the 'fantastique social de la rue' (social fantasticality of the street) [5] and their style of image making rendered romantic and poetic the way of life of ordinary European people, particularly in Paris.
The preoccupation with everyday life emerged after World War I. As a reaction to the atrocities of the trenches, Paris became a haven for intellectual, cultural and artistic life, [6] attracting artists from the whole of Europe and the United States. [7] With the release of the first Leica and Contax range-finder cameras, photographers took to the street and documented life by day and night. [8] Such photographers as André Kertész, Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson emerged during the period between the two world wars thanks to the Illustrated Press ( Vu and Regards). Having been brought to notice by the Surrealists and Berenice Abbott, the life work of Eugène Atget in the empty streets of Paris also became a reference.
At the end of World War II, in 1946, French intellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux embraced humanism; [9] Sartre argued that existentialism was a humanism entailing freedom of choice and a responsibility for defining oneself, [10] while at the Sorbonne in an address sponsored by UNESCO, Malraux depicted human culture as 'humanisme tragique', a battle against biological decay and historical disaster. [11]
Emerging from brutal global conflict, survivors desired material and cultural reconstruction and the appeal of humanism was a return to the values of dignity, equality and tolerance [12] symbolised in an international proclamation and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the General Assembly of the United Nations in Paris on 10 December 1948. [13] That the photographic image could become a universal language in accord with these principles was a notion circulated at a UNESCO conference in 1958 [14]
As France in particular, [15] but also Belgium and the Netherlands, emerged from the dark period of the Occupation (1940–4), the liberation of Paris in August 1944 released photographers to respond to reconstruction [16] and the Fourth Republic's (1947–59) drive to redefine a French identity after war, defeat, occupation, and collaboration, and to modernise the country. [2] For photographers the experience had been one in which the Nazi authorities censored all visual expression and the Vichy carefully controlled those who remained; [17] and who eked out a living with portraiture and commercial, officially endorsed editorial photography, though individuals joined the Resistance from 1941, including Robert Capa, Cartier-Bresson, [18] and Jean Dieuzaide, [1] with several forging passes and documents (amongst whom were Robert Doisneau, Hans Bellmer, and Adolfo Kaminsky).
Paris was a crossroad of modernist culture and so cosmopolitan influences abound in humanist photography, recruiting emigrés who impressed their stamp on French photography, the earliest being Hungarian André Kertész who arrived on the scene in the mid-1920s; followed by his compatriots Ergy Landau, Brassai (Gyula Halasz), and Robert Capa (Endre Friedmann), and by the Pole "Chim" Seymour (Dawid Szymin), among others, in the 1930s. [2] The late 1940s and 50s saw a further influx of foreign photographers sympathetic to this movement, including Ed van der Elsken from the Netherlands who recorded the interactions at the bistrot Chez Moineau, the dirt-cheap refuge of bohemian youths and of Guy Debord, Michele Bernstein, Gil J. Wolman, Ivan Chtcheglov and the other members of the Letterist International [19] and the emerging Situationists whose theory of the dérive [20] accords with the working method of the humanist street photographer.
Humanist photography emerged and spread after the rise of the mass circulation picture magazines in the 1920s and as photographers formed fraternities such as Le Groupe des XV (which exhibited annually 1946-1957), [21] or joined agencies which promoted their work and fed the demand of the newspaper and magazine audiences, publishers and editors before the advent of television broadcasting which rapidly displaced these audiences at the close of the 1960s. These publications include the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung , Vu, Point de Vue, Regards , Paris Match , Picture Post , Life, Look, Le Monde illustré , Plaisir de France and Réalités which competed to give ever larger space to photo-stories; extended articles and editorials that were profusely illustrated, or that consisted solely of photographs with captions, often by a single photographer, who would be credited alongside the journalist, or who provided written copy as well as images.
Iconic books appeared including Doisneau's Banlieue de Paris (1949), Izis's Paris des rêves (1950), Willy Ronis' Belleville‐Ménilmontant (1954), and Cartier‐Bresson's Images à la sauvette (1952); better known by its English title, which defines the photographic orientation of all these photographers, The Decisive Moment ).
National and international exposure of humanist photography was accelerated through exhibitions and of particular importance in this regard is The Family of Man, a vast travelling exhibition curated by Edward Steichen for MoMA, which presented a unifying humanist manifesto in the form of images selected from amongst, literally, a million. Thirty-one French photographs appeared in The Family of Man, a contribution representing almost one-third of the European photography in the show. [22]
Steichen said that based on his experience of meeting photographers in Europe as he sought images of ‘everydayness' which he defined as 'the beauty of the things that fill our lives', [23] for the exhibition, that the French were the only photographers who had thoroughly photographed scenes of daily life. These were practitioners he admired for their conveying 'tender simplicity, a sly humor, a warm enthusiasm ... and convincing aliveness'. [24] In turn, this exposure in The Family of Man inspired a new generation of humanist photographers. [25]
The British, exposed to much the same threats and conflict as the rest of Europe during the first half of the century, in their popular magazine Picture Post (1938–1957) did much to promote the humanist imagery [28] of Bert Hardy, [29] [30] Kurt Hutton, Felix H. Man (aka Hans Baumann), Francis Reiss, Thurston Hopkins, John Chillingworth, Grace Robertson, and Leonard McCombe, who eventually joined Life Magazine's staff. Its founder Stefan Lorant explained his motivation;
“Father was a humanist. When I lost him in the war, it changed me. He was in his forties, and I changed. I championed the cause of the common man, for people who were not as well off as myself” [31]
The movement is in marked contrast to the contemporaneous ‘art’ photography of the USA, which was a country less directly exposed to the trauma that inspired the humanist philosophy. [32] Nevertheless, there too ran a current of humanism in photography, first begun in the early 20th century by Jacob Riis, [33] then Lewis Hine, followed by the FSA and the New York Photo League [see the Harlem Project led by Aaron Siskind] photographers exhibited at Limelight gallery. [34]
Books were published such as those by Dorothea Lange [8] and Paul Taylor (An American Exodus, 1939), Walker Evans and James Agee ( Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , 1941), Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell ( You Have Seen Their Faces , 1937), Arthur Rothstein and William Saroyan ( Look At Us,..., 1967). The seminal work by Robert Frank, The Americans published in France in 1958 (Robert Delpire) and the USA the following year (Grove Press), the result of his two Guggenheim grants, can also be considered an extension of the humanist photography current in the USA which had a demonstrable impact on American photography. [8] In spite of the Red Scare and McCarthyism in the 1950s (which banned the Photo League) a humanist ethos and vision was promoted by The Family of Man exhibition world tour, and is strongly apparent in W. Eugene Smith's 1950s development of the photo essay, street photography by Helen Levitt, Vivian Maier et al., and later the work by Bruce Davidson (incl. his East100th Street), Eugene Richards, and Mary-Ellen Mark from the 50s into the 90s. [35] The W. Eugene Smith Award continues to award humanitarian and humanist photography. [36]
Typically humanist photographers harness the photograph's combination of description and emotional affect to both inform and move the viewer, who may identify with the subject; their images are appreciated as continuing the pre-war tradition of photo reportage as social or documentary records of human experience. It is praised for expressing humanist values such as empathy, solidarity, sometimes humor, and mutual respect of cameraperson and subject in recognition of the photographer, usually an editorial freelancer, as auteur on a par with other artists. [37]
Developments in technology supported these characteristics. The Ermanox with its fast f/1.8 and f/2 lenses (6 cm x 4.5 cm format, 1924) and the 35mm Leica, 1925) camera, miniaturized and portable, had become available by the end of the 1920s, followed by the medium-format Rolleiflex (1929), and the 35mm Contax (1936). They revolutionized the practice of documentary photography and reportage by enabling the photographer to shoot quickly and unobtrusively in all conditions, to seize the "decisive moment" which Cartier-Bresson defined as "the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes" [38] and thus support Cornell Capa's notion of "concerned photography", described as "work committed to contributing to or understanding humanity's well-being". [39]
The humanist current continued into the late 1960s and early 70s, also in the United States [32] when America came to dominate the medium, [40] with photography in academic artistic and art history programs becoming institutionalised in such programs as the Visual Studies Workshop, [41] after which attention turned to photography as a fine art and documentary image-making was interrogated and transformed in Postmodernism. [42] [43]
The list below is not exhaustive, but presents photographers that can be partially or totally attached to this movement:
Edward Jean Steichen was a Luxembourgish American photographer, painter, and curator. He is considered among the most important figures in the history of photography.
Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French artist and humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment.
Street photography is photography conducted for art or inquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places, usually with the aim of capturing images at a decisive or poignant moment by careful framing and timing. Although there is a difference between street and candid photography, it is usually subtle with most street photography being candid in nature and some candid photography being classifiable as street photography. Street photography does not necessitate the presence of a street or even the urban environment. Though people usually feature directly, street photography might be absent of people and can be of an object or environment where the image projects a decidedly human character in facsimile or aesthetic.
Robert Doisneau was a French photographer. From the 1930s, he photographed the streets of Paris. He was a champion of humanist photography and, with Henri Cartier-Bresson, a pioneer of photojournalism.
Israëlis Bidermanas, who worked under the name of Izis, was a Lithuanian-Jewish photographer who worked in France and is best known for his photographs of French circuses and of Paris.
Jean-Philippe Charbonnier was a French photographer whose works typify the humanist impulse in that medium in his homeland of the period after World War II.
Willy Ronis was a French photographer. His best-known work shows life in post-war Paris and Provence.
Louis Stettner was an American photographer of the 20th century whose work included streetscapes, portraits and architectural images of New York and Paris. His work has been highly regarded because of its humanity and capturing the life and reality of the people and streets. Starting in 1947, Stettner photographed the changes in the people, culture, and architecture of both cities. He continued to photograph New York and Paris up until his death.
Janine Niépce was a French photographer and journalist. Her career spanned developing films for the French Resistance to covering the women's liberation movement in the 1970s.
Olivier Meyer is a French photographer born in 1957. He lives and works in Paris, France.
Frank Horvat was an Italian photographer who lived and worked in France. He is best known for his fashion photography, published between the mid 1950s and the late 1980s. Horvat's photographic opus includes photojournalism, portraiture, landscape, nature, and sculpture. He was the recipient of the Fondazione del Centenario Award in 2010 for his contributions to European culture.
Gianni Berengo Gardin is an Italian photographer who has concentrated on reportage and editorial work, but whose career as a photographer has encompassed book illustration and advertising.
Réalités was a French monthly of the post World War II era which commenced publication in February 1946, flourishing during the Trente Glorieuses, a period of optimism, recovery and prosperity in France after the austerity of Occupation, ceasing in 1978 in France, although the later US edition continued until 1981. Its articles ranged across French culture, economy and politics, and featured profusely illustrated stories of interest to tourists, especially those traveling to French colonies.
Robert Delpire was an art publisher, editor, curator, film producer and graphic designer who lived and worked in Paris. He predominantly concerned himself with documentary photography, influenced by his interest in anthropology.
Le Groupe des XV was a collective founded in 1946 by fifteen French humanist photographers who exhibited annually in Paris until 1957. Its objective was to have photography recognised as an art form in its own right, and to use it to preserve French photographic heritage.
Sabine Weiss was a Swiss-French photographer active in the French humanist photography movement, along with Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Édouard Boubat, and Izis. She was born in Switzerland and became a naturalised French citizen in 1995.
Peter Johnston Galassi is an American writer, curator, and art historian working in the field of photography. His principal fields are photography and nineteenth-century French art.
Léon Herschtritt was a French humanist photographer. He won the Niépce Prize as a young photographer in 1960.
Les 30 × 40 or Le Club photographique de Paris was a photography club created in Paris in 1952 by Roger Doloy who was its president, with vice-president Jean-Claude Gautrand, photographer and author, and honorary president Jean-Pierre Sudre, professional photographer.
Clément Chéroux is a French photography historian and curator. He is Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He has also held senior curatorial positions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Chéroux has overseen many exhibitions and books on photographers and photography.
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