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5/31/2016 Kaplan: Humanities Through the Arts

https://kaplan.vitalsource.com/#/books/125939218X/cfi/6/38!/4/4/210/16/4@0:37.3 1/2

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PRINTED BY: [email protected]. Printing is for personal, private use only. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted without publisher's prior permission. Violators will be prosecuted. Joel Meyerowitz has been known as one of America’s finest color photographers since his book Cape Light was published in 1977. He works with the large-format camera that he used for a massive project called Aftermath (2006), a study of the wreckage after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. He is a fine-art photographer who rarely works in a journalistic tradition, so his study of Ground Zero is marked by a careful attention to color and light as he captures images that evoke deep emotional responses. Figure 11-20 is a night photo with a distant image of ruins standing like an ancient chapel. The cranes establish a strong vertical line, as do the remains of the buildings in the background. The rubble in the foreground seems almost fluid, as if it had been poured over the site. This image began on an eight by ten-inch sheet of film and was printed digitally. Meyerowitz has been a pioneer in fine-art digital photography.

Cindy Sherman is one of the few American photographers to have had a one-woman show at the prestigious Whitney Museum in New York City. Her work has annoyed, confounded, and alarmed many people both ignorant and well informed about photography as an art. Some of Sherman’s work is condemned because it seems designed to horrify the audience with images of garbage, offal, vomit, and body parts. For many years she photographed herself in various costumes, with makeup and guises that showed her almost limitless capacity to interpret her personality. Those color photographs often had a snapshot quality and probably were most interesting when seen as a group rather than individually.

Untitled #466 (Figure 11-19) is one of a series of imagined wealthy and privileged modern women. Sherman poses herself as if she were in a painting. The background, the Cloisters in New York City, was photographed separately and the two images were layered together. The contrast between the religious echoes of the Cloisters and the sumptuous secular blue caftan, richly decorated, with Sherman’s dangling gold earrings and gold rings is designed to inform us about the significance of the image. Because this is such large photograph, eight feet high, we can see every detail. The reveal of the cheap plastic sandal and the low-quality stocking implies that the surface is not entirely to be trusted. Sherman has subtly transformed the apparent subject matter and has produced a form-content that, like much contemporary photography, is the result of very careful staging. Color is also part of the subject matter, as it is in Loretta Lux’s Isabella (Figure 11-21), and can be appreciated somewhat the way one appreciates the color of a Rothko (Figure 4-10).

FIGURE 11-20 Joel Meyerowitz, Assembled Panorama of the World Trade Center Looking East. 2001.

Meyerowitz, famous as a color photographer, devoted months to recording the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City.

5/31/2016 Kaplan: Humanities Through the Arts

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FIGURE 11-21 Loretta Lux, Isabella. 2001. Digital print, 9½ × 9½ inches.

Like Meyerowitz and many contemporary photographers, Lux uses the resources of digital imagery to construct photographs that cannot be simply “snapped” in nature. This image may have taken three months to produce.