As we saw in Part 1, the 1970s was a time in which many photographers sought to overturn tradition, using the camera either as a means of making a political statement or as a device for the examination of its own ontological condition. But the '70s was also a decade of much greater photographic fluidity and eclecticism than ever before, with photographers switching and borrowing between genres. There is a great deal that we can learn from these photographers, both in terms of approach and technique. In this, the second installment of a two-part article on 1970s photographic movements and methods, we shall attempt to do just that.
Transgression
The world of photography has always been somewhat segregated. Genre distinctions are adhered to with considerable rigidity and the boundary between art and commerce is stringently policed by gatekeepers on either side of the divide. To be sure, many photographers quietly traverse the latter frontier with some frequency, often balancing gallery and museum shows with editorial and commercial assignments. Yet the unspoken rule is that art is art and business is business, and if ever the twain really must meet then they will kindly use the back door. Indeed, Magnum "conflict photographers" may be very happy to land lucrative advertising campaigns for major fashion brands, but they likely wouldn't thank us for mentioning this fact here.
However, recent years have been marked by a greater degree of flexibility in these matters, with photographers who made their names in fashion now showing up in major museum shows. Meanwhile, "serious" artists frequently collaborate with luxury brands.
We might trace the turning point in this state of affairs back to the 1970s. Throughout the decade, the pages of fashion magazines such as Vogue were host to a contentious strain of photographic creativity. Decadent, confrontational and at times outright misogynistic, the vanguard of '70s fashion photography deliberately courted controversy. What's more, the fashion itself often seemed like an afterthought, frequently taking a back seat to the creative vision of the photographer.
While the backdrop to this scene was New York and Paris, Its key players were all European: Chris Wangenheim, the son of a German aristocrat, and the two Frenchmen Guy Bourdin and Jean-Paul Goude. All three highly talented photographers. All three rather odd individuals.
Although Guy Bourdin's work had regularly been published in the pages of Vogue since the mid 1950s, it wasn't until the latter half of the '70s that he reached the true peak of his creativity. Still working for French Vogue, and also frequently collaborating with the shoe designer Charles Jourdan, by this time Bourdin's talent was so respected that he had total creative control, even over the layout of his images in advertising campaigns.
Bourdin's photographs were inventive, playful, and highly original. His compositions in particular strike us as totally fresh and unexpected even today, and his lighting was always creative, hard-hitting and dramatic. He also took fashion photography further into the realms of storytelling than anyone before him, insisting that his models act rather than pose. In this respect, Bourdin's legacy extends well beyond the confines of fashion, influencing photography more generally. Although Bourdin clearly didn't invent the "staged narrative" style of photography, he did much to determine the course that this way of working would later take, even in art photography circles.
Bourdin's narratives were often dark, surreal and subversive. Not in itself such a bad thing. Sadly though, they also tended to portray women in a highly objectivising manner: as mere props, or even sex-dolls (sometimes quite literally). Some of the scenarios he staged could also be quite violent. Even in the more innocent ones, the model is often sprawled on the ground - prone, pallid and lifeless. Regardless of his talent, Bourdin's images were windows onto a deeply troubled mind.
Although there's no suggestion that Bourdin's love of violent imagery ever extended beyond the boundaries of his photographic universe and into real-life dealings with others, there's plenty of evidence that his more general misogyny did. Bourdin was undeniably a great photographer, it's his status as a human being that remains somewhat more open to question. As one of the most in-demand fashion photographers of his time, Bourdin's career took him far and wide. Yet he remained based in Paris throughout his life and, due to non-payment of taxes, died indebted to the French state - which promptly seized all his negatives upon his demise.
Chris Wangenheim and Jean-Paul Goude, on the other hand, had left Europe for New York in the late '60s. Wangenheim quickly becoming well known as a fashion photographer with a reputation for excess. Meanwhile Goude initially started out as a graphic designer and art director before moving into photography in the '70s.
Wangenheim made his name shooting taboo-breaking and in-your-face fashion stories for GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and Interview. He was a fast-living playboy, shooting for "cash, caviar and cocaine". In the early '80s he would die in an automobile accident. Prophetically, some of his most famous photographs feature models either bleeding to death in, or escaping from, wrecked motor vehicles.
Violent or otherwise, Wangenheim's photos are invariably highly erotically-charged and possess a distinct trash-glamour aesthetic that is archetypically '70s in feel. Wangenheim's world was one of fast cars, helicopters and baroque hotel rooms filled with naked models. Lots of naked models: whereas Bourdin would often cut most of the model out of the frame to show only a shoe, Wangenheim didn't even bother feigning interest in the clothes.
While lacking the violence of Wangenheim and Bourdin, Jean-Paul Goude's work is sadly no less problematic. Perhaps best known for his professional and romantic association with Grace Jones, for whom he art-directed and photographed her late '70s album covers, Goude is an out-and-out exoticist who has consistently displayed a troubling fixation with black women's bodies. While the fashion industry clearly still has some way to go in terms of openness to diversity, that change is unlikely brought about by yet another white guy with a camera. As case in point, Goude is frequently criticised for his inclusion of black models in personal projects - such as his delightfully titled book Jungle Fever - while excluding them from the lucrative commercial work he does (while there's no reason to believe that Goude would deliberately set out to deny people of color a living, at the very least it suggests that he is unwilling to risk upsetting the gravy train by insisting on more diverse casting where he could actually make a difference).
Employing collage, graphic design, painting and (pre-Photoshop) retouching techniques, Goude's aesthetic might look more '80s to us now than '70s, but this is really testament to the wide-reaching and long-lasting influence he had on others. These were methods of working that he himself honed during the 1970s, both in his role as art-director at Esquire and in his collaborations with Jones and others. Beyond troubling ethical matters, what Goude shares with Wangenheim and Bourdin is a bold, graphic use of colour, coupled with often highly sexualised and over-the-top content that was deliberately intended to shock.
Laying ethics aside, then, these were photographers united in their desire to push the boundaries of the acceptable. Not only the limits of moral and social behaviour, but also those of the genre of photography they worked in. The photographs of Bourdin, Wangenheim and Goude were all commissioned with one primary purpose: to sell products. Yet each, in their own way, brought a strong, idiosyncratic approach to this task. One that often overshadowed the fashion items or brands they were contracted to promote.
While naturally there is always a certain degree of creativity in fashion photography, it is still somewhat rare that a fashion photographer should produce work that is more revealing of their own personality than of the luxury items they are meant to be showcasing. Bourdin in particular had a distinctive and unique artistic vision, and despite his troubling attitude to women, in recent years he has gained increasing attention from certain art circles. Indeed, over the last decade there have been a number of major retrospective exhibitions of his work in prestigious venues around the world.
Whereas the Provoke group (see Part I) employed photography in an aggressive manner for political ends, Wangenheim, Goude and Bourdin seemed to gain satisfaction from transgression entirely for its own sake. In this respect, though, they were not alone, as during the 1970s several other photographers shared this desire to contravene social norms by exploring taboo subjects - although few had much in common stylistically with the likes of Wangenheim et al.
One of these is the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Araki was closely associated with the Provoke group. While some Provoke work included a degree of eroticism, this was arguably just part of their championing of personal and political liberation and a general interest in documenting the changing social mores of the times - rather than an all consuming-passion for the sexually explicit or perverse.
Araki, on the other hand, clearly has a one-track mind: through his lens even the most innocent of subject matter, such as a flower, takes on a distinctly sexual light. The majority of Araki's work from the 1970s does not fall into this latter category however: indeed it could not be described as merely "suggestive" of the erotic, but rather documents his sex life in a totally direct and graphic manner, blurring the lines between art and straight-up pornography.
TALKING TECHNIQUE
Bourdin loved working with hard studio flash. Like Wangenheim, he often placed his lights low on the ground to cast larger-than-life shadows of his models up the wall. If the shadows were softly filled-in with a second, weaker flash, so much the better. Somewhat reminiscent of ring-flash, this technique gives a truly '70s glamour look that's straight from the cover of some long lost Roxy Music LP. Bourdin even used studio flash as his principal light-source outdoors, underexposing the daylight to give a dark and moody effect that contrasts with the harsh strobes and gives strong saturated colours. This look is pure Bourdin.
Commercial photographers of the time almost always shot slides, and Wangenheim's work in particular displays the tell-tale bubble-gum chemical tones of gently underexposed transparency film. Bourdin likely shot slides too, but many of his Polaroid test shots have also become well known in more recent years. Even gaining publication as a book. Both Goude and Bourdin favoured bold primary-coloured walls and backdrops. However, whereas Goude's work was nearly always produced on some elaborate and highly stylised studio set, Bourdin frequently also worked on location, adding to the somewhat B-movie vibe of much of his work.
Goude's photography was pure theatre though, and to nail the look you really need to approach a photo session not as either a photographer or a movie director would, but more with the eye of a graphic designer or art director. Indeed, he was both. In Goude's case, this meant playing with simple blocks of colour, directing the models in movement, and not being afraid to acknowledge the fact that a photo is a two-dimensional image - not the unmediated window on the world we so often take it to be.
As obvious as it might seem to us now, Goude was relatively rare among photographers of the time in realising that, like any 2-D image, the surface of a photograph can be modified. Indeed, the moment the film was despatched to the lab, most commercial photographers would have considered their job done. But at this point Goude was only just warming up: once the film was processed, he would often cut up, draw upon, repeat and otherwise alter many of his images before re-photographing them. In this way he'd exaggerate the proportions of his models' bodies, using a process similar to the Photoshop clone stamp, yet solely in the analogue realm.
Legendary photojournalist Robert Capa famously once said that "if your photos aren't good enough you aren't close enough". In general, moving in as near as possible and excluding everything but the main subject is excellent advice. Yet Bourdin demonstrates that, if you've got real talent, then such rules can also be profitably ignored: he frequently shot around the subject, pushing the model to the edge of the frame, or even half out of it. He also deliberately kept many totally extraneous elements in shot, or included wide stretches of negative space - in the form of grass, floor or wall. If his framing wasn't so evidently precise and deliberate, we might be forgiven for thinking that a clumsy assistant had knocked the camera off-centre before the shutter was released.
Bordin painted for much of his life, and we can only assume that he had a strong grounding in Modernism. Bold, graphic and totally ahead of his time, everyone could benefit from studying his compositions. Despite being purely commercial assignments, much of the work Bourdin produced as part of a long running relationship with the shoe-designer Charles Jourdan displays his iconoclastic compositional approach to great effect.
If one thing unites all four of these photographers, it is an obsession with the erotic. While it goes without saying that there will always be an audience for photography depicting sex and debauchery, does anything new remain to be said about these subjects photographically? Maybe there's still room for the same things to be said, but in a different way? Or, more importantly, by different people. Nonetheless, regardless of what we may think of the content of their work, what Bourdin and co. demonstrate is that, as photographers, we will develop a personal creative vision only by fully exploring our innermost obsessions and deepest psychological eccentricities. No matter what these might be.
The Autobiographical
Araki's '70s work depicted (mostly the physical side of) his relationship with his wife. While clearly a form of documentary photography, it is an altogether different strain of the genre to the humanistic reportage stories made so popular in earlier decades by photographers such as Gordon Parks or Eugene Smith. Whereas the Life magazine school of photography advocated a supposedly detached, objective point of view - usually depicting cultures and communities about which the photographer would have had little prior knowledge - Araki's documentary photography was purely autobiographical. Although such an approach had long been out of favour, the 1970s saw several photographers employ a highly subjective, diaristic way of working in the production of strong and often controversial bodies of documentary work that would significantly change the photographic landscape in years to come.
Larry Clark may now be best known as the director of '90s indie shock-drama Kids, but the work that first made his name was 1971's Tulsa: a book of photographs documenting a group of redneck-turned-hippy youths who are mostly seen naked, shooting up amphetamines or playing around with guns. Frequently all at once. A later book, entitled Teenage Lust and containing work shot throughout the 1970s and early '80s, featured more of the same - cementing Clark's reputation as chronicler of American adolescent "deviance".
Due to the uncompromising, and frequently sexually explicit, content of his work, Clark is often the recipient of a considerable amount of criticism. With Tulsa the accusation is invariably that he exploited his teenage subjects. Yet the photographer maintains that he was no opportunistic outsider, but rather an equal member of the group - living with them, taking drugs with them, having sex with them. This was his reality as much as theirs, he says. Indeed, the book opens with a quote from Clark regarding his own long-term amphetamine habit, and he himself appears in some of the photographs.
TALKING TECHNIQUE
Clark reveals that he often deliberately photographed his subjects backlit, exposing correctly for the shadows so that highlight zones in the background would burn-out almost to white. While this technique can just as easily be applied in the digital realm as the chemical, if there's one area that still tends to let digital photography down, it's in the highlights (at least if you don't own a top of the range medium format Hasselblad or similar camera). Large expanses of white pixels rarely look good, so if you really want to achieve a similar look to Clark's in Tulsa, analogue is the way to go.
As these are all photos of nocturnal-dwelling, daylight-adverse junkies, most of Tulsa was shot indoors - either under naked electric bulbs or, if in the daytime, then with the sunlight diffused by drawn curtains and blinds. Soft yet directional, light from a single window always makes for great portraits, and is especially gentle on the excavated features of chronic speedfreaks.
That's the easy part. As for the graphic nudity, lethal weapons and intravenous drug use, these are something that you'll have to figure out for yourself.
Tulsa's raw autobiographical energy inspired many photographers at the time of its release. Of these, the most well-known is likely Nan Goldin. Upon being shown a copy of Tulsa by her photography teacher, Goldin was compelled to apply Clark's intimate, confessional photographic approach to her own life - documenting the gay, transsexual and alternative scenes that she was herself a part of. Although none of this work would see the light of day until the mid-1980s, when some of it was published as part of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Goldin had been shooting her LGBT friends and housemates in Boston and New York throughout the preceding decade.
While Clark often comes across as deliberately contrary and provocative, Goldin's work is subtler and altogether more sensitive. Nonetheless, her subject matter frequently includes (and has often been accused of glamourising) drug-taking, domestic violence, and sexual "depravity". Yet the argument that an artist, or indeed anyone, should be obliged to only document the high points of their lives, and never the lows, is deeply suspect.
Goldin's work serves as a poignant and largely unembellished chronicle of the underground counterculture scenes of late '70s America, just as that generation began to wither under the massing stormcloud of the AIDS epidemic. If she had merely been an outside observer, voyeuristically peering in at this somewhat marginal community, it is unlikely that she'd be so highly regarded today. Instead, what secured Goldin a place in the 20th century photographic canon was her willingness to turn the camera around and reveal herself to the world at her most vulnerable.
TALKING TECHNIQUE
Goldin herself has said that she was never interested in "good photography", but rather in emotions. And that is indeed what you get with her work: these are stark, unadorned snapshots where emotional content is king and conscious technique extends no further than a correct exposure and (sometimes) sharp focus. Perhaps surprisingly, given her rejection of the traditional photographic emphasis on aesthetics, Goldin says that her early influences all came from fashion photography - particularly Guy Bourdin. Of course being "anti-aesthetic" is an aesthetic choice as much as any other, and Goldin's work has a recognisable look - the hard spank of electronic flash on slide film - that may indeed have been partially inspired by Bourdin and his colleagues.
Goldin's photography is in many ways highly emblematic of the times, and shares much of the no-bullshit philosophy and DIY sensibilities of the late '70s New York Punk and New Wave scenes that she herself was on the fringes of. In part a reaction against the bloated, self-important sounds of mid '70s stadium rock and the onanistic flourishes of progressive musos, Punk was aggressive, direct and had little tolerance for pretence. If Goldin first found photographic inspiration in the pages of Vogue, stylistically she was soon to kick against precisely such work, by producing brash, unrefined images that were the photographic equivalent of three-chord, speed-driven Punk anthems.
This was an aesthetic that she shared with several other photographers active at the time. Particularly those such as David Godlis and Derek Ridgers, who documented the New Wave and Punk scenes in New York and London respectively. Ridgers often employed a similiar bare-flash, straight to camera method to Goldin, shooting his subjects up against the wall as if facing a firing squad. And although working in black and white, Godlis had a loose, noirish, approach that under the street-lamps of the Bowery and in the back-rooms of CBGBs doesn't feel too far from Goldin's no-frills aesthetic.
Yet for anyone looking to emulate Goldin's classic images from the 1970s, the emphasis is always going to be on what you shoot, rather than how. It might be suggested that Goldin's habit of documenting the most intimate moments of her life, and then sharing them with the world, has become the norm in the age of Instagram. Yet today's visual-diarists play an entirely different game: social media accounts tend to be carefully orchestrated exercises in public relations rather than sites of genuine, heartfelt, emotional confession.
Goldin's most famous photograph is perhaps the self-portrait in which she sports two particularly nasty black-eyes. While not everyone will be willing to display their misadventures to the general public in such a direct and honest manner, this is precisely why Goldin is so enormously famous and we're not. Hopefully the reader lacks such extreme material in their own lives, yet Goldin's lesson is just as valid for those of us with less dramatic stories to tell: photograph what you have to hand.
As we've seen, then, the 1970s were marked by a notable degree of cross-pollination and appropriation between photographic disciplines. Prior to the decade, however, there was little of this genre-defying confusion. Not only that, but it was mercifully easy to tell a "high-brow" photographic auteur from a commercially-minded hack. Indeed, the distinction was a simple one:
Black and white photos = "real" photographer
Colour photos = journo, jobbing-technician, sell-out.
By the start of the 1980s, however, this attitude had been completely overturned.
Color Documentary and Street Photography
As much as the 1970s is now associated with colour photography, the technology was by no means new to the decade. In fact by this point many well-known photographers had been shooting in colour for some time already. For example, in the 1950s Gordon Parks had produced an important series on the segregated American South for Life magazine in full colour. Similarly, although most of Helen Levitt's famous, groundbreaking colour photographs of Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side date from the late '60s and '70s, she had actually been working in this same manner since the 1950s, but lost the first decade of her colour work in a burglary and had to pretty much start again from scratch. Saul Leiter, too, is well known for his colour street photography long predating the 1970s.
Why, then, are the '70s now almost synonymous with a shift to colour photography? What was so new about '70s colour photography if by that time many well-known photographers had already been shooting in colour for many years?
There was once a time when color photography meant shooting transparencies. Certainly, if you wanted your work published in magazines, then it was expected that you'd use slide film, as it gave better results when reproduced by means of off-set printing (this largely remained the case in the advertising and editorial sectors until at least the end of the '80s). Conversely, enlargements printed from slides tend to be an enormous disappointment, losing both definition and colour accuracy (the one clear exception to this was Cibachrome printing, but sadly Ilford laid this process to rest in 2012). Hence if you shot your photos as slides, it was usually better they stayed as slides.
Needless to say though, a small rectangle of 35mm acetate mounted in a plastic frame tends not to make for a fantastic public viewing experience, and projectors are a little cumbersome, so anyone whose primary interest was exhibiting in galleries usually steered well clear of transparency film (with the exception of Helen Levitt, whose 1974 MoMA exhibition was projected onto a wall, and of course Nan Goldin, as already mentioned). At the end of the 1960s then, colour photography largely meant commissioned photography, while purists still preferred monochrome.
Among the first wave of photographers to kick against the grain and truly embrace colour was Joel Meyerowitz. Along with his friend Tony Ray-Jones, Meyerowitz had been working in colour since the start of his career in 1962: first as a 35mm street-shooter and then moving on to slower paced large-format techniques.
Joel Meyerowitz: Dairyland, Provincetown, 1976. Image courtesy of Joel Meyerowitz.
Meyerowitz added monochrome to his repertoire in 1963 and stuck with it throughout the decade. However, upon seeing the significant improvements made to colour negative film stock and the increasing ease and affordability of producing colour prints in a home darkroom, at the start of the '70s Meyerowitz made the decision to ditch black and white photography altogether in order to concentrate on his "first love". In his forthcoming book, Where I Find Myself (to be published by LKP, London in early 2018), Meyerowitz explains the rationale behind this move:
"During this period John Szarkowski, of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, often wrote about description being what photography did first. Thinking about this made me understand that if that was true then colour had more descriptive power than black and white. It had a greater range of content and emotion: a yellow coat seen against a blue sky was not two similar greys, flesh was not a grey, cars and dogs were not merely greys! I wanted all the power that colour offered, all the subtlety, the tonal range, and the emotional meaning that colour carries for each of us."
Joel Meyerowitz: Ballston Beach, Truro, 1976. Image courtesy of Joel Meyerowitz.
Meyerowitz travelled widely, and his '60s and '70s images originate from destinations as far-flung as the US, Greece, Mexico and France - displaying a simultaneously rich yet restrained use of colour throughout. While today Meyerowitz is still probably best known as a city-bound street-photographer, arguably many of his stand-out images from this period were taken in the tropical light of Florida or under the coastal skies of Cape Cod. Certainly it's this latter work, Cape Light - shot in 1976 on a Deardorff 8x10" field camera - that displayed the most distinct break with both his own photographic past and with the history of photography more generally. Consequently, this body of work retains a real vitality and relevance even today.
Joel Meyerowitz: Doorway to the sea, Provincetown, 1982. Image courtesy of Joel Meyerowitz.
Joel Meyerowitz: Boy on a bed of nails, Provincetown, 1976. Image courtesy of Joel Meyerowitz.
It's worth noting though that Meyerowitz's initial colour and large format experiments were not greeted with open arms by everyone in the photographic world, and at the time even many of his friends felt that he'd lost his way. But as Meyerowitz himself comments, if he was to continue to grow artistically he knew he would have to shake things up and move on from the past: "Anything you have done well is worth letting go of," he says. It wouldn't be too long before many of Meyerowtz's critics would be forced to agree.
Joel Meyerowitz: Elias, Provincetown, 1981. Image courtesy of Joel Meyerowitz.
While several photographers experimented with colour well before the 1970s, if the decade has since become so closely associated with colour photography it is likely due to this shift in its reception by both the photographic world and the general public alike. When called upon to pinpoint the moment that color photography can be said to have truly achieved acceptance within a fine art context, William Eggleston's 1976 show at MoMA is proffered by many as constituting that watershed. Eggleston was a poet of the mundane whose richly detailed and intensely saturated colour prints are now the stuff of photographic legend. His work in the '70s condensed the routine, everyday objects and rituals of North American life down to succinct photographic emblems of modernity, overturning many of the standard tropes of postwar photographic convention. Gone was the drama of extreme poverty, the facile lure of the exotic and the freakshow of the metropolis. Instead Eggleston simply began looking closely at the ordinary people and places around him in run-of-the-mill Memphis.
Eggleston was probably at his most prolific during the second half of the decade, shooting and publishing many outstanding projects - although some of these would not be shown to the public until many years later. Interestingly, though, while Eggleston is now pretty much synonymous with 1970s colour photography, if it wasn't for Meyerowitz's influence, the Memphis colour king might never have made the shift from monochrome in the first place. Meyerowitz recounts a meeting in 1968 between himself and a young Eggleston - who at the time shot entirely in black and white - that changed the latter's shooting style for good: "Bill came to New York to meet the New York photographers working back then, Garry, me, Tod, Lee, John Szarkowski, Gibson, Gedney, etc, and he brought about 50 B&W 8x10 inch prints to show. We sat and looked at that work, talked about street photography in NYC and what he was seeing in the south, and then I showed him 3 reels of slides (around 300)." Eggleston appears to have had something of an epiphany during that long night of talking and drinking with his New York colleagues, and left convinced that colour photography was the way forward.
TALKING TECHNIQUE
Over the years Eggleston has become almost a poster-boy for a method of photographic printing called the dye transfer process. He first started working with the technique in the early 1970s, and most, if not all, his work from the period was produced in this manner. Including, of course, his famous shot of a lightbulb hanging from an almost impossibly deep red ceiling, Greenwood, Mississippi (1973). Indeed, so synonymous with this technology is Eggleston's work, that it's now hard to imagine that his photography could have become quite so influential without it.
To be sure, Eggleston clearly possessed an advanced appreciation of colour, and employed it remarkably well, but without the heavily saturated hues and superior shadow detail offered by the dye transfer process it's debatable whether his studies of the humdrum paraphernalia and accoutrements of modern life would have had quite the impact they did.
Joel Sternfeld and other '70s colour pioneers also employed the dye transfer process, so we can be in no doubt as to its importance in obtaining an authentic early-colour look. However, identifying the technique is one thing, achieving it today another matter entirely: in the early '90s Kodak ceased production of the specialised film required to produce the colour-separation internegatives that were key to the dye transfer process. All necessary chemicals were discontinued soon after. At the time, a few dedicated dye transfer printers remortgaged their homes and consigned enough of the essential ingredients to deep-freeze to continue working for decades. Some twenty-odd years later and amazingly one or two are still in business - so for anyone desperate to achieve the authentic look there is still a way. At least if you're quick. And ideally also very wealthy: given the scarcity of the chemicals and the complexity of the process, you should be prepared to pay through the roof for even one small print.
However, in recent years some of the world's utmost authorities on the dye transfer process have come out to say that they now believe digital inkjet printing has arrived at a point where it often equals, if not supersedes, the results achievable by means of dye transfer. The one exception to this seems to be in images containing a lot of information in the shadow areas, where apparently dye transfer still outdoes inkjet technology in terms of richness and subtlety of detail.
How might we achieve a similar look to Eggleston's today without also having to remortgage our homes? Eggleston himself now produces his photographs as inkjet prints, yet they still retain a chromogenic richness and palette comparable to his '70s dye transfer enlargements - so presumably he does some careful work on them in order to retain his signature style. Some people suggest shooting slide film for the deeply saturated colours and rich blacks it can offer, and then scanning for greater control. Others swear by an all-digital process. One or two argue that the closest results are achieved by means of a tri-transparency technique, in which the three colour channels are printed as separate transparent acetate layers, and then physically stacked and aligned before framing and mounting to create a greater illusion of depth.
Whichever method we choose, it's likely that the real secret lies in careful individual adjustment of the separate colour channels in Photoshop. Eggleston's colours are rich and intense, yet at the same time slightly off-key. They are saturated, but also contain something of their chromatic opposites. There's no universal formula, however, and every photo will require a slightly different set of modifications. Nonetheless, by working with a combination of Colour Balance, Hue/Saturation, and Selective Colour adjustment layers in Photoshop, we can independently tweak each part of the spectrum to get us somewhere in the vicinity of Eggleston's dye transfer look.
As an example, Eggleston's reds are often noticeably very different to the kind of reds we might expect to see either in a digital photo or with the naked eye. So if you have an image with large areas of red (other than skin tones), try first adding a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and, adjusting only the reds, massively increasing Saturation (sliding right) while at the same time moving the Lightness slider a similar degree to the left. Following this, add a Selective Colour adjustment layer and - again, altering only the reds - try adding a good amount of cyan while reducing magenta. Depending on your image, you may also want increase the amount of black in your reds and play with the yellow slider too. You can try a similar procedure for other dominant colours in the shot - such as blue or green - as well.
Meyerowitz and Eggleston were by no means alone in their desire to explore the possibilities of colour photography however, and by the mid-1970s several others such as Stephen Shore, Mitch Epstein, Henry Callahan, and Joel Sternfeld had also found themselves drawn to colour for "serious" photographic work.
Stephen Shore was a protégé of Andy Warhol who frequented the Factory in the late '60s while still a teenager. This early exposure to greatness led to Shore having his first solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art aged only twenty-four. Shore began working in colour at the turn of the decade and shared Eggleston's enthusiasm for the unremarkable: often producing his work on road trips through any-town America. His 1970s projects, Uncommon Places and American Surfaces, largely portray down-at-heel diners, the spaces between buildings, and parked cars. Lots of Parked cars. Particularly cars parked at intersections.
Although over the years Shore has produced many quite well-known portraits, he's more associated with a certain kind of landscape photography. Even when there are people in his photographs, they are often just another element within the environment, rather than the main focus. Shore does occasionally shoot a close-up portrait of an urban cowboy or other mild eccentric, yet mostly those he photographs are just fairly ordinary people on the street doing nothing in particular. Often also standing at intersections.
Shore's contemporary, Joel Sternfeld, produced much of his work on the road too, travelling across the United States in a camper van shooting 8x10 colour film after also being turned on to the format by Meyerowitz: "Joel came to my classes and my studio to sit in after he was out of school for a while, and later I suggested to him that he use the large format 8x10".
Sternfeld was also clearly tied to a tradition of landscape photography, yet he frequently photographed the people he met on his road trips, and in a much more direct way than we'd normally expect from a straight-up landscape photographer. In this respect Sternfeld perhaps provides the evolutionary link between Winogrand's band of black and white street photographers and Eggleston's banal colorists: formally and chronologically, Sternfeld clearly fits with the latter school, yet time and again his work also displays the subtle sense of humour and eye for the surreal that makes much of Winogrand's oeuvre so entertaining.
TALKING TECHNIQUE
As important as the dye transfer technique is to achieving an authentic 1970s colour documentary aesthetic, it's by no means all there is too it. Although in some respects the '70s colour school was just a logical progression of the American tradition of street photography, this new generation had an almost phenomenological appreciation of the commonplace and quotidian. Whereas Friedlander and Winogrand sought to disrupt tradition by means of radical composition techniques and quirky content, the compositions of Eggleston et al. were more quietly "wrong" than extrovertly rule-breaking. And where their content was defiant it was precisely in its banality.
While good use of natural light will never go out of style, there's something distinctly '70s about the way these photographers worked with the sun. Or lack of it. Shore was a great believer in late-afternoon sunshine: although the light in his photographs is frequently still quite hard, it is invariably warm and illuminates the scene from a low angle, throwing everything into high relief. In contrast to this, much of the work in Meyerowitz's mid-70s book Cape Light is about the soft glow of the vast twilight skies mixing in with the just-fired-up neon of diners and drugstores. In other images he juxtaposes harsh out-in-the open sunlight with the softness of diffused shade, or delights in the sultry, overcast coastal gloom to produce sombre, saudade-infused seascapes.
We've spoken about choice of subject matter, film, printing and light, but what about equipment? Does it matter? While the box of black and white prints that Eggleston brought with him to the Bourbon-fuelled show-and-tell session with Meyerowitz in New York were produced with a medium format camera, Eggleston eventually settled on the convenience of a 35mm rangefinder - allowing him to shoot spontaneously and move in close. So if you really wanted to be authentic, you could go for an old Leica (if there are any left on the market: Eggleston himself seems to have bought up rather a lot of them).
However, for the genuine Shore or Sternfeld look, you really need to be shooting on large format colour film. The cost of 8x10 sheet film (which both photographers used to make their most famous images) is prohibitively high today. However Shore also worked with the smaller 4x5 format, which is a much more affordable option and still produces incredible results.
If all you've ever seen are photographs shot on a digital sensor, even a full-frame or medium-format one, you will likely be blown away by the quality of large format negative film. Particularly once printed. This is not to say that LF film is necessarily "better" than a top-end digital image, but it's very certainly different.
Probably the most accessible route into shooting large format now would be a late model (i.e. 1960s or early '70s) Graflex Speed Graphic 4x5 camera. These were once hugely popular and, owing to their strong build, a great many have survived in good condition right up to the present. They also come with a built-in rangefinder focus system, making them practical for hand-held street work. Otherwise, you may be surprised to learn that there are in fact still plenty of 4x5 cameras in production today, although prices are likely to be somewhat higher than for a Graflex (but then again, don't expect to receive much in the way of after-sales support from a company that folded well over forty years ago).
Staged Narrative
At the same time that Eggleston and his cohorts were focusing their lenses on the banal, others were brewing up drama. In recent years mise en scène techniques have become a mainstay of art photography, yet prior to the 1970s this just wasn't really something that people did all that much: photography was for fact, not fiction. To be sure, Julia Margaret Cameron was staging Arthurian legends back in the 1860s, the Pictorialists had a good crack at setting up dramatic scenes, and Chris Marker's seminal photographic-movie La Jetée dates from 1962, but these were definitely exceptions to the norm. Yet in the 1970s, apparently quite independently of each other, several photographers began to employ photography in the creation of fictional narratives in a manner that had never really been seen before, certainly not on any scale. Might this have been prompted by a growing awareness amongst these practitioners that objective photographic truth was a troubled concept, thus opening the door to greater storytelling freedom?
Perhaps. But it was also likely due to the influence of one man: Duane Michals. While most photographers working in a fictional manner have tended to explore the storytelling possibilities of the single, self-contained photographic frame, Michals was, and indeed still is, one of very few people to instead create narratives that unfold over a succession of images. Many of the works from Michals' book Sequences (1970) could easily be outtakes from a reel of movie footage: following the progress of a protagonist step-by-step, shot-by-shot.
As is the case with a number of other photographers we've looked at here, Michals came to prominence in the closing years of the 1960s, yet produced what is arguably his strongest and most well-known work during the '70s (and he's still very much active today, despite now being in his mid-eighties). For someone who would become so respected within a "pure" photography context, Michals was unusual, in that during the '60s he had regularly worked as a commercial photographer. While his narratives frequently explore philosophical ideas and focus on the theme of death, he invariably treats these subjects with the elegant flair of a fashion photographer combined with the playfulness of a favorite uncle reading a bedtime story.
Much 1970s art was of course strongly influenced by second-wave feminist thought, with the human body often constituting both subject and medium. As the representational technology par excellence, photography was naturally suited to the production of work critiquing the position of women in society and the role that visual media plays in propagating this state of affairs. Of the photographers who pursued this line of investigation, one of the most well-known today is Francesca Woodman, an artist whose work displays the clear influence of Duane Michals.
Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Still #27, 1979. Gelatin silver print 10 x 8 inches (MP# CS--27). Image courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.
Woodman committed suicide in 1981, aged only twenty-two. While her career was incredibly brief, her output was prolific. Although she enjoyed no real recognition in her lifetime, Woodman is now regarded as among the most important artists to have considered the female body by means of the photographic medium. Her work mostly takes the form of self-portraits, or photographs of other female models: sometimes clothed, often naked; frequently using mirrors and other props to (quite literally) reflect upon body image. While her adolescent amateur-dramatics might not be to everyone's liking, from a very young age Woodman demonstrated a strong artistic vision that has since proved influential.
More influential still is Cindy Sherman's work from this period. Produced between 1977 and 1980, Sherman's Untitled Film Stills effectively fuse both performance and conceptual approaches with photography to comment upon the one-dimensional and restrictive depictions of women commonly reproduced in Western popular culture. Sherman radically altered her own appearance - by means of props, make-up, costumes and wigs - to act out various common stereotypical images of women in front of the camera in a neo-realist or B-movie style.
While Sherman was still early in her career when she produced the Untitled Film Stills, and went on to explore a similar line of artistic inquiry even more deeply in subsequent projects, this remains her most well known body of work and was highly instrumental in precipitating the growing trend for staged narrative that has since become so prevalent within the context of art photography.
Sherman was really the first to achieve significant art-world success with a fictional approach to photography. However, during the closing years of the 1970s other photographers, too, were experimenting with the medium as a vehicle for the creation of narrative fiction. Interestingly, at exactly the same time that Sherman was working on her Film Stills in New York, artist Marcella Campagnano was producing a very similar project in Italy: the chameleon-like Campagnano transformed herself into scores of different stereotypical women, each time taking her self-portrait against a standard backdrop. The images were then combined to create a vast typological grid of socially ordained female roles.
First emerging at this time also was Jeff Wall, who is now one of the world's most celebrated and emulated photographic artists. He is also an important theorist with an academic background in art history - a resource he frequently draws upon in his practice. Like Sherman, Wall often references cinema in the creation of his larger-than-life photographic tableaux. Not only cinema, but also documentary photography and, particularly in his '70s works, classical painting.
Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Still #33, 1979. Gelatin silver print 8 x 10 inches (MP# CS--33). Image courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.
Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Still #45, 1979. Gelatin silver print 8 x 10 inches (MP# CS--45). Image courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.
TALKING TECHNIQUE
Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Still #84, 1978. Gelatin silver print 8 x 10 inches (MP# CS--84). Image courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.
In actual fact Campagnano had begun work on L'invenzione del Femminile: Ruoli (The Invention of the Feminine: Roles) in 1974, a good few years earlier than Sherman started on her Film Stills. Aside from the obvious issue of U.S. cultural dominance, if to this day Sherman's series remains much better known than Campagnano's, it is likely largely due to the extra level of postmodern social critique that Sherman provides by referencing Hollywood movies.
Appropriation and allusion to popular culture and earlier creative movements and genres was an approach that photographic artists only really began to employ with any frequency in the late '60s and 1970s. While to a certain extent both Jan Groover and even much earlier photographers had sought to emulate something of the look of painting in their photography, this was purely for aesthetic effect. Instead, by the late '70s artists such as Sherman and Wall had begun to directly reference the content of other media in their photographs as a means of commenting on social and cultural phenomena.
Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Still #21, 1978. Gelatin silver print 8 x 10 inches (MP# CS--21). Image courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.
Wall's historical references are not always apparent to the untrained eye however. Rather than stylistically pastiching classical art - as so many of his weaker imitators have done since - the scenes he creates are often somewhat suburban and banal (yet nonetheless epic, if only by nature of their monumental size). Frequently it is only once composition and gesture have been carefully dissected that Wall's images of quotidian drama give up their historical allusions.
While postmodern appropriation and the staging of fictional narratives are techniques that may have emerged in the '70s, they have since become standard tactics within both photography and art production more generally. This means that their application will not automatically bestow an image with an instant '70s vibe. Nevertheless, retracing these methods of working back to their origins might suggest to us new directions in which to take them. Certainly, there still appears to be plenty of room for experimentation with alternative forms of fictional storytelling by photographic means.
Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Still #43, 1979. Gelatin silver print 8 x 10 inches (MP# CS--43). Image courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.
For example, if Duane Michals' work is often instantly recognisable, it is largely because he has taken the road less travelled. While frame-by-frame storytelling can often be a little plodding and didactic - and, when badly done, risks looking more like a photonovella from a trashy '70s teen magazine than high art - if adapted in an innovative manner, there may still be plenty of mileage in the extended photographic narrative techniques that Michals employed.
Michals expanded the scope of photographic narrative beyond the borders of the single frame in another significant way too: by combining photography with handwritten text. Aside from the obvious example of Magnum Photographer Jim Goldberg, there are surprisingly few who have explored this avenue for photographic storytelling. This too might yet yield interesting results.
As we've seen over the duration of this two-part series, the 1970s saw the culmination of a most profound transformation: namely the shift in perception of the photograph from that of a technologically produced document, to a medium for artistic inquiry and expression. As artist John Hilliard says, during the 1970s "there was still a widespread hostility to photography being presented as a form of art (despite its Nineteenth Century inception in precisely that context). Gradually, the climate has changed, so that photographs enjoy a far greater degree of acceptance." Indeed, photography - of a certain kind at least - now draws in huge crowds at museums and attracts even bigger sums of money at auctions.
Accompanying this shift was a growing appreciation amongst photographers of the degree to which the photographic act itself is implicated in the creation of its subject. Or to put it another way, during the '70s artists using photography became more aware of the important role the window frame plays in dictating the kind of view we will see through that window. "Nevertheless," notes Hilliard, "those works that incorporate a degree of critical self-consciousness may still be seen as ‘difficult’ or ‘too intellectual’ - underlining the fact that photography which goes beyond merely formal or documentary concerns to consider more complex themes is still unlikely to be met with widespread enthusiasm even today.
In addition to this somewhat philosophical approach, photography during the 1970s was also marked by a vibrant spirit of fluidity and experimentation, with photographers often drawing inspiration from one genre only to shoot in entirely another. A tendency that has undoubtedly increased since that time. For example, despite their radical beginnings and initial reaction against the polished veneer of commercial photography, both Araki and Nan Goldin were later commandeered back into the fold, working with major fashion brands - albeit in their distinctive lo-fi, no-nonsense styles.
There's a lot we can learn from every one of the photographers mentioned in this two-part series, and many of the techniques and technologies they employed still have a place in contemporary photography - if used intelligently. Today we inevitably look at the photographs of Eggleston etc. as iconic images of a certain kind of Americana - all tied up with Hollywood movies, American popular music and literature. Yet it is important to remember that these photographers were just documenting the ordinary - although admittedly sometimes quite surreal - situations they encountered in their immediate environment. We may now in part be seduced by the retro charm of these scenes, but the photographers themselves likely were not .
TALKING TECHNIQUE
There are two principle ways in which we can benefit from the experiments of 1970s photographers then. Firstly, we can simply study the innovative techniques that they employed and then incorporate these into our own shooting methods. Yet in addition to acquiring some of their compositional or formal tricks, we can also learn from these photographers more in terms of attitude: if they so successfully expanded the repertoire of photographic techniques now available to us, it was precisely by kicking against everything that had gone before them. So if we truly want to become today's Goldin, Friedlander or Eggleston, then, yes, we absolutely need to learn from their innovations. But then just as swiftly reject them.
To be today's Eggleston or Shore doesn't mean photographing neat compositions of sauce bottles, shiny plastic diner seat-covers, or greasy breakfasts on formica tabletops. Forty years from now, people looking back on photographs from the present day will not be interested in learning about the classic cars of mid-century America, old TV sets, or hand painted signs of the kind that are now only really found in antique shops or self-conscious coffee bars. Instead they will value the photographs that most unambiguously embody these times.
This means capturing what is unique about our world now: an archaeology of the contemporary environment, a history of the present. We'll only achieve this by forcing ourselves to examine with fresh eyes precisely that which we automatically overlook for its familiarity. We must become strangers in our own world.
But is there actually any life left in the photographic medium? How much scope is there for continued innovation and discovery today using a camera or similar device? After all, photography has been around for a very long time now.
To be sure, the rise of digital imaging technologies has opened up many new possibilities and changed our relationship with the photograph. Yet, as several artists working with photography in the 1970s have shown us, photographs were no more trustworthy as a form of documentary evidence then than they are now in the age of Photoshop. Doesn't a photograph remain fundamentally the same from an ontological point of view whether it was produced using an 8x10 Deardorff, a 35mm Leica, a GoPro, or a NASA satellite?
In some ways, yes, photography has remained fixed - despite technological changes. In others, the photo is continuously evolving. Indeed, although we all have a clear idea in mind when we say the word "photo", in actual fact the photograph is a much more duplicitous, multifaceted and mutable concept than common sense might initially suggest. John Hilliard sums this up well when he says that:
"A photograph can’t be defined in any singular way. It may be both image and object, it may exist as a physical print or only ever be viewed on a screen from a digital file or on the internet. It may exist as unadulterated evidence of reality or as an imaginary and artificial concoction. It may be a hospital X-Ray, an image of space captured by the Hubble telescope, a crime-scene photograph, a fashion shot or a snap in a family album. Its very diversity evades easy definition and is surely what makes it so interesting."
Artists such as Hilliard, Allan Sekula, Franco Vaccari, and Victor Burgin quite comprehensively dismantled the photograph In the 1970s: examining its inner workings before putting it back together again. But since that time, what is meant by the word "photograph" has to an extent shifted and expanded, and in turn so too has our relationship with it. This means that new ground is continuously being opened up for exploration. As with the work of the Provoke group we saw in Part 1, the role of an artist - photographic or otherwise - is always to react to the times, in a manner appropriate to those times. But old technologies can be used in new ways, or new technologies may elicit novel answers to old questions. Viewed in this light, the innovative photography of the 1970s can also serve as a manifesto for forward-thinking photography today.
Nigel Bennet would like to thank John Hilliard and Joel Meyerowitz for their cooperation and assistance with the respective sections of this article. The information contained here is considerably richer, and no doubt also a great deal more accurate, due to their willingness to answer questions, clarify dates or check historical accuracy. However, fault for any factual errors should of course be lain entirely at the door of the author.
Nigel Bennet is an artist, writer and educator based in Oakland, California. He is currently adjunct professor of photography on Stanford University's Bing Overseas Studies Program in Florence, Italy.
