Abstract Expressionist influences on Photography: Aaron Siskind and Ryan McGinley
"I've never entirely understood [Expressionism's] appeal for Americans," said Robert Coates, an art critic for the New Yorker, in 1943. "There is something florid, insistent, and over-obvious about the style that I can't quite reconcile with my own conception of our native temperament. But it's my belief, too that the artists, en masse, are always right -- how can they be wrong when it's they who produce the art that we others argue about? -- and if Expressionism is something that interests large numbers of them at the moment, then Expressionism is something we'd do well to study too."
With that, Coates set off to study how Expressionism was bleeding and dripping and splattering and smearing and screaming its way into American art in the thick middle-year turmoil of World War II. What he saw in the work of young artists like Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko was a "new type of 'abstract Expressionism' that seems, on the whole, to be better rooted in this country."
Aaron Siskind, a contemporary of the Abstract Expressionist painters, sliced bits of the world from their surrounding context by taking high contrast images on black and white film. He paid close attention to isolating details or objects in such a way that the graphic quality (the lines and shapes and textures) was more identifiable than the documentary quality (whatever the thing actually was) in a photograph.
Ryan McGinley's recent portfolio of Olympians in The New York Times Magazine does something very similar. Except McGinley adds a splash of color.
Continue reading »
With that, Coates set off to study how Expressionism was bleeding and dripping and splattering and smearing and screaming its way into American art in the thick middle-year turmoil of World War II. What he saw in the work of young artists like Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko was a "new type of 'abstract Expressionism' that seems, on the whole, to be better rooted in this country."
Aaron Siskind, a contemporary of the Abstract Expressionist painters, sliced bits of the world from their surrounding context by taking high contrast images on black and white film. He paid close attention to isolating details or objects in such a way that the graphic quality (the lines and shapes and textures) was more identifiable than the documentary quality (whatever the thing actually was) in a photograph.
Ryan McGinley's recent portfolio of Olympians in The New York Times Magazine does something very similar. Except McGinley adds a splash of color.
McGinley largely uses only one or two colors, maybe three colors - so the photographs are still more or less monochromatic - they're just orange and red with lights and darks instead of just black and white.
It's a pretty awesome photo essay.
