Post WWII Photographers Term Paper

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…