| In 1937 a group of industrialists brought the designer, artist, and Bauhaus teacher Laszlo Moholy-Nagy from Europe to Chicago to found a new design school. Intended to educate designers who would support Midwestern industry, the school became home to the most influential fine art photography program in the United States. A group of young photographers associated with the Institute of Design [ID] in Chicago during the 1950s and 1960s responded to and engaged with emerging cultures of individual experience, speed, and moving images, which were undergoing radical change in the years following the Second World War. These emerging cultures might have rendered photography's documentary and expressive capabilities obsolete, but instead they enlivened the medium by leading its practitioners to push their work in new directions. Exemplifying these are the photographs of Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and their students, including Kenneth Josephson, Ray K. Metzker, and Thomas Barrow. Responding to moving images and automobiles as new models for seeing in motion, they pushed at the limit conditions of their medium by focusing on its inability to achieve certain qualities, including fluid movement and the passage of time, within a single frame. They gave form to these limits by developing new visual languages, using extended series and experimental photographic techniques including multiple exposures, combined negatives, manipulated lenses, cut-outs, and photomontage. These visual languages exemplify the paradox that is at the center of this project: the use of photography, a medium defined by its ability to freeze motion and time, to depict those very phenomena.;This dissertation has two intertwined goals: to identify the ID as one of the key places where photographers took on the relationship between still and moving images in a serious and prolonged way, and to demonstrate the extent to which the imagery produced by ID photographers formed a photographic approach that filtered documentary interests in important elements of postwar American popular culture through personal expression. Rather than understanding ID photography as an empty replaying of styles drawn from the European avant-garde without the former movement's ideological substance, as it has sometimes been understood, I argue in contrast that this work reflects profound social changes in the postwar American scene, that these photographs come out of a particular historical moment, and that collectively they make up a complex project to understand and express the novel sensations of that moment. It is an important archive of the dynamic and productive struggles of a group of photographers to explore the boundaries of their medium in a changing media environment. |
