Photo Modernity

· Modernism
· Art Deco
· Minimalism
· Modern Architecture
· New York
· The Hoover Building
· The Chrysler Building
· Jazz age
· Metropolis
· Brave New World
· The white heat of technology
· Roxy Music
· Busby Barkley
· Style

This project is about capturing the positive emotional response to change. The optimism, and anticipation that, by embracing and exploiting the new, things will be better and be more stylish along the way.

Modernity is simply the state or quality of being modern. It has come to express periods of great change in the 20th century. Modernism represents the thrill of the new, the sanguinity that some how problems will be solved and life will be made better by the newest and latest science, technology, inventions, fashions and trends. That new technology is embraced with enthusiasm and explored to its fullest extent and pushed to its limits.

In particular, one period of modernism in the 20th century which best evokes this sense is the period after the First World War. There was, unsurprisingly, an optimism that things would be different and that science and technology would lead to a better life. During this period, the artists and photographers; Man Ray, Lee Miller, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia working in Paris did much to exploit the boundaries of what could be done technically in photography and art and capture the modernist philosophy in their work.

This project examines three area of photographic technology relating to that time:

1. Solorisation
A technique claimed as original by Lee Miller and Man Ray, but actually a process discovered in the 19th century and wrongly named by Ray.

2. Rayo-grammes
Again, Man Ray’s name for “photo-grammes” the process of placing objects directly onto photosensitive paper to form a one-off print.

3. Stitching
The technique of seamlessly joining two or more photographs to form a single image which will be applied to an image of the Chrysler Building built a few years after this period.