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June 29, 2010
In the previous post on Joe Deal I mentioned that he participated in the largely forgotten NEA Photography Surveys of the 1970s---a civic orientated photographic bicentennial project that centred on a desire to explore, document and interpret the nation through photography.
Another participant was Grant Mudford, the modernist Australian photographer who had been living in Los Angeles since 1977. He had a Photographers Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts Long Beach Documentary Survey Project:
Grant Mudford, From Terminal Island, Looking East, 1979, from the Long Beach Documentary Survey Project
From 1976 to 1981 the National Endowment for the Arts Photography Surveys granted money to photograph American cities (including Atlanta, Buffalo, Durham, East Baltimore, Galveston, Long Beach, Los Angeles) and it supported more than seventy projects that examined a wide range of people and places in America, which had undergone rapid transformation in the 1960s and 1970s.
This survey was a historical narrative or portrait of America as well as an exploration of photography-as-art and photography-as-document; or as John Szarkowski had put it photographs that are mirrors of the individual photographers aesthetic perceptions and photographs as windows that provide traces of the real world. the 1970s was a transitional decade in which photographic realism and modernism increasingly gave way to postmodernist approaches to making photography and to understanding photographic representations.
Grant Mudford, Mexico, 1976, Gelatin Silver Print
Mudford is an example of photography-as-modernist art. In the Long Beach series (1979), as well as in his early black and white views of North American cities such as Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and New Orleans, Mudford photographs the mundane -- a Ferris wheel, a nondescript corner of sidewalk, a view of telephone poles and tire tracks -- and transforms these ordinary structures into strikingly abstract compositions in which the play of textures and lines creates a highly patterned surface.
Update
The largest of the surveys was The Los Angeles Documentary Project which explored the American Dream, the visual diversity and the grimmer realities of contemporary urban life. Mark Rice points to a central problem with documentary photography:
Because representation is so entwined with cultural values, as a culture changes, its preferred forms of cultural representation will likewise change. That a photographic style could so easily shift from being viewed as a mark of objectivity to being written off as clichéd vividly illustrates the contingent nature of photographic representation.
The New Topographics was the new aesthetic style for the 1970s.
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In Disappearing Witness: Change in 20th Century American Photography, Gretchen Garner argued that the 1970s was a pivotal decade in photogprhay's shift from primarily being a witness to the world to being an expression of the artistic desires of the photographer.
Garner discusses direct witness as the dominant paradigm for American photographers from the 1920s to the 1960s. During these decades, photographers saw their medium primarily as a vehicle for truthful description and sometimes as a weapon against social injustice. In the 1960s, however, photographic practice and its cultural significance shifted to reflect more personal, idiosyncratic, and staged visions of reality -- a trend, Garner notes, that has intensified with digital photography.