ERWIN PANOFSKY (1892-1968) Part Two: The System of Meaning: Art History as Symbolic Form Like the anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Erwin Panofsky considered social acts to be not natural but linguistic forms, which are cultural, and thus subject to human...
GERMAN PHOTOGRAPHERS AND THE GERMANS New Topographics refers to more than a visual tradition in photography. New Topographics examines a mindset that is distinctly Western: marking, mapping, conquest, enclosure, and control. Land and territory has always been...
PHOTOGRAPHY AS CONCEPT Landscape and Idea The leading edges of Postmodernism were architecture and photography and film, all of which moved away from Modernism in the sixties. By the eighties, the shifts seen in these mediums would be characterized as...
WHAT ROBERT FRANK SAW Following in the footsteps of Walker Evans who, in the late 1930’s had produced The American Photographs, Robert Frank found the humble and forgotten America. But where Evans, the sophisticated and urbane New Englander, had located...
ROBERT FRANK AND THE NEW PHOTOGRAPHIC VOCABULARY After Robert Frank, contemporary photography was never the same. In the middle of the twentieth century, photography was redefined by one book, The Americans, published in 1958 in France as Les Américains, and in...
Finding White Art There is an interesting painting by the (white male) artist, Mark Tansey, White on White (1986), featuring an unexpected encounter between a Bedouin tribe and a band of Eskimos. At the edges of a sandstorm and a snowstorm is a white out, a reference...
