A Guide to Art Movements in Photography
Pop Art
Pop Art was an important twentieth-century art movement characterized by the use of images drawn from popular culture media such as advertisements, comic books, and “mundane” cultural objects. Pop art is commonly interpreted as a reaction to the then-prevailing ideals of abstract expressionism. Pop art replaced the destructive, satirical, and anarchic impulses of the Dada movement. Among the artists considered precursors of the pop movement are Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, and Man Ray. The movement itself emerged in the mid-1950s in the United Kingdom and in the late 1950s in the United States, with different motivations. In the United States, it marked the return of the Hard-edge type (translated as “sharp contour drawing”) and representational art as a response by artists using impersonal, mundane reality, irony, and parody to counteract the personal symbolism of Abstract Expressionism.
Op-Art
Optical Art, an art movement born in the United States in 1958, is an abstract pictorial composition based purely on optical phenomena. It creates sensations of movement in a two-dimensional surface, fooling the human eye through optical illusions. Optical Artworks cause the viewer to interact with a sense of virtual movement through the effects of optical illusion, a situation that triggers a dynamic response of the eye and a certain psychological reaction stemming from its striking appearance. It uses the Rubin effect, which discovers convex figures from the construction of perspectives that the eye cannot fix in space. It emerges from interfering lines and concentric circles with other perceptual illusions of instability, vibration, or confusion.
Op-Art is characterized by several aspects:
- The complete absence of real movement; all its works are physically static, which distinguishes it from Kinetic Art.
- It aims to create visual effects such as apparent motion, vibration, flicker, or blurring.
- Use the resources of parallel lines, either straight or winding, marked color contrasts, either poly or bichromate, changes in shape and size, combination, and repetition of forms and figures. It also uses simple geometric shapes such as rectangles, triangles, and circles in engineered, combination, or complex formation.
Naturalism
Naturalist Photography, as the word implies, is capturing images of an artistic, testimonial, or documentary nature related to nature.
In general terms, it is divided into two groups: flora and fauna, and also everything that is landscape and compositions.
Naturalist Photography is something we see every day, something that the photographer always finds handy for capturing and achieving good images, in this case, the Italian photographer Luca Cavallari photographs hands.
Realism
Realism in photography has been developing throughout photography history through different movements known as photographic realism, which have given more attention to the photographic documentation of reality in the absence of the aesthetic values of the picture.
You can also address the understanding of the term “realism” versus the term “abstraction,” which defines realism as an artistic expression that uses images taken from the outside world, facing the abstraction that replaces these images taken by gestures or signs of mental processes or artistic activity itself, i.e., the artist’s inner world.
By extension, it also applies the term “realism” to indicate that a camera, film, or photograph has very accurate colors and resolutions, “real.”
Contemporary Photography
– Photography is an ambiguous postmodern category for three main reasons: the ambiguity of the broader concept of postmodernism, because within it coexist various but mutually antagonistic practices, and it is less clear which represents a break with modern photography as a speech seems rather neo-avant-garde and therefore fully akin to the original principles of photographic modernism. It seems that opposition to the hegemony of the late-modern canon of straight photography is not enough to set a critical category, a historiographical and epistemological entity sufficiently.
– Postmodern photographic activity is a phenomenon inseparable from the art market and, in particular, the new hegemony of photography in this market since the eighties, which led to occupying the dominant place that painting had in the late-modern context. This two-sided relationship with the market characterized the debate between, on the one hand, the discussion on the problem of representation in the photographic image and, second, its legitimacy as a form of high culture. The epistemological question (reproducibility, loss of aura, multiplicity, lack of original, etc.) and the artistic question (recognition of photography in the system of fine arts and their victory over painting, or, conversely, the collapse of the fine arts because of the triumph of photography) are raised inseparably.
Impressionism
Edgar Degas is considered one of the founders of Impressionism. However, his style set itself apart from the group in several respects, primarily in his preference for urban themes and artificially lit scenes instead of the passion for nature and natural light of other group members. His academic background is evident in that he leaves drawing as an essential element of his craft, from figures, mainly because of the color line, leaving the oil technique to focus exclusively on the cake, using frames that approach photography.
Baroque
During the Baroque period, painting took a prominent role in artistic expression. It was the most characteristic expression of the weight of religion in Catholic countries and bourgeois taste in Protestant countries.
They developed new genres such as still lifes, landscapes, portraits, genre paintings or customs, and enriched the iconography of religious matters. There is a trend and a search for realism that blends with the theatrical and showy.
Surrealism
What Surrealism absorbed from the photographic model was fundamentally the way they operate and proceed through the articulation of unconscious images of reality, for it made use of two procedures: manipulated photographs, or technical surrealism, and those that were not manipulated, or surrealist “found.”
Regarding manipulated photographs, many techniques were invented to convey concepts such as automatism and surrealist free association.
To understand how photography can translate these surreal ideas, remember that image manipulation is entirely acceptable in that it breaks the rules of reality and allows for free invention and creativity.
Rococo
The Rococo is defined by a taste for bright, smooth, and clear colors. Predominant forms are inspired by nature, mythology, the beauty of naked bodies in Oriental art, and especially matters of gallantry and love. It is an essentially mundane art, without religious influences, dealing with daily life issues and human relationships. It is a style that reflects what is pleasant, refined, exotic, and sensual.
Neoclassicism
Photography is the star of the second section. In the first half of the nineteenth century, along with portraiture and landscape, the nude was one of the favorite subjects of artists. They often tried to replace realistic painting with the photographic medium. The nude was linked to sports and science, losing its erotic features and reaching a social space.
This exhibition documents with numerous examples the extraordinary historical and stylistic development of the nude in photography, whose evolution in the first half of the nineteenth century ran parallel to that of the various creative movements in other artistic media: painting, sculpture, and drawing.