California Museum of Photography (Extra Credit)

California Museum of Photography

More American Photographs, the name of the exhibit being shown at the California Museum of Photography. Twelve contemporary photographers were commissioned to travel the United States, documenting its land and people. The exhibition presented the resulting photographs alongside a number of the original images by FSA photographers.

The photographer of the below photo is Dorothea Lange, she was born in 1895 and sadly contracted polio as a child, leaving her with a lasting limp. After adapting to her impairment, she believed that her downfall increased her empathy for those who also drew the short end of the stick. Her photographic career began at a New York portrait studio in 1914, and she studied at Columbia University under Clarence White. She then moved to San Francisco to do freelance photography, until 1919, when she opened her own portrait studio. During the Great Depression, however, fewer people had money to spend on portraits, and Lange moved to Taos, New Mexico where she began work with several of the New Deal projects.

This powerful portrait depicts the weariness of a hard existence in poverty. Florence Owens, the migrant mother of the title, crouches in the front of the photo flanked by two of her children, their faces hidden.The viewers attention is directed to the mothers eyes, which seem not to be looking at the camera but to be directed outward, perhaps contemplating a very uncertain future with little hope.

Dorothea Lange

Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California, 1936

Courtesy the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Katy Grannan

Untitled, Bakersfield, California, 2011

Archival pigment print. Courtesy the artist and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

A zoetrope is a device that produces the illusion of motion from a rapid succession of static pictures. To create an illusion of motion, the drum is spun; the faster the rate of spin, the smoother the progression of images.  A viewer can look through the wall of the zoetrope from any point around it, and see a rapid progression of images. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from simply blurring together, and the user sees a rapid succession of images, producing the illusion of motion. Because of its design, more than one person could use the zoetrope at the same time. The zoetrope was invented in 1834 by William Horner, who originally called it a Daedalum ("wheel of the Devil").  It was based on Plateau's phenakistoscope, but was more convenient since it did not require a viewing mirror and allowed more than one person to use it at the same time. The zoetrope is the third major optical toy, after the thaumatrope and phenakistoscope, that uses the persistence of motion principle to create an illusion of motion. Among other early animation techniques such as the flipbook, the zoetrope shows groundbreaking knowledge of the basic idea behind moving sequences: when individual frames in a sequence are viewed quickly enough, the human eye cannot see the staccato jumps between images. This basic idea is the foundation for advanced animation techniques, stop motion animation, and film. Finally, in 1895, modern cinema was born.  Once moving pictures could be projected on a large screen, optical toys such as the zoetrope became used less and less frequently

(Photo I took while at The California Museum of Photography)

(Display of historical cameras)