Field Journal 6

The Modern Arts movement had also made an influence in the world of photography. The abstract forms and a play of color has become the subject matter for many artistic photographs.

As we can see in works American photographer Francis Bruguiere (1880 – 1945), photographic abstractions and the play of light and shadow becomes his subject matter.

Bruguière worked for many famous publications: Vanity Fair, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and the New York Theatre Guild.

In 1923, he started working with shaped or cut paper designs. He would lit those paper designs using some light source to create dramatic abstract patterns and movement with light and shadow and photograph them.

Bruguière held an exhibition in Berlin in 1928, and he work has attracted a lot of attention.

Francis Bruguiere
Untitled (cut paper abstraction), c.1927
Gelatin silver photograph
http://www.museumofnewmexico.org/mfa/ideaphotographic/cgi-bin/display.php?img=bruguiere.jpg

Another American artist known as Men Ray (1890 – 1976), born Emmanuel Radnitzky, applied Dada and surrealism to his photography.

Ray has contributed a lot to Dada and Surrealist movement. He is mostly known for his avant-garde photography, however, he worked in a lot of different media, and had considered himself to be mainly a painter. He had also done a lot of fashion and portrait photography.

Ray had come up with a very unique work of art, while living in France, they are known as ‘Rayogrammes’. Those were pictures that were made on photographic paper, yet the camera was not used: the subject would be laying directly on the paper, then exposed to light and later developed. This put a shadow from the subject the main focus, once again stressing the importance of light and shadow. His most famous piece from this unique series of work is “Electricity” (1931).




















Man Ray
Electricity
Rayographies, 1931
http://artdecoblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/man-ray-electricity-lee-miller-1931.html


While in France, Ray was also a part of the Dada art movement and the only American member of the Paris surrealist movement.















Man Ray
Tears
Photograph, 1930 - 1932
http://www.kyushu-ns.ac.jp/~allan/Documents/CCEurope-05.html

















Man Ray
Observatory Time — The Lovers
Photograph, 1936
http://www.kyushu-ns.ac.jp/~allan/Documents/CCEurope-05.html

He was one of the greatest artists of his generation.

Cubism, futurism, data, surrealism and expressionism, all part of the modern arts movement, had a great influence on photography and other art forms, including film and graphic design.