Lecture - Love and Life in the Cold War Era
This session explored photography during the postwar world in the context of the Cold War, both in Europe and the United States and focused on the work of photographers including Ed van der Elsken, William Klein and Robert Frank.
The highlight of this lecture was definitely the discussion of the “Family of Man” exhibition. Overall, the lecture looking at attitudes at the time of the Cold war reflected in photography and art in general. At the time, there was much divided opinion related to the cold war and art became much more subjective as a result.
The Family of Man exhibition looked at the positive side of humanity, curated by Edward Steichen, photos were grouped thematically to offer snapshots of the human experience: lingering on birth, love, and joy but also touching on war, privation, illness, and death. Steichen’s intention was to prove, visually, the universality of human experience and photography’s role in its documentation. I found it fascinating to find the exhibition received negative criticism, with various figures describing it as an almost falsification, too good to be true, not reflecting the true attitudes of man. Surely, that is the point? It doesn’t reflect it accurately, but it should! This should be the perspective we view life from, a universal experience, like droplets from an ocean etc.
Roland Barthes – “The great Family of man”. The myth of the human community. An apparent sense of unity that we are all the same. Politics is forgotten, replaced by universal ideologies.
Allan Sekula – FoM was biased as it had forgottenthe current state that the world was in.
Fred Turner – Show driven by ‘Deeply democratic, even utopian impulse’
Enjoyed looking at Kleins ‘The Americans’ especially his images of children in which his perspective takes away from the stereotypical images of children being cute, innocent etc.
Having had a brief look at the essay questions I can choose from, so question related to this lecture seems most attractive. It is a topic I feel I have a lot to say on and don’t have a solidly formed opinion on it, meaning to produce an essay would allow me to come to a conclusion on the topic.
