Running head: PHOTO HISTORY.

Photo History

Institution:

Student’s Name:

Date:
Photo History 2

Question One

As the possibility of a potential nuclear war tends to expand with increasing global

anxiety, a symbolic picture from World War II serves as a terrifying reminder of the

overwhelming power of massive destruction weaponry. The picture captured on 9 August 1945,

depicts a mushroom cloud rising about 45, 000 miles, exploding in the aftermath of a nuclear

explosion over Nagasaki, Japan (Baxter, 2018). Just days after the explosion of the world's first

nuclear battle, identified as "Little Boy," was launched and an estimated 140,000 civilians were

killed in the U.S. Hiroshima. The second nuclear explosion ("Fat Man") claimed Nagasaki's lives

only three days after (These estimates do not take into consideration decades of long-term

radioactive fallout.)

Pictures displaying the chaos on the field were suppressed by U.S. police, as per TIME,

and then Levi's shocking picture itself engulfed the globe. This revealed the blast as if happening

in a void, the application of power as Christ and scientific technology, which transcended the

world, entered the cosmos, and ultimately contributed to the conquest of the USA and the defeat

of the Japanese. This did not demonstrate the 3-mile area of destruction down to earth or catch

the unbelief of the lack of life on man (Although there was a tiny percentage of Japan’s top

military council that was ready to negotiate following the first bomb.)

The explosive type Levy saw then appear as a metaphor for American dominance and a

representation of the beginning of the atomic age in its simplicity as a celestial white outline set

under a contrasting gray sky. This will be constantly repeated through the mainstream media

from T-shirts to videos to the new "Blown-Emoji," showing a brain that releases a storm of

mushrooms from the crown of a sparkling yellow head.

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Question Two

An America seen in the image below is monolithic, unidentified, and threatening but this

does not illustrate the wider depiction seen in Chewing Gum and Chocolate. More frequently,

Tōmatsu emphasizes on American servicemen, like:

“Kin, Okinawa, 1969” by Tōmatsu Shōmei

The first interpretation is of an overwhelming physicality, owing to the usage of low

angle and proximity by Tōmatsu. The lowered angle underlines physical heights, whilst the

contrasting colors of dark uniforms and white sky enhance the physical appearance of the officer,

the spectator feels unpleasantly close. The usage of context on a strictly semiotic basis indicates
Photo History 4

that he is someone to fear, but the expression of the author assures us differently. The punch card

settled on his face, and a shadow over his head's serendipitous depiction shows a guy deep in

thinking. The plane's imagery appears in the top left corner, but here it swims away from the key

subject, indicating eventual deployments to Vietnam, or maybe returning from war.

Question Three

Portrait of Mankind is a revolutionary universal that helps to explain that there is much

more that binds us than divides us. The Family of Man, which dominated the globe in the 1950s

across eight years, helped promote the relaxation of peace as a reaction to a nuclear war (Hurm,

Reitz & Zamir, 2017).  In 1955, nearly a century into the Cold War and when fear was being

created about the prospect of a devastating Nuclear War, Edward Steichen, the department chair

of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, wanted to take on a huge challenge; to establish a

photographic exhibition showcasing the "basic solidarity of mankind." The show focused

primarily on the broad backlit visibility of color in a darkened space, and the red walls represent

a hydrogen bomb blast. It was accompanied by a large photomural showing the United Nations

assembly building, which was intended to signify a stronger future than just a nuclear war.

Question Four

The photomontage is the method and effect of creating composite photography by

rearranging, gluing, superimposing, and cutting two or more images into a new one. The

resultant hybrid image is often processed such that the final picture will act as a smooth digital

printout.

Dada was literature as well as an artistic movement that originated in Zurich. It emerged

as a response to the First World War and the nationalism that had driven everyone else to the war
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impacted by other trends of the avant-garde, such as Expressionism, Constructivism, Futurism,

and Cubism. Its works ranged from performed arts to poetry, photography, images, and Art

College. This ranged from performed art in several cities, including Paris, Hanover, Berlin,

Cologne, and New York. Dada's esthetic marked by its ridicule of materialism and nationalism

views has proved a significant impact on artists who have all established themselves. The

movement disappeared with the formation of Surrealism, but the concepts it produced became

the key elements of various styles in classic and traditional art.

Question Five

Heads of State 1918-1920 by Hannah Hoch

After carefully extracting the men, Höch produced a composition of usually disjunctive

and unpredictable results. In their bath suits, the two political leaders appear certainly ridiculous

and Höch positions them against such an iron-on broader design of flowers as well as butterflies

circling a lady. This work demonstrates her ability to integrate her diverse experiences to

produce unique and compelling pictures. The result is intentionally humorous, but a strong
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message is often sent. The President as well as his chancellor, who just viciously and ruthlessly

crushed the Spartacist Revolt, is portrayed in fiction as though they do not realize the immense

economic and political difficulties that Germany and its people have been experiencing in this

period.

The sticking habits of several German people today, including Höch herself, alludes to a

source of income and profession and equate the position of women with men. The collage is

designed such that it looks as if both individuals were captured in the context of their stick

patterns and puts these punished heads of government in a role to mock them with their normal

masculinity accouterments. The design often challenges the hierarchy and brings into question

abstract ideals which society projects in different types of art.

Question Six

To unleash the power of creativity, the surrealist artists tried to harness the ego. The

surrealists claimed that logical thought repressed the force of the imagination by disdaining

rationalism and literary realism and strongly inspired by psychoanalysis. We always believed

that, under Karl Marx’s guidance, the mind could expose the inconsistencies and spark revolt in

the daily world (Tanyushina, 2020). Their reliance on the influence of creativity brings it into

the context of romanticism; however, they claim the discoveries can be made on the street and

throughout their everyday lives, unlike their forebears. Many subsequent trends were influenced

by the surrealistic urge to access the unconscious mind and their belief in myth and primitivism,

and today the style remains prominent.

Photography played a critical role in surrealism because of the simplicity at which artists

could create unreal pictures (Welstead, 2017). Automatic technology explorations such as Man
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Ray and Maurice Tabard were rendered using approaches such as dual exposure, variations of

printing, deployment, and polarization, where the latter skipped the image. For the creation of

strange pictures, some photographers use rotation or distortion.

Question Seven

Women inscribed surrealism with a different kind of consciousness that their male

colleagues never attained (Brough-Evans, 2016).  An imaginative interpretation has transformed

the phenomenon into a dark, intimate, insightful examination of human experience,

psychological suffering, the mind, feminine identity as well as stereotypes. Because most women

Surrealists wanted to portray their male peers as muses, they could establish how their bodies are

portrayed and thus liberate the women's bodies from the patriarchal male gaze by reassuming the

position of artists. The body has been infused with strength and subjectivity by their practice,

always riddled with sexual appetite. Surrealism has empowered women to openly communicate

their consciousness, ignoring the way their emotional status has been marginalized in the past.
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References

Baxter, C. F. (2018). 1945 and the atomic bomb. The Secret History of

RDX. https://doi.org/10.5810/kentucky/9780813175287.003.0012

Brough-Evans, V. (2016). Sacred surrealism, dissidence and international avant-garde prose.

Routledge.

Hurm, G., Reitz, A., & Zamir, S. (2017). The family of man revisited: Photography in a global

age. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Tanyushina, A. A. (2020). German dada photomontage as art of the “real”: On the path towards

“new realism”. Культура и искусство, (6), 47-59. https://doi.org/10.7256/2454-

0625.2020.6.31742

Welstead, J. (2017). A seamless image: The role of photomontage in the meaning-making of

windfarm development. Extending

Ecocriticism. https://doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9781784994396.003.0014