Response: Nesbit

Before reading this text, the term "avant-garde" was always an ambiguous umbrella term that confused me. It is helpful now to know its limitations and applications to the development of photography. I think that the relationship photography's developmental progression had with that of painting is telling. It took time for photography to even be considered for discussion as an art form using the same philosophical terms as painting. However, both disciplines employed expressive descriptions of form such as the use of motion blur by photographers such as the Bragaglias.

The changing subject/emphasis of photography changed as well as the content's interpretation. Stieglitz's The Steerage signaled the shift to an emphasis on significant geometries and began an intellectual extrapolation of the significance thereof. The de-emphasis of the human as central to photography as established by the portrait was changed when photographers began to focus on the objects around them. This ready-made/Dada-esque approach had several interpretations. While Weston's Excusado intended to not criticize high art like Duchamp's Fountain, it revered the toilet as a beautiful form representing cultural advancements. Contrastingly, Moholy-Nagy's photograms were an entirely different approach to photography and the representation of objects.

What I ultimately come to think of after my reading is that with whatever role photography plays for artists, there comes another role that it is expected to fill in the consumer/public sphere in the form of mass media and advertising. This complicates the interpretation of photographs as well as their reasons for production. It is interesting how these two spheres (public and artistic) reconcile and clash.

Haley Taylor