Page 129 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 129/146
Philippe Halsman: Portrait of Jean Cocteau 1947 (previous page)
After a lifetime of writing poetry, plays, and libretti, making paintings, drawings and films (he’d just made La Belle et La Bete (1946) and was shooting Orphee (1949), Cocteau was a cultural master of
all the arts, Halsman shoots him thus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Halsman
It is Philippe Halsman, I guess, who exemplifies how still photographers were influenced by cine- matographic special effects - here Halsman composites a ‘chrono-Cubist’ vision of Cocteau. In an earlier image of Salvador Dali, Halsman had produced a remarkable image ‘in-camera’:
Philippe Halsman: Dali Atomicus 1948
This brilliant portrait of a surrealist artist at the very beginning of the Atomic Age, demonstrated Halsman’s ability with strobe photography, with stage management and mise en scene, and of course his split-second timing. Orchestrating this image - the 3 cats (one very wet), the suspended chair and easel, and Dali jumping in inspiration - took 28 attempts before both Dali and Halsman were satisfied. Halsman used the 4”x5” twin-lens camera he had designed himself. Halsman set the trend for individualistic ‘art-portraiture’ in late C20th.
Spatialising Photography
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbi94KWIDwQ
The final expansion of photography is spatial - the extension of the singular image into that of the Modernist exposition of photographs, and the use of photographic enlargements and cut-outs in exhibition-spaces. Early exhibitions of photographic prints simply followed the ‘art gallery’ format - single pictures, spatially-separated, presented with printed or inscribed titles and captions; though by the 1880s the Society of Amateur Photographers of New York, were experimenting with the idea of regular ‘Lantern Exhibitions’, including the work of the crusading photo-documentary pioneer Jacob Riis - who successfully combined illustrated talks, exhibitions and a press-campai- gn using photographs: