Foggy Bottom
Foggy Bottom is one of the oldest late 18th- and 19th-century neighborhoods in Washington, D. C. Foggy Bottom is west of the White House and downtown Washington, in the Northwest quadrant, bounded by 17th Street NW to the east, Rock Creek Parkway to the west, Constitution Avenue NW to the south, Pennsylvania Avenue NW to the north. Much of Foggy Bottom is occupied by the main campus of the George Washington University. Foggy Bottom is thought to have received its name due to its riverside location, which made it susceptible to concentrations of fog and industrial smoke, an atmospheric quirk; the Foggy Bottom neighborhood not only borders Downtown Washington D. C. but borders the affluent neighborhood of Georgetown as well. Residents of Foggy Bottom have convenient access to Georgetown University as well; the United States Department of State gained the metonym "Foggy Bottom" when it moved its headquarters to the nearby Harry S Truman Building planned and constructed to be the new United States Department of War headquarters building, from the State and Navy Building near the White House in 1947.
The Foggy Bottom area was the site of one of the earliest settlements in what is now the District of Columbia, when German settler Jacob Funk subdivided 130 acres near the meeting place of the Potomac River and Rock Creek in 1763. The settlement was named Hamburgh, but colloquially was called Funkstown. In 1765, German settlers established the town of Hamburg on what would become the area between 24th and 18th NW Street. There are two more founders: Robert Peter and James Linigan; the three had control of the land until 1791 when the territories were given to the city of Washington and the United States government. In the town of Hamburg, a German community was founded by many German immigrants. In 1768, Funk sold two lots of territory to both the German Lutheran and the German Presbyterian communities; the lot, sold to the German Lutherans was located on the corner of 20th and G Street. The lot sold to the German Presbyterians was located on the southeast corner of G Street; the Lutheran lot would not the Presbyterian until the 1880s.
The lot, sold to the German Lutheran community was turned into the Concordia German Church. By the 19th century, Foggy Bottom became a community of white and black laborers employed at the nearby breweries, glass plants, city gas works; these industrial facilities are cited as a possible reason for the neighborhood's name, the "fog" being the smoke given off by the industries. Foggy Bottom attracted few settlers until the 1850s, when more industrial enterprises came into the area. Funk set aside land in Hamburgh for a German-speaking congregation in 1768. Concordia German Evangelical Church, located at 1920 G Street NW was founded in 1833. Today the congregation is The United Church, is the oldest religious community remaining in Foggy Bottom. Foggy Bottom became the site of the George Washington University's 42-acre main campus in 1912. Foggy Bottom was the name of a line of beer by the Olde Heurich Brewing Company, founded by German immigrant Christian Heurich's grandson, Gary Heurich, he tried to revive the tradition of his family's Christian Heurich Brewing Company, which had ceased production in Foggy Bottom.
Christian Heurich Brewing Company's most successful products bore such local names as Senate and Old Georgetown. During the 1950s, Heurich Brewing sponsored the city's professional baseball team, the Washington Senators. Industry consolidation led the brewery to cease operations in 1956. In 1961–1962, the brewery buildings were razed to make way for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Heurich, Jr. and his two sisters donated a portion of the brewery land to the Kennedy Center in memory of their parents, established the Christian Heurich Family as one of the Founders of the national cultural center. Although the firm was founded in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood, the modern beer was brewed in Utica, New York. Foggy Bottom, along with the rest of Washington D. C, was designed using the L'Enfant Plan, which created squares of housing with open space left in the middle. Foggy Bottom's alley life issue emerged during the 1860s when an influx of Irish and German immigrants attempted to move into Foggy Bottom.
This influx was a result of the large number of industrial buildings that were located in Foggy Bottom. There were no immediate houses available for these new immigrants, so they were forced to move into the uninhabited alleys that were located in the middle of the squares; the situation became worse after the Civil War when a wave of newly freed blacks moved to Washington and began populating the alleys. Construction of the alleys continued until 1892 because the government needed to reduce overcrowding in residential areas. For the next decade, the government left the alleys untouched. However, at the turn of the 20th century, the government began relegating more responsibilities and authority to the Health Department, which began demolishing the alleys because of the copious amounts of crime and disease; the living conditions of the inhabitants were quite abysmal, with half of the population sharing or having no toilet facilities Furthermore, crime was a major problem. The following decades showed an improvement in the overall living conditions in the alleys of Foggy Bottom.
The Health Department's effort to reduce crime and overcrowding succeeded until the 1920s, when prohibition began being enforced. Because breweries were a major source of income for the in
David Lynch
David Keith Lynch is an American filmmaker, musician and photographer. He has been described by The Guardian as "the most important director of this era", while AllMovie called him "the Renaissance man of modern American filmmaking", his films Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive are regarded by critics to be among the greatest films of their respective decades, while the success of his 1990–91 television series Twin Peaks led to him being labeled "the first popular Surrealist" by film critic Pauline Kael. He has received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director, has won France's César Award for Best Foreign Film twice, as well as the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival. In 2016, Mulholland Drive, was named the top film of the 21st century by the BBC following a poll of 177 film critics from 36 countries. Born to a middle-class family in Missoula, Lynch spent his childhood traveling around the United States before he studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he first made the transition to producing short films.
He moved to Los Angeles, where he produced his first motion picture, the surrealist horror film Eraserhead. After Eraserhead became a cult classic on the midnight movie circuit, Lynch was employed to direct the biographical film The Elephant Man, from which he gained mainstream success, he was employed by the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group and proceeded to make two films: the science-fiction epic Dune, which proved to be a critical and commercial failure, a neo-noir mystery film Blue Velvet, which stirred controversy over its violence but grew in critical reputation. Next, Lynch created his own television series with Mark Frost, the popular murder mystery Twin Peaks, he created a cinematic prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, a road film Wild at Heart and a family film The Straight Story in the same period. Turning further towards surrealist filmmaking, three of his subsequent films operated on dream logic non-linear narrative structures: Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire.
Meanwhile, Lynch embraced the Internet as a medium, producing several web-based shows, such as the animated DumbLand and the surreal sitcom Rabbits. Lynch and Frost reunited for the Showtime limited series Twin Peaks: The Return, with Lynch co-writing and directing every episode. Lynch's other artistic endeavours include: his work as a musician, encompassing two solo albums—Crazy Clown Time and The Big Dream —as well as music and sound design for a variety of his films. An avid practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, Lynch founded the David Lynch Foundation in 2005, which sought to fund the teaching of TM in schools and has since widened its scope to other at-risk populations, including the homeless and refugees. Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana, on January 20, 1946, his father, Donald Walton Lynch, was a research scientist working for the U. S. Department of Agriculture, his mother, Edwina "Sunny" Lynch, was an English language tutor. Two of Lynch's maternal great-grandparents were Finnish, had immigrated to the United States from Finland in the 19th century.
Lynch was raised a Presbyterian. The Lynch family moved around according to where the USDA assigned Donald, it was because of this that when he was two months old, Lynch moved with his parents to Sandpoint and only two years after that, following the birth of his brother John, the family moved to Spokane, Washington. It was here; the family moved to Durham, North Carolina Boise and Alexandria, Virginia. Lynch found this transitory early life easy to adjust to, noting that he found it easy to meet new friends whenever he started attending a new school. Commenting on much of his early life, Lynch has remarked: I found the world and fantastic as a child. Of course, I had the usual fears, like going to school... For me, back school was a crime against young people, it destroyed the seeds of liberty. The teachers didn't encourage a positive attitude. Alongside his schooling, Lynch joined the Boy Scouts, although he would note that he only "became so I could quit and put it behind me." He rose to the highest rank of Eagle Scout.
As an Eagle Scout, he was present with other Boy Scouts outside the White House at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, which took place on Lynch's birthday in 1961. Lynch had been interested in painting and drawing from an early age, became intrigued by the idea of pursuing it as a career path when living in Virginia, where his friend's father was a professional painter. At Francis C. Hammond High School in Alexandria, Lynch did poorly academically, having little interest in school work, but was popular with other students, after leaving decided that he wanted to study painting at college, beginning his studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1964, where he was a roommate of Peter Wolf. Nonetheless, he left the School of the Museum of Fine Arts after only a year, stating that "I was not inspired AT ALL in that place", instead deciding that he wanted to travel around Europe for three years with his friend Jack Fisk, unhappy with his studies at Cooper Union, they had some hopes tha
Tim Gunn
Timothy MacKenzie Gunn is an American fashion consultant, television personality, voice actor and author. He served on the faculty of Parsons The New School for Design from 1982 to 2007 and was chair of fashion design at the school from August 2000 to March 2007, after which he joined Liz Claiborne as its chief creative officer. Over 16 seasons Gunn has become well known as the on-air mentor to designers on the reality television program Project Runway. Gunn's popularity on Project Runway led to two spin-off shows, Bravo's Tim Gunn's Guide to Style and Lifetime's Under the Gunn, as well as five books. In addition to being an executive producer, Gunn has served as mentor for the teen designers on Project Runway: Junior, he provides the voice of Baileywick, the castle steward in the Disney Junior television show Sofia the First and narrated the sitcom Mixology. Gunn was born in Washington, D. C.. His father worked in the FBI where he started off as an agent but transitioned into becoming a ghostwriter and speechwriter for J Edgar Hoover.
Gunn attended the Corcoran College of Design, receiving a BFA in sculpture. Gunn, gay, was raised in an intensely homophobic household where homosexuals were viewed as predators. According to a video Gunn created for the It Gets Better Project, he attempted suicide at the age of 17 by swallowing over 100 pills, he denied his sexual orientation until his early 20s, did not share it with his family until he came out to his sister when he was 29. After serving as director of admissions for the Corcoran, Gunn started working at Parsons in 1982, served as associate dean from 1989–2000, became Fashion Design Department chair in August 2000, he was credited with "retooling and invigorating the curriculum for the 21st century."Gunn began appearing on Project Runway during its first season in 2004, is known for his catchphrase "Make it work." Gunn received a Primetime Emmy Award in 2013 for Outstanding Host For A Reality Or Reality-Competition Program. Tim Gunn's Guide to Style, a reality show in which Gunn gives fashion advice, debuted in September 2007 on the Bravo television network.
This show ran for a total of 16 episodes over two seasons. Starting in January 2014 Gunn was the host on a single 13–episode season of Lifetime's Under the Gunn. Gunn is an executive producer for Project Runway: Junior, he is the teen designers' mentor. Gunn played a version of himself as a reporter for the fictional Fashion TV in two episodes of ABC's Ugly Betty in February 2007 and guest starred on Drop Dead Diva in August 2009 as himself. Gunn left Parsons in 2007 and joined Liz Claiborne, Inc. as the company's chief creative officer in March of that year. In April 2007, Abrams Image Publishers released Gunn's book A Guide to Quality and Style, co-written with Kate Moloney, cover photo by Markus Klinko & Indrani. While on tour in Palm Springs, the nearby city of Palm Desert honored him with an official resolution declaring April 27, 2007 Timothy M. Gunn Day, he was presented with a certificate by the city of Palm Springs and a plaque by the nearby city of Rancho Mirage in recognition of his career achievements.
From 2010 to 2015 Gunn published four additional books. In May 2009, Gunn served as commencement speaker at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, received an honorary doctorate from the institution, he made sporadic appearances on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson's "Dear Aquaman" segments, helping or standing in for Aquaman, answering letters and dispensing advice. He guest starred as Barney's personal tailor on several episodes of. Gunn guest starred as himself on the 6th episode of CW's fourth season of Gossip Girl, "Easy J". On September 7, 2018, it was confirmed that Gunn, along with Heidi Klum would not be returning to Project Runway for a 17th season on Bravo as they both signed a deal to host a fashion competition show on Amazon Video. In August 2007, "Tim Gunn's Podcast" by Jeffrey Lependorf premiered at the Cornelia Street Cafe in Manhattan, it received its first run one year at New York International Fringe Festival. Gunn appeared in a backup story in the first issue of Models Inc. a fashion-themed comic book miniseries published by Marvel Comics that debuted in September 2009 to coincide with New York City's style showcase.
Gunn appeared on a variant cover of the issue illustrated by Phil Jimenez. In the series, written by Project Runway fan Mark Sumerak and illustrated by Jimenez, Gunn dons the Iron Man armor to foil an attack against the New York Fashion Museum. Gunn appeared in the opening skit on the 62nd Primetime Emmy Awards to style Jimmy Fallon to look like Bruce Springsteen, from his Born in the U. S. A. album. In 2014, he participated in Do I Sound Gay?, a documentary film by David Thorpe about stereotypes of gay men's speech patterns. Gunn lives in Manhattan. In a 2006 interview with Instinct, Gunn stated that he had not been in a relationship since the early 1980s, following the abrupt end of a six-year relationship when his boyfriend cheated on him, that he still loves his former partner, though they are not in contact. In a 2010 interview with People Magazine, he said, "For a long time, I didn't know. I knew what I wasn't: I wasn't interested in boys, I wasn't interested in girls." He mentioned he has "always been kind of asexual."
Gunn spoke about his celibacy in 2012. He stated that he is unashamed of this fact saying, "Do I feel like less of a person for it? No… I'm a happy and fulfilled individual." He said he started his self-imposed celibacy as AIDS began ravaging the gay community, that he and many other people retreated from that danger. Gunn is an outspoken critic
Academy Awards
The Academy Awards known as the Oscars, are a set of awards for artistic and technical merit in the film industry. Given annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the awards are an international recognition of excellence in cinematic achievements as assessed by the Academy's voting membership; the various category winners are awarded a copy of a golden statuette called the "Academy Award of Merit", although more referred to by its nickname "Oscar". The award was sculpted by George Stanley from a design sketch by Cedric Gibbons. AMPAS first presented it in 1929 at a private dinner hosted by Douglas Fairbanks in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel; the Academy Awards ceremony was first broadcast on radio in 1930 and televised for the first time in 1953. It is now seen live worldwide, its equivalents – the Emmy Awards for television, the Tony Awards for theater, the Grammy Awards for music – are modeled after the Academy Awards. The 91st Academy Awards ceremony, honoring the best films of 2018, was held on February 24, 2019, at the Dolby Theatre, in Los Angeles, California.
The ceremony was broadcast on ABC. A total of 3,072 Oscar statuettes have been awarded from the inception of the award through the 90th ceremony, it was the first ceremony since 1988 without a host. The first Academy Awards presentation was held on 16 May 1929, at a private dinner function at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel with an audience of about 270 people; the post-awards party was held at the Mayfair Hotel. The cost of guest tickets for that night's ceremony was $5. Fifteen statuettes were awarded, honoring artists and other participants in the film-making industry of the time, for their works during the 1927–28 period; the ceremony ran for 15 minutes. Winners were announced to media three months earlier; that was changed for the second ceremony in 1930. Since for the rest of the first decade, the results were given to newspapers for publication at 11:00 pm on the night of the awards; this method was used until an occasion when the Los Angeles Times announced the winners before the ceremony began.
The first Best Actor awarded was Emil Jannings, for his performances in The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh. He had to return to Europe before the ceremony, so the Academy agreed to give him the prize earlier. At that time, the winners were recognized for all of their work done in a certain category during the qualifying period. With the fourth ceremony, the system changed, professionals were honored for a specific performance in a single film. For the first six ceremonies, the eligibility period spanned two calendar years. At the 29th ceremony, held on 27 March 1957, the Best Foreign Language Film category was introduced; until foreign-language films had been honored with the Special Achievement Award. The 74th Academy Awards, held in 2002, presented the first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Since 1973, all Academy Awards ceremonies have ended with the Academy Award for Best Picture. Traditionally, the previous year's winner for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor present the awards for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, while the previous year's winner for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress present the awards for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor.
See § Awards of Merit categories The best known award is the Academy Award of Merit, more popularly known as the Oscar statuette. Made of gold-plated bronze on a black metal base, it is 13.5 in tall, weighs 8.5 lb, depicts a knight rendered in Art Deco style holding a crusader's sword standing on a reel of film with five spokes. The five spokes represent the original branches of the Academy: Actors, Directors and Technicians; the model for the statuette is said to be Mexican actor Emilio "El Indio" Fernández. Sculptor George Stanley sculpted Cedric Gibbons' design; the statuettes presented at the initial ceremonies were gold-plated solid bronze. Within a few years the bronze was abandoned in favor of Britannia metal, a pewter-like alloy, plated in copper, nickel silver, 24-karat gold. Due to a metal shortage during World War II, Oscars were made of painted plaster for three years. Following the war, the Academy invited recipients to redeem the plaster figures for gold-plated metal ones; the only addition to the Oscar since it was created is a minor streamlining of the base.
The original Oscar mold was cast in 1928 at the C. W. Shumway & Sons Foundry in Batavia, which contributed to casting the molds for the Vince Lombardi Trophy and Emmy Award's statuettes. From 1983 to 2015 50 Oscars in a tin alloy with gold plating were made each year in Chicago by Illinois manufacturer R. S. Owens & Company, it would take between four weeks to manufacture 50 statuettes. In 2016, the Academy returned to bronze as the core metal of the statuettes, handing manufacturing duties to Walden, New York-based Polich Tallix Fine Art Foundry. While based on a digital scan of an original 1929 Oscar, the statuettes retain their modern-era dimensions and black pedestal. Cast in liquid bronze from 3D-printed ceramic molds and polished, they are electroplated in 24-karat gold by Brooklyn, New York–based Epner Technology; the time required to produce 50 such statuettes is three months. R. S. Owens i
S. Dillon Ripley Center
The S. Dillon Ripley Center, better known as the Ripley Center, is one of the buildings of the Smithsonian Institution series of museums located in the National Mall in Washington, D. C; the above-ground portion is only a small pagoda, it descends into a larger underground portion. The Ripley Center houses the International Gallery, The Smithsonian Associates, the offices of the Smithsonian Contributing Membership, it contains a conference center, an art gallery, meeting/class rooms as well as exhibition space. It connects underground to the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the National Museum of African Art, the Freer Gallery of Art; the Smithsonian Associates was formed in 1992 from combining the Resident Associates Program with the Smithsonian National Associate Program. The Smithsonian Associates was established as the cultural and membership division of the Smithsonian Institution; these membership and educational programs include the Young Benefactors, Smithsonian Sleepovers, Resident Associates Program, Discovery Theatre, Regional Events, the Art Collectors Program.
The Art Collectors Program is devoted to the creation and appreciation of contemporary American limited-edition art and to creating a context for collecting and a forum for artists to discuss their work. The Program sells Smithsonian-commissioned contemporary fine art prints and posters by acclaimed American artists like Sam Gilliam and April Gornik, its limited-edition prints are numbered and signed and come with a Certificate of Authenticity from the Smithsonian. Official website
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the United States. With 6,953,927 visitors to its three locations in 2018, it was the third most visited art museum in the world, its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among seventeen curatorial departments. The main building, on the eastern edge of Central Park along Museum Mile in Manhattan's Upper East Side is by area one of the world's largest art galleries. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art and artifacts from Medieval Europe. On March 18, 2016, the museum opened the Met Breuer museum at Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side; the permanent collection consists of works of art from classical antiquity and ancient Egypt and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met maintains extensive holdings of African, Oceanian and Islamic art.
The museum is home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments and accessories, as well as antique weapons and armor from around the world. Several notable interiors, ranging from 1st-century Rome through modern American design, are installed in its galleries; the Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 for the purposes of opening a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. It opened on February 20, 1872, was located at 681 Fifth Avenue; the Met's permanent collection is curated by seventeen separate departments, each with a specialized staff of curators and scholars, as well as six dedicated conservation departments and a Department of Scientific Research. The permanent collection includes works of art from classical antiquity and ancient Egypt and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, an extensive collection of American and modern art; the Met maintains extensive holdings of African, Oceanian and Islamic art. The museum is home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments and accessories, antique weapons and armor from around the world.
A great number of period rooms, ranging from 1st-century Rome through modern American design, are permanently installed in the Met's galleries. In addition to its permanent exhibitions, the Met organizes and hosts large traveling shows throughout the year; the current chairman of the board, Daniel Brodsky, was elected in 2011 and became chairman three years after director Philippe de Montebello retired at the end of 2008. On March 1, 2017, the BBC reported that Daniel Weiss, the Met's president and COO, would temporarily act as CEO for the museum. Following the departure of Thomas P. Campbell as the Met's director and CEO on June 30, 2017, the search for a new director of the museum was assigned to the human resources firm Phillips Oppenheim to present a new candidate for the position "by the end of the fiscal year in June" of 2018; the next director will report to Weiss as the current president of the museum. In April 2018, Max Hollein was named director. Beginning in the late 19th century, the Met started acquiring ancient art and artifacts from the Near East.
From a few cuneiform tablets and seals, the Met's collection of Near Eastern art has grown to more than 7,000 pieces. Representing a history of the region beginning in the Neolithic Period and encompassing the fall of the Sasanian Empire and the end of Late Antiquity, the collection includes works from the Sumerian, Sasanian, Assyrian and Elamite cultures, as well as an extensive collection of unique Bronze Age objects; the highlights of the collection include a set of monumental stone lamassu, or guardian figures, from the Northwest Palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II. Though the Met first acquired a group of Peruvian antiquities in 1882, the museum did not begin a concerted effort to collect works from Africa and the Americas until 1969, when American businessman and philanthropist Nelson A. Rockefeller donated his more than 3,000-piece collection to the museum. Today, the Met's collection contains more than 11,000 pieces from sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, the Americas and is housed in the 40,000-square-foot Rockefeller Wing on the south end of the museum.
The collection ranges from 40,000-year-old indigenous Australian rock paintings, to a group of 15-foot-tall memorial poles carved by the Asmat people of New Guinea, to a priceless collection of ceremonial and personal objects from the Nigerian Court of Benin donated by Klaus Perls. The range of materials represented in the Africa and Americas collection is undoubtedly the widest of any department at the Met, including everything from precious metals to porcupine quills; the Met's Asian department holds a collection of Asian art, of more than 35,000 pieces, arguably the most comprehensive in the US. The collection dates back to the founding of the museum: many of the philanthropists who made the earliest gifts to the museum included Asian art in their collections. Today, an entire wing of the museum is dedicated to the Asian collection, spans 4,000 years of Asian art; every Asian civilization is represented in the Met's Asian department, the pieces on display include every type of decorative art, from painting and printmaking to sculpture and metalworking.
The department is well known for its comprehensive collection of Chinese calligraphy and painting, as well as for its Indian sculptures and Tibetan works, the arts of Burma and Thailand. All three ancient religions of India – Hinduism and Jainism – are well represented in these s
Fine-art photography
Fine-art photography is photography created in accordance with the vision of the artist as a photographer, using photography as a medium to bring something to life that only lives in the artist's mind. Capturing what one sees in an artistic way is the art of photography and not creating fine art; the goal of fine-art photography is to express a message, or an emotion. This stands in contrast to representational photography, such as photojournalism, which provides a documentary visual account of specific subjects and events representing objective reality rather than the subjective intent of the photographer. One photography historian claimed that "the earliest exponent of'Fine Art' or composition photography was John Edwin Mayall, "who exhibited daguerrotypes illustrating the Lord's Prayer in 1851". Successful attempts to make fine art photography can be traced to Victorian era practitioners such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Oscar Gustave Rejlander and others. In the U.
S. F. Holland Day, Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen were instrumental in making photography a fine art, Stieglitz was notable in introducing it into museum collections. In the UK as as 1960, photography was not recognised as a Fine Art. Dr S. D. Jouhar said, when he formed the Photographic Fine Art Association at that time - "At the moment photography is not recognized as anything more than a craft. In the USA photography has been accepted as Fine Art in certain official quarters, it is shown in exhibitions as an Art. There is not corresponding recognition in this country; the London Salon shows pictorial photography, but it is not understood as an art. Whether a work shows aesthetic qualities or not it is designated'Pictorial Photography', a ambiguous term; the photographer himself must have confidence in his work and in its dignity and aesthetic value, to force recognition as an Art rather than a Craft" Until the late 1970s several genres predominated, such as nudes and natural landscapes.
Breakthrough'star' artists in the 1970s and 80s, such as Sally Mann, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Farber and Cindy Sherman, still relied on such genres, although seeing them with fresh eyes. Others investigated a snapshot aesthetic approach. American organizations, such as the Aperture Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art, have done much to keep photography at the forefront of the fine arts. MOMA's establishment of a department of photography in 1940 and appointment of Beaumont Newhall as its first curator are cited as institutional confirmation of photography's status as an art. There is now a trend toward a careful staging and lighting of the picture, rather than hoping to "discover" it ready-made. Photographers such as Gregory Crewdson, Jeff Wall are noted for the quality of their staged pictures. Additionally, new technological trends in digital photography have opened a new direction in full spectrum photography, where careful filtering choices across the ultraviolet and infrared lead to new artistic visions.
As printing technologies have improved since around 1980, a photographer's art prints reproduced in a finely-printed limited-edition book have now become an area of strong interest to collectors. This is because books have high production values, a short print run, their limited market means they are never reprinted; the collector's market in photography books by individual photographers is developing rapidly. According to Art Market Trends 2004 7,000 photographs were sold in auction rooms in 2004, photographs averaged a 7.6 percent annual price rise from 1994 and 2004. Around 80 percent were sold in the United States. Of course, auction sales only record a fraction of total private sales. There is now a thriving collectors' market for which the most sought-after art photographers will produce high quality archival prints in limited editions. Attempts by online art retailers to sell fine photography to the general public alongside prints of paintings have had mixed results, with strong sales coming only from the traditional "big names" of photography such as Ansel Adams.
In addition to the "digital movement" towards manipulation, filtering, or resolution changes, some fine artists deliberately seek a "naturalistic," including "natural lighting" as a value in itself. Sometimes the art work as in the case of Gerhard Richter consists of a photographic image, subsequently painted over with oil paints and/or contains some political or historical significance beyond the image itself; the existence of "photographically-projected painting" now blurs the line between painting and photography which traditionally was absolute. Until the mid-1950s it was considered vulgar and pretentious to frame a photograph for a gallery exhibition. Prints were simply pasted onto blockboard or plywood, or given a white border in the darkroom and pinned at the corners onto display boards. Prints were thus shown without any glass reflections obscuring them. Steichen's famous The Family of Man exhibition was unframed, the pictures pasted to panels; as late as 1966 Bill Brandt's MoMA show was unframed, with simple prints pasted to thin plywood.
From the mid-1950s to about 2000 most gallery exhibitions had prints behind glass. Since about 2000 there has been a noticeable move toward once again showing contemporary gallery prints on boards and without glass. In addition, throughout the twentieth century, there was a noticeable increase in the size of prints. Fine art photography is created as an expression of the artist’s vision, but as a byproduct it has b
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