On the Streets and In the Suburbs: Photographers of the American Social Landscape, 1963-1976

Abstract

Three American photographers came to prominence during the years bracketed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the American Bicentennial in 1976. Lee Friedlander (born 1934), Garry Winogrand (1928-1984), and Robert Adams (born 1937) each used an emotionally detached, "documentary-style" approach to picture the rapidly changing social landscape of this period. This dissertation aims to bring a fresh perspective to select bodies of work by these photographers. Though each chapter is intended as a singular discussion of specific projects, the essays are united by a methodological approach grounded in social art history, rather than the rhetoric of "photographic" formalism as espoused by John Szarkowski, who promoted the work of these three photographers through exhibitions and publications during his tenure as Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York from 1962-1991. Significantly, the interpretations retain an appreciation for the unique aesthetic aspects of the photographs as they were informed by the historical moment in which they were produced and received. The first chapter focuses on Garry Winogrand's Public Relations, situating the photographs within the context of a burgeoning critical discourse about the impact of television and the mass media on social behavior as articulated by such writers as Daniel J. Boorstin and Marshall McLuhan. The second chapter reconsiders Winogrand's Women are Beautiful, and focuses on Winogrand's photographs of female subjects on the streets and in the public spaces of New York City within the context of the women's liberation movement and the sexual revolution. Robert Adams's photographs of suburban sprawl and industrial development along the Colorado Front Range and the Denver metropolitan area, which comprised three related series--The New West, Denver and What We Bought--are the focus of the third chapter. This essay proposes a new interpretation of Adams's photographs as rooted in a long tradition of American Transcendentalist thought and contemporaneous environmentally conscious writing. The fourth and final chapter focuses on Lee Friedlander's The American Monument, and considers these photographs as they resonate with the themes of history, memory, and patriotism in the wake of the Vietnam War and Watergate.