![]() One way in which artists early in this century signalled their rapport with science was to concern themselves-as contemporary science was itself concerned-with questions of time, space and motion. Artists could reconcile science with the already enshrined precepts of post-Impressionists and Symbolists such as Gauguin and Redon about a metaphysical reality and the unseen world. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was first described in 1905 Minkovski’s explanation of the space-time continuum was given a few years later. It comes as no surprise that a startling imagery should emerge, its philosophical foundations rooted in scientific theory, its form in the visual recordings of experimental science.Īs art was looking more toward science, science itself was becoming to the layman more poetic and entering into a mysterious realm of abstraction. ![]() This state of mind was, on the surface at least, the very antithesis of the fin de siècle forebodings of a Symbolist-dominated art and literature which recoiled from the ugliness and stupidity of the modern world, embracing in its place the domains of fantasy and the dream.īut after the chiliastic mood of a gloomy decade, the arrival of the 20th century seemed to mark a new, perhaps even desperate hopefulness which, in view of current artistic ideologies, was likely to manifest itself in extravagant and unheard-of ways. Such enthusiasm, especially that of the politically disenchanted, was vested in the liberating potential of scientific and technological achievement. Unbounded adulation was bestowed on the discoveries and new technologies in science, medicine, engineering and transportation, founded on the hope of a brighter future-a physical regeneration of the environment and the commensurate spiritual rebirth of mankind. The dissertation concludes that a "cinema of stills" was White's attempt to create not only a persistence of memory as in Chapter 1, but a memory of memory, to recall memory and lock it to itself.ONE IMPORTANT ASPECT OF 20th-century modernism, from the first decade of the century until the ’30s, was its irrepressible optimism for what we now call the “developed” world. The fifth aspect concerns White's belief in "reading without reservation." Chapter 5 notes that this method preceded that of Roland Barthes and that it was based on Freud's process of word association. ![]() Chapter 4 examines the San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism, especially work by CSFA instructor Clyfford Still, and demonstrates White's fusion of painterly abstraction with photographic realism. The fourth concept is the tension or "spring-tight line" between abstraction and reality in the photographs. ![]() White proposed a unification of these previous concepts in "the flow of the sequence." Chapter 3 claims that this is a transformation of Heinrich Wolfflin's "flow of the Baroque," from the Principles of Art History, and Sigmund Freud's "psychic concatenation" from The Interpretation of Dreams. However, Chapter 2 argues that the subject is couched symbolically and metaphorically, where the rocks become equivalents of White's frustrated homosexual desires. White then examined "the subject of the sequence." The Fourth Sequence images depict the coastline rocks found south of the city at Point Lobos. White first addressed "the time between photographs." Revising the cinematic concept of the persistence of vision, Chapter 1 argues that this is negative time, or eternity, and that it is filled in by the beholder's persistence of memory. The accompanying text claims that "a sequence of photographs is like a cinema of stills." Utilizing archival evidence, this dissertation deconstructs this text in order to reconstruct White's theory in relation to five contemporaneous philosophical debates in painting, photography and film. Of all his sequences, White's Fourth Sequence (1950) of twelve images was critical because it inspired his definitive theorization of sequential photography. This dissertation addresses the work of the American photographer Minor White (1908-1976), especially from 1946 to 1953 while he taught at San Francisco's California School of Fine Arts (CSFA). There are many theories of photography and film but few theories of ordered groups of photographs called sequences. Cinema of Stills: Minor White's Theory of Sequential Photography
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