Modernism / Postmodernism

The invention of photography was part of the process of modernization of the means of production that took place during the Industrial Revolution. Photography is a modern form of image making, contributing to the development of modernism.

MODERNISM

Modernism is in its broadest definition is modern thought, character, or practice. More specially, the terms describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term surrounds the activities and output of those who felt the traditional forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life.

E.G

Lola Álvarez Bravo is a photographer, photojournalist, portraitist and street photographer, a widely recognized as Mexico’s first major female photographer and a pioneering figure in the rise of modernist photography. She was a profound humanist who used the camera to chronicle the people and places of her beloved country over a remarkable six-decade career. Diverse in subject and technique, Álvarez Bravo was a photojournalist, portraitist and street photographer. Her best-known portraits, and ultimately the work for which she gained international recognition are those of her colleague and friend Frida Kahlo.

POSTMODERNISM

Postmodernism is a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the rejection of objective truth and global cultural narrative, comes from its rejection of the Modern scientific mentality of objectivity and progress associated with the enlightenment. It emphasizes the role of language, power relations, and motivations in particular it attacks the use of sharp classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus colonial. Postmodernism has influenced many cultural fields including literary criticism, linguistics, architecture, visual arts and music.

E.G

Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and film director of ‘Office Killer’ who is best known for her conceptual portraits. Many art critics have seen Sherman's work as an indicator of a postmodern approach, an image that stands alone with no reference to anything "real" outside the image that validates it as an image (the indexical function), photographing herself in a ranges of costumes. Sherman’s work can generally tell us that the subject has become simply an image or simulacrum that lacks any depth, and yet can mediate between interior and exterior spaces breaking down the subject- object boundary, also the subject is fragmented and has become hybrid in its gender and material makeup, being in transition between man and woman and between ‘fake’ plastic mannequins, ‘real’ bodies and mutated cyborg flesh which are the main things about the mediation of subjectivity in postmodern culture.

From this comparison between modernism and postmodernism, the distinction between modes thought is clear, the two creates a modern-postmodern dichotomy that undermines the very principles. The overview clearly exposes shortfalls in the postmodernism critique of modernism. These movements, Modernism and Postmodernism are understood as cultural projects or as a set of perspective.

REFERENCE:

• Books: 'Modern Art' by David Cottington'; 'Modernism/Postmodernism' by Peter Brooken; 'Practising postmodernism, reading modernism' by Roy Boyne and Ali Rattans; 'The Museum of Modern Art', 'Retrospective' and 'The incomplete Untitled Film Still' by Cindy Sherman