The Second Birth Of Photography

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The Second Birth of Photography The first birth of photography might be likened to the birth of a child. The gestation period lasted for hundreds of years, beginning with the work of men like Aristotle and Mo Ti who studied the heavens with a primitive camera called a “camera obscura.” The child developed over the centuries until the year of its birth in 1839 when a French showman named Louis Daguerre presented the discovery of photography to the Royal Academy in Paris. The birth of heralded as a miracle. Since 1839 the camera has taken on many new forms an characteristics, much like a child does as he or she grows. This is sometimes referred to as “the second birth of photography.” One of photography’s most unique faces was World War Two. Most of the artists associated with Abstract Expressionism matured in the 1930s. They were influenced by the era’s leftist politics, and came to value an art grounded in personal experience. Few would maintain their earlier radical political views, but many continued to adopt the poser of outspoken avant-gardists protesting form the margins. Many of the artists changed how they viewed the world. World War Two affected them in many ways. For example, a famous female, Bourke-White was the first female war correspondent and also the first woman to be allowed to work in combat zones during the World War Two. In 1941, she traveled to the Soviet union just as Germany broke its pact of non-aggressoin. She was the only foreign photographer in Moscow when German forces invaded. Taking refuge in the U.S. Embassy, she then captured the ensuing firestorms on camera. As the war progressed, she was attached to he U.S. Army Air Force in North Africa, then to the U.S. Army in Italy and later Germany. She repeatedly came under fire in Italy in areas of fierce fighting. After the war, she produced a book titled Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly, a

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