Deconstructing Environment Photographers

As part of our environment unit on urban spaces, we have been given a deconstruction task to help us better understand city photography.
Our task is centralised around the Flatiron Building, or Fuller Building. A brief description of the building was given to us:

The Flatiron building, or Fuller Building, as it was originally called, is located at 175 Fifth Avenue in the borough of Manhatten, New York City and is considered to be a ground breaking skyscraper. Upon completion in 1902 it was one of the tallest buildings in the city and the only skyscraper north of 14th street. The building sits on a triangular island block formed by Fifth Avenue, Broadway and East 22nd Street, with 23rd street grazing the triangle's northern (uptown) peak.
As the French celebrated their Eiffel Tower, so did the Americans regard the Flatiron Building as the icon of a city being modernized and to be celebrated resulting in many different photographs of the building.


Our task is to look at six different photographs taken of the Flatiron building, by six different photographers, and to deconstruct them looking at similarities and dissimilarities in order for us to gain a better understanding of different methods of representation one can take on a single structure.

The first of these images is Edward Steichen's The Flatiron taken in 1905.

Edward Steichen was once considered one of the highest paid photographers in the world at the pinacle of his career, immigrating to the United States from Luxemburg in 1880, and took a lithography apprenticeship with The American Fine Art Company of Milwaukee. Eventually he met Alfred Stieglitz, and became partners with him and helped him create his magazine, Camera Work, by designing the logo as he had a beginning in Fine Art.
His photograph the The Flatiron was taken two years after Alfred Stieglitz's Flatiron. The two photographs bear many similarities in both framing and depth of field, as both have utilised trees as their foreground imagery, slightly obscuring the building behind, and the Flatiron itself is presented almost ghostly, looming over the city below. Steichen's approach falls in with his fine art background slightly when you look at how his tonal range and contrasts span across the image, along with his compositional approach, are reminiscent of Japanese woodcuts that had become rather fashionable at the turn of the century.

His use of the water, and the silhouettes of the carriages and men driving them,  make the image incredibly haunting, we have a few suspended lights that appear to merely hover with no stand, and the sinister figure on the watery road shadowed by this ghostly monolith of the Flatiron building create a mise en scene reminiscent of a gothic horror novel.


This is where Steichen's image differs from the visual style of Alfred Stieglitz's Flatiron, as they have a similar tonal range and certain choices in composition match up, but Steichen's image was very clearly taken at night and taken from an angle including the river, completely switches the mood to something far darker.


To the right we have Alfred Stieglitz's Flatiron, taken as stated a few years before Steichen's, but bearing many similarities, the composition again is very reminiscent of a Japanese woodcut print, and uses similar techniques in perspective. Unlike Steichen however, who presents his Flatiron looming above all else in quite an intimidating manner, but Stieglitz however has chosen to angle his camera so the tree in the foreground matches the height of the Flatiron, in fact if you look at the tree reaching out of frame, it would even stand taller than the Flatiron. Therefore we see the two on a more equal plane to one another, especially as they both retain similar tones to one another, presented in a snowy scene of other trees in a park. As Stieglitz has taken a similar approach, from the Japanese woodcut prints, his angles and depth of field almost flatten the items presented, the tree in the foreground, the trees behind, and the Flatiron all appear at the same depth as one another.
The mood of this image is by no means as intimidating as Steichen's, but majestic in a way, as if man and nature are both presented equally  in their triumphs.

Alvin Langdon Coburn was also part of this wave of photographers that followed a pictoral movement, where photographs followed the visual styling of paintings, and indeed created his own Flatiron in 1911. Indeed he was even a close colleague of Stieglitz as well, so we can see a clear grouping between the photographic choices of these three photographs and their time practicing.
Alvin Coburn's Flatiron does appear quite similar in its composition to Steichen's Flatiron  when we look at the framing with the tree overhanging in the foreground silhouetted. Instead of the ominous road and carriages, however in the foreground like Steichen's Coburn has chosen a street scene that is quite busy and on an overcast day. In this case we see the Flatiron building in a more 'natural' state almost, as the other two photographs clearly present the building as something more abstract, be it the marvel amidst the trees like an old temple in Stieglitz's photo, or Steichen's dark gothic monolith. Coburn has however represented this building next to others smaller in stature, with a busy street of black suits and hats passing like traffic, so we see the building in its more 'natural' environment as it is more recognisable as the city in which this building is placed.

Going ahead in time, to the work of Walker Evans' Flatiron Building seen from below in 1928 we can see a completely different conceptual approach. In fact Walker Evans openly spoke opposed directly to Stieglitz and Steichen, stating "I thought Steichen was too commercial and Steiglitz too arty, playing around, photographing the beautiful and calling it 'God'".
Evans worked looking at detail, frontal portraits and straightforward depictions of American life, aspiring to create photographs that were "literate, authoritative, and transcendent".
He tried to capture the literal in sharp focus, through careful observation of his subject looking for the extraordinary. This generated a documentary style that would start to influence a new wave of American photography.
 He sees the Flatiron from the perspective we would see the Flatiron, looking up at it from the street, he uses the lamp post on the left hand side in the foreground as a signifier of where this shot was taken, as we can just see the top and quite close  in the foreground we the viewer can identify that this shot was taken from just below this lamp post at street level.
He also plays with the angles of other nearby buildings, we get a sense of a layered city, with tracks over the ground and buildings over the tracks, we gain a tremendous sense of height, but in a way most subtle unlike other photographers' Flatiron that utilise the full of the buildings height and drawing on how flat it is, looking at its angle from the side generally, like Walter Gropius' Flatiron, who coming from an architectural background, utilised a diagonal angle and as much of the buildings height as physically possibly to obviously show its height and width.
As Walter Gropius came from the school of Bauhaus, and working predominantly in architectural design, he has approached his Flatiron looking at it's sheer height above surrounding buildings, framing it just so that the building appeared as flat as possible. A viewer could almost feel a sense of vertigo with this piece, at a low angle he shows nothing but the Flatiron, and using the diagonal framing of corner to corner, he perfectly replicates the dizziness one could feel trying to gaze up at the entire building on the street.
It may have a completely different in composition to Walker Evans' Flatiron however he again follows this new emerging style of documentary, showing the building simply for what it is.

This styling is also apparent in Berenice Abbott's Flatiron taken in 1938.
Berenice Abbott took many photographs of New York, using as many contrasts as possible, using simply things like the way the light falls in a city filtering through buildings and overhead fire escapes onto the city below.
 Berenice Abbott again adhering to the more documentary style of photography has chosen to photograph this at an angle more natural, of a person looking up on the building, she uses her contrasts to darken and emphasise this huge building against a perfectly clear sky, making sure that it is in detail down to the dark outline of each individual brick.
The buildings to the right being used as a tool again to show the scale of this building above the others, playing with the forward angle of the Flatiron against buildings facing horizontally, we get a tremendous sense of depth from the Flatiron, similarly to Gropius' diagonal technique we get a sense of vertigo from this photograph, like we must crane our necks to see it like a pedestrian on the street. These techniques are very similar in meaning to the composition of Walker Evans' Flatiron and we can see clear choices for the same reasoning, but Walker Evans has made a clear conscious effort to create his own version of the Flatiron that takes the earlier framing techniques of Steichen and Stieglitz, of utilising an overhanging object in the foreground and the other present elements around the Flatiron, (like Stieglitz's field or Steichen's lake) but using a more contemporary style, almost manipulated their stylistic approach and the elements of the Japanese woodcut  paintings, but converting it into something more industrial and modern, documenting the building for what it is as a pose to manipulating it onto a pedestal.