Photo: A History from Behind the Lens

1. E1. Surrealist Photography

   Dec 13, 2009 · 26m

   They include names such as Man Ray, Dora Maar, Alvarez Bravo, Brassaï, André Kertész and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who gure among the greatest names in photography of the 20th century. In the 1930s, their images embodied the epitome of Surrealism.

2. E2. The Primitives of Photography, 1850-1860

   Nov 4, 2012 · 26m

   In the middle of the 19th century, 25 years after its invention, photography is still considered as a simple scientific curiosity. But between 1850 and 1860 a dozen of photographers, in France and in England, will get in a struggle to get photography acknowledged as an art. It will be the decade of Nadar, Le Gray, Baldus, Robison, Rejlander, Fenton. They will be the first ones to explore all posibilities of photographical creation and of its relations to reality.

3. E3. The New German Objectivity

   Nov 11, 2012 · 26m

   This episode recounts the New Objectivity evolution in photographic practice, the symbol of which is the Dusseldorf school. For the Bechers, photography was documentary in nature.

4. E4. Staged Photography

   Nov 18, 2012 · 26m

   For almost the entire 20th century, photography was mainly realist. But from the 1960s, "staged photography" was no longer considered naïve or passé, and made a major comeback, enriched by the external influences of film, theatre, performance and sculpture. This photography that was "infused" by other mediums played on the ambiguity of photographic realism.

5. E5. Pictorialism

   Nov 25, 2012 · 26m

   50 years after it was invented, photography once again sought to rival painting. The debate was as old as photography itself: is photography merely a simple, mechanical "imitation" of reality, or can it interpret reality subjectively, as drawing and painting can?

6. E6. New Vision: Experimental Photography of the 1920s

   Dec 2, 2012 · 26m

   Criticism of the 1920s heralded the arrival of "The New Photographer", which was a typically European phenomenon. This photographic avant-garde, often politically located on the far-left, was embodied by Moholy-Nagy, Umbo, El Lissitzky and Rodtchenko.

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