The History of Photography

The History of Photography
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Introduction
The modern advancements of the photos that we see nowadays are basically the work of 20th century photographers and artists such as Garry Winogrand. These were the great men who came up with the ideas and eventually discovered photography. By 1950 most of photography ambitious young supplicants considered photojournalism to have bore the arena of conspicuous opportunity. The picture magazines were at the height of their success and confidence, and magazines that had traditionally depended on the written word had come to devote substantial number of their pages to photo-stories (Vallencourt & Poolos, 2015).
The History of Photography
The greatly expanded market of the post war years made room for scores of new photojournalists who had limited time and concentration in their work. This is because new ideas and crafting came up and during the time of Winogrand's entrance one could make a beginning with little more than energy, confidence, and a distaste for regular working hours. Much of the minimal technical training of these new recruits came neither from schools nor traditional apprenticeship but from the wizards of the camera shops who knew about cameras and lenses as well as films and chemicals. Partly out of this absence of conventional technical competence, camera new attitude toward conventional ideas of photographic quality.
In 1948, after High School and two years in the army, Garry Winogrand was in a desultory way studying painting at Columbia University when he met George Zimbel, a student and a photographer for the Columbia Spectator. Zimbel introduced Winogrand to the dark room in the basement of the architecture building, which was open twenty-four hours a day. It was Winogrand's first exposure to the process of photography, and the simple magic of it captivated him completely. Within two weeks he had abandoned painting. Once he began to devote all of his energy to photography he could no longer pose as a student and enjoy the financial support of the GI Bill, but he did continue for some time to use the Columbia darkroom, forming with his friend Zimbel the Midnight-to-Dawn Club, which had full use of the place while more normal sorts slept (Vallencourt & Poolos, 2015).
For a year or two he experimented with various cameras—a Graphlex, a Rolleicord, a Kodak 35—but soon most of his works was being done with the Leica. When flush, he bought surplus film in bulk at $1.49 for one hundred feet (approximately 700 exposures) and ten-by-ten-inch paper, designed for aerial photography, which cut in two would yield two five-by-seven-inch prints. When necessary he would cadge paper and chemicals from his friends. He lived with his parents in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx, and presumably received some walking-around money from his father Abraham, a leather worker, or his mother Bertha, who made neckties on a piecework basis. During the first years photography brought him no income, and it can only be guessed that he lived by those unrecorded strategies known intuitively to indigent but ambitious youth. It is not difficult to imagine the young Winogrand as a kind of city hick—an undisciplined mixture of en...