Career In Photography

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Last week, I attended a wonderful exhibit at the Art Institute called "Sharp, Clear Pictures: Edward Steichen's World War I and Conde Nast Years". These photos showcase war time aerial photography for intelligence purposes, mainly for surveillance reasons but still have a major impact on modern warfare today. Some people may look at this exhibit and say, "What's so special about clear pictures from an airplane? I do that with my iPhone." but what they don't understand is the difficulty of taking clear photos from a weak & vibrating, wooden plane with a large format camera. Steichen later looked back and said: "The wartime problem of making sharp photos from a vibrating, speeding airplane twenty thousand feet in the air had brought me a new kind of technical interest in photography. . . . Now I wanted to know all that could be expected from photography." It seems as though he had started to understand the value of photography's ability to transmit information, and he soon proved his know-how as a collaborator and producer rather than a lone author -- newfound skills that allowed his groundbreaking career in publications. …show more content…
Some of the photos showcase bombs being dropped and the aftermath of them hitting the ground. Those are the photos I found particularly interesting. To this day, I still don't understand how he did it, the planes back then were absolutely crap. I believe the main reason most of the photos resonated with me were because of my family's military background. My great grandfather was a recon pilot in WWI so being able to see what he saw really made me gravitate to this exhibit. There are a large amount of photos to look through as well. Some look to be almost like panoramas, albeit stitched together pretty