Untitled, from the series UFC Fighting Television Images, 2014. Gelatin silver print, 8 1/2 x 12 in. (21.5 x 30.5 cm). Yale University Art Gallery, Promised gift of Grace and Donald R. Blumberg. © Donald Blumberg
American photographer Donald Blumberg was born in 1935, just one year before RCA held the first public demonstration of a television. At that time, radio stations and newspapers were the dominant forms of mass media, with figures like President Franklin D. Roosevelt and columnist Edward R. Murrow elevating the discourse in media and journalism to an art. As film companies and magazines began to dominate the conversation with bold and powerful images, Henry Luce launches Life magazine with the intent to use photography to allow readers “to see life, to see the world; to eyewitness great events…to see and be amazed.”
Untitled, from the series Daily Photographs, 1969–70. Gelatin silver print, 14 15/16 x 21 7/8 in. (38 x 55.5 cm). Yale University Art Gallery, Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund. © Donald Blumberg
Although World War II disrupted the development of commercial television, by the time Blumberg was 12, RCA had placed more than 10,000 black and white television sets in American homes. As shows like Meet the Press and Howdy Doody hit the airwaves, a new generation was born. With technology firmly in place, live television changed the course of the culture itself, from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist trials to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. As television increased the speed of life, other forms of media sought to keep pace, creating as 24/7 news cycle that has made mainstream media one of the most influential voices today.
Blumberg, a photographer, always maintained a keen interest in the relationship between image and text. He first gained national attention for his 1965–67 series In Front of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, which was first published in 1973. A shrewd observer and politically conscious artist, Blumberg began to focus on the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the worker’s rights movement. His series Daily Photographs (1969–70) features images of newspaper articles about the war and the politics of the time. He also began photographing television broadcasts and made multi-image collages of televised events such as speeches by President Richard Nixon, freezing media moments for reflection and reconsideration, before moving on to photograph programs with closed-captioning in a series titled In Their Own Words.
These series have been brought together for the first time in Words and Images from the American Media (Yale University Press). The book shows the development of the culture through the media itself, as American obsessions with wealth, fame, body image, materials goods, and violence began to take center stage.
Untitled, from the series Newtown School Massacre, 2012. Gelatin silver print, 9 1/4 x 12 in. (23.5 x 30.5 cm). Yale University Art Gallery, Promised gift of Grace and Donald R. Blumberg. © Donald Blumberg
Blumberg began appropriating still photographs from a kinetic televised form led to my use of images from the Buffalo Evening News, which reporting on the war in Vietnam and antiwar demonstrations at home. Blumberg reveals, “It became apparent to me several years ago that as our society deteriorated, photographers as well as other visual artists would be confronted with the absurd luxury of their work. The traditional significance, beauty, the importance of basic creation and the integrity and historical continuity of the medium, collapse when reading and watching the daily news. I wanted to make my work political, without metaphor, simile, sentimentality, or heroics. I chose to transpose typography and images from daily newspapers, inherently direct from political propaganda. They were small in format, visually transient. I wanted to fix them, inescapable in scale, for you to look at.”
By integrating image and text into a single work, Blumberg forces us to stop and look carefully at the media we consume without thought. When taken out of context and isolated, we begin to see the way in which the media works to shape the narrative. The results run the gamut from disturbing to absurd, bordering on vacuous as so many narratives often are. Words and Images from the American Media reminds us, it’s not “just” a television show or a newspaper story when money and power are involved.
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
