Captured by Melanie: Post Modernism

The post modernism movement began in the mid 1960's, and is a move away from the Modernist era of photography which was the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by the horror of World War I. Modernism also rejected the certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and many modernists rejected religious belief (source: Wikipedia). Post modernism is formed around the idea that many apparent realities are only social constructs, as they are subject to change inherent to time and place.

The following extract was sourced from Post Modernism in a nutshell:

"It [Post modernism] emphasizes the role of language, power relations, and motivations; in particular it attacks the use of sharp classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus colonial. Rather, it holds realities to be plural and relative, and dependent on who the interested parties are and what their interests consist of. It upholds the belief that there is no absolute truth and the way in which different people perceive the world is subjective. It attempts to problematise modernist overconfidence, by drawing into sharp contrast the difference between how confident speakers are of their positions versus how confident they need to be to serve their supposed purposes. Postmodernism has influenced many cultural fields, including religion, literary criticism, sociology, linguistics, architecture, history, anthropology, visual arts, and music.

Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from modernist approaches that had previously been dominant. The term “postmodernism” comes from its critique of the “modernist” scientific mentality of objectivity and progress associated with the Enlightenment.

These movements, modernism and postmodernism, are understood as cultural projects or as a set of perspectives. “Postmodernism” is used in critical theory to refer to a point of departure for works of literature, drama, architecture, cinema, journalism, and design, as well as in marketing and business and in the interpretation of law, culture, and religion in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.[1] Indeed, postmodernism, particularly as an academic movement, can be understood as a reaction to modernism in the Humanities. Whereas modernism was primarily concerned with principles such as identity, unity, authority, and certainty, postmodernism is often associated with difference, plurality, textuality, and skepticism."

Some examples of post modernist photography are shown below. They were copied from and pasted into this blog from www.theclotheswhisperer.co.uk :

A Postmodern photography example. Author unknown.

Personal note: I LOVE this image and the use of the many hands to form one image. I had found this last year when researching hands for another photographic assignment.