1 Why did people ask whether photography could be art?
Correct. The answer, developed in this unit, is that photographers make deliberate decisions about framing, light, focus, timing, and subject.
The argument against photography as art was that the camera merely records. The lesson answers with the choices the photographer makes.
2 Pictorialist photographers
Correct. Stieglitz's Paula is a pictorialist photograph: soft focus, dramatic light, careful composition.
Pictorialists borrowed painting's techniques, such as soft focus and dramatic lighting, to raise photography's status.
3 What did the f/64 Group and Edward Weston embrace?
Correct. The name f/64 refers to the smallest aperture, which keeps everything in focus. Ansel Adams was a founding member.
Straight photographers rejected pictorialism and celebrated the camera's own strengths: sharpness and detail.
4 What is the "decisive moment" in documentary photography?
Correct. The best documentary work, like Lange's, captures a peak of meaning in a single instant.
The decisive moment is about timing: the instant when a scene's intensity peaks.
5 How does this unit define sentimentality?
Correct. Sentimental work manipulates the image to produce an emotional response that the subject matter does not earn.
Sentimentality is not simply sadness. It is faking or forcing feeling by asking for an easy response.
6 What does "the modern eye" in photography accept?
Correct. Vivian Maier's candid street photographs are an example: quick, attentive to accidental arrangements of city life.
The modern eye is the opposite of the pictorialist's tidy composition. It accepts what chance puts in the frame.
7 Gordon Parks's American Gothic, Washington, D.C. echoes a famous painting. Why does that matter?
Correct. This is a direct test of the claim that background knowledge deepens perception.
The photograph depends on a comparison. The reference to Wood's painting is part of what the photograph says.
8 Why does Vivian Maier's work challenge the categories pictorialism, straight photography, and documentary?
Correct. Her case raises the question of how intention relates to artistic form.
Maier took over 100,000 pictures of strangers and never showed them. That makes her hard to fit into the lesson's three categories.
9 What did Muybridge's high-speed photographs of a galloping horse reveal?
Correct. Photography does not only record what we see; it can reveal what we cannot.
Muybridge used very fast shutters to freeze moments too quick to see. The discovery concerned the horse's legs.
10 In Daguerre's 1838 photograph of the Boulevard du Temple, why does the busy street look empty?
Correct. A long exposure records what stays still and loses what moves. It is a vivid reminder that shutter speed decides how time is shown.
Early exposures lasted minutes. Anything that moved too much did not register.