Siegel, grew more and more independent from ID
and IIT. Both the artistic and political climate chan-
ged dramatically during these years, and had their
effect on photographic practice at the school. And it
was during this period that students were trained in
large numbers to become photography teachers,
directing photographic programs at new and estab-
lished institutions across the country and propagat-
ing an ID philosophy and pedagogy to new
generations of students.
Siskind was the primary draw for students who
came to study at the ID in the 1960s. Although he
was assisted by former student Joseph Jachna, who
taught from 1961 to 1969, and various other tea-
chers for much shorter periods—Reginald Heron,
Frederick Sommer, Wynn Bullock, Joseph Ster-
ling, Charles Swedlund, and Ken Biasco—he
more or less embodied the program. Classes con-
sisted of seminars and critiques in which students
presented their thesis work to Siskind, and addi-
tional meetings were as likely to be at a student-
faculty party as in a classroom. The ID and IIT
administration allowed the program a great deal of
independence, and photography became increas-
ingly isolated from the other departments at the
school. But although the focus was now on the
graduate thesis project, students still began with
the foundation as initiated by Moholy-Nagy and
modified by Callahan and Siskind.
The 1960s witnessed the rise of environmental-
ism, free love, hallucinogenic drugs, and the anti-
war and civil rights movements. The times were
manifested photographically in a renewed interest
in photographic landscapes, nudes, psychedelic
experimentation, and politically grounded docu-
mentary photographs. ID students were affected
by the times in varying degrees, but it is clear that
photography there, as around the country, began to
look different from that of the preceding genera-
tion. At the ID, students began to move beyond the
solitary frame, using such techniques as collage or
inserting photographs in their photographs, print-
ing entire strips of film as a single image, and unit-
ing two or more frames or negatives into a joined
picture. The nude (both male and female) became a
subject of intense exploration, a screen upon which
different experimental techniques were projected.
Students increasingly inserted themselves into the
photograph, bypassing a detached abstraction or
documentation in favor of a more self-conscious
approach to photography. A select list of the almost
50 photographers receiving master’s degrees in the
1960s includes Barbara Crane, Reginald Heron,
and Thomas Porett (1966); Thomas Barrow, Kurt
Heyl, Thomas Knudtson, William Larson, Art Sin-
sabaugh, and Judith Steinhauser (1967); Rosalyn
Banish, Barbara Blondeau, Keith Smith, and Geof-
frey Winningham (1968); and Kenneth Biasco and
Linda Connor (1969). Their thesis projects fol-
lowed, in reach and scope, the standard laid out in
the 1950s: sustained investigations of a particular
topic or technique, they originated from the foun-
dation course assignments and expanded upon
them with individual vision.
Siskind was retired by the school in 1970, and
returned to teach classes in 1971 before joining
Callahan at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Four years before his departure, however, he had
rehired Arthur Siegel to help teach the graduates,
and Siegel once again became head of the photo-
graphy program in 1971, where he remained until
his death in 1978. With his training as a student at
the New Bauhaus in 1938, experience founding
the photography department in 1946, and commit-
ment to teaching there sporadically throughout
the 1950s, Siegel was the last remaining link to
Moholy-Nagy’s program. As irascible and brilliant
as ever, he was also the last in a line of charismatic
photography teachers. Other faculty and visiting
lecturers taught photography for short periods
at the school in the 1970s, and included Patricia
Carroll, Alan Cohen, Jonas Dovydenas, John
Grimes, Arthur Lazar, David Phillips, David
Plowden, David Rathbun, Alex Sweetman, and
Garry Winogrand (whose small-format, edgy
street photography would have a lasting effect on
student work).
The 1970s witnessed a massive rise in graduate
enrollment, with over 80 master’s degrees awarded.
A necessarily incomplete list would include Barry
Burlison, Eileen Cowin, Antonio Fernandez, Elaine
O’Neil, Judith Ross, and Robert Stiegler (1970);
Calvin Kowal, Esther Parada, Lynn Sloan, and War-
ren Wheeler (1971); Douglas Baz, Patricia Carroll,
Alan Cohen, Francois Deschamps, and Charles
Traub (1972); Andrew Eskind and James Newberry
(1973); David Avison, John Grimes, and Lewis Kos-
tiner (1974); and many others in the second half of
the decade. A notable change was the rise of cinema-
tography and animation, both of which were attract-
ing students in schools across the country. Cinema,
long a favorite medium of Moholy-Nagy, had been
an active part of the photography program since as
early as 1942, and many students and teachers had
made films independently or as part of a class during
the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s, students began
to earn degrees with thesis projects in cinematogra-
phy, and after 1971, cinema became separate from
still photography. Under teachers such as Larry
Janiak, students produced short, experimental, andINSTITUTE OF DESIGN