To my knowledge there weren't any in the original group and I've never heard or read of any that followed. The original group of artists were mostly painters or atleast started out as painters.
I think that 'artistic thought' about photography - even though it was respected at the time - was such that it would preclude there from being any 'school' of abstract expressionism in photography- except to consider those, in retrospect, like siskind. Siskind and a handful of others wanted to emulate it - but a photograph could never, and by any rigid definition, CAN never be 'abstract expressionist' insofar as it was much more about he isolating or capturing of GESTURE, by the canvas. Any photograph which can capture a given 'gesture' or movement requires it's author to remain perfectly still to record it (i.e. camera on a tripod, etc) - and any photographer attempting to record gesture via the imprinting of light on the negative - would, in most cases, only manage to capture a blurry morass on the negative. I'd assume it just wouldn't fly - to most contemporaries of the movement. Not without using paint or some other 'hard worked' medium. Just a thought.
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As I understand it, Siskind was an integral part of the abstract expressionist movement. He exhibited alongside the painters, and there are examples of influence going both ways.
Fredrick Sommer's work always reminds me of earlier art movements. His Arizona landscapes for example are similar in feel to early Mondrian paintings. The chicken bits and the soot pictures are abstract, and expressionist in the German school sense, but for me he is too much cerebral and too little emotional to fit with the New York gang. (I love his work though).
Ralph Eugene Meatyard's landscapes, Zen twigs, light-on-water and sound-and-motion series were all to a greater or lesser extent influenced by abstract expressionism.
Many of Lee Friedlander's more recent landscapes feel very abstract expressionist to me. They are suffused with his own syncopated sense of composition, and retain a very photographic sense of depth, but all the same I get the same sense of frenetic restraint when I stand in front of them that I do from painters like Pollock and Motherwell.
Ray Metzker's work is - for me - a direct descendent of the Siskind/Callahan school, and his book 'Landscapes' is a wonderful example of an abstract expressionist eye applied via a camera.
You can probably guess from that list that I personally feel the strongest connections to the line-based abstract expressionists, and less so to the colour field painters. However, Rothko has undoubtedly bequeathed an acceptibility to large numinous colour prints that has benefited photographers like Richard Misrach, Ben Moon, and the Joel Meyrowitz of Cape Light. There are any number of less famous contemporary photographers who use a similar subtly glowing palette to show their take on the world. For that matter, I have a growing link list of photographers who are making drip paintings with the camera, including myself (see attachment). Barnet Newman's 'zip' paintings opened the door for very many centered-line compositions.
The abstract expressionists' compositional tools and their ways of organising space and tones on the canvas have been very influential to me. In art history the conventional wisdom is that abstract expressionism boxed itself in and died a noisy death down it's own back alleyway. My own feeling is that it was accepted and exalted so early that it quickly became encapsulated and packaged as a ready-made artistic success, making it very hard to develop the movement's ideas without being accused of plagiarism or unoriginality. Perhaps now enough time has passed for that accusation to be less daunting.
Last edited by Struan Gray; 05-27-2008 at 06:02 PM.
Siskind was part of the ab ex New York gang in the late 40s and 50s. He was good friends with Franz Kline and Motherwell and hung out at the Cedar Tavern from time to time. After Kline's death from heart disease, Siskind did a series of images (wall abstracts) as an homage to his friend. As pointed out in the previos post, Siskind was considered an equal to the painters and shared gallery space on the same walls. (although I doubt his prints shared the same amounts on the price tags)
Harry Calahan did a lot of experimenting with camera movement, multiple exposures both b&w and color. I don't know how much he was influenced by the ab exr's, but it was a time of stretching the boundries of all art, sort of an anti F64 in photography.
__________________ "Fundamentally I think we need to rediscover a non-ironic world"
Robert Adams
Yeah - Metzker! That would be a classic example. Wish I thought of that. Not sure what his affiliations would have been, if any, though - I think he was around MUCH later - like late 60s/early 70s.
I have no formal training in art history and so don't really know my ass from my elbow on this, but a series I've been working on could possibly be considered abstract expressionist. (Or maybe abstract impressionist, or im- or ex- without the "abstract" prefix, or maybe just mush. I'll leave that to you.)
abstract expressionist photographers 
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