03.10.13 - Photography The Key Concepts (KS)
3 significant periods in theory -
- Victorian aesthetics (1837 - 1901)
- 1920's and 1930's mass media
- 1960's and 1970's beyond postmodernism
Aesthetics -
A set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty, especially in art. The branch of philosophy that deals with the Plato believed that for us to have a perception of beauty there must be a transcendent form for beauty in which beautiful objects partake and which causes them to be beautiful also. Aesthetics incorporates proportion, harmony, and unity among their parts.
Mimesis -
Imitation, in particular: imitative representation of the real world in art and literature.
From Plato to Benjamin to Derrida Mimesis is discussed in philosophical exploration of art and aesthetics.
Much of Aesthetics and Mimesis is about recreating beauty in the natural world, presenting it as sublime.
Plato 428 - 384 BC (aesthetics is based on greek philosophy) -
"Education is teaching our children to desire the right things."
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle."
Victorian Art -
Painter James Whistler (1843 - 1903) was born i America, Whistler's "Mother" 1871 in Musee d'Orsay is an oil painting with a geometrical composition subject is an old woman in black and white head covering. The composition has a frame within a frame. Another painting is "Nocturne in blue and gold: Old Battersea Bridge Detail" - it is an exploration of colour.
Pictorialism - (still in Victorian art era) -
This is an approach to photography that emphasises the beauty of the subject matter, tonality, and composition rather than the documentation of reality. e.g. Stieglitz, The Flat iron Building 1903.
The Pictorialists used different techniques:
- Combination printing (from several negatives)
- The use of short focus in camera
- The manipulation of the negatives (scratching or printing over the negatives)
- Gum bichromate, which greatly lessened the detail and produced a more artisitc image.
Edward Burne Jones
Oscar Gustav Rejlander in collaboration with julia Margaret Cameron "Kate Dore with photogram frames of ferns" 1862.
Henry Peach Robinson - "Fading Away" (1858) Victorian family with dying girl.
Eva Watson-Schutze - "The Rose" (1905).
Next we moved on to discussing the next time period -
1920's and 1930's -
- 1921 photos can be transmitted by wires across the atlantic
- 1923 neon signs
- 1923 Time, the weekly news magazine
- 1925 Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin establishes film montage techniques
- 1927 Martin Heidegger's Being and Time will help find modern existentialism.
Family of Man series 1950's there is nothing like this today, trying to portray the universality of man. It was criticised because in order for it to be universal it had to be homogenous.
Lewis Hine "Power House Mechanic" 1920
Mass democracy, mass media, photography and cinema, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" 1963 Walter Benjamin (which later informed john Berger's "Way of Seeing".)
1928 shows Derby women at work in the sand core shops. and leys amin office, away from the workshops, in the 1920's.
1980's Chris Killip -
Killip is well known for his gritty black and white images of people and place. In particular the images of the girl with the metal hoop by the sea on what looks a tip. Comparison between the Victorian grandeur and poverty (start of post-industrial decline). He photographed street shots of children.
Structuralism and poststructuralism impacted on all of the following disciplines:
- Literary theory
- Film studies
- Media studies
- Cultural studies
- Art history
- Photography theory
1960's and the 1970's
- Women's movement
- Structuralism
- Photography as documentation
- Victor Bargin
- Roland Barthes
- "The Photographic Message" (news)
- "Rhetoric of the image" (advertising)
- "Idealised photographs are everywhere and used to incite the desire and appetite of the consumer."
- French Philosopher Louis Althusser argued that Ideology was primarily communicated through images, myths, ideas or concepts.
- Sub-conscious or pre-conscios - ideology is reproduced through the ways in which society presents itself to itself.
- The forst serious attempt to develop a systematic (structured) theory of the ideology of photography was the discipline of SEMIOTICS
- A method of culture analysis proposed and developed by Barthes in 1960 (semiotic theory was not devised particularly for photography.
Semiotics involes the study not only of what we refer to as "signs" in everyday speech, but of anything which "stands for" something else. In a semiotics sense, signs take the forms of words, images, sounds, gestures and objects.
Contemporary semioticians study signs not only in isolation but as part of semiotic "sign systems".
They study how meanings are made and how reality is represented.
- Signified - signifier
- Sound image / concept
- Photographic codes
- Perceptive codes
Critique of the image - Summary of Codes -
- Perceptive Codes: Colour, Intensity, Frequency, Primacy, Recency.
- Codes of Recognition: Cultural and personal schemata and stereotypes.
- Codes of Transmission: nature of the medium - tone, taste, style.
- Tonal Codes: conventional shades e.g. different type faces.
- Iconic Codes: figures, signs, abstract models images e.g. painting, photographs and icons.
- Iconographic Codes: metonymic, signifer becomes signified, "symbolism".
- Codes of taste and sensibility
- Rhetorical Codes: assumed conventions and values e.g. couple holding hand= they must be lovers.
- Stylistic Codes: genre, aesthetics, production values e.g. a beautiful grainy photograph.
- Codes on the unconscious: persuasive, use of psychological conventions to stimulate response.
10.10.13 - Definitions (KS)
Marxist - The name for a set of political and economic ideas
Aesthetic - Concerned with beauty or the appereance of beauty. also the nature, taste and beauty of things.
Freudian - Physiology analysis of things - e.g. reading and looking more into the image, looking for "give aways" e.g. peoples body language.
Form - Bringing together parts or combine parts to create something. The visible shape or configuration of something.
Content - The position and appearance of people and objects.
14.11.13 - Dissertation Powerpoint Presentations (KS)
Within this session we were asked to prepare and present to the class a powerpoint presentation that shows our research, what we are doing for our dissertations and where we are up to with them. Here below is the powerpoint that I put together to show what my dissertation is all about.
No comments:
Post a Comment