Chapter 1 - What is a Photograph?
This chapter gives a history of early photographic procedures. William Henry Fox Talbot produced the first negative/positive process to be able to produce multiple copies.The camera lucida was used an as aid to drawing.
Functionally, the photograph is dependent on its context; differences between colour and black and white, circular and square images, small and large. Also, in a newspaper or magazine, in a frame, on a document, in a gallery etc.
Initially there were technical limitations; the long exposure time limited choice of subject.
Art photography describes the medium's capacity to express something beyond the surface appearance of things.
When we enlarge photographs contrary to the mass produced size we underscore their differences and value. (This pertains to selecting particular images to be blown up and displayed).
Chapter 2 - How do we Read a Photograph?
We read a photograph, not as an image, but as text (I interprate this as the image telling a story/narrative).
Studium - A passive response to a photograph's appeal (on a surface level).
Punctum - A detail within the photograph that disturbs the surface unity and stability and opens up the space to critical analysis.
I found the concept of Studium/Punctum intriguing, and is helpful to begin to understand how to 'read' an art photograph.
Chapter 3 - Photography and the Nineteenth Century.
Combination photographs - A series of negative combined to contruct the image gives a false appearance. (Manipulating images began from the inception of the photograph, and is dealt with further in chapter 10).
In a period of limited travel and communication, photography offered wonderous images of otherwise only imagined cultures. (I surmise that this idea of showing people places they wouldn't ordinarily see is related to a similar idea mentioned in chapter 5).
Chapter 4 - Landscape in Photography.
Landscape photography remains encoded within the language of academic painting and traditions of 18th and 19th century landscape art.
Roger Fenton was a photographer who showed the idealized and touristic; there is no sign of work, poverty or hardship, and the people are posed; this offers a highly edited version of rural england. This contrasts with documentary photography of rural life. There is nothing in the frame to disturb the pleasure of the eye.
Chapter 5 - The City in Photography.
The camera negotiates between two poles, the vertical and the horizontal, which suggests part of a larger dialect on how the city has been seen: the public and private, the detail and general, the exterior and interior, the historial and modern, the permanent and the temporary. (Photography in the city provides infinite scope).
Photographers responded early on to the variety of the streets and their ambience.
Images for an assumed middle-class audience allowed them to see what they would otherwise not see. (Related to 19th century travel photography).
Chapter 6 - The Portrait in Photography
In the 19th Century photography increased demand for portraiture. Daguerreotype was the most popular form; it produced a unique image as it had no positive/negative process. (This gives added value to the image, as it a one-off, like an original painting).
Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, like others, had different depictions of men and women. Her image of a man, showing the head only, implying intelligence and individualism, and looking into the camera. This reinforces the myth of male dominance. Her image of the woman shows the subject being looked at sideways-on. This implies she is being looked at, rather than looking herself; this underlines the passive nature of the image. (In contrast to the image of the man). There is also an exaggerated depiction of the woman's neck and hair; the sense of the woman as an individual is deferred to a larger, passive female ideal based on assumed sexual difference and social significance. It is not a portrait advertising a self as much as a general idea to be consumed (by men). (I found this different way of posing males and females by photographers of the time to be very intriguing, and shows how the camera can record social phenomenon).
The image of the heir to the throne and the prime minister. This is a whole body shot giving weight to their status. Each is given equal space within the frame, suggestive of a sharing of power and influence. The camera however has established differences between the two: contrasting faces; bullish vs hesitant, different tie, collar, waistcoat. Left hand clenched, relaxed. (To me, this image was reminiscent of Diane Arbus' image of the twins, where closer inspection reveals differences between the two figures).
Chapter 7 - The Body in Photography
Since its inception the photograph has delighted in the depiction of nude bodies within a private space - implying a sense of the hidden, illicit and secret. It makes the private space of the body open to the public eye; this eye being traditionally male.
In comparison to nude painting, photography gives the promise of the actual.
Soft-focus and passive poses - female stereotypes are depicted in relation to male fantasy and expectation. The subjects rarely look at the camera, designating them as 'objects' to be looked at.
In Alfred Stieglitz's image of Georgia O Keeffe, there is the absence of her face, hands and feet (all of which are arbiters of her individual self). This allows her to remain absent from the image.
The image of the body-part mobile - This allows the viewer to create an individual hierachy of significance. (I found this concept intriguing, and it highlighted how each individual viewer would 'read' the image differently, depending on their own preferences).
Chapter 8 - Documentary Photography
In many ways this genre dominated the photographic history of the 20th century.
It is a truthful and objective account (or representation) of what has happened.
Photography is able to record an objective image in a way painting and drawing can't.
Makes available images of an otherwise unknown world. (Again, see chapters 3 and 5)
There is a debate whether certain images are real or fake. (Which perhaps undermines the genre).
Chapter 9 - The Photograph as Fine Art
Photography is distinguished from painting as a unique medium in its own right with its own unique possibilities.
Changing the ordinary to the extraordinary is basic to the aesthetics of art photography. (And which I get the feeling this whole book is about).
Textures of walls, stones, doors and fences - Paul Strand makes what would otherwise be part of the detrius of the urban scene yield something signficant and unique - takes the most marginal of subject-matter and turn it into a hierophany of potential meaning.
Debate between black and white, and colour. The Photographic world still retains an elitist view of B&W; still the dominant medium, as in documentary. B&W lays stress on the photograph as a medium in its own right, rather than to reproduce the world 'as is'. Colour insists on a 'thereness' of the world.
Art photography is not intended for the casual glance.
The banal is boosted to a new frame of meaning.
The irony of the art photograph: everything can be a photograph, and, in Egglestons terms, can be art. (This photographer's job as far as I can tell is to develop a 'way of looking' that allows you to see the art in everything.
Chapter 10 - The Photograph Manipulated
Beginning in the 1900's we see a series of photographers who begin to both question photographic practice and relate their concerns to the modernist aesthetic beginning to make itself felt in painting and literature. The need for a new visual vocabulary that many photographers sought to take account of in relation to developments in other media at the time. (At this time there was a big shakeup in Western art music; it seems that practitioners of all media were looking to leave behind the old way of doing things and do something new).
How was the camera to equate itself with new ways of seeing, such as the terms of reference found in cubism; a series of multiple views and perspectives.One response was the Vortograph - projecting the lens into a series of mirrors, resulting in something akin to cubist portraiture. 'Vortograph, the first completely abstract kind of photograph, it is composed of kaleidoscopic repetitions of forms achieved by photographing objects through a triangular arrangement of three mirrors.' (A very interesting concept that I will learn more about and try myself!).
Photographic collage and montage in the 19th century - Photographs were manipulated since their inception.
'Defamiliarization or ostranenie (остранение) is the artistic technique of presenting to audiences common things in an unfamiliar or strange way in order to enhance perception of the familiar.'
Soon Man Ray was making photographs of objects not unlike Marcel Duchamp's "readymades," ordinary objects elevated to the status of art because so designated by the artist, and "assisted readymades," objects that the artist "assisted," or altered, by combining them with others.
Manipulate the image and the photographic space: constructing, deconstructing, cutting-up and fragmenting the primary terms of the photographic space in order to suggest other levels of meaning and significance. (I think this is a good explanation of why people would want to manipulate photographs; especially those of a banal nature).
Merely placing two objects or images together (as with any two words) creates the potential for meaning and a new relationship between reader and image. Everything in an individual state can be recognised, and yet in the pattern in which they are presented they demand a new form of recognition and a new kind of attention. (This is especially pertinent to Assignment Five. Two images can mean one thing when viewed individually, but open up a whole new narrative when viewed side-by-side).
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