1760 – 1840 - Industrial Revolution transformed society with mass-production leading the way formed, scientists endeavour to reproduce reality in a fixed format. The first known photograph was taken after these developments. In 1827 Joseph Nicephore Niepce fixed the first projected image of his view from his window in 1827. unable to draw well, Niepce first placed engravings onto engraving stones or glass plates coated with a light-sensitive varnish of his own composition. He created the first known photograph on metal in 1826 and called them heliographs.
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Louis Jacques Daguerre worked with Niepce in his quest to fix the projected image. he was a painter of stage sets and illusionistic scenery for the diorama, a popular visual entertainment in Paris. In January 1839 Daguerre announced his invention, the daguerreotype which is a type of photograph which was laterally reversed and monochromatic printed onto a metal plate.
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In 1839 William Henry Fox Talbot invented the calotype. This had one advantage over the Daguerreotype, it could be reproduced as a negative as opposed to being a single, non-replicable image. However the calotype was improved over time and advances in paper technology led to better processing. Therefore, the Calotype soon became the most popular type of photography that is still used today.
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Photo Secession
The Photo-Secession was an early 20th century movement that promoted photography as a fine art in general and photographic pictorialism in particular The movement was founded by Stieglitz in 1902. It had the ideals of Pictorialism but the concerned photographers also wanted the mechanical origins to be apparent. |
Pictorialism
Pictorialism is an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the later 19th and early 20th centuries. It is an approach to photography that emphasises beauty of subject matter, tonality, and composition rather than the documentation of reality. Pictorialists hoped to express and engage feelings and senses and felt that their images should be concerned with beauty rather than fact. |
Straight Photography
Straight photography generally refers to photographs that are not manipulated, either in the taking of the image or by darkroom or digital processes, but sharply depict the scene or subject as the camera sees it. Straight photography respects the medium's own technical visual language. The camera's distinctive vocabulary includes form, sharp focus, rich detail, high contrast, and rich tonalities. Straight photography is also synonymous with pure photography, since both terms describe the camera's ability to faithfully reproduce an image of reality. |
Looking at this image makes the viewer feel uncomfortable because there are two different eyes on two different floating hands. A feeling of sadness meets the viewer because of the black and white image and because of a shadow from the hands on the building linking to oppression. The composition makes the viewer feel empathy. Wider issues the artist is addressing in this image are the claustrophobic/ cramped living conditions threw the back drop being all covered in a building with lots of windows suggesting lots of rooms. Because the hands and eyes are from two different people this highlights how detachment is collective. It is seen that art must respond and influence the modern world. Surrealists use photography to connect with the unconscious mind. .There was a repressive political situation in Germany in 1928 which meant Bayer left Germany to study in the US. This image demonstrates that after the world wars everyone , indicated from the eyes, felt trapped and alone in their city. He achieved this image by making a collage of images taken both by Bayer and ones he found taken by other artists. He also used the technique of gouache which is a method of painting using opaque pigments ground in water and thickened with a glue-like substance. There is a brownish tint to his image on the left and there are a lot of shadows on it which draws the viewers attention to the darkness and sadness which filled the city after the wars and political situation.
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Richard Prince Presentation Notes:
Richard Prince is a 73 year old American painter and photographer who now lives and works in New York city after being born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1949. In June 2021, his painting Runaway Nurse from 2005-6 fetched a record-breaking $12 million. Richard Prince tackles consumer culture, which includes everything from advertising and entertainment to social media and literature. This image is from a series known as the Untitled Cowboys, produced from 1980 to 1992. They represent an idealized figure of American masculinity. This image and others in this project are controversial to people as he found these images that other photographers had taken in a magazine and took pictures of them and adjusted the focus and angle to make them as much his images as possible. While Prince recontextualizes images by others to redefine them, he has also failed to acknowledge those preceding photographers whose work he appropriates. This image is a rephotographing of a photograph by Sam Abell and is appropriated from a cigarette advertisement, and was the first rephotograph to be sold for more than $1 million at auction at Christie's New York in 2005. Richard Prince has employed a number of strategies to question the ownership of artistic imagery. By rephotographing, copying, scanning, and manipulating the work of others, he has crafted a technique of appropriation and provocation. He was first interested in the art of American abstract expressionist Jack pollock. The 1956 Time magazine article dubbing Pollock "Jack the Dripper" made the thought of pursuing art as a career possible. |
Migrant mother (1936) is really impactful as the mothers face is so emotive and shows pain, sadness, confusion and desperation all together with even more emotions. Also her children are hiding behind her and snuggling into her so that they need her protection and are scared of what will happen and need her support. Also them being physically close could be showing the closeness of the family and how cramped their conditions are. This image is just overall really powerful and has a big impact on every viewer who looks at it. However good the feedback and response to the image taken, there were people criterzing the authenticity of it. They said because she took multiple photos of the family in posed positions before to find the right composition and got the image to look exactly how she wanted it that it isn't actual real and is manipulated in a way it shouldn't be. She found after taking many images before that one that she wanted the main focus to e the mothers face so she got the children to look back to take the focus away from them and she took out the older child because it didn't work well for her. She even edited the mothers thumb out and got her hand to touch her face so it would show the viewer where to look when they are looking at the image. I personally believe she had the right to this as the image became really popular and brought the public's attention to the problem of migrants cramped living conditions.
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In my option I think there are many ways in which a photographer can make what is captured in an image mysterious. If there is darkness or blurred in the image the viewer cant see everything captured clearly so there is a sense of unknown for the viewer. For example, these images taken by Robert Frank on the left can all be seen and justified as being mysterious when all he is doing is photographing what he can see and is no changing what is reality and a fact that is around him. The blurred faces and covered faces lead the viewer to wonder who it is that is in the image and dehumanising them and creates a more sinister and in a way, scary image .
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Photographers may, however invent something in the viewers mind. For example John Hillard created an image called 'cause of death' in 1974 which leads the viewer to decide how the person died. was it either: height, fire, water or were they dug up from the ground. I really enjoy this image as it clearly shows the effect cropping can have as if you cropped the image in 4 different ways you would have completely different story's behind the image. In my opinion, cropping can have a major influence on an image because a photographer may find they want to crop in really close on an image or crop out something big in the image. If they choose to do this it can completely change the overall look of the image. It is therefore really important for a photographer to know how to crop their images well and some say that you shouldn't even crop your images at all. For example Henri Cartier-Bresson believes that photographers should get ''closer, or further, so there’s is an emphasis on the subject. If it’s not correct it’s not by cropping in the darkroom and making all sorts of tricks that you improve it. If a picture is mediocre, well it remains mediocre. The thing is done, once for all.'' I believe that a photographer doesn't have to not crop to be a good photographer and cropping can just enhance and make a good picture great. As you can see on the image on the right with the people and the collapsed wall, he even leaves the black outline of the image so that you know he hasn't cropped it and he does this to all his images. A photographer chooses what to keep and what not to keep in an image to make it better in their mind.
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Firstly I'm going to discuss the work of Gustave Le Gray and in particular, the piece he made in 1857, entitled 'The Great Wave'. It was a albumen print from co0llodion-on-glass negative. He made this image by initially taking a image of the sea whilst not exposing the top area of the image where the sky will go. After doing this he then went to a different area and photographed a different sky that he liked better on the same piece of light sensitive paper and only exposed the top half of the image to be the sky, This means he made on image out of 2 separate places so he could create what he thinks is the perfect image. On first glace at the image, most viewers would just think they are looking at one image which has dramatic waves and sky all at once. I can see now why he decided to use this technique to create his image as I think the dark clouds with most the light in the image being in the middle has a lovely effect and centres the viewers look on the image.
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Now, I will discuss the work of Dafna Talmor and especially her constructed landscapes II series. She is overwhelmed with possibilities with her camera. When she sees a landscape, she doesn't know what to photograph because there are too many options. She aims to create an utopian space that's rooted in reality. Basically, her images are created by her taking lots of negatives from separate images she has taken and cuts them up and places them together in a way she likes them. She makes the lines so cuts fit with the other images to create a cohesive image. This makes a space that is only able to be seen in a photographic state as she has made something that doesn't exist in real life. She takes all the negatives together and makes a positive out of them and this is evident where you can see the white lines on her images where there is a gap between her negatives. There are also bigger gaps of darkness where she has exposed nothing but these are in cool shapes which I think still adds to the images. I really like this technique she uses and I would like to use it in the future. I liked how when I first saw the image I had no idea what I was looking at and only after hearing about the process of her work did I understand what I was looking at.
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