week Fourteen

New Media Theory (network culture, photobloggin, ect)

This weeks reading on new media made me think about blu-ray discs, I have not had the pleasure of viewing one, however the advertisements are hard to ignore. So this is what I found out,  they are for high-definition video and hold substantially more data than DVDs. However you are not just getting a moving when you purchase one they are loaded with interactive features. A new Blu-ray feature is BD-Live which allows you to connect to the internet to download new content, peer interactions, live events and gaming activities. 

Flickr and Shutterfly are online photo management and sharing application for the consumer, which let you create, print and share photo albums and prints.

Rather than traditional albums which are less interactive. 

Week Thirteen

Why Photography Matters (as Art) as ever Before:

Fried~Modernism

Realism Modernism conceptual 'other'

conceptual concerns

ontological issues

'tobeseenness'

theatricality-between representation & presentation

beholding/&or objecthood

absorption & theatricality

relationship between viewed & viewer

~'near documentary'- depiction of straight photography, pictorial construction, factual 

~absortive mode- inner engagement, a key figure in a image is involved in a private activity, a contemplative mode regardless of the presence of other figures.

'near documentary'

Jeff Wall, A sudden Gust of Wind, 1993

'painted drama' Theoretical Large-scale photographic transparency in a light box

Jeffris Elliott, Islamic Woman Ascending Stairs, 2007

Does not consider this work documentary, but an interpretation of the Middle East world.

Jeffris Elliott, Afghani Praying in Desert, 2008

'absorptive mode'

Jessica Bruah, Untitled #39 from "Stories", 2006

A visual narrative, which explores the idea of constructed reality to discuss gender, identity and domesticity. 
Jessica Bruah, Untitled #4 from "Stories", 2003

Week Twelve

Convergence of art and Photography

~1st  theoretical object

~2nd destruction of the conditions of the aesthetic medium in a transformative operation

~3rd relationship between obsolescence and the redemptive possibilities enfolded within the outmoded itself.

Photography has moved past its identity as a historical or aesthetic object and now is a theoretical object introducing  photoconceptual practice. 

Examples: of "postmedium" or the reinventing of the medium

Postmodernism.

These photographers mix painting and photography indifferent ways to reinvent and bend lines

Gregory Scott, Flip Side (2004)

Is a Painter and Photographer, His painting started out as photographs now it was only natural that they became connected, to explore the demarcations between photography and painting and the perceptions of photographic truth. 
Holly Roberts, Hard Ride III (2008)

Likes to bend the line between painting and photography, blending the two mediums creating new dialogue.

Lynn Geesaman, Parc de Sceaux, France (2004) [#4-04-16c-8]

Does not push the medium, but takes photographs to re-experience like paintings. 

Artists from the readings

Sander

Dan Graham, created photoconceptual work, marrying written text to documentary- photographic illustrations

Robert Smithson
Cindy Sherman, Untitled film still #11

Sam Taylor Wood

Insightful links

Reinventing the Medium, Rosalind Krauss

Rolan Barthes, "The Third Meaning"

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernity

and Pastiche

Week Eleven

Portraiture

Narrativity/Stasis

Narrativity:

~Sustain a readable discourse 

~duration, movement and sense of plurality

~inherent embrace of duration, of time (historical consciousness)

Stasis:

~opposed to narrativity

~petrifaction of motion (freezing of time)

~instead of plurality (fixed or receptive motif)

~refusal of duration (anti historical)

Julie Blackmon, Girl Across the Street (2008) Shows Narrativity,  The viewer witness an act showing a Readable discourse, Movement. Her work depicts her children  engrossed in reality and fantasy narratives of their lives.

Jeffrey Wolin, Nguyen Vin Luc (2008) Shows both Narrativity and Stasis, Jeffs work is inserting to look at after completing this weeks reading, because of the literal narrative that is included in the portrait. Weather the viewer interprets the portrait has narrativity or stasis, Jeff inclusion of text in the image gives it a narrative (In his earlier work the text is hand written over the images)

Josephine Sacabo,  La Jaula I (The Birdcage) (2005) Shows only Stasis, This image was choses for its  lack of a narrative, however it has me second guessing that it could have a narrative. While the image does not have or hint at motion, its frozen in time it does have a historical element. So does this portrait have Stasis (at first glance) or narrativity or both?

Week Ten

Race Are we So Different? an exhibit of the Science Museum of Minnesota. Link

To distinguish between

racialization as a visual process

racism as an ethical political dilemma

Race system of representation vs truth about a group of people

Week nine

Acts

Moral philosophy='action theory'='to do'

Social agents constitute social reality through

Language

Gesture

Symbolic social sign

Gender/ stylization of the body

week eight

The Gaze

Scopophilia- the desire to look, which is a primary human instinct.An interesting response on Laura Mulvey's essay is Epidexiphilia, or, I'll show you Mine by David J Tremblay

The majority of "viewers" for the Reality TV series The Girls Next Door is women in their 20's and 30's, which is rather shocking. It appears to be a guilty pleasure for women to day, we have the desire to look just as much as men. 

Barbara DeGenevieve "Gordon #3" from the Panhandler Project 2004, her work explores the connection between power and sex, in the historical and inverse relation ship.

Bettie Page, till this day there is still a fascination with her, the way she "looks" at the viewer.

Barbara Kruger's work is still power full with today's audience. 

Week Seven

Power and Structure

Week Six

"As a Principle a work of art has always been reproducible" From founding and stamping, to woodcut, engraving, etching and lithography, to printing and finally photography and film. 

However a Copy/reproduction of a painting is very different than that of a photograph. While a photograph can be printed infinitely and be identical copies (therefor all originals), a painting can not be coped identically, same as a woodcut or lithograph which  have a limited printing run (the first is not the same as the next as seen in the diagram). 

"technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce  all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes."

"first, process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction."

"second, technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original."

Reinventing Documentary (Art as a mode of human communication)

"a representational art, an art that refers to something beyond itself"

"A small number of contemporary photographers have set out deliberately to work against the strategies that have succeeded in making photography a high art."

"... they insist on treating photographs not as privileged objects but ad common cultural artifacts."

Fred Lonidier: Sociological possibilities of photography applies to social change

Lewis Baltz: focused on the counter-aesthetic of photography (New Industrial Parks 12/85)

Martha Rosler

Week Five

In a multimedia culture is photography enough? While television is a continuous stream of images that keep canceling the predecessor out. You can stay with and return to a photograph. How ever there are a lot of factors which play into the way you denote and connote an image.

Connotation:

Differs according to the way the text is presented.

Depends on the readers "Knowledge"

trick effect, pose, objects, photogenia, aestheticism, syntax

The uses/ reason behind why a photograph is created also plays in to how it is read. Travel photography  exist as a witness to the vacation that it really happened. Also for the middle class workaholic it creates the feeling of work while they are suppose to be relaxing. While war photography is created for a very different reason, it still caries with it the notion of a predator. For to photograph  people is to violate them, it turns them into objects. For what ever reason photographs are created they create a nostalgia, where it inform or shock the reader, but after repeat exposure dose it become less real, do we become numb?

Jeff Wall "Dead Troops Talk"

Week four

Studium: 'study'  just an image not as important or meaningful to every viewer. liking, not loving 'all right' 

For example Harry Callahan, Eleanor 1947, photograph has more meaning to him than other viewers, it is a beautiful image however does not compel a strong response from every viewer.

Punctum: holds meaning for all viewers, it has importance more than just personal. Its compelling in response. 

However for example Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother 1936 does compel a strong response from almost  every viewer.

Week three

Week Three

Week two

Theory: Charles Harrison, "Modernism"

How is Modernism defined- it's the intentional rejection of what's come before

Modern qualitys

1st - If its modern then it must demonstrate a wide spread social issues of contemporary culture

2nd - medium

3rd  - criticism

"Kitsch"

Key point raised  "The point is that the from of attention the painting both demands and defines is one that results in a form of critical consciousness: a responsive awareness not only of painting as object, but of the rich determinate range of metaphorical meanings the sutface of the object, in akk its plenitude an

d  its particularity, is embled to sustain; a self-conscious awareness, that is to say, of which is the other." Harrison p199

Criticism: Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting"

- Unique and irreducible over all and in each art

- "Modernism used art to call attention to art: Greenberg

- Flatness is unique to painting, so modernist painting uses flatness to define

- Emphasis on color induces the flatting out of painting

Key Point  "Bit the making

 of pictur

es means, among other things, the deliberate creating or choosing of a flat surface, and the deliberate circumscribing and limiting of it. This deliberateness is precisely what Modernist painting harps on: the fact, that is, that the limiting conditions of art are altogether human conditions." Greenberg p6

Curatorial: John Szarkowski, "Introduction" to the Photographer's Eye

- Photography the art of selection

- Painting are made/ photographs are taken

What is artistic? Painting recorded what was important/ Photography mad thing important by recording them, with out thought of composition, light, form or texture.

- Photography the actual

- Truthful

- Facts/ suggestive clues

- not conceived but selected

-Choosing and eliminating the central act

Scroll Painting

- describes or alludes to time

- Clarity or obscurity of the vantage point

Key Point  "An artist is a man who seeks new structures in which to order and simplify his sense of the reality of life. For the artist photographer, much of his sense of reality (where his picture starts) and much if his sense of craft or structure (where his picture is completed)are anonymous and untraceable gifts from photography itself." Szarkowski p103

Practice: Lewis Hine, "Social Photography: How the Camera may Help in the Social Uplift"

Paul Strand, "Photography"

- photography as a fine art

- straight approach/the belief to depict detail clearly

- the potential depends on the purity