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