photography exam

Straight photography

"Barthe's subjectivism, in which the photograph exists as a construct - fabricated "for me" is a scandal for the aesthetics of Straight Photography For how can it be real, if it is fabricated?

Rhetoric of the image

Analysis of the Panzani advertisment Linguistic meaning: what do the texts on the products mean Symbolic meaning: what do the products represent, what is the meaning of the products in combination with eachother? The colours too: the red, white and green remind of the Italian flag and thus radiate a sense of 'italianicity' Connotaded ideology: the image wants you to buy the products.

How are the goals of the movement of Surrealism visible in Surrealist film? Explain and name two artists and two films

-Deconstruction of bourgeois society - priest on the ground Attack rational categorization • Undermining gender norms Un Chien Andalou : Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali attacks rational categorization: attack linear plot, is about nothing. undermines gender norms : Man on bike is wearing female clothes, female is shown with hair on her under arms, female officer is dressed like a man, yet is still wearing high heels, women attacks back, the shadow behind her makes her look able and strong , to the point that the man backs off. The film's structure, even from the very opening title, is misleading and disorientating. Un Chien Andalou, which literally translates as An Andalusian Dog, takes place in Paris and contains no dog, nor even mentions one outside the title. This title and the opening scene quickly shatter any expectations the audience might have. "No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted." "Nothing, in the film, symbolizes anything. The only method of investigation of the symbols would be, perhaps, psychoanalysis." L'étoile de mer, Man Ray, 1928 collides words with image, to make us psychological witnesses, voyeurs of a kind, to a sexual encounter, resist easy decoding, film about a love triangle between a woman and a man, however the man can only love the woman when he becomes a woman himself. Once again, gender norms are subverted and challenged. The symbolism of the sea star, an animal which is both male and female also suggests that Man Ray believes in a reconciliation of both the male and female in one human body.

PSYCHOANALsis

. photography is the perfect way to play with gender&sexuality because of it's aura of reality. the female body and the male organ have become each the sign for the other Freud started with gender theories in the 1920/30's.

Camera Lucida

Barthes says that the essence of photography is not just showing an image but having an image that makes you think and have a discussion. Studium is described as the moment of interest in the photograph: it is not yet a love, just a like. Punctum is described as a moment of impact by an image, like a shot with an arrow. This is a very subjective feeling, as it is different for every person. Barthes uses as an example an image of his dying mother, a picture which he does not share because it is so personal. He describes 'shock' as something unexpected studium: as it is not traversed lashed, striped by a detail. I am sympathetically interested, as a docile cultural dubject, in that th photograph has to say, for it speaks respect, family life, conformism. Interests but does not prick. Always coded Punctum: which attracts or distresses me, engenders a very widespread type of photograph, which we might call the unary photograph. A shock can traumatize but no disturbance; the photograph can shout. Is not coded. a transformation is unary if, through it, a single series is generated by the base. It is unary when it emphatically transforms reality without doubling it,. new photographs are very often unary and have no punctum. another type of unary is the pornographic photograph. in habitually unary space, detail can attract the spectator. This detail is the punctum. impossible to posit a rule of connection between the stadium and the punctum. It is a matter of co-presence, docile photographs( ones invested by a simple studium) has a quick glance whereas the punctum is at once brief and active. Punctum whether or not it is triggered ; it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there. i love or hate it Studium is of the order of liking not of loving; mobilizes half desire, to recognize it you encounter the photographers intentions and enter in harmony with them to approve or disapprove of them , but always to understand them, to argue them within myself for culture ( which the stadium derives) is a contract arrived at between creators and consumers.

The third meaning

Barthes talks about an 'obvious meaning' and an 'obtuse meaning'. The obvious meaning is consists of the obvious connotations: for example, when Ivan the Terrible is overflown with gold coins. Gold means wealth, thus Ivan is very wealthy. The 'obtuse meaning' is the more layered meaning, which maybe takes a while to get to. He then speaks about a 'third meaning', the point where the mind of the viewer takes of and starts associating wildly. This third meaning is completely objective, as this point and the following associations are completely different for every person.

informe

Bataille: the category that allows all categories to be unthought removal of all those boundaries by which concepts organize reality, its job: to undo formal categories, to deny that each thing has its "proper" form, to imagine meaning as gone effects needed: Rotation: Changing the vertical and horizontal axis (Man Ray, Boiffard) Solarisation (Man Ray, Ubac) Flipping of the negative (Tabard)

group f/64

Group f/64 only strives to produce works of pure photography standards. Pure photography: possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form. The production of the "Pictorialist," on the other hand, indicates a devotion to principles of art which are directly related to painting and the graphic arts.

Crimp's view on photography?

It's precisely on this distinction - the distinction between making and taking - that the ontological difference between painting and photography is said to rest."

Why did painters feel threatened by photography? Mention three reasons and explain.

More efficient; faster, , portraits painters were out of jobs , painters started to focus on movement could take family members with you autonomactically more realistic More popular for the technological aspect, blurring of lines; jules alexandra lumiere : painted from a photograph

Explain why some critics thought that photography could never be considered an art form. Name two critics in your answer and explain their line of thinking.

Painters threatened of rival medium. Boundaries began to blur. Baudelaire: photography was unable to transcend to external reality. " realism is a silly cult of nature" - Baudelaire photography is mechanical, therefore not art useful to other art disciplines Charles Baudelaire: 'a very humble servant of art and science, like printing and stenography' - photography could not be art, it was not imaginable Lady East Lake : Her end conclusion is that photography will never be an art form of its own, but is necessary to liberate other art form Eastlake states that photography can mainly be seen as an aid for art. Before the invention of photography, art was also supposed to focus on depicting reality. Now, with photography taking over this representational function, art is freed from this,

Weston

photographers can not equal the work of painters and painting can not equal the work of photographers. Each art-form has their own, unique qualities For Weston the best quality of photography is the lens power, sees more than the eyes do two basic factors of photography, "the nature of the recording process" and "the nature of the image"

Name and explain a particular photographic movement that can be linked to this struggle.

Pictorial photography Oscar Gustave Rejlander - Two ways of life, 1858 Henry Peach Robinson, Fading Away

Clarify the difference between pictorialism and a 'straight' approach to the the medium of photography. Name an advocate of each perspective.

Pictorialism later 19th and early 20th centuries. emphasizes beauty of subject matter, tonality, and composition rather than the documentation of reality. group f/64 was explicitly against pictorialism Straight Photography: discourages any tampering with the image. Encouraged by Weston and stejiks

types of narrative in essay film? how is this relation established formally?

The Idea of Essay Film Laura Rascaroli: , Adorno, who claimed the essay 'must be constructed in such a way that it could always, and at any point, break. Noël Burch essay lms as a new type of documentary that 'set forth thesis and antithesis through the very texture disjunction of form. each and every essayistic text must create the conditions of its own form

Surrealism and gender

The surrealist movement had not just an artistic goal, but also a political and phsychological goal. They focused on the devine and abnormal forms of gender and sexuality. Marcel Duchamp and his alter ego Rrose Sélavy were an example of this exploration of the grey areas between masculinity and femininity. between masculinity and femininity. The main goals of the surrealist movement were thus the deconstruction of bourgeois society and the undermining of classical gender norms and binaries. The surrealists were convinced that the rationalist thought of the late 19th centuries was what caused the First World War. Surrealists saw photography as medium of change. Photography could be used not just to represent reality, but also to distort reality. They were not just reflections, but also new objects of art. female body - objectified - fetisjen - violet and sexual connotation

Naturalism - 1870s + 1880s Aims:

achieve higher illusionism record social inequality of the day photography: the truth claim photography as a way of sketching - Valuable practice in itself - But before that it was all in secret

Explain how and in what aspects Surrealism was inspired by cultural entertainment of the 1920s and 1930s. Give two specific examples.

advertising, cartoons, Dali , fashion, new fashion for women , gender blurring, cultural output, incorporated the expansion of boundaries Advertising, flapper style, influenced by the poster made for war, gender blurrying.

Stieglitz

anti pictoralism, don't copy paintings but rather focus on light, naturalistic focus on photography, honesty and reality is essential to photography, nine-tenths of photography is just mechanical and therefore not art. An art-photographer must know tonality, laws of composition just like a painter. Alfred Stieglitz started a more modern, naturalist approach to photography. more strict realism

dali

double image: representation of an object that it is also the representation of another entirely different object, without the slightest physical or anatomical change. Dali made it about entertainment rather than political context that came with surrealism. So, it became a capitalist idea. Dali made it commercial by working with Disney and stars, rather than 'real' artist. .

describing the film in 1 or 2 in one or two sentences sans soleil

in between fiction and documentary. Takes on a stream of conscious approach. It is narrated in a form of a letter

importance of Daguerreotype

late 1838 Before this invention, it took hours with camera obscura. Daguerre shortened the exposure time. spontaneous reproduction of the images of nature received in the camera obscura—not with their colours, but with great delicacy of tonal gradations. DAGUERREOTYPE: is superior in speed, in sharpness of image, gradation of tones, and detail. time 3-30 min. The DAGUERREOTYPE is not an instrument to be used to draw nature, but a chemical and physical process which gives her the ability to reproduce herself.

what is the relation between word and image ?

quite loose ,technique of using different perspective to interpret the film reminds you that is constructed , destruct the thought of reality, destruction of real time, creates stream of concousiness, also connects two seemingly disjointed idea by flowing from one shot to the other while still being connected by a theme of dialogue.

Explain how the relation to painting was instrumental in the struggle of artistic photographers halfway the 19th century to establish the new medium of photography as an acknowledged art form.

science and commercial use, taking not making, imitating painting. Fine art: 'creative art, photography: mechanical = no creativity and

readymades Crimp idea

the artist cannot make, but only can take what's already there. (This is the ontological difference between painting & photography). EG.. Marcel duchamp

Surrealist photographic subject matter often contains images of women. What type of images do we usually find here and are there other types, that contradict the more 'traditional' ones?

traditional: by male surrealist in terms of psychoanalysis of fantasty. contradiction: the object becomes the representational object ( female) types of women objectivity are dislocations females body, destroying the bodies. female nude is classical images. types of women that contradict , female surrealists took self portrait, fluidity of gender, alter ego photo - man ray man images were objectifying images. Seeing the body as the pieces of meat, takes away rationality. Seeing the body as a beast . Marcel Duchamp , his alter ego Rrose Selavy, blurries the lines of masculinity and femininity

How can photography be seen as a transformation in the paradigm of representation? Explain in a short essay of max. 400 words

what is an image? captures nature truth claim of photography ; you make a picture , you take apart of the world. perfect representation whereas art you have your own interpretation on it. Rhetoric of the image ; The type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly never done, not a consciousness of being there an awareness of its having-been-there. -creates a new spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority; The photograph therefore become here-now and the there-then painting no longer has to be realistic , painting becomes free