#mph0403

[saminaminyraouf-blog]

Carol Squiers - Looking at Life

Squiers’ essay about Life magazine begins with explaining the origins of mass media magazines in Europe and how this style of photojournalism and documentary spread to America, although America had adopted a different approach of illustration their news and opinions. Squiers discusses her opinion of Life magazine and how it influenced the lives of readers and American culture into the culture that we experience today. she mentions a few articles that illustrate the Patriarchal influences and viewpoints of the magazine and also explores how they represented various groups of people at certain times throughout history (e.g. the black society during the Integrations in schools, women and men as represented from a contest for Miss America).

However the readers of this essay cannot view the articles or pages that she cites from the magazine and rely entirely on her opinion of how Life may have organised images and texts throughout the text to represent certain events in America or worldwide events such as the war scene in Vietnam.

[saminaminyraouf-blog]

Introduction to The Photographers Eye - John Szarkowski

The introduction to ‘The Photographers Eye’  explores how John Szarkowski influenced Formalism as a mode of illustration in photography and how this was magnified by the exhibitions that would occur in San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in concentration of the Formalist ideals. The photography and art chosen at the time of Szarkowski’s  directorship in the museum heavily directed the theories and ideals of the time in art: everything was strictly approached in terms of its shapes and composition of shapes ignoring any context or any depiction of reality.

“The formalist attitude was everywhere in American art, embodied in what Irving Sandler has described as the sensibility of antianthropocentrism, a concern with objects above human emotion and human experience.”

There are details of Szarkowski’s ideas into the formalist photography and how the photography of any commerce and art functionality conformed to the ideals of formalism, for example the mass media photography which is mentioned as a medium which conforms to certain guidelines that identify the medium as a particular genre of photography and hence the conformity towards these simple and forced compositions and forms, the mass media photography aids the ideas of formalism.

[saminaminyraouf-blog]

Out in the World: Still Life photography between Art and Commerce

This text by David Campany explains how the still life photography has been evident throughout the medium from the very beginnings when Daguerre contrived his arrangement s of sculptures and William henry Fox Talbot exhibited his china and glassware as well as his fruit bowl. Campany also discusses the distinction between the still life photography that could be labelled as art and mentions that many photographers “insisted their medium was not art but it could be an art.”

“This indirect path to artistic status produced extraordinary images – and they could only have been made that way.”

References to Roland Barthes 1964 essay, ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ is also mentioned as he starts to discuss the commerce aspect of still life photography intended to represent a specific and particular view of an object; an ideology of the object that allows audiences to believe in the object. The key effective reason that results in this ideology of objects stems from the belief in audiences that the photographic medium is a truthful medium: “It is unique in appearing to point at things transparently (‘there it is’) while fashioning appearance artificially (‘this is how it is’)”

“But a less remarked legacy of Pop was the polarizing of art’s attitudes to commerce into rictus-grin irony or high- minded disgust. It led to a fraught attitude to money, to the commodity status of art works themselves and, indirectly, to a stand- off between art photography and applied photography.”

Campany talks about how the still life photography although at times intended for commerce purposes it can be viewed as a controversial art that can question the reality of life within an arrangement of objects, he uses the example of Damien Hirst’s billboard photography of the hammer and peach, the cucumber and Vaseline and the third panel that read ‘The Problems with Relationships’. He also uses some works from John Evans to explain his idea of a transparent line between still life photography as an art or commerce prospect.

[bateman-90]

“If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” - Robert Capa

Probably one to remember for the ‘Street Photography’ project... I might write this on the back of my camera.

[saminaminyraouf-blog]

Ideas for essay concerning Photography Histories

During the lecture today with David Campany, there was a wide discussion concerning where photography has come from and essentially what is is as well as why we, as a humanity have chosen this medium to express both ourselves and other ideas or cultures. It’s interesting to me the different perspectives many writers, historians and photographers have brought into the history or histories of photography - definitely makes me excited to be apart of it and to read these perspectives. 

So far my interest concerns the colonisation of the west into the east and to Africa that brought a change to the culture, documentation and society of these countries. I feel as though the realisation of photography in these countries brought a voice to the people who may have really needed it, the way people could communicate became broader and maybe there was an essence of hope? There also is a difference in how often a photograph of a certain race or belief is taken and how they are taken or even how they are perceived by the people who see the photographs. 

[reenakaurrr]

MPH0403: History and Theory 1 - from Invention to Mass Medium

What is photography? Where did it come from? How do we define it? How can we use it? What is it good for? How does it affect us? What is its relation to art? What is its relation to science? What is its status as evidence or expression? Such questions have never gone away.