Ways of Seeing

                  I found this video to be pretty interesting because it talked about the psychological aspects of viewing photographs and actually showed examples of how different outside factors influence a viewer’s reading of an image.  For example, because of societal advancement, we can now view high-quality images of artwork online or printed in books.  But viewing a piece in person is the best way to experience the piece as it was intended; with books, computer or TV images, we are likely to be distracted or mentally influenced by our surroundings.  One example of how outer surroundings influence the viewing of a painting was shown by playing two different songs over a viewing of a painting, one peaceful and one fast and tense.  The painting seemed to transform in front of us as the music changed, which was a great way to show psychological factors of viewing artwork.

Susan Sontag - On Photography

            Photography captures experience within a frame, “miniatures” of the real world.  To photograph something or someone puts the photographer in a relationship with it in which they interpret and convey an idea about their subject.  They give evidence and validity to a situation; a common concept held by many is that if It can be seen in a photograph, it must be reality (although this notion has changed somewhat due to technology such as PhotoShop, etc).  But according to Sontag, photographs are just as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.  She comments on how photographers always impose standards on their subjects by manipulating different factors of the shot or by taking many frames in hopes that one will turn out to be good.  She also acknowledges that photographs can be used for a variety of purposes, in addition to just “note-taking”.  I love her perspective on photography; she explains that photographs are important to think about, and can be used for important purposes, but also acknowledges the fact that taking pictures is just something people do because they enjoy it, not always for a goal-oriented purpose or in search of some kind of payment.

Errol Morris

               In this video, Errol Morris discusses how photographs are manipulated and posed, and questions what makes a true, honest photograph.  Some believe that the photographer shouldn’t manipulate any aspect of the photo, but Morris thinks differently; he believes that all photographs are “posed” in a way because of the nature of framing the subject.  Something will always be excluded, even it it is something that affects the situation in reality.  But isolating figures within a frame gives them a whole new relationship; in a frame, they have been made significant to one another even if that’s not the case in real life.  We have feelings and initial notions about photographs without knowing it, without seeing them for what they truly are, which is just a momentary snapshot of a much larger scenario that lies outside the visible frame.

Camera Lucida

Notes

•  Barthes is of the opinion that chemists, not painters, invented photography around the time that new discoveries were being made about silver halogens and light sensitivity.
• “Color is a coating applied later on to the original truth of the black-and-white photograph.”
• Photography’s purpose, for Barthes, was to give proof to what he believed he had seen.  It doesn’t always say what no longer exists, but always shows what did.
• Photography resolves the issue of whether the past in a painting was true…by recording reality by way of light, we essentially “divide the history of the world”
• While photos gave a real and accurate depiction of the world, the frame limited the viewer greatly, since only so much can fit within a frame. (So what they saw was what they got, essentially).  The photographs only gave a small part of an entire experience.

The Photographer's Eye

How could a process that involved simply “taking” a piece of the real world mechanically be a creative, meaningful way of conveying human experience?  Photographers had to find new ways to meet artistic standards.

Photography, since its beginnings, has commonly practiced by those who had no formal training and often did it as a hobby on the side of another skill or trade.  It was considered in its early days to be a scientific endeavor, or simply a separate trade, as well as an art.  People of all trades practiced “professional” photography, many photographers being part of a totally unrelated trade.  By the late nineteenth century, the process of photography had become much easier, and more casual amateurs became more commonplace.  People started shooting a large variety of subjects, often without stopping to wonder whether it was artistic.

Photographers learned by using and coming to understand their tools and materials, and by viewing other photographs.

Five issues of medium encountered by photographers in their work:

The thing itself

·             The world itself was an artist, and a photographer was to recognize the best works and moments the world presented

·             The subject captured in a photograph is different than the actual subject; total reality cannot be captured within a frame

·             The image survives the subject, and therefore becomes the new existing truth about the remembered reality

The Detail

·             Clearly conveying previously trivial aspects of a subject within details, creating “symbols” or fragments of the subjects rather than stories about them

·             It was incredibly daunting to try and narrate a story accurately through photographs without extensive captioning

The Frame

·             The frame suggests and creates different relationships when a subject is isolated within it, and that which surrounds the subject in reality is excluded from the frame

·             The act of choosing and eliminating when it comes to creating a frame is crucial in photography

·             “Cropping” in early photography, or using fragments of photographs when processing, was difficult and rarely done

·             The edges were seldom neat

Time

·             There is no such thing as an “instantaneous” photograph; rather, all photographs are portrayals of varying durations of time

·             Photographs showing motion were considered failures or accidents

·             Galloping horse: first photographed by Muybridge in 1878, showing the motion with which the animal’s legs moved over the course of a stride

Vantage Point

·             Photography teaches us to view the sense of a scene without knowing its full narrative meaning

·             “An artist is a man who seeks new structures in which to order and simplify his sense of the reality of life”

·             “Photography, and our understanding of it, has spread from a center…was born whole.  It is in our progressive discovery of it that its history lies.”

I felt as though this reading did a great job of really taking apart the photographic process and scrutinizing the details to allow the reader to thoroughly consider each one.  It’s interesting to read about the notion of what is real or fake in photographs, as well as how stories are covered and narratives are conveyed through the photos.