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.