Tuesday, April 29

Today was our final class! We completed course evaluations and prepared for the final. I have to thank you, Dr. Hendricks, for allowing us to opt out of the final!!! It made my day. Actually, it made my whole week :) I really enjoyed this class, and honestly learned a lot!!!

Yosemite

In yesterday's NY Times, there was a neat article on Ansel Adams. The article gave a little background on Adams, but was esentially about how many photographers are venturing to Yosemite National Park in hopes of capturing photos that mirror those of Adams. More than anything, the article made me really jealous and depressed that I'm not there too! :( Oh well, maybe one day I'll be able to see the sites for myself. Until then, Ansel Adams's work will suffice :)

Miley Photos

(Ok, so just ignore Bobby Kennedy in the background! I couldn't find the photo anywhere else)

Ok, so I couldn't resist the temptation to comment on this new "Miley Cirus Crisis" that is apparently all over the news. I must say that the press has blown this up in to some sort of crisis situation when the girl just took some tasteful photos! Granted, the girl is only 15 and I understand that she appeals to children. However, what's so wrong with the photo. There's no nudity, it's not overly sexual...it's just her back. Obviously, as Annie Leibovitz did take the photo after all, it's very beautiful. People really need to relax a little. The poor girl has gone on some apologizing campaign, when she did nothing wrong. Honestly, loosen up people!!

Amores Perros

I recently watched Amores Perros (Love's a Bitch, In English) and I felt like I had to write about it (mostly because it left me GREATLY disturbed!). The film is directed by Iñárritu, the same guy who did Babel. Although the film has a great message, I couldn't get past the disturbing images/violence. The film features MANY dog fighting scenes with graphic violence. The dogs were bloody and crying out in pain. The scenes were so graphic that I still keep thinking about them (over a week later). Firstly, this film once again reinforced the visual power of film. Even though I consciously know that this didn't REALLY happen, I can't help but think of it as reality. However, the film also made me think about how desinsitized I am to violence against humans, but not animals. If the violence had been against a man, woman, or even a child, I honestly think that I would have been okay with it. It's just something about animals...I can't stand to see them hurt :( Nevertheless, I must comment on the film's positive aspects as well. The film is divided into three "chapters" and are not in chronological order (much like Babel I have heard). In doing so, the film's innovative style keeps the viewer entertained and contributes to the film's overall quality.

Thursday, April 24

Today, we looked at 3 different silent films by early filmmakers who were experimenting with film in the 1920s. These films are part of a series called "Light Rythms".

The first film was by Man Ray. This film, "Le Retour a la raison" (return to reason), has no actors or spoken words. This film is clearly a part of the Dada movement. The music and changing images are very important.

The second film was Ballet Mecanique by Leger and Dudley Murphy. This film is a take on the machine age and there are many changing/swinging images which reflect movement and machines. The film seems to represent the relationship between machines and humans.

The final film was Anemic Cinema by Marcel Duchamp. This film alternates between two basic concepts. The first is swirly black and white lines. The second is swirly quirky words. Each time, the images and words change slightly, but are still of this basic concept. The music is extremely important as it changes with each changing image.

Each of the films has a great deal of energy and repitition. They all seem to be reflecting on the modern age and its relationship to humanity.


We completed class by discussing the differences and similarities between Avant garde cinema and Hollywood Classical Cinema.

Avant Garde= difficult to identify with in the same way as classical, deals with unconscious, surrealism

Classical= wants to present normal/average perspective, humanistic identification

Tuesday, April 22

Today, we continued watching films based on Beckett's plays.

We began by watching "Act without words II". This is another silent film. The film features two actors in sacks. The background is a film strip and they appear to be apart of the film strip (thus it is very self reflexive). The first actor awakes and is very depressed. The second actor, however, is much more upbeat. They certainly represent two very different perspectives. Throughout the film, the music and movement is very important in order to represent these perspectives. Again, there is some unkown outside force controlling the men.

We next watched "Come and Go", which was directed by John Crowley. This film features 3 older women sitting side by side. The women are reflecting on their pasts. The entire film is taken in no more than 4 or 5 shots. The movment and clothing is very important. The women seem to represent the complexities of relationships.

We completed class by viewing "play", which is another Beckett film. This one was directed by Anthony Minghella. This film is very unique and features 3 actors talking quickly in some dark, cemetary-esque place. Makeup and the setting are very important for the film's effect. The actors are reflecting on adultery. Although there is no clear interpretation, it seems to convey the impact of adultery.

Thursday, April 17

Today, we viewed several short films that are part of the series, "Becket on Film". This series is an attempt to make films out of most of Samuel Beckett's plays. Samuel Beckett was a leading 20th century playwright. He was born in Ireland, but lived in Paris in the 20s and 30s when Paris was the center of the artistic world. He wrote plays that founded the "theater of the absurd". These plays are part of the avant-garde and are largely a response to the world wars. The plays are interesting as they do not tell the audience what to think, they leave that to us.

The first film we looked at was "Breath". This film was directed by Damien Hirst, who is a very famous British artist. The film was very short and was simply a deep inhale and exhale while certain objects floated around. These objects (hospital things, computers, ashtray with a sawstika, trash, etc.) have no order and are quite chaotic. This combination of items and the breathing are indicative of an attempt by Beckett to comment on smoking and its very real negative effects. By showing the hospital items it shows what technology has given us, but the cigarette ashtray shows how easily everything can be taken away. I found the film particularly difficult to watch as my dad passed away from lung cancer. Then again, it also reinforced the power of film as I was deeply affected by a few seconds of film.

The next film we watched was "Act without words 1" which was directed by Karel Reisz. The film features a man trapped in the desert. Throughout the film, objects such as water, boxes, scissors, etc. that could potentially save him appear. However, as soon as the objects are within his reach, they are taken away by some unknown force. This shows again how easily things can be taken away right when they seem to be within grasp.

Tuesday, April 15

Today, we viewed a short film by Buster Keaton entitled "Cops". This film has many similarities to Chaplin's "A Dog's Life", but is also unique in several regards. The film also follows a regular/middle class protagonist, but this character is not quite as down on his luck as Chaplin's tramp. However, both characters are certainly interested in obtaining money and becoming a part of society. Just like the tramp in Chaplin's film, this character wants to find love and the American dream. However, in this film, women are portrayed as money-hungry, which is different from Chaplin's film where women are portrayed as just wanting to get by. The most obvious correlation between the films is the presence of the crime/society theme. Both characters are held down by societal forces that stand in the way of obtaining their dreams. The most obvious difference between the films is their finales. Whereas Chaplin's tramp obtained his happy ending, Keaton's character gives himself up to the police and his dreams are essentially killed.

Stylistically, the films are also different. Chaplin focuses a great deal on his face and the emotions. Thus, he has a more personal involvement. Keaton, however, has many long shots which show large groups of people. Keaton also explores new ways of placing cameras to get more movement. Also, Keaton often shows the character taking on these large crowds/forces. Chaplin, however, also shows the individual taking on 1 or 2 other people.

Thursday, April 10

During class today, we looked at a short film by Charlie Chaplin which approaches several serious topics from a comedic perspective. "A Dog's Life" was created in 1918 and is quite impressive for its time. The film follows the life of a man, played by Chaplin, who is clearly a tramp. This homeless tramp is driven to steal in order to survive after he is unable to find employment. The film clearly mocks the wealthy as each of the wealthy characters are portrayed as stupid. What is interesting about the film is its optimistic perspective, as the film has a happy ending and Chaplin never gives up during the film. This perspective is clearly reminiscent of the American dream.

Camera Angles

After you briefly mentioned the importance of camera angles in film, I was reminded of a movie that I recently viewed for my Latin American Film class. El callejón de los milargros follows the lives of several families who all live in the same neighborhood. Interestingly, the film tells the same story from several different perspectives. The film, which is not in chronological order, is divided into four chapters. Although each chapter tells the same general story, the camera is placed at a different angle in each chapter. In doing so, the film shows the same story from three different perspectives and demonstrates the importance of camera angles. For example, during a scene in the chapter which shows the perspective of a girl named Alma, the camera is outside the window of her house and shows two women in the background. In the next chapter, the film has the exact same scene, but the camera is angled to focus on the women with Alma in the background. Not only does this method of filming make for an interesting work, it also allows the viewer to understand how important perspective is in understanding a story. This method of filming also demonstrates the evolution that film has undergone during the last century. At the advent of film, a majority were shot with little movement and from only one perspective. Today, however, it is quite common to find films with an unbelievable amount of movement that are told from multiple perspectives.

Tuesday, April 8

Today, we left the unit on photography and began our final unit on film. We began the class by discussing a few elements of film:

1. Narrative impulse- tells a story
2. Psychological identification- there is an illusion of reality as there is a manipulation of time. Films are also like dreams (note, we do turn the lights out after all)…film is also connected to myth (meaning, story) as these myths shape us (ex- Snow White/Cinderella/etc)
3. Intensity- film has energy…many films move very fast (especially today) ex- Fast and Furious…it is an illusion of energy
4. Shot- film is based on a shot (a single take)…these shots are edited to created a film
5. Sequences- sequences are several shots in a row…films are put together with numerous sequences

*Classical Hollywood Cinema- a mode of production…economic mode of production designed to make money….it can also be an art, but most think of it as a business

*angles are very important!

*When analyzing film, one must first ask, What does it mean? What is it trying to say? Does it have a particular point of view?


We next watched Madonna's 1989 controversial music video, "Like a Prayer".
The music video has a number of religious references (burning crosses, Jesus icon, etc.). The video is sort of a dream sequence as she falls asleep in the church and reawakens in the end of the video. Although the video is controversial, it shows the physical power of religion to move people and was a good video to begin the film unit!

Tuesday, March 25

*KEY TERMS
*Photomontage is the process (and result) of making a composite photograph by cutting and joining a number of other photographs. The composite picture was sometimes photographed so that the final image is converted back into a seamless photographic print. The same method is accomplished today using image-editing software. The technique is referred to by professionals as "compositing", and in casual usage is often called "photoshopping". Hannah Hoch is known for her photomontages.

*Hannah Höch (1889-1978) was a Dada artist born in Gotha, Germany. Worked during the early 20th century primarily. She is best known for her work of the Weimar period, when she was one of the originators of photomontage. Höch's most famous piece is Cut With The Kitchen Knife, a critique on Weimar Germany in 1919. This piece combines images from newspapers of the time re-created to make a new statement about life and art in the Dada movement. She was also very interested in combining images to convey feminist messages.

*John Heartfield (1891–1968) is the anglicized name of the German photomontage artist Helmut Herzfeld. He chose to call himself Heartfield in 1916, to criticize the rabid nationalism and anti-British sentiment prevalent in Germany during World War I. His images were very anti-nazi and mocked the Nazi party. He worked during the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.

*Man Ray- an American photographer and artist who worked in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. He “invented” the rayograph (a negative reversal process that influenced avant garde photography), also important with regards to surrealism.

*Barbara Kruger- (born 1945) is an American conceptual artist who is a post-modernist photographer. She continues to produce images. She has less emphasis on the image and takes a more multimedia approach with text. Much of Kruger's graphic work consists of black-and-white photographs with overlaid captions set in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique. The phrases included in her work are usually declarative, and make common use of such pronouns as "you," "I," "we," and "they."

*Loretta Lux- (born 1969) Lux is a German fine art photographer and known for her surreal portraits of young children. She manipulates the background and features of the image to produce an image that is surreal, but also very engaging. The artist executes her compositions using a combination of photography, painting and digital manipulation.

*"Photoshopping" is slang for the digital editing of photos. The term originates from Adobe Photoshop, the image editor most commonly used by professionals for this purpose. Photoshop is widely used as a verb, both colloquially and academically, to refer to retouching, compositing, and color correction carried out in the course of graphic design, commercial publishing, and image editing.

*Paul Outerbridge, Jr. (1896-1958) was an American photographer noted for early use and experiments in color photography. Outerbridge was a fashion and commercial photographer, an early pioneer and teacher of color photography, and an artist who created erotic nudes photographs that could not be exhibited in his lifetime. Outerbridge's vivid color nudes studies included early fetish photos and were too indecent to find broad public acceptance.

*Clarence John Laughlin (1905 - 1985) was a United States photographer, best known for his surrealist photographs of the U.S. South. Laughlin was born in to a middle class family in Lake Charles, Louisiana. His rocky childhood, southern heritage, and interest in literature influenced his work greatly. He used reflections/mirrors/ etc. in his images and creates surreal images that emphasize the unconscious. He had a particular interest in history.

*Diane Arbus (1923 –1971) was an American photographer, noted for her portraits of people on the fringes of society, such as transvestites, dwarfs, giants, prostitutes, and ordinary citizens in unconventional poses and settings. Of her most famous works, is the black and white image of Twins that is featured in the text book. In July 1971, Arbus committed suicide in Greenwich Village at the age of 48 by ingesting a large quantity of barbiturates and then slashing her wrists.

*Joel-Peter Witkin (1939) is an American photographer. He worked as war photographer between 1961 and 1964 during the Vietnam war. In 1967, he decided to work as a freelance photographer. He deals a great deal with the grotesque and Witkin claims that his vision and sensibility were initiated by an episode he witnessed when he was just a small child, a car accident that occurred in front of his house in which a little girl was decapitated.

*Surrealism- is a cultural movement that began in the early-1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members. The works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur, however many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost with the works being an artifact. An example is the work of Man Ray.

Paul Strand

I find Paul Strand's work particularly interesting, primarily for its ability to convey such strong social messages. With regards to the "Blind" photo, which features a blind woman who is clearly labled, Strand is able to convey a deep message. To me, the photo forces the viewer to contemplate the fact that a blind woman is forced to wear a sign around her neck that clearly lables her. Futhermore, the Wall Street image, with its dark shadowing and mysterious features, conveys the "dark side" of city life. Meaning, life on Wall Street may not be so glamorous after all. What is so great about Strand's work, in addition to conveying such strong social messages, is the fact that each viewer can interpret the work a little bit differently.

Thursday, March 13

Chapter 9 Notes

KEY WORDS/PEOPLE
*Alvin Langdon Coburn- (1882-1966) Fine Art Photographer. He began taking photographs at the age of eight, became a founder-member of Photo-Secession and in 1903 was elected to the Linked Ring, and at the early age of twenty-five had exhibited a one-man show at the Royal Photographic Society. Coburn made a number of urban landscape pictures, with a definite mood. He was also an accomplished portrait photographer, and in 1913 and 1922 produced a two-volume collection of photographs of celebrities, entitled "Men of Mark." He is perhaps best known for producing Vortographs, non-objective photographs of such items as a piece of wood or crystal, through an arrangement of mirrors, resulting in multiple images.

*Edward Steichen (1879–1973) was an American photographer, painter, and art gallery and museum curator, born in Luxembourg. Having established himself as a fine art painter in the beginning of the 20th century, Steichen assumed the pictorialist approach in photography and proved himself a master of it. In 1905, Steichen helped create the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession with Alfred Stieglitz. After World War I, during which he commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces, he reverted to straight photography, gradually moving into fashion photography. Steichen's 1928 photo of actress Greta Garbo is recognized as one of the definitive portraits of Garbo. During World War II, he served as Director of the Naval Photographic Institute. His war documentary The Fighting Lady won the 1945 Academy Award for Best Documentary.

*Imogen Cunningham (1883 - 1976) was an American Fine Art photographer known for her photography of botanicals, nudes and industry. Cunningham became one of the co-founders of the Group f/64. In the 1940s Cunningham turned to documentary street photography which she did as a side project whilst supporting herself with her commercial and studio photography and later on with teaching at the California School of Fine Arts.

*Paul Strand (1890 –1976) was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. Some of this early work experimented with formal abstractions, while other works showed his interest in using the camera as a tool for social reform. Although Strand is best known for his early abstractions, his return to still photography in this later period produced some of his most significant work in the form of six book ‘portraits’ of place.

Tuesday, March 11

KEY WORDS/PEOPLE
*Jacob August Riis (1849 - 1914), a Danish-American muckraker journalist, photographer, and social reformer, was born in Ribe, Denmark. He is known for his dedication to using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the less fortunate in New York City. As one of the first photographers to use flash, he is considered a pioneer in photography. He used photography as a tool to document the lives of the impoverished in New York City.
*How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890) was a pioneering work of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting the squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. It served as a basis for future muckraking journalism by exposing the slums to New York City’s upper and middle-class.

*Lewis Wickes Hine (1874 –1940)was an American photographer. For Hine, the camera was both a research tool and an instrument of social reform. In 1908, he became the photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). Over the next decade, Hine documented child labor in American industry to aid the NCLC's lobbying efforts to end the practice. Between 1906 and 1908, he was a freelance photographer for The Survey, a leading social reform magazine. He took all these pictures to show the country the cruelties of child labor. During and after World War I, he documented American Red Cross relief work in Europe. During the Great Depression, he again worked for the Red Cross, photographing drought relief in the American South, and for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), documenting life in the mountains of eastern Tennessee.

*Walker Evans (1903 –1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans' work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera. He wrote that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent."

*Dorothea Lange (1895 –1965) was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the tragic consequences of the Great Depression and profoundly influenced the development of documentary photography. In 1952, Lange co-founded the photographic magazine Aperture.
* “Migrant Mother”- The photograph that has become known as "Migrant Mother" is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made of Florence Owens Thompson and her children in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California.

*FSA-Initially created as the Resettlement Administration in 1935 as part of the New Deal, the Farm Security Administration was an effort during the Depression to combat rural poverty. The FSA stressed "rural rehabilitation" efforts to improve the lifestyle of sharecroppers, tenants, and very poor landowning farmers, and a program to purchase submarginal land owned by poor farmers and resettle them in group farms on land more suitable for efficient farming. The RA and FSA are well known for the influence of their photography program, 1935-1944. Photographers and writers were hired to report and document the plight of the poor farmer.

Thursday, March 6

Today's class discussion focused on the body in photography. We began class by discussing images by Robert Mapplethorpe, particularly an image of Ken Moody. This image is particularly interesting because Moody has no facial hair and is featured with a neutral background, which creates a beautiful image. We also viewed a number of Mapplethorpe's other photos of the body (which are often nude), as well as flowers, and sculptures.

KEY WORDS/PEOPLE
*E.J. Bellocq- was a professional photographer who worked in New Orleans during the early 20th century. Bellocq is remembered for his haunting photographs of the prostitutes of Storyville, New Orleans' legalized red light district. These have inspired novels, poems and films.

*Hans Bellmer- was a German artist, best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. He is also commonly thought of, in the art world, as a Surrealist photographer. His photographs are mostly of pubescent girls.

*Edward Weston- was an American photographer, and co-founder of Group f/64. Most of his work was done using an 8 by 10 inch view camera. After 1927, Weston worked mainly with nudes, still life and landscape subjects. He took many interesting photos of the human body (many nude, but some face photos as well).

*Robert Mapplethorpe (1946 –1989) was an American photographer, known for his large-scale, highly stylized black & white portraits, photos of flowers and male nudes. The frank, erotic nature of some of the work of his middle period triggered a more general controversy about the public funding of artworks. Most of his images feature a neutral background so that the subject stands out. Ken Moody is one of his models. He passed away from complications of AIDS.

*Minor Martin White (1908 –1976) was an American photographer born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His photos were often of barns, doorways, water, the sky, or simple paint peeling on a wall: things usually considered mundane, but often made special by the quality of the light in which they were photographed. One of his more popular photographs is titled Frost on Window, a close-up of frost crystals on glass. White co-founded the influential magazine Aperture in 1952 with fellow photographers such as Ansel Adams.

*Aperture is a quarterly photography magazine based in New York, New York, USA. The magazine is published by Aperture Foundation, a non-profit organization devoted to fine art photography. The foundation also publishes books on photography. Aperture magazine was founded by Minor White, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan, Nancy Newhall and Beaumont Newhall, Melton Ferris and Dody Warren.

Portrait Photography

Since we discussed portrait photography this week, I thought that I'd write a little bit on Anne Leibovitz. While I already knew that she had photographed practically every celebrity, I really didn't know much else about her. While searching for some background info, I found an interesting interview with her on Powells.com where she discussed one of her books. She explains that when she attented the San Fransisco Art Institute, she studied "personalized reportage...a la Robert Frank and Cartier-Bresson" and when she first started working at Rolling Stone she thought that she was more of a photo-journalist. However, she soon realized that she was much more of a portrait photographer. She explains that, "In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view and to be conceptual with a picture. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative." (http://www.powells.com/authors/leibovitz.html)

I found this interview particularly interesting as Leibovitz is responsible for a number of amazing images. After reading more about her, I now understand that each image is a deliberate means of representing a message. One of her messages, as she explains in the interview, is to disprove the stereotype that as women age they are no longer beautiful. This photo of Barbara Bush is included in her book Women and is likely meant to convey this message.

(Photo:http://www.cosmopolis.ch/english/cosmo15/leibovitz.htm)

Whereas before I only admired the Leibovitz's actual portraits, I now admire her personal mission as well.

Tuesday, March 5

Today's class discussion centered around the portrait in photoraphy. Be began class by looking at photos by Scarlett (which are great!). We then looked at several other portrait photographers. Nadar, a French photographer, was first studied. Nadar photographed in the 1850s and 60s and has a number of interesting photos. Many of his photos capture a subject who is not smiling and appears to be somewhat uncomfortable. This is far different from the norm today, where people must smile in portraits. We then looked at photos by Julia Margaret Cameron, an English photographer who photographed in the mid-19th century. Her images were the beginning of art photography. She used images of people to create a mood. She was much more interested in the poetic possibility of her images. August Sander, a German, was then studied. Sander photographed around the time of World War I and during the 1930s. He was interested in documenting everday life in Germany, and captured the Weimar Republic. Finally, we looked at photos by Bill Brandt who was a British photographer. Brandt was a documentary/environmental photographer who captured a number of subjects, including many coal miners. His photos of coal miners captures the reality of the job.

KEY WORDS/PEOPLE
*Nadar- was a French photographer who photographed portraits of people in the 1850s and 60s. Many of his photos capture subjects who are not smiling and appear to be somewhat uncomfortable, drastically different from portraits of today. He also photographed Catacombs.

*David Octavius Hill- (1802 – 1870) collaborated with the engineer and photographer Robert Adamson between 1843 and 1847 to pioneer many aspects of photography in Scotland. Their collaboration, with Hill providing skill in composition and lighting, and Adamson considerable sensitivity and dexterity in handling the camera, proved extremely successful, and they soon broadened their subject matter. Adamson's studio, "Rock House", on Calton Hill in Edinburgh became the centre of their photographic experiments. Using the Calotype process, they produced a wide range of portraits depicting well-known Scottish luminaries of the time, including Hugh Miller, both in the studio and in outdoors settings, often amongst the elaborate tombs in Greyfriars Kirkyard.

*Robert Adamson- (1821 –1848) was a Scottish pioneer photographer. See above

*Julia Margaret Cameron- was a British photographer who photographed in the mid-19th century. She created the beginning of art photography. She used imagery of people to create a mood. She specialized in soft focus. She was more interested in poetic possibility of imagery. She was conscious of photography as an art form. Many portraits are of her niece.

*August Sander- was a German photographer who photographed in and around the time of WWI and also in 1930s. He wanted to document everyday life in Germany. He also captured Weimar Republic, before it was destroyed.

*Bill Brandt- (1904 –1983) was an influential British photographer and photojournalist known for his high-contrast images of British society and his distorted nudes and landscapes. He also captured coal miners, and the reality of coal mining.

*Yousuf Karsh- (December 23, 1908 –2002) was a Canadian photographer of Armenian heritage, and one of the most famous and accomplished portrait photographers of all time. He created portraits of many famous people, including Winston Churchill, Humphrey Bogart, Einstein, etc.

*Richard Avedon- (1923 –2004) was an American photographer. Avedon was able to take his early success in fashion photography and expand it into the realm of fine art. Avedon was always interested in how portraiture captures the personality and soul of its subject. Avedon also created two famous sets of portraits of The Beatles.

*Environmental portraiture- when you took a portrait in the environment in which the subject either works or lives.

Powerful City Pictures

Each of these photos, taken from the photographers discussed in class, capture how powerful the city truly is. Particularly, these photos capture that certain mystical/forceful quality that skyscrapers seem to possess.
I find Levitt's photograph particularly interesting because the people look so sad. It's almost as if they have been taken over by the city and they are imprisoned. It's as if they are looking out the window and hoping to escape the city's grasp.




Steglitz (above)














Levitt (above)


















Abbott (above)

All photos taken from Masters of Photography

Thursday, February 28

Our discussion of photography shifted from the landscape to the city in photographs. We began by looking at photos by Alfred Steglitz, who photographed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Steglitz primarily photographed New York and was influenced a great deal by pictorialism. Steglitz really records reality of everday life from his perspective and attempts to see what we may not see. He was very much interested in form, but also the relationship between the city and the natural environment. Interestingly, he was also the husband of Georgia O'Keefe. We also viewed photos by Berenice Abbott, who was a French photographer who also photographed New York around the 1930s. Abbott captured the power of the city by photographing enormous buildings, but was also very much interested in form. She really wanted to capture as much as the city as possible. We next looked at photos by Helen Levitt, who also captured New York City but in the mid-20th century. Levitt was known as a street photographer and recored the lives of people in the city. She captured random moments, but they are moments that often have a deeper meaning. Levitt was very much interested in the city as the center of the universe. Outside of New York City, Eugene Atget captured Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Atget was interested in everyday Paris, particularly older parts of the city as the area was changing. His point of view was more historical. He became inspiration for future street photographers. Finally, we looked at photos by Brassai, who began photographing in the 1930s. Brassai captured the underworld of Paris and was interested in street photography.

KEY WORDS/PEOPLE
*Alfred Steglitz- was an American photographer who worked a lot in New York during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is often called the “father of art photography” as he was a champion of photography as an art form. He was influenced by pictorialism. He records reality of everyday life from his eye in an attempt to capture the things that an ordinary person might miss. He was interested in form and also the relationship between the city and natural environment. He was also husband and champion of Georgia O’Keefe. Later in life, he began to photograph nature.

*Georgia Totti O'Keeffe (1887—1986) was an American artist. She is associated with the American Southwest, where she found artistic inspiration, and particularly New Mexico, where she settled late in life. O'Keeffe has been a major figure in American art since the 1920s. She is chiefly known for paintings in which she synthesized abstraction and representation in paintings of flowers, rocks, shells, animal bones and landscapes. She was also married to Alfred Steglitz.

*Camera Work- was a quarterly photographic publication by Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secessionists from 1902 to 1917 that was known for its high-quality reproductions and its effort to establish photography as a fine art.

*Photo-Secession movement- was a group of photographers led by Alfred Stieglitz in the early 1900s that helped to raise standards and awareness of art photography. In 1902 Stieglitz formed an invitation-only group, which he called the Photo-Secession, to force the art world to recognize photography "as a distinctive medium of individual expression." Among its members were Edward Steichen, Gertrude Kasebier, Clarence White and Alvin Langdon Coburn. Photo-Secession held its own exhibitions and its work was frequently published in Stieglitz's journal Camera Work which acted as a mouthpiece for the group, although it was technically independent from it.

*Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (later known as 291)- was a tiny fine art photography gallery in New York City created and run by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen from November 1905 to 1917. The gallery helped bring art photography, initially that in the Pictorialist style, to the same level of appreciation in America as painting and sculpture.

*Berenice Abbott- Abbott was an American photographer who studied in France. She is most well known for her black and white photography of New York City during the 1930s. She wanted to capture as much of the city as possible. Her work provides chronicles of buildings that have since been destroyed.

*Eugene Atget- was a French photographer who photographed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is most well known for his photographs of Paris. He was interested in everyday life of Paris, particularly the older areas of the city at a time that the city was changing. He became an inspiration for future street photographers. He had more of a historical point of view.

*Brassaï- (1899 –1984) was a Hungarian photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker who rose to fame in France. He began photographing in the 1930s and was interested in the underworld of Paris. He was a street photographer.

RANDOM CLASS NOTES
-Photography evolves within modernism
-Modernism is strongly associated with the city.
-In late 19th century, Paris is center of art world and London was also important
-In beginning of 20th century, New York becomes center of world’s high culture
-New York is captured as a multi-cultural environment in 1930s

*Helen Levitt- was an American photographer in the mid 20th century. She captured New York and recorded people in the city (primarily children). She was thus a street photographer. Some images are somewhat surreal. One of her most famous is of 3 children with masks. She captured random moments but they had meaning. She was interested in the city as the center of the universe.

Photos by Jeff Grandy

So, I found myself looking at Anseladams.com and I happened on these photos by Jeff Grandy. The similarities between the two photographers are obvious. The image of the mountains mimicks Adams' interest in contrasting different shades. Both photos portray nature as an extremely powerful creature. Furthermore, the images also idealize nature, much as Adams' photos do. Anyways, I am amazed by both of these images! (even if they are an idealistic view of nature)

The power of an Image

Yesterday, an image surfaced in the media of Barack Obama. The photo, taken 2 years ago on a trip to Somalia, features Obama dressed in what the media has coined "Muslim garb". The Obama campaign is accusing Clinton's staff of leaking the photo to the media in an attempt to portray Obama as a Muslim and thus win over votes. I found this controversy to be a perfect example of the power of a photograph and also the myth of photographic truth. In my opinion, it is ridiculous that this image even created a controversy as Obama was likely just dressed in this clothing as a sign of respect. Despite the fact that Obama has consistently repeated that he is a Christian, this image will likely sway at least a few voters. Perhaps some people will take this image as evidence of the truth, meaning that he is in fact tied to the Muslim religion. If the Clinton campaign was responsible for leaking this image, it would be a disgusting tactic. Campaign 2008 is supposed to be about "change", but the Clinton campaign seems to be interested in continuing the same mud-slinging that is so prevalent in politics. Regardless, this conflict displays the power of a photograph to create such controversy.

Tuesday, February 26

Today, our focus shifted to landscape in photography. Our discussion started with Ansel Adams. Adams, who largely photographed the American west, photographed the landscape in an idealized manner. Many of his images illustrate his focus on contrasting different shades. These images portray the natural environment as extremely powerful. "Nevada Fall", for example, features a powerful waterful which is clearly in contrast to the rocks that it covers. A majority of the images show no signs of human existence and thus portray the notion of a "utopian landscape".

In contrast to Ansel Adams, Robert Adams features the same American west in a much different manner. Robert photographs the lanscape to show the human destruction of the natural environoment. These images evoke a concern for the environment by illustrating the impact that one can have on nature. His photos show that nature is not only beautiful and powerful, but also can be dismal and bleek.

KEY WORDS/PEOPLE
* William Henry Jackson- (1843 -1942) was an American painter, photographer and explorer famous for his images of the American West. Jackson had photographic evidence of western landmarks that had previously seemed fantastic rumor: the Grand Tetons, Old Faithful and the rest of Yellowstone, Colorado's Rockies and the Mount of the Holy Cross, and the uncooperative Ute Indians. Jackson's photographs of Yellowstone helped convince the U.S. Congress to make it the first National Park in March 1872.

*Hudson River School- was a mid-19th century American art movement by a group of landscape painters, whose aesthetic vision was influenced by romanticism. Their paintings depict the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, as well as the Catskill Mountains, Adirondack Mountains, and White Mountains of New Hampshire.

*sublime- is the quality of greatness or vast magnitude, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. This greatness is often used when referring to nature and its vastness.

*Landscape art- depicts scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather usually is an element of the composition. In the United States, the Hudson River School, prominent in the middle to late nineteenth century, is probably the best known native development in landscape art.

*Ansel Easton Adams- (1902 –1984) was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West. His is known for the zone system in his images where every really good photograph shows range going from dark to light shades…contrast is important. His images show that we are part of a larger universe. “Moonrise over Hernandez, N.M.” is a famous photo where the sky is pitch black and the moon stands out…this shows the contrasts between shades. He also often follows the rule of thirds where land takes up 1/3 and sky takes up 2/3. A lot of his images show no signs of human life (this is a utopian view of nature).

*Group f/64- was a group of photographers espousing a common philosophy. The group was created in 1932. The original membership included Ansel Adams. The term f/64 refers to the smallest aperture setting on a large format camera, which secures maximum depth of field, rendering a photograph evenly sharp from foreground to background. Such a small aperture implies a long exposure and the selection of relatively slow moving or motionless subject matter, such as landscapes and still life over action and reportage photography.

*Straight photography- straight on, documentary, as objective as you can be, realistic, most think of black and white as dominant accepted mode. Refers to photography that attempts to depict a scene as realistically and objectively as permitted by the medium, renouncing the use of manipulation.
*Zone System- is a photographic technique for determining optimal film exposure and development, formulated by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer in 1941. The Zone System provides photographers with a systematic method of precisely defining the relationship between the way they visualize the photographic subject and the final results. The Zone System is concerned with control of image values, ensuring that light and dark values are rendered as desired.

*Robert Adams- An American photographer who began photographing largely in the 1970s. He shot the American west. He shows the impact of human beings on nature. “Untitled Denver” shows how humans have taken over nature…very different from Ansel Adams…he shows a diminished landscape. He also shows boundary between city and country. His images provoke a “green” feeling. Interestingly, his images show a human presence without including people. Although his photos do not have an obvious meaning, they show that nature can be mundane.

*New Topographics- "New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape" is the title of an exhibition that epitomized a key moment in American landscape photography. The show was curated by William Jenkins at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in 1975. It had a rippling effect on the whole medium and genre, not only in the USA, but in Europe too where generations of landscape photographers emulated the spirit and esthetic of the exhibition. Since 1975 "New Topographics" photographers such as Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Frank Gohlke, and Stephen Shore have influenced photographic practices regarding landscape around the world. This move was clearly illustrated by the subject matter that the New Topographics chose as well as their commitment to casting a somewhat ironical or critical eye on what American society had become. They all depicted urban or suburban realities under changes in an allegedly detached approach.

*Nature photography- refers to a wide range of photography taken outdoors and devoted to displaying natural elements such as landscapes, wildlife, plants, and close-ups of natural scenes and textures. Nature photography tends to put a stronger emphasis on the aesthetic value of the photo than other photography genres, such as photojournalism and documentary photography.

RANDOM CLASS NOTES
-The pastoral- began with the Greeks. There was a distinction between country life and urban living. The pastoral was idealized country where nature becomes a refuge where people escape to.
-This pastoral tradition leads to people starting to claim nature
-18th century landscape painting shows humans possessing nature

*pantheism- to find god in nature
*Rule of Thirds in Landscape photography- generally, land will take up 1/3 and sky will take up 2/3. This creates tension between negative and positive spaces.

Thursday, February 21

The focus of today’s class was on the role of photography in the 19th century. One of the first photographers that we looked at was William Henry Fox Talbot. Talbot, who photographed in the early 19th century, was important for developing photography as an artistic medium. His photographs, of items as simple as lace, show the power of a photographer to use the camera as an art form.

Roger Fenton, a British photographer, was one of the first to capture war. Fenton photographed the Crimean War and provided ordinary citizens with the reality of war that could not before be seen.
Similarly, Timothy O’Sullivan photographed the American Civil War. O’Sullivan provided Americans with a vivid account of the realities of war. This era was the birth of war photography which changed the relationship between ordinary citizens and war as photographs allowed war to be seen in a whole new light. This is another example of the power of the camera to connect people with realms that were previously unknown.

KEY WORDS/PEOPLE
*Joseph Nicéphore Niépce- (1765 –1833) was a French inventor, most noted as the inventor of photography and a pioneer in the field. He is well-known for taking some of the earliest photographs, more than 180 years ago. He created the first permanent photograph, of the exterior of his home, around 1826. The photograph was made using a camera obscura and a sheet of pewter coated with bitumen of Judea, an asphalt that when exposed to light, hardened permanently.

*William Henry Fox Talbot- (1800 –1877)He worked in England and was the inventor of the negative/positive photographic process, the precursor to most photographic processes of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was also a noted photographer who made major contributions to the development of photography as an artistic medium. His work in the 1850s, on photo-mechanical reproduction led to the creation of the photoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure. He was interested in forms and shapes. His book, “Pencil of Nature” was the first book to be illustrated entirely with photographs.

*Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre- (1787 –1851) was a French artist and chemist, recognized for his invention of the daguerreotype process of photography. The daguerreotype is an early type of photograph in which the image is exposed directly onto a mirror-polished surface of silver bearing a coating of silver halide particles deposited by iodine vapor. In later developments bromine and chlorine vapors were also used, resulting in shorter exposure times.

*Roger Fenton- (1819-1869) was one of the 1st war photographers. He photographed the Crimean War in the 19th century. At this time, people had to be still in photos so he did not capture in action shots. His photos were influential in showing the British public a realistic account of the war.

*Henry Peach Robinson- (1830-1901) was an English Pictorialist photographer best known for his pioneering of combination printing - joining multiple negatives to form a single image, the precursor to photomontage.

*Peter Henry Emerson (1856–1936) was a Cuban-born photographer. His photographs are early examples of promoting photography as an art form. He is known for taking photographs that displayed natural settings.

*The Reverend Charles Dodgson- (1832 –1898), better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican clergyman, and photographer. He is now considered by many to be one of the very best Victorian photographers, and is certainly the one who has had the most influence on modern art photographers. His subjects also include skeletons, dolls, dogs, statues and paintings, trees, scholars, scientists, old men, and little girls. His notorious (and possibly misunderstood) studies of nude children were long presumed lost, but six have since surfaced, four of which have been published.
*Mathew B. Brady- (1822-1896), was one of the most celebrated 19th century American photographers, best known for his portraits of celebrities and the documentation of the American Civil War. He is credited with being the father of photojournalism. He also captured the American West.

*Timothy O’Sullivan- An American photographer who photographed in the 19th century. He is best known for his photographs of the American Civil War and of the American west. He captured a photo of the aftermath of Gettysburg and entitled it “Harvest of Death”. He captured the realities of war but it still had an element of art.

*Carleton Watkins- was a 19th century Californian photographer. He photographed the American West and he taps into the mythic notion of the west. His photos capture the majestic view of nature.

*Eadward Muybridge- He was a British photographer who photographed America in the late 19th century. He did a series of photographs that became linked to the formation of film and motion. He did this series of photographs to determine if a horse ever had all four feet off of the ground while running. These photos led to the development of the motion picture camera.

*Pictorialism- largely subscribed to the idea that art photography needed to emulate the painting and etching of the time. Most of these pictures made were black & white or sepia-toned. Among the methods used were soft focus, special filters and lens coatings, heavy manipulation in the darkroom, and exotic printing processes. Pictorialism is interested in sentimentalizing the real. Ex) Albin-Guillot

*The Linked Ring- In May 1892, Robinson founded the Linked Ring, a brotherhood consisting of a group of photographers based in London, pledged to enhance photography as a fine art. Famous members of this brotherhood included Frank Sutcliffe, Frederick Evans, Paul Martin, and Alfred Stieglitz. Though the formation of this group was, as their publicity indicated, "a means of bringing together those who are interested in the development of the highest form of Art of which Photography is capable", it is also very likely that serious photographers were now trying to distance themselves from the growth of photography for all, brought about by the introduction of simple cameras.

*Albumen print- was invented in 1850 by Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard, and was the first commercially exploitable method of producing a photographic print on a paper base from a negative. It used the albumen found in egg whites to bind the photographic chemicals to the paper and became the dominant form of photographic positives from 1855 to the turn of the century.

*Photogravure- is an intaglio printmaking process initially developed in the 1830s by Henry Fox Talbot in England and Nicéphore Niépce in France. Photogravure was developed to provide an archivally permanent way of reproducing a photographic image. Photogravure registers an extraordinary variety of tones.

RANDOM CLASS NOTES
-In 1830s, issues of realism came about.
-photograph was viewed as real by some. The goal was to attempt to copy nature.
-Others realized that photographs could be altered.
-Thus there was a conflict between those who felt that photography should be used for realism and those that felt it should be a sort of self-expressionism.

-beauty was important at first, but 19th century brings about the notion that photography can be more than beauty.

*Straight photography- straight on, documentary, as objective as you can be, realistic, most think of black and white as dominant accepted mode

-In Britain and the United States, the tradition of moving into expressionist photography was known as Pictorialism. For example, Robinson. It became particularly important after 1880s. Alfred Steglitz is an example. This becomes dominant tradition for a while and was in contradiction to realism.

Certain genres develop…
Landscape photography/nature
portrait
war photography
still life (objects arranged within a frame)
Journalistic
Travel
Beginnings of Street Photography

Tuesday, February 19

Today we began our photography unit by comparing and contrasting several photographers. Henri Cartier-Bresson, a French photographer who photographed throughout the 20th century, was discussed. Cartier-Bresson captured humans in various dimensions of everyday life. Among his most famous, “Behind Gare St. Lazare” features a man that appears to be jumping over water on tracks. The photo is striking in that everything, including the man and the background, is mirrored. His photos provide an intimate look into everyday life.

We also looked at Cindy Sherman’s photographs. Sherman only photographs herself, but each photo features her styled to appear as someone else. Many of her photos are modeled after the old “Hollywood glamour” style. In each of these photos, there is something awkward about her appearance. Perhaps her images are meant to make viewers question the way that women are portrayed. Her photography is important for showing the view that photos can be used to portray a deeper message.

Chapter 1 and 2
KEY WORDS/PEOPLE
*Cindy Sherman- An American photographer born in 1954. She started in 1970s as an art student. She is best known for her conceptual self-portraits and her “Untitled Film Stills” where she places herself as an unnamed actress in shots reminiscent of foreign films, Hollywood movies, B-movies, and film noir. In each of these photos, she has a slight look of anxiety. Her more recent work includes images where she poses as a clown. She is interested in the visual identities of women. She is more conceptual and uses photography as an art in an attempt to express a point of view.

*Photography-is the process of recording pictures by means of capturing light on a light-sensitive medium, such as a film or electronic sensor. Traditionally the product of photography has been called a photograph.

*Performance art- is art in which the actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time constitute the work. It can happen anywhere, at any time, or for any length of time. Performance art can be any situation that involves four basic elements: time, space, the performer's body and a relationship between performer and audience. Performance art genres include body art, fluxus, happening, action poetry, and intermedia. An example is Yoko Ono.

*Snapshot aesthetic- refers to a trend within fine art photography in the USA from around 1963. The style typically features apparently banal everyday subject matter and accented framing. Subject matter is often presented without apparent link from image-to-image and relying instead on juxtaposition and disjunction between individual photographs.

*Vernacular photography- refers to the creation of photographs by amateur or unknown photographers who take everyday life and common things as subjects. Examples of vernacular photographs include travel and vacation photos, family snapshots, photos of friends, class portraits, identification photographs, etc.

*Environmental Portrait- a portrait executed in the subject’s usual environment, such as their home or workplace, and typically illuminates the subject’s life and surroundings.

*Fine art photography- refers to photographs that are created to fulfill the creative vision of the artist. Fine art photography stands in contrast to photojournalism and commercial photography. We can see this by looking at Ansel Adams' work of Yosemite and Yellowstone. He is one of the least disputed fine art photographers of the 20th century.

*Abjection- literally means "the state of being cast off." The concept of abject exists in between the concept of an object and the concept of the subject, something alive yet not. In contemporary critical theory, it is often used to describe the state of often-marginalized groups, such as people of color, prostitutes, homosexuals, convicts, poor people and handicapped persons. The concept of abject is often coupled (and sometimes confused with) the idea of the uncanny, the concept of something being "un-home-like", or foreign, yet familiar. An example is a corpse, namely that of a loved one.

*Henri Cartier-Bresson- a French photographer who lived from 1908 to 2004. He is considered to be the father of modern photojournalism and the master of candid photography. He helped developed the style of “street photography” that influenced generations to come. Of his most famous, “Behind the Gare St. Lazare”. This photo captures the moving action of a man…it seems random, but also seems to have taken some thought (everything is mirrored). He felt that a decisive moment is when “insight into people at same time that formal elements come together in interesting ways”. He has a great deal of faith in the world and was more of a documentary photographer.

*Documentary Photography- usually refers to a type of professional photojournalism, but it may also be an amateur or student pursuit. The photographer attempts to produce truthful, objective, and usually candid photography of a particular subject, most often pictures of people. The pictures usually depict a certain perspective of the photographer.

*Candid photography- photography that focuses on spontaneity rather than on technique, on the immersion of a camera within events rather than focusing on setting up a staged situation or on preparing a lengthy camera setup. Best described as photography that is un-posed and un-planned.

*Street photography- a type of documentary photography that features subjects in candid situations within public places such as streets, parks, beaches, malls, political conventions, and other settings. Uses techniques of straight photography in that it shows a pure vision of something, like holding a mirror to society. An example is Cartier-Bresson.

*Photojournalism- a particular type of journalism that creates image in order to tell a news story. Photojournalism is distinguished from other close branches of photography by the qualities of timeliness, objectivity, and narrative. Fenton’s images of the Crimean war, for example.

*Magnum Photos -is an international photographic cooperative owned by its photographer-members, with offices located in New York, Paris, London and Tokyo. According to co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson, "Magnum is a community of thought, a shared human quality, a curiosity about what is going on in the world, a respect for what is going on and a desire to transcribe it visually." It was founded in 1947 in response to World War II experiences.

*Rule of thirds- is a compositional rule of thumb in photography and other visual arts such as painting and design. The rule states that an image can be divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines. The four points formed by the intersections of these lines can be used to align features in the photograph. Proponents of this technique claim that aligning a photograph with these points creates more tension, energy and interest in the photo than simply centering the feature would.

*Golden Ratio- In mathematics and the arts, two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio between the sum of those quantities and the larger one is the same as the ratio between the larger one and the smaller. At least since the Renaissance, many artists and architects have proportioned their works to approximate the golden ratio—especially in the form of the golden rectangle, in which the ratio of the longer side to the shorter is the golden ratio—believing this proportion to be aesthetically pleasing.

Election 2008

As you briefly mentioned in class, images are playing an integral role in the campaigning for the 2008 election. The media has been focusing on the potential candidates since early last year. The power of the media and electronic technologies has made this election unlike any other. The internet has become an integral aspect of both Senator Obama and Senator Clinton's campaiging, as they have both placed videos on blogs, taken advanatge of social networking websites (such as Facebook), raised campagain funds, etc. In this case, I feel that the internet provides most Americans, well those with computers or acess to library computers at least, an opportunity to engage in politics. Whether or not this is more democratic or not is another issue, but at least it provides a sense of involvement.

The media also has a greatly deal of power with regards to the fact that only a select few candidates have received substantial coverage. During the Democratic debates, the networks often stood Clinton, Edwards, and Obama side by side and focused the camera solely on them (leaving out a number of candidates). The media thus has the power to greatly persuade who the front-runners are. Because Dennis Kucinich, for example, received little attention, few people know anything about his policies or even who he is. However, if the media would have chosen to focus more coverage on him, it would be a different story.

With regards to images, Senator Obama has greatly benefited. He has a very powerful presence and the ability to give "moving" speeches. This is evident through the fact that he even won a grammy for the audio version of his book. I find it interesting that Obama focuses less on issues at his rallies and more on giving firey speeches about "how he will bring about change for America". Senator Clinton certainly offers more concrete plans for the future, but is not nearly as charismatic. I must say that I have found myself swayed by Obama simply by hearing his voice. This interaction with the media is an advantage for candidates that was certainly not available before the advent of technology.

Focusing more on what you mentioned in class, I think that is very interesting that the international community is intrigued with the prospect of Obama as president. The media/images/internet are all the reason that the international community is able to view news that is happening across the globe. However, I wonder if the damage done by Bush in the recent years is irreversible. (we can only hope!)

Thursday, February 12

Chapter 8 Notes from reading

-Because scientific imagery often comes to us with confident authority behind it, whether we view it through the press or through professional work and study, we often assume it represents objective knowledge. But, scientific looking is as culturally dependent as the other practices of looking we have examined.

*positivism- a philosophic position that is strongly scientific in inspiration and that assumes that meanings exist out in the world, independent of our feelings, attitudes, or beliefs about them. It assumes that the factual nature of things can be established by experimentation and that facts are free of the influence of language and representational systems.

-Photographic images are highly subjective cultural and social artefacts that are influenced by the range of human belief, bias, and expression.

*discourse- in general, the socially organized process of talking about a particular subject matter. According to Michel Foucault, discourse is a body of knowledge that both defines and limits what can be said about something. While there is no set list of discourses, the term tends to be used for broad bodies of social knowledge, such as the discourses of economics, the law, medicine, politics, sexuality, technology, etc.

-In addtion to the initial explosion of portrait photography in the mid-19th century, photography was taken up by scientists and in medical institutions to provide a visual record of experments, to document diseases, and to register scientific data. In modernity, the idea of seeing farther, better, and beyond the human eye had tremendous currency; photography was the quintessential modern medium adied in this quest.

-Scientific images are thus understood as providing the capacity to see “truths” that are not available to the human eye.
-Hospitals, mental institutions, and government agencies all employed photography to catalog subjects, diseases, and ctizens in the late 19th century.

-“The races of man”, written in 1862 by John Beddoe argued that there is a difference, both physical and intellectual, between those in Britain with protruding jaws and those with less prominent jaws.
-The sciene of eugenics, which was devoted to the practie of both studying and controlling human reproduction as a means of improving the human race was founded by Sir Francis Galton…he used measurement and the new method of statistics to read medical and social pathology off the surface of the body.
-In the 19th century, Duchenne de Boulogne, a French physician, used photographs to document his experiments of applying electronic shock to subjects’ faces in order to create a system for understanding facial expression. His aim was to establish the universality of human expression and photography was the essential tool.
-These examples all prove that the creation of images of the “other” was enabled by the use of the camera in the name of scientific inquiry.

*colonialism- the policy of a nation by which it extends its power over another people or territory. The term is used primarily to describe the colonization by European countries of Africa, India, Latin North America, and the Pacific region from the16th through the 20th century. Colonization was motivated by the potential exploitation of 3rd world peope and resources by 1st world nations.

-the role of images in science and as evidence is caught up in the debate about what empirical evidence is and how it can be established.

*empiricism- the science-inspired philosophy that assumes that things exist independent of language and other forms of representation, and can be known unambiguously as positive truths independent of any specific context. An empirical methodology relies on experimentation and data collection to establish particular truths, and is in opposition to theories that see facts and truths as dependent on the context and language system in which they take on meaning.

*direct cinema-closely related to cinema verite, direct cinema involved recording synchronized sound and footage of real-life action spontaneously, as it unfolded before the camera and crew. This technique broke with the use of voice-over narrative that had continued in some of the work of the work of directors like Jean Rouch. Their focus was primarily people in everyday institutions and their inhabitants, from famous political figures to students and teachers, prison inmates and guards.

-There are two different traditions of interpreting visual data. The most immediate one is the history of film analysis. Since the 1970s, film theorists have conducted analyses of motion pictures in which indiviudal frames of the continuous flow of 16 or 35 millimeter images are slowed and selectively frozen. These frames are reproduced as stills and subjected to comparative analysis to discern aspects of meaning lost to the viewer during the images’ rapid and fleeting production. The idea is that we can scientifically break down, abstract, and decode the discrete elements of a visual text in order to arrive at meanings embedded in a film’s textual structure.
-The second method started at the turn of the century. Scientists in physiology and other fields used photographs and motion picture film to conduct frame analyses in order to reveal aspects of a living or moving entity. The idea was that by breaking down and freezing moments in the flow of a body’s or a machine’s continuous process, we might learn something new about its function-something imperceptible to the eye and imperceptible in the unaltered footage.

-In the late 19th century, Eadweard Muybridge used photography in a now-famous study of animal locomotion. Muybridge set up elaborate systems of cameras and trip wires to take a series of images of animals and humans in motion in order to study locomotion.

-Whereas scholars trained in visual analysis would see these techniques as ways of changing meanings, those trained in scientific imaging techniques often regard image manipulation as essential to the process of allowing evidence to emerge.
-In the case of the Rodney King Trial, the reduction of moving images to stills by the defense took it to another level of distortion, precisely because of the way each still could be made to tell an individual narrative.

-Images do not embody truth, but always rely on context and interpretation for their meanings.

-The process through which images change meaning according to variations in context, presentation, textual narrative, and visual re-framing is well illustrated in the history of the x-ray image.
-The xray image, essentially a picture of bone density, suggested to some that the xray gave is practioners superhuman powers
-ultrasound images provide another example of a kind of medical looking that has been invested with public meaning and cultural desires.

*ultrasound- a technique now used in medical diagnosis that uses sounds waves to map soft tissue in the body, and which produces an ultrasound image. Ultrasound is derived from the technology of sonar devices that can measure objects in water

-fetal sonogram serves a purpose beyond machine, in other words, it is not simply a scientific image but a cultural image

-Medical images like ultrasounds and MRIs have also been integrated into nonmedical ads to signify special care of the body or to evoke the authority of scientific knowledge.

-Throughout the history of Western science, the idea that science is a separate social realm, one unaffected by ideologies or politics, has been a central doctrine of the hard sciences. Scholarship in science studies of the last few decades has forcefully pointed out, on the contrary, that what science signifies depends on social, political, and cultural meanings, and what kind of science is practiced and rewarded is a highly political issue

-In Michael Foucault’s terms, we can analyze how the discourses of science, like all discourses, change over time, allowing for new subject positions to emerge and new ways of speaking about science to come into being.

*subject positions-a term used to define those ways that images, whether as films or paintings, etc., designate an ideal position for their intended spectators. For instance, it can be said that particular films offer to their viewers an ideal subject position. There is an ideal spectator of the action film, regardless of how any particular viewer might make personal meaning of the film, and the subject position of a traditional landscape painting is that of a spectator who luxuriates in the fantasy of ownership of sublime and bountiful nature.

-In “The Silent Scream”, ex-abortion doctor Bernard Nathanson mounts a case against the practice of abortion through various tactics including showing the viewer what he describes as real-time ultrasound images of a 12-week “unborn child”, an abortion, and images supposedly of aborted fetuses.

-A rebuttal tape made by Planned Parenthood reveals that “the silent scream” consistently uses older fetuses to give the impression of a bodily form, and manipulates time and motion to make the ultrasound image of an abortion appear to produce the image of it “screaming”
-Whereas “the silent scream” banks on the power of images to reveal the truth, “response to the silent scream” makes the argument that images are easily manipulated and can seduce people into believing things that are not true.

-In his book “Enjoy your symptom”, cultural critic Slavoj Zizek explains that consumers of popular media are not dupes of the media industry; they know they are participating in systems of ideology that work against their interests, but they participate all the same-and they enjoy this participation, as they should.

-In the 1960s, Lennart Nilsson released the 1st fetal images

-The idea that truth lies beneath the surface and needs to be seen to be fully understood, has predominated in Western culture since that time of the Greeks
-French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote “Birth of the Clinic”, an account of the creation of hospital-based teaching and research in 1790s France, is pertinent to discussions of science and visuality, though its particular focus is the clinic and not obstetrics or law. Foucault describes the replacement of traditional methods of diagnosis by reading the surface symptoms of an illness with the practice of anatomical dissection and looking for empirical evidence beyond the physical surfaces of the body. He was also interested in the identification of signs and symptoms, specifically how the “medical gaze” elicited truths hidden within bodies, rather than through direct self-evidence of pathology.


-Increasingly, digital rather than analog technology is being used to map the body, such as the MRI image, and this means in turn that cultural concepts of the body begun to reflect concepts of the digital.

-Just as 19th century scientific practices of measurement were used to shore up ideologies of racial difference, gene therapy is used to map differences among human subjects and has the potential to be used to designate those who are outside the “norm in profoundly troubling ways.

-Dorothy Nelkin and Susan Lindee explain that with the shift to a genetic model had emerged as a new and deeply problematic marker of biological and cultural difference, taking the place of 19th century physiognomy.

-some feel that genetics constructs the “truth” of the body as a secret that science cannot readily see

-As Jose Van Dijck explains, during the same period that Marshall McLuhan espoused the view that the medium is the message, geneticists minded his communications theory for metaphors to describe the body as a medium of communication

-In other words, science does not necessarily become freer of ideology but finds new ways to make that ideology less evident and therefore more embedded and inisidious.
-The visual technique of morphing, for instance, makes it difficult to distinguish between one person and another, thus, collapsing the boundaries between bodies that were once considered inviolable.
-Artist Nancy Burson has been a major force in the development of morphing not only in the art world, but in the crossover between art, science, and the broader culture. In the late 1980s, Burson was instrumental in developing computer software that contributed to the ability to take a photograph of an individual and make it “age”-that is, to create a virtual rendering of the person as they could be predicted to look many years after the photograph was taken.

-Mona Hatoum, a Lebanese artist living in exile in Britain, uses the body as a metaphor for social struggle. Hatoum turns the feminist phrase “the personal is political” to an investigation of the body as a site of contested meanings and political struggle.

*cyborg- a term originally proposed by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960 to describe “self-regulating man-machine systems” or cybernetic organisms. Since that time, the cyborg has been theorized, most famously by Donna Haraway, as a means to consider the relationship of human subjects to technology, and the subjectivity of late capitalism, biomedicine, and computer technology.

-The cyborg has its roots in early computer science. It was prominently theorized by cultural and science studies theorist Donna Haraway in her essay “The Cyborg Manifesto” as a means to think about the transformation of subjectivity in a late capitalist world of science, technology, and biomedicine.

-Haraway wrote the body-technology relationship as one filled with potential for imagining and building new worlds.

-The genre of science fiction in literature, film, and television has had an important influence on the popular imagination of science and scientific practices.

-Science and the popular and news media, then, work in complexly interwoven ways to forge new ways of looking, and new ways of receiving these new ways of looking.

Chapter 9 notes from reading

*globalization-a term used increasingly toward the end of the 20th century to describe a set of conditions escalating since the postwar period. The conditions include increased rates of migration, the rise of multinational corporations, the development of global communications and transportation systems, and the decline of the sovereign nation state, and the “shrinking” of the world through commerce and communication.

*convergence-a term that refers to the increased combination of media together into one point of access. The potential combination of communication technologies such as computers, t.v., film, fax, and telephone into one interconnected multimedia system is the vision of media convergence of many proponents of new technology.

*synergy-a term used in industry to describe the ways that corporate conglomerates own aspects of cultural production, programming, and distribution across many media and into many geographic locales. Synergy thus refers to the capacity of corporations that own across many media such as broadcast networks, cable television, movie studios, film distribution companies, magazines and other publishing entities, to both vertically integrate across programming and distribution and horizontally market products globally.

-With the wiring of the world, the rapid development of wireless communications, and the rise of multinational corporations, many critics feel there has been a collapse of geographic distance and national boundaries-hence a globalization of economics, technology, and culture.

*hybridity- a term referring to anything of mixed origins that has been used in contemporary theory to describe those people whose identities are derived simultaneously from many cultural origins and ethnicities. Hybridity has been used to describe diasporic cultures that are neither in one place or the other but of many places.

-The media have been important forces in the changing status of the nationstate and the move toward a global economy.

*diaspora- the existence of various communities, usually of a particular ethnicity, culture, or nation, scattered across places outside of their land of origin or homeland. There are, for instance, large diasporic communities of Jews throughout the world, and of East Indians in England.

*World Wide Web-the internet information server that uses hypertext as its primary navigation tool. The World Wide Web includes multimedia: images, graphics, audio, and video in the form of web sites and pages that can be accessed and downloaded by viewers through browsers

*Third world-a term coined in the post-World War II period, which refers to the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This was in response to the concept in political theory of the world divided into West and East with two major super powers, USA, and USSR. These countries established themselves as a third world rather than taking sides with Eastern or Western superpowers.

-T.v., the internet, the world wide web have been extolled for erasing national boundaries and creating cross-cultural exchange.

*global village-a term coined by Marshall McLuhan to refer to the ways that media can connect people from all over the world into communities, hence to give the collective sense of a village to groups that are separated geographically. McLuhan stated that the global village was created by instant electronic communication.

-The globalization of media and industry has also been criticized for facilitating unchecked capitalist interests at the expense of communities.
-Media scholars Herbert Schiller and James Ledbetter hold that the new digital media are in fact the tools of big business. Their argument is that the corporate expansion of the late 20th century is not dissimilar to the political practice of colonialism that existed in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

-Disney-Capital cities is a global enterprise is capable of creating, packaging, and distributing entertainment, news, and sports programming in the USA and oversees

-Schiller makes the case that the global expansion of corporations hardly translates into access to media production and information for 3rd world countries. What corporations are seeking is cheap labor, natural resources, and new audiences or consumers for their services and goods.

-T.v. emerged in 3rd world countries not because of local popular or market demands, but because of smart global marketing plans on the part of mostly American and European industrial interests.
-By the mid-1970s, every country of the 3rd world with a population over 10 million had introduced t.v.

-global media including t.v., marketing, and the web ignore the laws of borders

-There are several frameworks that we can use to understand the circulation of images around the world. One framework is the concept of cultural imperialism.

*cultural imperialism-refers to how ways of life are exported into other territories through cultural products and popular culture. Because it is the center of the production of global pop culture and has economic power, the U.S. is often accused of cultural imperialism

-Communications theorists including Armand Mattelart and Herbert Schiller argue that t.v. is a means through which world powers like the USA and the USSR invade the cultural and ideological space of a country with images and messages, in place of an all-out military invasion.

-In 1985, the Reagan administration instituted Radio Marti…this was intended to provide a message of democracy to Cuba
-According to some critics, t.v. marti violated the spirit, if not the word, of the 1982 International Telecommunications Convention that determined that a country’s air space, like its land, was a part of its domestic property and hence these boundaries must not be violated.

-Communication scholar Armand Mattelart and cultural critic Ariel Dorfman wrote a scathing analysis of the role played by the seemingly innocuous figure of Donald Duck in promulgating US imperialism in Latin America, titled “How to read Donald duck”. They argue that Donald Duck and various other innocent Disney characters and stories presumably aimed at child audiences in fact were targeted also at adult viewers; that the narratives of these cartoons modeled for their adult 3rd world viewers a relationship of dutiful respect for and submission to US paternal authority.

-They believe that in a postcolonial world where overt measures of domination were no longer feasible, the innocuous visual images of Donald Duck and his cartoon cohorts were ideal venues for charming unwitting Latin American audiences into submission and conformity, making their adoption of US ideology palatable and even pleasurable.

*postcolonialism- a term that refers to the cultural and social context of countries that were formerly defined in relationships of colonialism, in the contemporary mix of former colonies, neocolonialism, and continuing colonialism. The term refers to the broad set of changes that have affected these countries, and in particular to the mix of identities, languages, and influences that have resulted from complex systems of dependence and independence.

-The growth of multinationals and the related emergence of a global information system to carry ads and other information results in homogenization-a collapse of borders and distances, and of differences of taste, language, and meaning. But they also result in the emergence of specific cultural and national identities under the sign of the brand, rather than under the sign of an empire.
-The local has also emerged as a marketable concept. Many ads attach the meaning of local regions to their products to give them a folksy connotation and counter their meaning of local regions to their products to give them a folksy connotation and counter their image as distant corporate conglomerates

-Many contemporary theorists have analyzed the global movement of people and commodities as indicative of the ways that the model of 3rd and 1st world divisions no longer make sense, if they ever did

-One model for rethinking the distinctions between cultures undergoing globalization has been suggested by anthropologist Arjun Appadural. He uses the suffix “scapes”, derived from the geographical metaphor of landscapes as a framework for thinking about particular sorts of global flows. Ex) Ethnoscapes are groups of people of similar ethnicities who move across borders in roles such as refugees, tourists, exiles, and guest workers. This allows for a critique of the different power relations within these cultural and economic movements and exchanges of products, people, and capital.

-While the dominance of cultural producers in creating and disseminating messages to varying markets of consumers is evident, it is also the case that cultural difference may allow for a broad range of responses to images.

-French anthropologist Jean Rouch produced a series of films in the 1950s in which he tried to get Western audiences to see the world through the eyes of the African people he filmed, inviting these subjects to participate with him in the scripting process and training them in film production.

-For diasporic and exiled peoples, t.v. programming aired across national boundaries and narrowcast to their own communities can be a vital lifeline.
-Telemundo and Univision similarly offer programming in Spanish with cultural issues and formats meant to appeal to geographically and even culturally broad groups of people.

-While many critics see the internet as a new, more democratic mode of communication, others see it as a form through which corporations are taking control of public dialog and global markets

-The internet was originally designed as a communications system that would not break down in the event of a nuclear war.

-One early on-line model that demonstrates the internet’s potential for democratic exchange is Usenet. Started in 1979 by two grad students, its founders thought the system would be use to raise discussions about computer operating systems, but it evolved into an anarchic body of newsgroups far from academic interests.
-Usernet was the prototype for the use of the internet as a public space of communications open to everyone, not just to academics and military personnel.

-It is precisely because of its decentralized technology, which has allowed it to be a truly international medium with a global reach, that the internet is extremely difficult to regulate.

-The development of computer imaging, multimedia, and hypertext made possible the emergence of the web as a commercial entity in the early 1990s.
-The ethos of universality and the idea of a web-like structure that would make all information universally available are widely regarded as having originated with computer pioneer Vannevar Bush, who wrote of a “memex”, a conceptual machine that could store vast amounts of information in trails of links of related text and illustrations.

*graphical user interface-the design in computer software and in the world wide web that allows users to make choices, enact commands, and move around through the use of graphics and images rather than text.

-The web has facilitated a broad range of expressive activities including new kinds of publications, ones that are cheap to make with access to the software, and which have potential global audiences. It can thus be said that the internet and wwweb have dramatically changed the power relations between producers and consumers in the mass media.

-one area of the web in which issues of regulation, access, and rights is played out with great force is on-line pornography.

*phenomenology- a philosophical position that centers on the dimensions of subjective human experience in how we react bodily and emotionally as well as intellectually to the world around us. It emphasizes the importance of the lived body in how we experience and make meaning of the world.

Images by Michael Ray Charles

Michael Ray Charles' images (specifically the ones on "Artnet") are amazing! The images, which mainly portray African American stereotypes, provoke the viewer to contemplate deep issues. By painting the stereotypes in a "silly" manner, such as the "Dress Your Best" painting which features a young black male dressed in baggy clothing, it portrays the message that it is absurd to think that these stereotypes are in fact reality. (It doesn't hurt that Charles is an amazing artist!)