Inspiration

   These are some of the preliminary photos I looked at when deciding the locations of my project. I really liked the visual leap created in the top photo and the distortion of the proportions in the bottom two.

Ways of Seeing, Episode 1: Psychological Aspects

   This video explores the way paintings and art have been changed by photography. Photos allow you to see a painting as no one has before. The way a painting is seen depends on habit and convention. Convention focuses on the perspective of the beholder. Perspective makes the eye the center of the visible world. Photography has made it no longer easy to think of things as traveling regularly as a single center. The invention of cameras has allowed for the mass production of paintings that once could only be viewed in one place. It has rendered these images no longer unique to their environment. They can be seen in many places at once. This has caused the meaning to no longer reside in the unique painted surface but to be transmittable and take on many different meanings.

   The camera also decontextualizes the painting by showing details and cropping the paintings. The new frame the camera creates can change the meaning of a painting. Words and sounds that are added in videos of paintings also change the perception of a painting. If specific music is played or a fact about the painting is said, the painting takes on a new meaning and is not just speaking for itself as an immobile image.

    Paintings also have to compete with all the other images they are shown with now. In a gallery a painting is shown as an individual and has its own context. When a painting is showed next to other images, the meaning changes based on how the other images relate. The addition of cameras has added as well as detracted from the meaning and value of the original painting.

Spencer Art Museum Reflection

   The trip to the Spencer Art Museum of art presented many different ways of arranging photographs. My favorite arrangement and concept was the old drive in movie theaters arranged in a grid format. I like that this piece showed the decay of certain technologies in society and that nothing is completely permanent. I was on the fence about the grid format and this piece pushed me over the edge and helped me decide that I wanted to do a grid format. The cleanness of the movie screens created a frame within a frame. It also helped me strive to find a deeper meaning in my own project because it showed me that a piece that is interesting is a piece that tells a story through its subject matter and composition.

Photography Changes Everything by Marvin Heiferman

 

   Marvin Heiferman explored the medium of photography’s active role in our lives and the world in his book “Photography Changes Everything.” He described photography as “notoriously difficult to assess” and asserted that it “resists being shaped by any set of single imperatives or standards.” Each person’s view on photography is different and each person shapes what photography is to fit his or her own views and is in turn shaped by photography.

   Society believes, according to Heiferman, that you need to see more to know more. This comes from the idea that you can see and experience the world through pictures. Billions of photos are at our disposal every day, piling visual knowledge on us. 1.3 billion new images span the world in seconds every day and one million of those photos are added to Facebook alone. People are defined and embodied by the photos they take, use, share, and respond to.

   With so many photos in circulation it is hard to say what constitutes a “good photo.” I agree with Heiferman’s belief that what constitutes “good photography” depends on who is talking. Just because a photo does not get framed does not mean it has no importance. The importance of a photo depends on the person’s relationship to the photo.

   The “digital revolution” occurred slowly as opposed to all at once, according to Heiferman. Technology went from digital cameras, to personal computers, to smart phones, which can share photos instantly. I personally probably take at least one photo a day on my smart phone, and that is not including photos on the app “Snapchat,” with which you can send a photo or video to someone that deletes itself automatically in a given amount of seconds. These photos are not framed and are rarely posted, but I often look back on them to remember certain moments, and if I lost them I would be devastated. Although they not pass for the textbook definition of “good photography” they are still relevant to photography because they are of importance to at least one person.

   The new relationship of the viewer to photography creates a contract between the image, the viewer, and reality. Heiferman states that we should spend less time focusing on what makes photos good and more time figuring out how they work.” Photos create an opportunity to explore the medium and its active role in our lives and world. Photography has no identity and keeps changing. Photography invites people to interact with it actively. It engages us “optically, neurologically, intellectually, emotionally, and physically. Photos are not passive but move us forward.

   According to Heiferman photography changes what we want, what we see, who we are, what we do, where we go, and what we remember. I found his description of how it changes who we are and where we go most interesting. Photography is a way of self-expression and is a depiction of how we represent ourselves. It has the power to shape stereotypes and change your perception of a person, place, or thing just through an image. Photography has also “taken” us many places we may not have the power to physically go in our lifetimes. Not only can it take us across oceans, but it can also take us inside bodies, to mars, the ocean floor, and black holes.

   The meaning of photography is ambiguous and varies from person to person. It has no singular meaning and “urges us not to just reminisce, but to act.” Photography changes itself as well. It evolves along with the individual’s perception of photograph and photographs and will continue to do so. 

On Photography by Susan Sontag

   Susan Sontag explored the effect photography has on society and her own ideas about photography. Society currently has many images vying for its attention. The evolution of photography has made it possible for anyone to record a moment in time the way they see it and then broadcast it quickly and easily. According to Sontag photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have the right to observe. Almost anything from a meal to our pets is photographed, posted, and found interesting now. Photographs give us a window to different places and times and allow us to hold the world in our heads.

   Photography is a cheap, easy, and portable way to explore times and places we otherwise may have only a verbal description of. I have never been to Australia or Africa and a website or person who has been there could describe it to me, but I would have a much smaller understanding of the area if it were not for pictures. Pictures give us a clear understanding of a place we may never be able to see ourselves, capture the experience of that place, and present it to us in a way that we can also try to experience it.

   Photos also hold knowledge of a separate place and therefore power. Photos have the power to incriminate, or justify. Photos can be seen as miniatures of reality seen through someone else’s’ eyes. They are a “generic exception between art and truth,” according to Sontag. Photos reflect someone else’s ideas and reality. Through deciding how photos should look the photographer is imposing their own standards on the subjects and forcing the viewer to see it their way as well. A photo captures as well as interprets reality.

Masters of Illusion

   The video “Masters of Illusion” explores basic visual techniques from the Renaissance, which are now employed in cinematography. The idea of how to make a flat picture three-dimensional was first studied in depth in the Renaissance period. Brunelleschi discovered the idea of linear perspective, parallel lines drawing together to create a vanishing point. Giotto, the father of Renaissance painting first explored parallel lines creating depth, but without a vanishing point, and Masaccio painted The Trinity, one of the first paintings to use linear perspective. Sculpture also used linear perspective, creating the illusion of vast space.

   Piero Della Francesca, painter and mathematician, created octagons with systematic perspective, creating depth in paintings. Uccello’s perspective drawing of a pot resembles a grasp of perspective that we would expect from a computer-generated drawing. Albrecht Durer was the first to create works using multiple vanishing points.

   The analysis of light and shadow was also explored in the Renaissance period and added to the three-dimensional effect of works at that time. Light creates depth through shadow cast on and from the form as well as light reflected off of it. Leonardo DaVinchi discovered atmospheric perspective, which can be achieved through blurring and adding blue to elements in the distance.

   These studies of ways to create perspective were discovered many years ago and are still relevant today. In photography the choice of what to blur and what to focus on can create perspective the way atmospheric perspective in painting creates it. This video also helped me understand how pictures create a window into a three-dimensional space.

Errol Morris on Photography

   Errol asserts that people have forgotten that photographs are connected to the physical world and that photos decontextualize their subject. He believes that all photographs are posed whether through the omission or addition of elements. I found this idea interesting and it led me to think of photographs as more than just a picture and more as a piece of actual time depicting a physical place. It also led me to question how the photographer changed the way that space looks to the viewer when photographing it. Whether a photograph is posed or not, it is a study of what the photographer was feeling about his subject matter at the time. A photo should evoke curiosity about the subject matter and the time it was taken in.

   Errol also said, in reference to “iconic photos,” that certain photos have a “power over us.” This made me question what kind of photo can have power over a person. I think the “power” Errol was referring to was the power some photos have to invite a person to investigate the photo deeper just based on the subject matter. This led me to ask the question of how I could implement that power in my own photographs and how I could lead people to want to know more about my subject matter.