Thursday, April 10, 2014

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.

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