PH 302 Theory and Criticism
Photography: Theory & Criticism will examine historic and contemporary philosophical, aesthetic, and epistemological topics addressing the evolution of theories germane to contemporary photographic discourse. As a class, we will address structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, semiotics, and the taxonomy of visual representation from simulacrum to social classification analysis. Conceptual understanding and the successful application of the topics addressed throughout this course are designed to further develop your photographic lexicon. The application of thoughtful, theory-based ideas can be employed to promote visual solutions to challenges in the design, execution, and creation of your work. Theories and topics discussed in the readings will be introduced with supporting imagery for discussion and debate.
Active discussion and participation are core requirements of this course.
Thoughts on Tagg: Beautiful writing. Even if half way through I started getting lost he got my attention back when talking about how photography has no identity. Photography would be nothing without rules and people to see them through. The camera will never be neutral, ever. Even if we gave it a brain it still couldn't be neutral. We control what the camera creates. “Photographs are never “evidence” of history; they are themselves the historical.” I thought that was just the icing on the cake.
ReplyDeleteThoughts on Rosler: I've always been skeptical of documentary photography because of the doubt in truth of photography in general. Why should we make documentary photography exempt from that? I've also been opposed to documentary photography since from what I've seen is like what Rosler says, "Documentary is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy, into imagery. It is them, not us." Documentary is fueled by political agendas weather the photographer is aware of it or not. What makes documentary exempt from the rules of the game?
Thoughts on Berger: What is the meaning of "too shocking?" I love how that phrase is tossed around like a football in the field of photography. I love it because it's so generalized that it can apply to anything. For me "too shocking" has to do with blood or missing limbs. For some it's seeing a child picking out of a garbage can. At the time of the Vietnam war "too shocking", in my opinion, meant the "truth" or "reality" of other countries and how "different" our country/society is from others. When talking about war I have to stop myself from getting too caught up in the corrupt political part of it, even in the photography aspect. I loved Berger's view in this reading.
John Tagg - i was confused while reading Tagg because i really couldn't understand what he was trying to say. What i did understand that photographs are records of time and it is also part of evidence and that photographs have power. i though his view on photographs have no identity was interesting. i am not sure if i believe that or not its an interesting idea to think about . i do think that photographs have power is some ways and i believe that photographs dont have a identity.
ReplyDeleteMartha Rosler - i thought this reading was very unique way of looking at documentary photography. i thought it was very interesting in the different examples she gave us. i am not a big fan of documentary photography because you never know if is truthful or fake and unrealistic. in reality when you take a photograph an event or documentary you are altering that photograph they way you want your viewers to see and not just photographing what is in front of. when you take a picture from you camera you are altering even if you are not aware of it. i didn't realize what goes into documentary photography there are a lot of background information witch i thought was interesting.
John Berger - i thought it was a interesting view because durring the vietnam war the choose to hide the real events that was happening to america because if they showed the "real " photographs in newspaper or magazines americans will see and might speak out about what they think about what is going on. instead they hid form reality from the war i fell that they are covering it from people at home. they are a lot of different political views that can go along with this because it is such a strong subject that i believe and that i liked his view on it. it was interesting to read about it. i do believe that the reason we do not see real war photograph then and still to current day is that they are hiding things that are going on there that is why they dont publish the photographs in the papers. i feel that it is wrong to not publish real documentary photographs to the people so they are giving us unrealistic photographs or even fake we dont know if they truthful or not.
Kevin Cummings
ReplyDeleteMartha Rosler
In, Around, and Afterthoughts (on Documentary Photography)
What Martha is saying in her essay is that Documentary Photography can be looked at in a few different ways. First, it can be viewed as helping those less fortunate than the privileged and it can be used in conjunction to written word, such as a newspaper article or a magazine.
When a photographer goes out and documents a living situation such as near the end of the depression, one good way to spread the word about those who have fallen on hard times and trying to raise families, is to, infact, photograph a family. Migrant Mother is such a photograph. Although the subject was never paid royalties, she did become very famous since her picture is the most duplicated photographs in the world.
During the war, photographs were taken and printed in newspapers to show us back home what was really happening. These at times were gruesome, but it did get the point across.
John Tagg
Evidence, Truth, and Order
What John Tagg is referencing in this essay is that as photography progressed, so too did the need for photographic evidence. Thus we now have surveillance photographs, crime scene photographs and even in the jails, they use video to document the incident when a prisoner is taken forcefully from his/her cell.
He also talks about the camera never being neutral. I agree with this statement. How can an image not be neutral? A scene was shot, thus documenting the information, therefore it must be one sided.
John Berger
Photographs of Agony
This essay was very short but to the point. All John Berger talks about is images taken during Vietnam War. Some of these photographs were actually staged. I can see that being done so that the photographer is not in harm’s way, but, if one really wants to photograph war, then they do it at their own risk.
Berger:
ReplyDeleteWhen talking about the violent photos in the newspaper, it made me instantly think about the unshown photo of Osama Bin Laden's dead body. Things are much different now then they were in the way of violence. Now we're more desensitized to it. When I had heard the news that he was killed, my grandmother and I both had the same thought about if they were going to release an image. The argument we had was do we really need photographic evidence? While seeing it would give us visual "proof", what's going to happen because we show the photo. Should we not trust our government to not be dumb enough to lie to us about killing Osama (but that's another issue on its own). Not only that do we really need to plaster an image of a dead terrorist everywhere for some national pride to say "we found him and shot him in the face. check it out!!". Just last week we found out that Ghadafi had been killed, there was video and photos of his death all over the internet. I dont really think it's all that necessary to share such violence in the media, no matter who it is and how much we hate them.
Tagg
This ended up going well right after reading Berger and flowed with the ideas that popped up from that reading.
There is a photograph of of Osama's dead body, it's historical. shown to the world or not. it exists and again, we dont really need it to be shown as evidence for the event to be historical or the photograph to be history.
Rosler
Documentary Photography.
Truth of photography, same train of thought really but more was thinking about the presence of photoshop in the vast majority of the images we view daily. and staying on the same train, after the announcement of Osama's death, there was quite a few obviously photoshopped images that we're all over the internet, and actually fooled a ton of people. Even if the real photo was released, I bet there would be a lot of people thinking that it was fake anyways. so what's the point?
John Tagg :: Tagg basically explains what we have already touched upon in class a little bit, on how that there is no true neutral in photography. All of photography is an opinion, and yet we as a society rely on photos more than we should. He explains crime scene photos that I never really thought of before and made me think of how we actually use these photos to judge a person on if they are guilty or not.
ReplyDeleteJohn Berger :: Berger just ads to Tagg's paper, and talks about how we view explisit photographs. The paper made me think of how people react to images in the paper and get mad. I had always found that interesting and would love to talk about it in class. A few somewhat current photos come to mind, like the "Falling Man" and the photo of the girl that was killed from the Boston Redsox riots. People were outraged when they saw that, they had a response... is it moral to do that? What about when the photo becomes famous, should the person in that photo receive compensation? There are a lot of things to talk about from this essay.
Martha Roster :: Her perspective was very interesting in that I never looked at how documentary photography isnt true anymore. I can somewhat agree with that. The fact that we have these editorial or documentary photos of poverty, they have become romanticized and no longer serve the purpose it was originally sopposed to have. But on question I find interesting is that is it really the photographers falt, or society?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/05/The_Falling_Man.jpg
http://www.forgetfoo.com/images/blog/makeout-during-vancouver-riot640.jpg
http://worldsfamousphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/pulitzer_94_500.jpg
http://ehehr1955.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/arthur-fellig-murder-in-hells-kitchen-1944.jpg