Friday, 7 December 2018

2. Presentation Notes

PRESENTATION NOTES

MY PRESENTATION: CIRCULATION AND AUTHORSHIP OF THE PHOTO-IMAGE

Reading, research and speaking notes:



Below are the slides we created. I have captioned the slides that I created as a contribution.

Above: my extension on our definition of  authorship, touching on how authorship can constantly be questioned today with the ease of digital editing. I included examples of my own photography where the images appear simple but are actually manipulated to convey certain messages - e.g. bottom left, the original image was not actually shot in foggy weather.



Below: I produced the following three slides on Richard Hamilton's career, notable works and linked one of his pieces to a discussion about the circulation of photography.







NOTES ON OTHER GROUP PRESENTATIONS

1. VERNACULAR PHOTOGRAPHY

- "Vernacular" refers to everyday life; common things as subjects

- amateur, general, "not learned"

- August Sander: "People of the 20th Century"; German photographer; used portraits to construct stories about subjects; snapshots of society; saw portraits as the "mirror"

- Robert Frank: freelance photojournalism; LIFE and VOGUE; "when people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice"; controversial - hated his country according to critics

- Martin Parr: vivid colours, meticulously staged images that appear naturalistic; depicting the wealth of the western world; sees the beach as an "experimental place to explore new ideas"; National Portrait Gallery exhibition from 2019
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- "maybe the best photography will come when you put the word [art] aside": this was said in the workshop after the presentation and really struck me. I definitely need to consider this in future work. I often become so focused on achieving a certain aesthetic or artistic standard, and that overworking of a concept often leads to a failure. The best images I've ever taken have been spontaneous, unplanned, and taken informally rather than on a staged shoot.

- controversy over the popularity of vernacular photography: photographers fought long and hard for their professions to be respected as a cultural activity. This has arguably been undermined by casual mobile phone photography today.


2. GENDER, GAZE AND OTHERNESS

- Lee Miller: US, 1920s; surrealism period; merged the gap between art and photojournalism; developed 'solarisation' - discovered when accidentally overexposing an image which uncovered more detail; famed "Lilian Harvey" image; "portrait of space" - surrealist ambiguous image where the reading is determined by an idea-evoking title

- Diane Arbus: US, 1923-1971; photographing marginalised people in a more beautiful, personal way rather than alienating; subjects such as people with dwarfism or gender-nonconforming people; documentary style photography; controversy of the potential objectification of the marginalised for personal popularity

- Nancy 'Nan' Goldin: US, born 1973; bisexual photographer documenting LGBTQ bodies; "the ballad of sexual dependency," 1986; focused photography on the AIDS crisis in America; consistent portfolio themes of romance and the harsh realities of addiction, abuse and AIDS in New York

- Sarah Maple: graduated from Kingston Uni in 2007; challenges identity, religion and the status quo; pro-feminist work; controversial and witty imagery exploring inequality; photography style is brightly lit and staged/posed


3. CULTURAL IMAGINARIES AND LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY

- Hall looks at how meanings are constructed in society

- Anderson visualised the nation as an "imagined community"; socially constructed by those who see themselves as part of a particular group

- landscape photography - increasingly punctuated by modern man-made disturbances

- Mishka Henner: documentary / conceptual / appropriation; uses Google Earth and Streetview to create images; "trailblazer [...] new approach" to photography - but questionable authorship; "No Mans Land" - capturing assumed roadside sex workers on Streetview - project deemed controversial for potentially degrading women

- Lauren Marsolier: pieces together fragments of different images - creating the illusion of a landscape; "familiar yet not identifiable"; collection - "dislocation" - "blending the physical landscape with the landscape of the mind"; despite the locations being fabricated, as humans we put labels on them as a form of security because otherwise it depicts the unknown

- Esteban Pastorino Diaz: Abraham Arbur Award; tilt-shit photography using handmade camera and a kite; later progressed to shooting from high perspectives to control the depth of field further; hyper-real and vibrant tones; panoramic work - Guinness World Record for the longest image - 2-mile long panorama capturing a 360 degree landscape during motion from a car window

- the first two photographers in this presentation appropriate material to create their images. Can their work really be considered original e.g. when it was technically Google that photographed it?

- history of landscape imagery; emergence in the romantic period where natural imagery was idealised; today traditional natural landscapes are seen as twee and pretty but during this period it was rather rebellious to depict natural scenes rather than portraits of important societal figures in art

- Marsolier's work reminds me of Andreas Gursky's art - his images seem like simplistic landscapes but are in fact extensively digitally manipulated


5. UBIQUITOUS PHOTOGRAPHY AND WEB 3.0 SERVICES

- ubiquitous photography: digital imaging, "transformed" visual language and culture

- web 3.0: culture of connectivity - presented in the way photographs are shared (social media e.g. Flickr) - enables new forms of interaction but a possible downside is a lack of authorship

- Penelope Umbrico: appropriates photography, sunsets on Flickr project - 9 million photos in 2009, another 'photograph about photography' - commentary on the medium, reflection of the human need to share the same experiences similar to the Instagram similarity project @Insta_Repeat

- Joachim Schmid: physical appropriation, combining portraits through collage, states that photography has changed - it was a technique but due to today's ubiquitous nature there are more photos taken each day than in the entirety of previous centuries

- Erica Scourti: feminist themes, "interested in the patterns that structure language in the web," Body Scan (2014) intimate iPhone photos and Google search matches, Life in AdWords (2012-2013) diary on Gmail recording how words influenced targeted advertising

- Jens Surdheim - self portraits in public webcams, examining public/private blurring boundaries of imaging; quite an eerie project

- technology enables ubiquitous photography and its proliferation






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