Art is a way of life.
Showing posts with label Other (own knowledge). Show all posts
Showing posts with label Other (own knowledge). Show all posts

Monday, 28 November 2011

FINISH-Narrative and Semiotics

*Blue Velvet Introduction
Signs of opening sequence

- Red roses = perfection and beauty
-Slow romantic music - calm/peaceful
-White fence - American Dream - Ideology
-Hose pipe leaking - Foreshadows rest of the plot - negative

Nothing is contained in the town - not perfect - only appearance looks beautiful.

Photographers produced work in 80/90's on narrative


  • Philip-lorca Dicorcia = Street Photography - He would highlight individuals with light
  • Jeff Wall - set up photos designed to look realistic - similar perception to painter Di ego Velazquez (Book - The Order of Things) 
  • Gregory Crewdson 

Monday, 31 October 2011

Perception - Camera Position

What does a camera placement do?


  1. Determine our position to the subject 
  2. It is a code for how the audience responds to the subject
  3. Is a photographic decision that determines how you want us to engage with the image
  4. How will you position our ‘reading’ of the image? A photographer puts the viewer in a specific place from which the viewer has a relation to the subject.

    Therefore, when making an image, the following questions should be addressed;

- From where does a Photographer position oneself? 
Where would the camera provide a place upon which construct its image of the world


• Camera position not only determines position to subject, it determines how the audience sees the subject. How does camera position determine how the viewers engages with the image? It provides position, context, and relation.
• How does the photographer want the viewer to feel about the image? Whether distanced or up-close - forms, patterns, psychologies, moods, feelings, and emotions are created through the relative position of the camera to the subject 








Monday, 17 October 2011

Representations - Semiotics

In todays lecture we learnt about Semiotics.
It was an interesting lecture as I got to question photographs - what is really happening in the image?


I learnt how meaning is constructed by deconstructing the different elements of an image into different parts


- we are surrounded by images from the media and we are constantly bombarded by them but we are also surrounded by images, representations and communication that don't really enter our conscious thoughts such as when we walk down the road


- All Photography is made up of signs, and semiotics is the 'science' behind how those signs create meaning
Therefore to understand the 'science of signs' is to understand how photographs communicate meaning. 


Plato - believed that words do not name actual things. Since to name things would require an individual name, things would require an individual name for each individual thing.
(each dog would require a different name to reflect to signify its individuality)


For Plato, words were ideas and concepts derived from essences of things - whereby there is a perfect, platonic idea of the concept.


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To broaden my mind on the topic, I looked at artist Jeff Wall and his work of narrative+semiotics



This image questions what is actually happening in the moment...


Despite this studied approach, his work generally feels almost improvisational. Take, for example, the following photograph. It has a photojournalistic ambience…an unscripted street scene in which a man displays his racism. The street is nondescript; it could be any street in any North American city. The racism is as casual and nonchalant as it is evil, using an obscene gesture to 'slant' his eye; it’s the unthinking banality of the racism that makes it both common and pervasive and all the more quietly pernicious. The people involved are ordinary people from slightly different social classes, yet there is a definite class component to the underlying resentment and racism. It looks like a moment captured in time. And it was completely staged.
Wall stated that he’d seen an incident like this take place as he walked along the street in Vancouver. He decided to recreate the scene…but as a work of social art. He hired actors to be his subjects, he found the perfect nondescript street, he set up lights and the tripod for his large format camera. He selected the costumes the subjects wore. He directed the way the actors moved, the way the racist drags his girlfriend forward, the way she squints in unconscious mimicry, the aggressive stare of the racist, the quiet anger of the Asian man. He wanted the photograph to be more real than the incident itself.

He even recreates the work of painters he believes met Baudelaire’s standard. For example, Wall is quite taken with the woodcuts of Hokusai, a Japanese artist who lived in the late 18th and early 19th century. In the following woodcut, Hokusai depicted a sort of Cartier-Bresson moment…a decisive moment.
Hokusai
Wall recreated the scene on a cranberry farm in rural Canada. In keeping with his obsessive, directorial style, he staged the photograph with great care. He selected the location to match Hokusai’s wind-bent trees. He had the subjects crouch and hold their hats similar to Hokusai’s. He recreated the hat that was blown away, and the scattering of papers. And yet he made it a completely contemporary image by setting it in a Canadian landscape and including the line of telephone poles.



Wall’s photo has all the drama and spontaneity of Hokusai’s woodcut. There is a wonderful sense of immediacy and tension. How was he able to create such an atmosphere and still reproduce Hokusai’s image so faithfully? By using the magic of digital imagery. Wall’s image is actually a composite of more than 100 separate photographs taken over two winters.

JeffWall1



Monday, 10 October 2011

Lighting : Principles

Today we looked at how many Photographs go back to paintings to influence their Photography
and Lighting is the key feature in all images - especially with artists such as; Irving Penn and Helmut Newton.


  1. Lighting and the body
  2. Lighting and the object
  3. Lighting and space

Monday, 3 October 2011

Analysing and Deconstructing Images

In Todays lecture, we looked at what to consider when analysing images
Main things to consider - non verbal communication ;

  1. Construction
  2. Audience
  3. Narrative
  4. Categories
  5. Agency
*Technical Codes
  1. Camera position - shot size
  2. Camera angle
  3. Lens type
  4. Composition
  5. Focus
  6. Lighting
  7. Colour and Film
Looking at Mis-en-scene is also important and linking to props and dress code. 

Lighting in your portrait can change the whole meaning of the image and representation of the model (YOU)
As there is no 'real you' the Photographer decides how he wants the audience to perceive you and judge.

Monday, 26 September 2011

Reality and Representation



In todays lecture I learnt many things about 'What is Photography'


* It's about constructing reality
* It provides a mirror to the world
* It's about transformation of the state energy to another state of energy 
Personally, Photography is about viewing the world through your eyes/lens but as stated in todays lecture a Photograph does not provide a transparent window to the world and it does not guarantee 'truth' - it may resemble and evidence it but it is not the truth of reality.

  • What if two people understand the same image in different ways - This is all based upon their background, beliefs and appreciation of art. 

Friday, 23 September 2011

Types of Shutter speed and Light readers





Shutter Speed

  1. Focal Plane Shutter
  2. Leaf Shutter
- Curtain Shutter in DSLR

Photographer Dan Holdsworth uses several minutes of exposure in his work - few examples


 British Landscape Photographer is very enthusiastic about his long exposure images



Wednesday, 21 September 2011

Landscape becomes the narrative

Casper David Friedrich - 'Chasseur In The Forest' 1814

The German forest had a particular meaning to the artist as in 1814 When he celebrated the expulsion of the French, it was with 'The Chasseur in the Forest', a haunting image of a solitary French dragoon lost in a wood of evergreens. It is a compassionate picture: the invader's fate is just and inevitable, but also sad, and seems to belong to the same higher natural destiny as the forest's vigorous growth.

Oil Painting - Wanderer above the sea of fog

Casper David Friedrich  - Wanderer above the sea of fog 1818
Whilst analysing this painting by German artist Friedrich, I noticed the posture of the man (one leg forward) illustrates elegance and also gives away a sense of achievement in some sort. 
I believe he wants to enjoy the moment of admiring the view as he must of climbed this mountain to reach such great height which goes back to the point of achievement. For some reason I get this feeling of grace; from the man. The Wanderer - metaphor for unknown future. 

Monday, 19 September 2011

Pseudo-Science

Artists;

Have practiced Pseudo-Science in their Photography and each have produced unique images
But what is Pseudo-Science?
It's a belief which is presented as scientific but does not actually have a valid scientific method.
It just phrased for unprovable claims!

Fontcuberta examines the truthfulness of Photography and now who teaches photography in a Fine Arts programme at a University in Barcelona, has stated Photography "should be taught not in fine art schools…but in philosophy schools." He insists photography is a way of thinking more than a way of art, and he sees his role as undermining the legitimacy and authority of the photograph as a depiction of unquestioned reality.



Fontcuberta is mostly known for his diverse work - Fauna (1987) and Sputnik (1997)     





 In this series, Fontcuberta "arranged inanimate objects such as electrical cord, plastic, a shaving brush or a rubber hose into what appear to be exotic plants",thereby creating "pseudo plants".The black and white still-life photographs of these constructions were "drily classified in Latin and thereby resembled the photographs of Karl Blossfeldt The photographs were exhibited in Belgium, the United States, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, Canada, and France.


 FontCuberta artistic imagination is shown in his series called Miracles & Co which are not intended to represent reality as it documents an imaginary isolated sect of monks who have developed miraculous but useless powers.  What I like most about the selected image is not knowing what the monk is doing to the 
tree. Overall its a magical Photograph.


Peter Fischli and David Weiss adapt objects and situations from everyday life and place them into an artistic context. Most people don't see everyday objects in their surroundings as art, but the Equlibres Photograph has made a statement. Both are influenced by Dada, Surrealism, Pop, and Conceptual art.
Fischli/Weiss have been collaberting since 1979 and are the most renowned contemporary artists of Switzerland. Their best known work is the film "Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go)." 

This was described by The Guardian as being "post apocalyptic" as it is all about chain reactions and the way in which objects fly, crash, and explode across the studio it was shot in. Both artists live and work in Zurich.


What triggers my mind when seeing their work is 'Why' and 'How'
Why did they decide to do a series of objects and possibly how did they think of it?
What could it mean to them or even to us - the audience?




Chema Madoz - Spanish Photographer is best known for his surrealist images
The image on top left is called 'Stairway to heaven' which is portraying a ladder in the mirror - but where does it go?
The irony with which Madoz assaults recognizible objects creates a relationship with viewers that leads to paths of a parallel universe. - Which is what Madoz creates in his studio. 







The beauty of Madoz's Photography is that he allows us to participate in his work, by being the viewers we  get to decide what his images mean or what they may mean and play a game of our own perception. 
He allows us to think about 'understanding Photography' on a whole different level and his
art-work is mind-blowing. Which not only makes the viewers think and grow but it trains the human mind. Madoz's work is filled with facination and exhilarating imagination, which I've never seen before in Photography. 






Jenkins is interested in recording the visual and material world and she wanted to create images which promised to give some information but actually relayed nothing. 




Recently Jenkins has turned her attention to Alchemy - the attempt to change base metals into a higher material, often lead into gold using the transforming properties of Lapis Philosophorum [the philosopher's stone].

Evidence - Social and Political Commentary


Shomei Tomatsu, ‘Melted Bottle’ (1961)








Irving Penn, ‘Cigarette Butts’ (1972)






Art Nature



Karl Blossfeldt, ‘Art forms in Nature’ (1928)













Robert Mapplethorpe, ‘Tulips’ (1984)   


Style and Symbolism

Symbolism of Art - Paintings of still life

Looking at artists such as;

  • Van Gogh
  • Samuel Van Hoogstraten
  • Oasis beert
  • Pieter Claesz
  • Adrian Vander Spelt
  • Paul Cezarne
  • Francisco Goya
  • Willem Kalf
  • Leiden Master
  • Abraham Van Beijeren
  • Wilem De Poorter
  • Pieter Claesz         
Each convey Symbolism and Light in their paintings with their own meanings of still life

     

Pure Photography - F64 Group+Its followers

Members of F64 (GREAT DEPTH OF FIELD) Group - San Francisco Photographers 1932

- Ansel Adams




- Imogen Cunningham

Succulent, 1920. This was the first image of Cunningham's to be in the Group f/64 exhibit
Between 1923 and 1925 Cunningham became increasingly interested in Botanical Photography 


- Edward Weston





- Sonia Noskowiak





- John Paul Edwards




- Henry Swift




- Willard Van Dyke

F/64 brought the new West Coast vision of straight photography to national attention and influence. This first exhibition consisted of 80 photographs, including 10 by Adams, 9 each by Cunningham, Edwards, Noskowiak, Swift, Van Dyke and Edward Weston, and 4 each by Holder, Kanaga, Lavenson and Brett Weston. Edward Weston's prints were priced at $15 each; all of the others were $10 each. The show ran for six weeks. 

The still life and Photography*

Today's lecture on still life and Photography during the period of 14th-17th century was about how objects in those days were painted due to how they symbolised wealth and importance. Even flowers emphasised the importance of religion.
                        For example this paining by Hans Memling called Vase of flowers (1480)
                       according to some scholars this vase is filled with religious symbolism.

                                         

*Still life started in medical 5th-15th century
*Illusion: The Renaissance 14th-17th century 
- Visions becomes about Pyramids
- Paintings become as real as possible
- Paintings mimicked reality
*Society Flemish 16th century
-Celebrating modern methods, farming and nature
-This was a period of starvation therefore painters were commissioned to paint certain things