11.19.10 Lecture and Reading

Contemporary Photography

-photography is very technologically dependent
-it captures an instant/documenting an instant of time
-Street photography: capturing things as they happen
-every picture has the viewpoint of the artist
-"The decisive moment" -Henri
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1981 - Appropriation
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-photography has always been taking something
-investigating yourself with play-acting
-theme of a photo: globalization. Sharing/adopting of culture
______
Constructing Worlds:
making things to document. Eleborate creation
-picture of a situation
-assume that its a real event
______
Stranger than fiction
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Personal Investigation:
-darker sides
-quantity was more important than quality
______
Objectivity
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People looking around

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 Reading - Ch1

.photography invented in 1839

photos:

  -teach visual code

  -alter and enlarge our notion of whats worth looking at

  -are grammer/ethics of seeing

  -puts the world at our fingertips

.To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed

.Written words, paintings and drawing are all interpretation..photography captures a reality

.frigile objects, easily torn and mislaid

.Furnished evidence. incriminates. proves things. Justifies

.Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring relity, they are still hunted by interpatives of taste and conscience.

  -will take dozens of pictures of the same subject until they get what they want.

  -by choosing one picture over another, photographers are imposing standards or their subjects.

  -though pictures record reality, and harbor just as much interpretation as a painting or drawing

.1840s and 1850s sped mentality of seeing the world and a set of potential photographs

.photography implied the capture of the largest possible subjects

.democratize all experiences by translating them into images

.First cameras(made in France in the early1840s) were only operated by inventors and buffs.

  -no professional photographers, nor amatuers

  -no clear social use

.It was through the industrialization that photography came into its own art

  -provided social use

..to be continued