Friday 30 March 2012

Genius of Photography Part 3

1)One of the most familiar concepts in photography is that of the decisive moment, capturing something notable or an historic moment.
2)One should never trust a photograph but people are drawn to photographs and tend to take them at face value. We need to be objective when looking at photography.
3)The Leica was revolutionary in 1925 as it was so small and light it gave photographers, more sped, accuracy and accesability, especially for documentary photographers in war zones.
4)Geaorge Bernard Shaw said he would exchange all paintings of Christ for a single snapshot of Christ.
5)Tony Vaccaro's negatives were destroyed by the USA army censors because the imagery they contained was too negative and disturbing for the American public to handle.
6)Henryk Ross was a Jewish German photographer who was the official Photographer of the Lodz ghetto in Poland where he documented life within the ghetto, good times and of course the bad. He then buried the negatives and returned having survived, years later to retrieve the negatives. They are fascinating, emotional pictures.
7) the Family of Man exhibition was the 'sticking plaster for the wounds of War' which was organized by Edward Steichen in 1955. 9 million people had visited by 1964 and the final sentimental photograph at the end of the exhibition was W.Eugene Smith's image of his children, The Walk to Paradise Garden.(1946)

Thursday 29 March 2012

Genius of Moving Image Part 3

1)Bjork gave Chris Cunningham complete control over the video of All is Full of Love. The only analogy she gave him was that of Indian figures/ornaments. locking together in a sexual position to imply the connection and love. She had seen his work and heard of him and totally trusted him. I guess as an artist she respected his work.

2)Film directors who have made music videos include:

Martin Scorcese with Michael Jackson's Bad

Sofia Coppola with the White Stripes

Michel Gondry and Kylie

Moving image part 2

1)The role of a cinematographer is to orchestrate lighting and cameras. A cinematographer works in unisn with art directors and directors and actors to achieve the best visual results for the script.
2)Roman Polanski insisted on using a hand held camera in China Town partly because this was the French/Polish filming method he was akin to. So it has cultural reasons. Also a hand held camera adds a sense of disorientation for the viewer. The camera had to be in close to the actors giving intimacy and claustrophobia.
3)Two films in which colour is used to symbolically is 
1) Paris Texas- director Wim Wenders uses reed and green gels throughout the film, especially the first half. The characters costumes often follow this trend. Even the backdrops are thought out in terms of old, vivid colours. Red and green are colours which a re uneasy, especially when used together. they are also symbolic of stop and go. Travis the character has been on the run then is stopped by his brother, then runs again to find his ex partner with whom he has a son.
2) Schindler's list uses colour very sparingly however it is used poignantly. If we think abut the masses of Jews murdered by the Nazis it is hard to have a recognizable emotion other than general horror and remorse. However, the use of the colour red with the little girls coat makes us think of a small, weak child,a girl. It is more powerful and evocative to single out so strongly such a sweet, innocent character who has no dialogue in the narrative. She carries the message of the story.
3)Raging Bull- the fight scene is filmed in two different speeds to add emphasis to the figt which is filmed at the faster speed of 48 frames per second.
4)Vittorio Stararo was the cinematographer for Apocalypse Now.


Genius of Moving Image Part 1



1) Sam Taylor Woods work can seem filmic in photography and photographical in film. She often uses actors obviously associated with film in her photographic work such as Crying Men which shows a strong link between film and photography. A stronger message is sent b using recognizable, famose men. Her imagery in photography is ethereal which gives a sense of movement, also the use of colour can be filmic.
The other relationship is the overwhelming use of emotional states in both her film and photographic work and an autobiographical leaning. I think perhaps women tend to be dominated by this subject mater in art. She is a victim of herself and uses this in her art.
2) h euse of multi screen installations in Sam Taylor Woods work can play with the viewers sense of spacail percepion in terms f the narrative. The actors are presented in realtion to each other to give their charactors more ephasis to a viewer. it allows sound to be seperated adding to the intensity.
3)Two photgraphers wo have used film as part of their inegral work are Cindy Sherman as she created movie esque sets in which to portray characters which she called ' movie stills' This is photography directly influenced by film.
Also Gregory Crewdson creates hugely expensive photographs set up as if they were a movie with actors, movie lighting, art directors. He also has nothing to do with taking the actual shot which is similar to film as directors do not film as a rule.
4)

Douglas Gordon in his own words:
"I was trying to get to the point where you can make sense of even the most chaotic images or pictures which formally and aesthetically are battling with each other. While one film is representing good, and one represents evil, the fact is that they can coexist quite easily - on a physical and conceptual level. I simply played the two films at the same time, together and on the same picture plane. They were not manipulated in any sense - there was no alteration to the speed, or the sound, or the form."
Steve McQueen
Can art address these questions?
Art can't fix anything. It can just observe and portray. What's important is that it becomes an object, a thing you can see and talk about and refer to. A film is an object around which you can have a debate, more so than the incident itself. It's someone's view of an incident, an advanced starting point.
Shame is released on 13 January

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-bkLmIRzV8
interview with Steve McQueen


5) David Lean

Ryan's Daughter
Lawrence of Arabia
Dr Zhivago
These are examples of films which the director in this case David Lean has chosen to take on a film/script as the locations are so visually captivating. Kerry, The Sahara and Siberia. The locations almost guarentee a great film.

Genius of Photography Part 2

1)Typologies are pictures which represent nothing but the truth and depict things or people as they are in a documentary fashion.
2)The face of the times is a series of photographs taken by August Sander at the time of economic and social unease in Germany in the 1920's. It depicted people in different walks of life as portraits.
3)Rodchenko designed for the USSR in Construction magazine which through propaganda glorified the soviet union.
4)Photomontage is a graphical art of using photography to create re worked, abstracted images through cutting and pasting.
5)Atget used albumen prints because he did not grasp modern techniques being used elsewhere.
6)solarization is the reversal of the negative giving areas which would otherwise be black an extreme finish which can appear unlife like.
7)Bernice Abbott acquired Atget's estate and helped to spread his images of Paris and his unusual way of seeing.
8)Walker Evans was fired fromthe FSA probably for similar reasons to W.Eugene Smith. He could not help but personalize his experience ratyher than portrying the propaganda expected from him.

Genius of photography Part 1

1)The true genius of photography is it's hidden depth which gives the viewer stimulating visual and psychological stimulation ad asks questions on many levels.Photography has the ability to stir our emotions through subject, colour and style as well as memory.
2)Henry Fox Talbot was on of the first pioneers of photography as well as Daguerre but he had a different technique for finishing the image which had more in common with a negative and allowed photography to become mass produced.
3)Mirror memory was the term coined with Daguerrotypes as the metal plate onto which the image was transferred shone/reflected the imposed picture 'memory' as well as the viewers reflection.
4)The term vernacular in photography is used to describe any use of photography which is not deemed as art. This would include passport photos, crime scene/forensic pictures and home snapshots etc.
5)The early pioneers of photography learnt how to stop an exposure from fading into blackness by fixing the black and white image with a nitrate solution, silver nitrate.
6)Cartes de visites were a knock on reaction to the sudden ability to mass produce images. They were small and mounted on card and were posted around by people as keepsakes.
7)Nadar had the ability to capture his models naturally without all the trappings of Victorian or the equivalent life. He brought out the essence of the sitter's personality.
8)Pictorialism was a back lash against the mass production and use of vernacular photography in society. I t wanted to create its own branch of fine art photography in keeping with painterly works of the time.

Genius of Photography Part 5

1) Diane Arbus said that 'the camera gave me licence to strip away what you want people to know about you, to reveal what you cant help people knowing about you'.  1960's
2) I think some photographers do prey on vulnerable people.
3)
4)Diane Arbus may have committed suicide for reasons unknown to us, however the chances are that she felt ill at ease with herself and struggled with fame and some of the bad press she may have received for her art.
5)Larry Clark shot Tulsa by living with a commune of  young adults and constantly taking pictures of whatever he wanted as everyone was so drug addled and 'free'. I believe he wanted to shock and enjoyed the sense of bohemianism, although he may not have given much thought to any other sort of affect his pictures might have had other than to shock and or notoriety.
6)An example of confessional photography is the work of Nan Goldin. She documented intimate moments in her own life and those of her friends. She experienced abuse and documented this. She focuses on issues in society such as the third gender. The impolite genre is presented in Larry Clark's work such as Tulsa where things that people would normally perceive as shocking are depicted graphically such as drug taking and sexual activity.
7) Araki will not photograph anything he does not wish to remember.
8)The premise of post modernism is to question common thinking, it focuses on the individuals interpretation of the world through experience. Cindy Sherman's typologies of women in movie stills challenged viewers perceptions in an 'image saturated world'.