Week 3 Reading

Week 3 Reading: Looking at Portraits:

We do readily recognise the importance of ‘looking right’. We know they are part of how people see each other.

IDENTITY:

• ·        Portraiture is a semiotic event for social identity. Portraits fix our identity in what is essentially an art of description.
• ·        Portraits fix our identity in what is essentially an art of description. Public sphere (passport mugshot), private life (snapshots), social purposes (art, political, medical etc.).
• ·        Portraits are a direct result of the massive impact photography has had. The different uses constitute a large part of the history of photography. A history that shows how portrait photography itself became a values commodity within the nineteenth century industrial revolution.

THE INDUSTRIAL PORTRAIT:

• ·        Development of studio portraiture. Photography became a cheaper and quicker method of making a portrait of someone, as much less labour was involved than in a painting.
• ·        The studio context provided the opportunity for people-clients- to see themselves in a picture as they wished to appear. Social identity became a performance for the camera.
• ·        John Tagg ‘democracy of the image’- photographic portraiture created a situation where it was no longer a privilege to be pictures. The portrait became a means of identification of the population, even though who did not wish to be recognised, like criminals.

MASS PORTRAITURE:

• ·        Aaron Scharf describes how painters were obliged to use photographs as the basis for painted portraits and began to change the conventions of posture and style in their own paintings.
• ·        Disederi’s ‘carte-de-visite’, was easy to carry around and cheap to produce in comparison to whole plate portraits. Cameras like this increased the number of portraits produced from eat plate, cutting the cost of each picture by a quarter or more. This invention also flattered the aspiring classes with images that mimicked the trappings of bourgeoisie settings.
• ·        This revealed the aspirations of the sitter more than their own actual status.  Carte-de-visite photographs emphasised the social aspirations of the sitter, while more up market social portraits emphasised that sitter’s particular personality.
• ·        The combination of social and personal features involved in portraits that lends them their special fascination to questions of identity.

BUREAUCRATIC PORTRAITS:

• ·        With the mechanism of image production, the police, doctors, army, various schools of scientists etc. all developed archives of photographs to be kept and used as evidence.
• ·        The physical appearance of an individual was assumed proof that they were typical of a certain social type whose psychology is indexed to their appearance and can be read off from that visual profile.
• ·        The portrait is a means employed to establish the identity of a sitter, regardless of whether they are viewed as a social problem or a human being with positive features.
• ·        The main arguments about portrait images circulate in relation to questions of social identity and process of identification.

ELEMENTS OF A PORTRAIT:

• ·        All portrait photographs are typically made up of four key elements: Face/pose/clothing/location
• ·        Sub genres of portraiture vary their emphasis on each of these components; each element affects another in the overall potential for meaning.
• ·        Passport photographs- plain background focuses on face of the sitter. Removes potential social connotations. The use of the four elements and their combined relation in the picture are what organises the rhetoric of a portrait.

THE FACE:

• ·        The expression on a face is crucial and can exert a considerable impact on how a portrait signifies meaning. An expression can have a dramatic impact even with the slightest movement. We read these components of the head and face for mood, temperament and character in relation to ethnicity, sex and age and for their ‘attitude’ as well as towards the viewer.

POSE:

• ·        A pose can be a self-consciously adopted manner intended to express a specific cultural identity.
• ·        Whether it is strength or weakness, power or the lack of it etc, the important thing here is to grasp the register in which such connotations take their meaning.
• ·        The pose signifies the art of a good portrait and contributes to the significance of character, attitude and social positon.
• ·        How a person carries their body can be read as embodying their psychological attitude, pointing to a social or sociological grouping and revealing anthropological habits.
• ·        Passport photographs try to abolish all aspects of subjective emotion in the portrait. Attempting neutral codes to see people as they really are.

CLOTHES:

• ·        Clothes indicate a great deal about someone’s social identity and how they relate to it.
• ·        A uniform makes it easy to distinguish a factory worker from a police officer.

LOCATION:

• ·        The setting or background behind the sitter provides a context for the sitter. It quite literally locates the sitter within a social place and we judge their position accordingly.

When talking in class critically about the reading, we focused on the four elements within portraiture.
We highlighted how in contemporary portraiture we are consumed with the art of taking selfies, self portraiture has almost taken over and our appearance has become pivitol in the way we express ourselves over social media. 

We also considered that another element, both for women and men is makeup. We search for ways to find out how to look like people we aspire to be. We look to media sources such as Instagram and YouTube to find videos to teach us how to look like the A list stars. This view of wanting to aspire to be something better through our appearance has been conditioned in our modern culture. 

Another point we made was that our want to be keep with the up and coming trends may not even be a way to stand out, but to keep up with looking the same as everyone else. We may not want to stand out and look different, but by keeping up with trends, we avoid the situation of looking anything other than normal/mainstream.

Therefore we could ask ourselves as to whether modern portraiture has become a problem? We rely on the new technology for selfies, and self portraits. We constantly edit our representation of ourselves to essentially fit in that we become obsessed over it. We focus more on the digital version of ourselves than we do our real self to the point where some people cant even be recognised when comparing their digital and real self. 

Week 2 Cartier Bresson's Viewpoint

http://truecenterpublishing.com/photopsy/decisive_moment.htm 


When looking at Cartier Bresson's work, it is interesting to see his take on documentary photography. The photographer describes his images as Images a la Sauvette, which translated means, images on the run. When I first read this, I imagined the idea of images being taken on the move, or a sense of spontaneity rather than planning images. He later explains his key theme when taking images is to capture, the decisive moment. Cartier-Bresson explains this term by suggesting that 'the secret is to forget you are carrying a camera'. In many ways he could be trying to explain that by always keeping your camera  to your hand or close to your eye, you will be able to look through the camera as if it were your reality. The photographer confirms this by telling the reader to go out to discover the image and seize it. The camera is later described as a sketchbook, describing documentary photography as spontaneous and a constant art in which you have to feel involved in what you are framing through the viewfinder.

Cartier Bresson argues that there is not one correct point of view. Important features of composition are found through a lot of training- This is something I slightly agree with, with practise you are able to understand how a picture can be taken with more depth. However, I believe with concentration and a bit of playfulness, someone with less experience could definitely create a similar effect.




'Visual organisation can develop only from a developed instinct' - Here i definitely do not agree with this statement that Cartier Bresson is making. In my opinion, I think there is no one way to take an image, there are 7 billion people on this planet who all think differently and individually, therefore there are over 7 billion versions of reality and each one will look at reality and through the viewfinder differently to another. I do not believe that you have to be developed to take a good photograph. Any photograph has an opportunity to stand out in it's own way.

Week 2 Practical

This task was followed on from our week studying documentary. In all honesty, at this point I had mixed emotions about documentary. I did not like the idea of having to be imposed on other people's lives, i did not like having to essentially feel like a stalker. I did not want to capture images that people may not have wanted to be captured. However, I feel like the end result of this task slightly gave me a different perspective on documentary.

After researching as a class on the photographer, Henri Carter-Bresson, we learned about his style of waiting for the decisive moment in photography. We were asked to replicate this style. Taking out cameras we were asked to set ourselves up in a location on campus to take our own decisive moment. We could either take a trigger happy approach- constantly taking pictures and then selecting the best one by narrowing them down in the editing stage. On the other hand, we could take an approach to take images cautiously. Our subjects could be people, animals, objects, anything that was able to create a decisive moment to make the image stand out.

When I set out onto the campus, I was very unmotivated as I felt awkward taking images of people that I had not asked to take part. However, I thought i was prop myself behind a bench with a couple sitting on it. After a few minutes i was able to take a few shots and thought that they would be satisfactory to take back to class.

When looking through my selection of images, I was shocked to find that the images i had been taking came out very successfully. I caught a great moment of light intimacy between a couple, I especially liked my choice to create short depth of field in the background which gave focus to the foreground of the two subjects. It could be argued that the image is slightly too dark, however I liked it as it gave the image an essence of a silhouette feature to it. This also gave a bit of dignity to the couple but also enabled us to be spectators in a quick, but heartwarming moment.

Week 2 Photographer

NAN GOLDIN

In class, a fellow classmate presented his journal article which explained the work about Nan Goldin. I had never heard of her work before, but was intrigued by her images and wanted to further research her and her images for myself.

Nan Goldin is a contemporary American photographer, who's work became known in the 1980s. Her work was described as intimate, gritty and quite busy and chaotic. Goldin would take images in any situation, taking images of intimate moments in her community, to taking self portraits of herself after she had been abused. Goldin turned photography of everyday people, parties, sexual moments and private events into a matter worthy of attention. Her most famous body of work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency has become an invaluable record of a creative community soon to be torn apart by the AIDS crisis - with many of the artist's photographs now haunting memorials of friends and lovers lost to the disease.

Ryan in the tub (1976)

When researching further, it was argued that although Goldin is famous for gritty, "in the moment" photographs, a lot of her portraits are carefully posed. Goldin focuses on “the gaze” of her subjects. This is touched upon in Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger describes various ways that people in images look at each other, and at the viewer, as a way to read power dynamics in painting and popular culture, stating that women are presented to be looked at, while men do the looking. Goldin's photographs upheave these traditional representations, by inviting viewers to share her erotic gaze towards a naked man, or staring straight out at the viewer confrontationally. Her photographs are extremely important challenges to traditional power relations as they are played out in images in art and everyday life.

Self-portrait in my Blue Bathroom, Berlin (1991)

This image was a later self-portrait, Goldin photographs herself in the bathroom. Serving as a backdrop, which is multiplied in the bathroom mirror's reflection, the blue tiles take up most of the image. The geometric shapes are only broken up by Goldin's face sitting in the bottom corner of the mirror. She looks off and out of the frame.

The blue tiles overpower the portrait, engulfing Goldin's disembodied, hovering head. Goldin often photographed people, especially women and young girls, in bathroom mirrors. The artists use of mirrors again plays with expectations of the gaze between photographer, photographic subject, and viewer: here photographer and subject are the same woman, and it's hard to tell if she is looking at herself or something else. As viewers we are not acknowledged, however the subject knows we are watching her.

The bathroom is a place usually associated with privacy, where people, and especially women, and queer people can be both comfortable and safe, while also being a space they can transform themselves into the type of person they want to present to the world or, alternately, the person the world demands them to be. Bringing the camera into the bathroom reinforces Goldin's interest in addressing the unspoken or hidden private moments that build up into identities, appearances, and selves.

Hidden,
the gaze,
staged but natural
images in the moment

Week 2 initial idea

Above is a brainstorm of ideas that i created when thinking of very early ideas and thoughts for my project brief.

It is very early on in the module and knowing me, it is very likely that I am going to completely change my mind or develop deeply into one specific point. However I wanted to try and get some thoughts down early in order to start researching photographers, themes and movements.

I think my ideas are based a lot around the idea of subjectivity and documentary. I find this quite unusual as there is a big contrast between the two. One is based on creativity, interpretation and sometimes abstract and ambiguous technique, whereas documentary in my opinion is quite objective, in the moment and contains a lot of realism. However part of me wants to try and combine the two.

One thing that is definite, is that i will want to use people in my images, whether they are models or natural spectators is undecided, but i know i like to involve people and human interaction in my images.

The use of textures in my project is also intriguing to me, over the years i have seen photographers directly paint, burn, rip and submerge their images under water. Whether this is something I take on or not will be something i look into. I think I will find a few photographers to analyse in more depth and hopefully i could take inspiration off for possible project ideas.

Week 2 Reading

DOCUMENTARY AND STORY-TELLING

• ·        Emerging after the First World War, documentary photography drew on the idea of information as a creative education about actuality, life itself.
• ·        Documentary aimed to show, in an informal way, the everyday life of ordinary people to other ordinary people.
• ·        The photographer was a ‘reporter’ of everyday life who supplied the pictures for this growing market. Creating ‘picture stories’ – a sequence of images that could tell a story by itself with only basic, minimal contextual writing to accompany it.
• ·        The aim of social documentary work was not only to record and to document, but also to enlighten and creatively ‘educate’.

Editorial control:

• ·        The layout of pictures on the page became a key means of articulating a story. Pictures could be organised to indicate their significance and meaning. (small pictures surrounding a large picture could be used to show the different aspects of a character)
• ·        Editors had to think about their advertisers and audience, matters of social taste and potential legal or political issue. This division between the photographers handing control of their pictures to edits often highlights the potential conflict of interest between what a photographer and journalist saw and intended the photographs to say, and what the magazine wants.
• Auteur photographers:
• ·        ‘Auteur’- authors with control over their own work, publishing their photographic work as photo books. These photo-books were given more prominence than the writing that accompanied them.
• ·        Ironically, journalists such as Brassai became more remembered from their photos rather than their written work.

Democratic vision:

• ·        The impetus for the commercial development of documentary came from the rise of mass democratic movements, given inspiration by the Russian Revolution of 1917.
• ·        Factography- the ‘representation of the people’ was essentially absorbed widely into societies that had little or no tradition of it, like Britain. In addition, the early years of the 20^th century saw the birth of a whole range of documentary movements around the world.
• ·        Documentary photography was thus a tool in a broader movement of social change and liberal attitude. The idea was to inform and encourage the population to understand the life in the ‘century of the common people’.
• ·        In the 1930s, ‘worker photography’ movements across Europe inspired by the Russian example of 20s insisted that common people should represent themselves in photographs to show their shared ‘common condition’.
• ·        Self-representation was a form of self-knowledge, which would help transform social relations as experience, were shared with others around the world.

How the other half lives:

• ·        Documentary photographers took images out of social criticism or journalism. These projects used photography with written texts, combined as facts to demonstrate the truth of a social concern, the issues of poverty, child labour, etc.
• ·        They aimed to inform and disseminate the truth about an issue by using photography, alongside writing. They wanted to demonstrate that documentary seeing as a way of knowing which could improve humanity. The emphasis of ‘seeing’ was to know something as true.
• ·        These photographs represented a literally different view of the world.
• ·        By the 1930s there were two general modes operating within the idea of documentary photography: ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’.
• ·        Objective- neutral camera view (John Thomson, August Sander, Eugene Atget)
• ·        Subjective- instantaneity, the capturing of a fleeting instant as the expression of everyday life.

Reportage:

• ·        Reportage implied a greater expressive quality, ‘subjective’ both in its mode of production and the visual connotations it produced.
• ·        Objective = cold/ subjective = hot.
• ·        Social documentary employs three strategies, process, event, state. Moving across and between them to narrate the stories of everyday life through photography.
• ·        Documentary pictures can show social processes, the actors within it (events) and the conditions in which it takes place (state).
• ·        Reportage uses both event and process to show them as life story ‘experiences’.
• ·        Walker Evans believed photography should be a ‘photographic editing of society’. Anything that made up everyday life was scrutinised under Evans camera.
• ·        Documentary photography hovers between art and journalism, between creative treatment and actuality.
• ·        Reportage is similarly an ambiguous concept, ranging from the reporting of an event as news to the description of social processes and their impact on people, whether as individuals or as a whole social group.

‘Decisive moment’ as peripateia:

• ·        Henri Cartier-Bresson’s idea of  the ‘decisive moment’ fuses a notion of instantaneity in photography (the freezing of an instant) with an older concept from art history: story telling with a single picture
• ·        Peripateia- showing the ‘pregnant moment’ of the story, where the past, present and future of the story can be summed up. The pregnant moment is the instant when the future of the story will be determined.
• ·        Cartier-Bresson formulates his concept of the decisive moment as ‘one unique picture whose composition possess such vigour and richness and whose content so radiates outward from it, that this single picture is a whole story in itself’
• ·        The most common device in Cartier-Bressons own photography is his use of a figure whose foot is about to touch the ground. The striding foot indicate a future event, caused by the past whose outcome is anticipated by what we see in the picture. The viewer can imagine the sequence of events constituting the story, which a single picture can only imply.
• ·        The decisive moment is thus the instant when the photographer must click the shutter to capture not ‘reality’, but the dramatic instant that will come to signify it.
• ·        In this mode of documentary work, the camera is perhaps better thought of as a portable theatre, or studio, where the photographer ‘stages’, create a scene from the flux of life.

Staging Reality:

• ·        The medium involved in all photography, decisions about the position of the camera within and toward the event are what organises the staging of the scene. ‘Composition’ is here simply the organisation of raw material into photographic codes, a rhetorical form to create a reality effect.
• ·        By facing the subject matter head on, it is deploying the rhetoric of photographic codes too. This is not to dismiss documentary but for Grierson, a good documentary is a good ‘interpretation’ of real life, one that ‘lights up the fact’. It is about interpretation, not objectivity or truth.
• ·        Reportage signifies human involvement and expression of life in events
• ·        Objective/descriptive photography offers a more disengaged position to the scene.

Eyewitness:

• ·        The aim of documentary is to make the spectator into an eyewitness. The photographer becomes an agent of truth, producing ‘documents’ who responsibility to truth is ultimate and ethical.
• ·        Documentary as a subjective viewpoint appears involved and engages in the event, while the neutral picture seems to lack commitment, as almost indifferent or disengaged.
• ·        The ‘concerned’ photographer might find reportage more attractive as the rhetoric engagement in life.

Reality and representation:

• ·        Documentary relies on the construction of an image of reality in representation. This can also be described as manifesting a desire for reality.
• ·        The very recognition of what was not ‘recognised’ in public (homeless, poverty, excluded ethnic groups) as reality has given the justification for taking photographs of these people or their lived circumstances.
• ·        Documentary photographs construct representation of reality, according to someone’s view, their desire to see.

Desire to see:

• ·        Politics of vision comes to play a role in the crucial issue of what viewers do with the knowledge presented to them in documentary photographs. ‘confronting’ a situation is not something humans are good at, to it is not surprising if a documentary that sets out to change the mind of its audience does not succeed.
• ·        The idea of witnessing invokes the concept of voyeurism, defined as an illicit or obsessive act of looking. The often-felt sense of guilt or shame that accompanies voyeuristic looking manifests in being annoyed at the photograph.
• ·        Outrage and protest at photographic representation show that representation can intervene in a spectator’s belief in reality.
• ·        Jacques Lacan argues that looking can be invested with jealousy. Looking is the wish to observe, to make sure someone does not have what you have. This is relevant to the reality effect invested in the documentary genre. Whether conscious or unconscious, the narcissism of the viewer is involved in the capacity to recognise ‘alien’ matter.
• ·        The direct address to the viewer does not ensure that pity, empathy or respect are felt by that viewer. Under such conditions, documentary has had to renovate itself, adopting different strategies to attract audience.

Colour documentary:

·        During the 1980s, the use of colour photography began to appear in documentary and art.

·        Colour might bring a ‘new’ veracity to concerned photography. The more ‘authentic’ realism of the colour snapshot was gradually absorbed in to the style of documentary photography.

·        This shift of focus from the public social sphere to more intimate private spheres regenerated a completely new interest in documentary photography as art.

·        The use of medium and colour film has created a newer, higher fidelity colour documentary tradition.

Week 1 Workshop and Practical

In our first weeks practical we were asked to take on a task using an abstract state of mind. Using our cameras, we had the task of going to the jubilee building and using the idea of abstract portraiture we had to take images that referred to the building.

We had to show in our images, what the building was for, what it's like, creating a general overall theme for the building through the eyes of our lens. The main point from our teacher was to focus on the ambiguity of the image at hand, to describe it but not literally.

 I think all the images below are successful in the sense that they are have some form of abstractivity to them. This first image was one of my favourites. I loved the overlapping and continuous lines and shapes throughout the composition. The geometric style to the image really enhanced the ambiguity but also represented the Jubilee building in a lot of ways. The jubilee building is known for business and maths modules, therefore the geometric and structured composition really complimented the style of work that was being undertaken within the building. As the image was taken from a low perspective, the building is almost given an authority which is an aspect that can be related to the building as it is a relatively new, and large building that stands out among the campus. However, the plain colours and repeated pattern could also bring quite a boring and mundane aspect to the image. In my opinion i think this reflects the building quite well to my own taste for the building, as I do not particularly like the style of the building itself as it feels quite boring and dull from the outside.

 This image when looking over my contact sheet, I found the most obscure and interesting to look at. The reflection in the window creates a distorted, dreamlike state as the lines are slightly wobbly and looks as if the building is constantly moving. I wish that this image could have been captured with more people in the reflection as i am intrigued to see how this would have played out. However, i like the perspective as It almost looks as if the viewer is hiding and spectating as we are not supposed to.

Again, I selected this image as the perspective made it look unique. For some of my classmates, it took them a few seconds to grasp the perspective of this image. I liked the idea of people having to look closer and further into the image to understand what it going on. The image was taken in the same place as the first image in this post, just in a different angle and I liked how taking it from underneath made it look completely different.

 This image was not one of my favourites, however it did stand out again the rest when selecting my images and narrowing them down. Again the due to lighting and shadows, there were so many different lines and shapes present in this arrangement. Although it may not look completely abstract, which is what the brief was, I still liked how the shadows created a depth and pattern throughout the flights of stairs. The shadows patterns are clear to see in the foreground as well as the background which I liked. There was a relationship between the continuity and the ambiguous which I found interesting to think about in my own thoughts.

This image here I thought was quite abstract when looking, you do not fully understand where it is being taken and what angle. Again, a common theme throughout these images is the use of continuous lines and structure. Reflection and shadows is also a key theme in my images especially.

Thinking about this task in relation to ideas for my final project, I do not think this theme is going to be carried on. As much as I find satisfaction in taking landscape images, I feel much more creative and involved when people are used in my photography. However, I did enjoy having to look as landscape from an ambiguous perspective as it took a lot of thought of how I could represent the purpose of the jubilee building through an abstract theme.

Week 1 Journal Article

OBSOLETE AND DISCONTINUED 2015

One of the tasks we were given was to search for a journal article either online or in the library that had some of interest to us. I chose to do some searching online and when looking on the British Journal of photography, I came across this article written by Izabella Radwanska Zhang.

http://www.bjp-online.com/2018/08/group-projects-obsolete-discontinued/

The reason this article interested me was mainly by the images that were created from the darkroom papers. However, taking time to read over and discuss it in class made me realise that although it may have been a boring subject, I was somehow still interested in the idea that these images were processed on materials that had been alive for decades. I loved the connection that was created between the old and new.

It was brought up in discussion that this article is hard to grasp; it was argued that the article would have more influence if we could hold the images in our hands and get a feel for the materials rather than looking online. I had to disagree, as a part of a generation surrounded by technology, you can only look at this as a positive. We have so much more access to images around the world through means such a JPEG that we can still connect with the image and the context behind it, without having to hold it in our hands or stand in front of the original version.

Although this article is something that may not have an influence on my process in terms of my project brief, I enjoyed the concept of merging the old and new together to form a creative piece of art.

Week 1 reading

thoughts
agree disagree
how will i use for further work

PHOTOGRAPHY THEORY

·        There is no un-theoretical way to see photography- would never have been invented without theories of chemistry (geometry, light an optics)

·        Technique is a practical theory

·        Photography theory is the method or means for a systematic understanding of its object.

·        We need theory when there is a problem to be dealt with and an existing mode of thought cannot deal with it.

History of photography theory:

·        Victorian aesthetics – how far is photography able to copy things accurately? If photography copies things, how can it be art? Still held the similar conclusion we have today – camera is an automated vision, but requires a creative being to bring it into ‘art’. Imagination is required to make a modern technology ‘creative’

·        1920s and 1930s- photography and cinema emerged as key modern mass media tools. The rise of Avant-garde. Concepts of montage, realism, formalism, democratic vision, modernism, documentary etc. were all formed and are still concepts that have an impact on our photography today. Walter Benjamin “the primary question – whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art?”

·        1960s and 1970s- conceptual artists began to use photography too to challenge the orthodoxies of fine art. Artists began to use and interrogate the way photography had overturned traditional notions of art in the manner that Walter Benjamin had indicted. Photography now formal a vital component of the institutional value of art.

Theory of representation:

•        Photographic images are hardly artistic statements, but are significant in how we see the product. Idealised photographs are everywhere, used to incite the desire and appetite of the consumer and not only in the domain of food. Almost everything can be made to look attractive photographically.

This is clear when looking at advertising, however is disagree with the comment that images arent artistic statements. Depending on whether the image is subjective or abstract, an image can reflect subjects such as emotion through simple uses of composition and colour. 

•         Governments acknowledge this power through advertising. What we are allowed to see it a matter of political judgement and decision by social institution. However, the continuous amount of photographs make it easy to forget their impact upon us.

When combined with news media, this use of photography can be used to heavily influence the public's interpretation of power.

•        Louis Althusser- ideology is primarily communicated through imaged, myths, ideas or concepts in ways that we do not usually think about. There ideologies become unconscious.
•        Roland Barthes 1960s- systematic theory of the ideology of photography using semiotics- a method of cultural analysis.

Structuralism:

•        Focused on the structures and the system of rules that underpin and organise any practise and was based primarily in a new, expanded use of linguistic ‘semiotics. Barthes tackles how photographic meaning is achieved, using his own experience to test and develop the semiotic methods and approaches to photography.

Semiotics:

•  Semiotics is the study of sign systems. Thinking about other possible language systems.
•  Words only have their meaning within the particular language, the code or system in which those signs operate. The relation between a sign and the object it designates is arbitrary. There is no reason why we call an animal a dog except as a matter of cultural convention.
•  Language secures reality. The habit of the use of language ‘naturalises’ the relation to objects around us. Is a picture of someone throwing a bomb an image of a ‘terrorist’ or ‘freedom fighter’? The same visual signifier can have different interpretations depending on the viewpoint where meaning is sometimes a political batter over the world.
• Even the most fundamental signified meaning of any photograph is partially dependent upon the viewer’s language as well as the codes that it employs and their cultural knowledge.

Photographic codes:

•     In photography, many codes are already built into its materials. Perspective is built into the camera and lens, the lens organises light to fall on a surface plane to create an image in perspective. We can vary these codes by point of view, changing the type of lens.
•     Focus is used in photography to indicate relevance and importance –out of focus, background/in focus, important/foreground.
•     Lighting is culturally coded too, a direction of light (top light) from above can signal an otherworldly presence or angelic innocence. Move the light behind the head and you have glamour photography light. Bottom light under the chin can create a devilish shadowy face.

When talking about this point in class specifically, I agreed with the reading as different perspectives of an images can propose different expressions and meanings. However, these interpretations of an image are only temporary. Not everyone will grasp the same analysis of an image. When an analysis is created from one particular audience, another can be created or developed on. 

Rhetoric:

•         Defines the organisation of codes into an argument- art of persuasion, aiming to move, please and instruct. It is from the drawing on the stock of rhetorical forms that individual photographs can become original, seen as creative.
•         In photography, codes are combined to produce a rhetorical argument- to be effective in producing a ‘good photograph’.
•     The ‘language’ of photography:
•         Realism is an aesthetic theory based on similarity or an identity between the photograph and the depicted reality.
•         Semiotics brings the approach that if we bring attention to the difference between the photograph and the real object represented, we can begin to highlight what photography brings to the viewer.
•         While realism hold to the idea that the signifier (photograph) is the same as the signified (reality). The signifier (photograph) has disappeared into the signified (referent) and we only see the subject matter.
•         Both theories are useful because they draw attention to different aspects of photography.
•         The theory of realism shows us how people think about photography and the similarity it appears to have with reality.
•         Semiotics highlights the difference between what we see in a picture and the actual reality it depicts as non-identical.

Points of view:

•         In terms of realism, there is a sense of immediacy to the scene, I feel as though I was there.
•         In terms of semiotics, I know very well that this structure of immediacy is organised by codes of perception analogous to my own vision and codes of recognition that draws on specific cultural knowledge.
•         Realism sees a similarity of the picture to a real scene, semiotics sees a perceptive difference.
•      Denotation – The visual signifiers:
•         Technical word for contrast is antithesis
•         In the study of rhetoric, antithesis is one of the common forms of argument. People contrast one thing with another. In advertising, image markers are fond of making a contrast between the new and old- an antithesis about age. Understanding how a rhetorical device like antithesis is at work in an image in photographic codes helps us to understand how meaning is derived from them.

Realism and Reality:

•         Reality is what we believe exists whereas realism is the mode of representation that supports that reality. The reading of any picture will already involve assessing how far that picture is credible or plausible.
•         In advertising, a picture may show something unbelievable but this does not challenge our concept of reality if we believe people cannot do that.
•         It is the argument put forward by the realism of the photograph: the world is like this because this is how it looks, but it can look different, which depends on how it is photographed.
•         Photographers and viewers share the privilege of the viewpoint of what is seen. The sense of veracity that it claims and organises. Therefore, it is important not to forget that there is a difference involved in photographs.
•         What the realist takes for granted as reality, semiotic argue is constructed through a photographic discourse of codes.
•         Visual semiotics does not refute the existence of reality; rather it develops a way to speak about how the graphic marks on a flat piece of paper come to signify a reality?

Post structuralism:

•         While the photograph itself does not change, the chains of cultural connotation with which it may be attached are never fixed. A context or discourse are only temporary. 

Introduction to course

My name is Hannah Burgess and i am starting my second year with an open mind to photography.

I have always believed that photography is subjective. No interpretation of an image can be true or false. Likewise, I believe that one image can be connected to thousands of interpretations and understandings. Despite this, I know that photography comes with a lot of theory and am keen to understand why photography could also be argued as objective and neutral.

I thoroughly enjoyed my first year and experimenting with different compositions, textures and elements into my images. Looking back at my project: Struggle for Identity, there are a lot of parts from my project that I am very proud of, and a lot of parts I am keen to improve on this year.

This year, I want to involve a lot more artist research into my learning process. I think that this would boost my development and style that i want to take forward for my project. This approach could also benefit my inspiration and ideas process when choosing my final ideas for the module.

Last year my images were very subjective when relating to my final topic. This meant that my images were deeply analysed which sometimes could be a benefit, however, there were times when sometimes my images became lost to the project brief due to the subjectivity. I am interested in taking a more objective view to my project this year and seeing where this inspiration process could take me.