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.