Landscape Photography - Week Four [Reading Notes]

Bate, David (2010) Photography: The Key Concepts Berg: Oxford, New York. See Chapter 4, In The Landscape

Knowledge and Vision

What is shown in a landscape picture? Whatever is seen is always coded through the picture. Since the goal of landscape painting (where landscape originated) was always more than just showing a scene, what emerged as a dilemma, as much for photographers as painters, was the type of vision implied in the image.

The invention of photography created a new problem for painting: the issue of 'truth' and 'fidelity' in vision. The mechanism of the photographic process was thought to reveal a nature laid bare and ugly in its lack of aesthetic beauty. 

This idea immediately points to the categories that painters and art critics were concerned with in landscape: notions of pleasure, sight and an aesthetic view of nature. These idea dominated their attitudes towards photography as well and provided an allegorical figure for the views of a cultural elite towards the industrial revolution - in which photography was obviously implicated.

History of Landscape

- Photography had a major impact on the aesthetic ideals of paintings. Early photographers interested in art pursued pictorial value derived from the genres of painting. Nature was shaped according to how it was already seen in pictures. Early landscape photography used the same principles used in painting in order to create works of art. This was a time when painters such as Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain's work on landscape painting would combine the 'best' parts of the landscapes into a single, unified 'virtual' landscape. 

17th Century

Their scenes were drawn from nature but collated into singular idealized landscape compositions. These imaginary spaces were anchored mostly to the depiction of biblical scenes, but their evocative imagery, playing with time, space, weather, sunlight within their paintings can be seen to influence film and photography today. For instance like the example Berg gives in the reading where he compares work from this era to have influence over certain scenes used in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

In the latter part of the century however, artists such as John Constable and William Turner have started romanticizing the environment, using it as a principal subject in paintings.


18th Century

Landscape painting in the eighteenth century continued to develop in response to the general social and political climate engered by the ancient regimes in England, France and the rest of Europe. New attitudes to the natural environment emerged, and in England distinctive new topological traditions appeared, reflecting the practice of landscape gardening - the reordering of nature to suit aristocratic patrons. Scenic paintings were still not regarded as ends in themselves. Rather they portrayed the divine harmony of nature, and a calm confidence in the current climate of prosperity. The inclusion of humans being idealized as part of the landscape was now incorporated into many works of art and photography at the time.

20th-21st Century

Nowadays, Landscape is taking shape in the symbolic form of space for the projection of physical thoughts on culture, identification and civilization under the name of natures, as much as a treatise on any actual nature or question of the environment itself. It can now be seen to take the form of many substances - it can mean bricks and mortar, leaves and fields, the desert, vehicles in the streets, overcast or sunny skies, suburban and concrete architecture, seascapes, eroded buildings, panoramic views. It's a highly differentiated discourse on representing space. 

However, in order to understand the art of landscape we need to have an understanding of the distinction between the picturesque, or the beauty and the sublime. 

Documentary/Storytelling Photography - Week Two [Workshop Notes]

Documentary Photography - Class Presentation Notes

A depiction of the real world by a photographer whose intent is to communicate something of importance - to make a comment - that will be understood by the viewer?
Documentary Photography, Life Library [1972]

Art/Journalism
- Form
- Genre
- Tradition
- Style
- Movement
- Practice

Phases:
- Visual Reality
- Social Reality
- Psychological Reality

History:
- The term documentary was first used by John Grierson in 1926.
- However, documentary film was being produced since the 1800s.
- Robert Frank captured pictures during the Great Depression of its effects on different social groups.

Poignant Photographers
- Martin Parr
- Jacob A. Riis
- Dorothea Lange
- W. Eugene Smith - Life Magazine
- Robert Frank
- Richard Billingham


[CHECK STUDY DIRECT FOR OTHER, SIMILAR PRESENTATIONS]



- To be documentary, does it have to be real or can you construct the codes to intend a certain meaning upon your intended audience?

- Creative Treatment = Construction 

- Take a look at the FSA and their photos for another resources on documentary photographers/photography.

Look at the Magnum website as it's full of photography projects all across the world.

Have a look at using Google Street View in contemporary photography.

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Week Two - Practical Task

Go around campus and take photos using a tripod that tell a story or have a decisive moment. Use the skills you learnt from last week's practical workshop.

Here are some of the photos I took during the shoot:



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Homework Task - Documentary Photography

Produce 4 images that tell a story in any style or location of your choice for next week's session.

I carried out my task whilst on holiday in the Canary Islands. The four pictures I've produced tell the story of ......

Documentary/Storytelling Photography - Week Two [Reading Notes]

Documentary and Story-telling, in Photography: the Key Concepts, by David Bate

Intro

- Documentary emerged as a popular practice across a variety of media after WWI and developed throughout the twentieth century. 

- The birth of documentary as a popular form is linked historically to the rise of a large-scale mass press, particularly during WWII. Commercial magazine markets flourished around the world with a constant flow of new stories and pictures, documentary 'stories' on everyday life.

- Documentary aimed to show, in an informal way, the everyday lives of ordinary people to other ordinary people.

- Photographers for these magazines became a key role in the industry's competitive production process. These photographers would act as a reporter of everyday life who supplied the photographs (sometimes the stories) for this growing market.

- The aim of social documentary work was not only to record and document, but also to enlighten and creatively educate

Picture Story: 
A sequence of images that could tell a story with only basic, minimal contextual writing to accompany it. These stories would show the world in motion and full of life, represented by people 'in action': shown smiling, laughing, or looking angry while 'doing' something like work, play or travelling.

Editorial Control

- Pictures could be organized to indicate significance and meaning; for example several images gathered around a larger central portrait could be used to show different aspects of a character (happy, lonely, excited, etc.) or different aspects of their life (work, home, etc.)

- Pictures were organized spatially to construct narrative effect, reinforced by basic written caption, an introductory text and title. As is now well known, cropping of photographs is an essential part of this process, to emphasise specific meanings.

- The sequencing of pictures on a page can radically affect the story told. Editorial control is a key issue and the conflict between photographer and editor over photographic meaning remains highly relevant for documentary photographer today.

- The issue of control and constructed meaning, coupled with ambition, led to photographers publishing their own work as photography books.

Auteur Photographers

- Auteur Photographers: Authors with control over their own work, publishing their own photographic work as photo-books. In these documentary photo-books the photographers were given more prominence than the writing that accompanied them.

Democratic Vision

- The early years of the twentieth century saw the birth of a whole range of documentary movements around the world, groups of people who organzied and made representations of themselves or others for a wider public in film, photography, writing and sound recordings. The ambitions of most of these documentary movements can be seen as driven by the demand for a new reality and a recognition that that ordinary people did in their lives, mattered.

- Social truth was embodied in the modern technological process of 'documenting'. Thus, documentary photography become a tool in a broader movement of social change and liberal attitude. 

- It became a source of visual knowledge, especially in the 1930s since mass literacy skills were not yet achieved globally. It became an international tool of communication and the emergence of humanist photographer which photographs would depict a shared 'common condition'.

- They would become a key part of the legal/judicial systems as photographs would be considered evidential documents of truth. But how close is documentary photography to social documentary photography? If documentary practices are as different as the visual means used to archive them, then how to define documentary photography as a social practice?

How the Other Half Lives

- Nineteenth-century documentary mode photographers like Matthew Brady, Jacob A. Riis and Lewis Hine of the USA or John Thomson and Henry Mayhew in Britain all aimed to inform, educate and disseminate the truth about an issue using photography, alongside writing. They wanted to demonstrate that documentary seeing was a way of knowing and further, that knowing would improve humanity.

- Issues they all documented - war, slums, immigrants and child labour, and street workers.

- The emphasis of 'seeing' was to show something as true, associated with giving the reader empirical evident with a strong educational or judicial tone. 

- By the 1930s, it was possible to see two general modes of documentary photography. Objective and Subjective which were binary opposites. These two tendencies privileged either a neutral camera view, the so-called 'objective approach' or the subjective idea of instantaneity, the capturing of a fleeting instant as the expression of everyday life.

- Techninally, in semiotic language it might be said that the formed 'tripod-photography' emphasises the informational codes, the qualities of the lens and film (e.g. depth-of-field, high-fidelity information) while the other 'shutter' photography privileges the stylistic and iconographic codes (e.g. blur, cut-off edges, human movement indicating speed and time) of the camera.

Reportage

- Reportage became an accepted genre of socially-critical literature and visual presentation in the 1920s, largely under the influence of the Russian revolutionary avant-garde who extolled fact against the pop entertainment which the European Left had always condemned as the people's opium. Eric Hobsbawm

- News photographs are percieved as signifying events. Art and most documentary photographs signify states. Some documentary photographs are seen as signifying processes. From what we know about minimal narratives, we might say that an ideal minimal story form might consist of a documentary photograph, then an art photograph (process, event, state).  Peter Wollen

- Documentary pictures can show social processes, the actors within it (events) and the conditions in which it takes place (state). The neutral type photography shows the state of something, its 'condition', while reportage uses both event and process to show them as life story 'experiences'. This helps to explain why documentary is itself such a slippery category too since it can embrace different modes of practice, using techniques from art, new and journalism. 

- Documentary photography hovers between art and journalism, between creative treatment and actuality, the very terms that the found of documentary film, John Grierson had combined to define social documentary: the creative treatment of actuality.

- Reportage is similarly an ambiguous concept, ranging from the reporting of an event as news to the description of the social processes and their impact on people, whether as individuals or as a whole social group.

Peripateia in the Documentary Mode

Staging Reality

- Composition and postioning are what help stage a scene, using raw materials which together create photographic codes, a rhetoric form to create a reality effect.

- For Grierson, a good documentary is a good 'interpretation' of real live, one that lights up the fact. 

- Reportage (and snapshots) signify human involvement and expression of life in events. Whilst objective/descriptive photography offers a more disengaged position to the scene. Despite the differences, both subjective and objective are variant modes of the 'straight photograph' and depend on the idea of witnessing 'life', which is so crucial to the documentary form.

Eyewitness

- Another aim of documentary is to make the spectator into an 'eyewitness'. A spectator can participate by seeing with their own eyes hat the photographer has seen; an argument built on trust that what we see is what the photographer had seen.

- The photographer becomes an agent of the truth, producing documents whose responsibility to truth is ultimate and ethical. We see truth visually. It can be thought of as the point of view of a witness who is telling the story about a social event or process.

- Story-telling in photograph implies a potential for fiction and subjectivity. When you or I witness an event, our stories may be quite different; because of where people stand it can seem different, even though it was the same event. In this sense, documentary photography always has an opinion, no matter how subjective or innocent the picture appears to be. A documentary photograph always has a point-of-view.

Reality and Representation

- Documentary relies on the construction of an image of reality in representation. This construction, on which the whole project of documentary was based, can also be described as manifesting a desire for reality. However, the desire for recognition of reality is not only on the part of the photograph; it involves the spectator. Documentary pictures tend to suggest that there is a reality and it is in this sense that we must argue that: documentary photograph construct representations of reality, according to someone's view, their desire to see.

Introduction to Photography - Week One [Workshop Notes]

Using a Camera: Technical Recap

The first part of our practical workshop consist of the class familiarising themselves with digital cameras and their operations. Here are some notes I took down that I knew I'd find important and relevant for future reference:

Aperture and F-Stops

[To Be Completed]

Shutter Speed

[To Be Completed]

ISO

[To Be Completed]

Practical Task: Jubilee

Using my current camera skills and techniques, go around the Jubilee building and take a minimum of four abstract shots that focus on elements that you think define the Jubilee building. Here are a selection of photos from the practical task which I captured on a Nikon D700 fixed lens camera.

Project Brainstorm

After going through our project brief in the workshop, I understood that our projects would have to focus on certain areas of photography such as portrait, documentary, street and landscape. The best way to find what approach I would take for my creative project was to brainstorm ideas about any of my passions and any relevant themes I could relate to photography.

Previous Photography Work:
- Architecture photoshoots
- Recce shoots for filming locations
- Displaced Cultures in the Canary Islands
- Instagram/Snapchat account 

Passions:
- Football
- Food - Independent food outlets in Brighton?
- Films, formats of exhibition
- Music - London Grime
- Friends - Social/leisure activities

Introduction to Photography - Week One [Reading Notes]

Photographic Theory, in Photography the Key Concepts, by David Bate

- Photography was invented in the late 1830s.
- There were three key periods of the development of photographical theory, these were; the Victorian era, the 1920-30s and the 1960s.


The Victorian Era

- How far is photography able to copy things accurately?
- Can we 'trust' photographs as accurate representations of the things they show?
- These questions posed above summed up the attitudes of the time in Talbot's first book of photographs The Pencil of Nature

- How can photography be art? Is art to do with copying?
- What values make photography, art? It's precision or composition, clarity of idealism, naturalism or pictorialism?

A camera is a kind of automated vision that records things, but requires a creative being to bring it into 'art'.


Mass Reproduction in the 1920 and 1930s

- This was a time when cinema and photography were key modern mass media tools.
- Concepts of montage, realism, formalism, democratic visions, modernism, documentary, political photography, psychological realism and others, were all formed in this period.

John Berger's book Ways of Seeing  developed the argument that photography had not only transformed the ways of seeing high art painting, but also demonstrate how images helped to structure the way we see each other as men and women.


The 1960s and 1970s

Photography became a massive part of communication media industries such as:
- Advertising
- TV
- Fashion
- Marketing
- Cinema

Ideologies on photography changed as it moved from a scientific practice to an art form. This was due to postmodernism and the advancements in technology as well as the accessibility of a camera.


Theory of Representation

Photos surround us in our everyday lives in so many spheres of cultural activity, we are rarely conscious of them. 
- Do we see them as photographs?
- How does it relate to how we see ourselves and the world?

Semiotics

This is the study of sign and symbolism systems.
In Barthes book Elements of Semiology, he tried out the idea that you can treat food, furniture of fashion as 'language' within photography.
- We could ask ourselves, is photography a language? Does it have rules that define it?

Saussure showed that the signs in any language are arbitrary, 'unmotivated' and have no particular relation to the signified objects, except cultural convention.
- Saussure went further dissecting how the sign and its components construct meanings. There is a unity between object and concept e.g. sound/image/word + concept.

Language is not a passive reflection of the real word, it is the way through which we come to represent and see it as reality.

--> Thus, the meaning of any photograph is partially dependent upon the viewer's language, as well as the various codes it employs, and their cultural knowledge.


Photographic Codes

- Focus is used in photography and film to indicate relevance and importance.
- Lighting and its direction create meaning within photography which contributes to the the tonal, iconic, taste and rhetorical codes.

RHETORIC

- Defines the organisation of codes into an argument. It is an art of persuasion, aiming to move, to please and instruct. Codes are combined to produce this argument as by themselves, codes are meaningless. It is only when put together in specific combinations that they're effective.

The theory of realism shows us how people think about photography, about the similarity it appears to have with reality. Semiotics, in contrast, highlights the difference between what we see in a picture and the actual reality it depicts as 'non-identical'. 
Whereas realism privileges similitude, in the analogy between codes of perception and human vision, semiotics shows how difference operates in all the codes.


Points of View

- As realism in photos sees a similarity of a picture to a real scene, semiotics sees a perceptive difference.

Photographic vision is monocular, human vision is binocular thus by looking at a photo, our vision is reduced to a monocular viewpoint.

Denotation + Connotation

The technical word for contrasts is ANTITHESIS which is apparent in visual signs in a photo.

A photography mediates meaning where realism is different from reality.


Realism + Reality

Reality is what we believe exists whereas 'realism' is the mode of representation that supports that reality. The realism of the image corresponds to a preconception of reality too. The point is that any picture is usually tested against preexisting suppositions and knowledge about the world. The reading of any picture will already involve assessing how far a picture is credible/plausible.

Photographers often need to think of themselves as having a special point of view, a privileged position, in order to function. It is on of the miraculous features of photography that viewers feel they share in that privilege, the viewpoint of what is seen.