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.