Throughout the story "An Uncertain Grace: Photography and the Alchemy of Light and Time" there were seven pictures that were talked about. The article talked about these specific pictures because each photo represents different things and different modes when looking at the image. The five elements in photography are the thing itself, the details, the frame, the time, the vintage point. The images that were shown in the article each represent at least one of the five elements of photography. The article talks about historical events that helped understand things better, as well as stories that helped me understand more of the different moods that an image can bring on.…
During this presentation, the main focus is on what kind of prompt the professor will give to her photography students. In this prompt she wants depth in clarity, a rhetorical analysis, looking to understand the content and clarity for the audience to understand. Not only is that, but the key point the professor want the student to focus how Robert Adams a photographer and author of “Beauty in Art” define beauty and what the important of truth in art which the professor had written down in the…
In the world of art, the photograph has conventionally been used to establish original subjects that document and reflect cultures as accurately as possible. However, in Philip Gefter’s essay, “Photographic Icons: Fact, Fiction, or Metaphor”, Gefter points out that, “just because a photograph reflects the world with perceptual accuracy doesn’t mean it is proof of what actually transpired. (208)” What Gefter is telling us is that it is that the ordinary reality of the image is not what is important; the metaphoric truth is the significant factor. What makes photojournalism essential is that it helps show us how to view the world in an individualized way. It is, essentially, a public art, and its power and importance is a function of that artistry. From the war photography of Mathew Brady (who was known for moving dead bodies to create a scene) to Ruth Orkin (who directed a second shot to capture “American Girl in Italy”, when the first “real” shot was not to her liking), Gefter underscores that, although these shots are not the unedited version of life,…
“Photographs are “easy” to understand in visual terms as they are composed of elements found around us and more importantly they allow viewers to envision themselves in the photograph.”…
In Pictures and Power, an essay about the forms of power of the images, W.J.T Mitchell described the image “not merely as instruments of power, but as internally divided force-field, scenes of struggle indicated by the hybrid term of the “imagetext.””(Mitchell 323) In another word, to Mitchell the image, itself a vessel for the creator’s voice (Mitchell 140), is almost a battlefield, one which witnesses a three-way clash between the voices of the image’s creator, the observer and the image’s owner, or the one who owns the mean to reproduce it. To demonstrate this clash, we will have a photograph by the French photographer Robert Doisneau titled Be bop in The Vieux Colombier, a club in Saint Germain des Près (Doisneau). Taken in 1951, Paris,…
In general photography is used to trick the audience’s eyes. For example, advertisement is displayed every single day in our lives manipulating the honesty. When a cigarette commercial goes on they have enhanced the color, and edited all the little details that appeals to our emotions, making cigarettes look good. The only problem is cigarette isn’t good for you, but the viewers wouldn’t get that message due to the changes the photographers have made. Following this further Sontag said “… one never understands anything from a photograph.” The reason for that is because photography shows everything but context. Photography gives you a small glimpse of reality, but the realities have been manipulated to the photographer’s idealism.…
We are conformed to believe this is true because we generally believe that “seeing is believing” and that the images provided we take as ‘photographic truth’. The mechanical nature of image-producing systems such as photography and film, and the electronic nature of image-making systems such as television, computer graphics, and digital images, bear the legacy of ‘positivist’ concepts of science (Lecture 6 / Technologies of Visual Reproduction, 2001).…
Photography has accomplished the task of manipulation to the point where images do not exhibit the honesty. In general photography is used to trick the audience’s eyes. For example, ads are displayed every day in our lives distorting the honesty portrayed. Long ago when a cigarette commercial came on they had enhanced the color, and edited all the little details that appeals to our emotions, making cigarettes look good. The only problem is cigarette isn’t good for anyone, but the viewers wouldn’t get that message due to the changes the photographers have made. Following this further Sontag infers that nothing that comes from a photo can really be understood. The reason for that is because photography shows everything but context. Photography gives people a small glimpse of reality, but the realities have been manipulated to the photographer’s idealism.…
The search for visual truth is a continuing quest. A pondering of ontology pushes our efforts and abilities as a homogenous culture to question and challenge identity within the visual boundaries of technology and time. Building upon the visual codes and methods of the past, the relatively young medium of photography conveys the surrounding subjects in true aesthetic representation. We surround ourselves with images of the past wistfully longing for what some consider a better, more civilized time. Photographs-- especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the disintegrating past-- are inspirations to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by a photograph feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance or a longing to reactivate a past moment, feeling or experience. The lover’s photograph hidden in a married man’s wallet, the poster photograph of a pop star pinned up over an teenager’s bed, the coin in your pocket with the imprint of Lincoln’s face, the snapshots of a hairdresser’s child taped to their beauty mirror- all such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact, transcend or lay claim to another reality. Portrait photography adheres to long existing functions, however new and instantaneous the medium may be. In order to understand photography, more specifically- portraiture, we must deconstruct the meaning and approach within the modern context. Just as any Fine Art, photography lives an intellectual and visual existence-…
In chapter one, Sontage gives readers a idea which “the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads—as an anthology of images”(2). The writer uses a metaphor here to emphasize that how importance of photography, and how it works in human’s mind. After he indicates a relationship between photographer and photography; “to photography is to appropriate the thing photographed, [it] means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power” (2). In addition, Sontage gives a note which is “a photography—any photography—seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects” (6). This is also means that photography is not only for keep the memories, but also can be provided as evident for something exists.…
The myth of photographic truth is that we perceive photographs to be an unmediated copy of the real world. This understanding comes from positivism, the theory that scientific knowledge, gained through empirical data, is the only authentic knowledge. Machines (such as cameras) were thought to be more reliable than humans to provide this data and knowledge. As we know, however, images can be altered, reflect only one instant in a situation, and can be taken out of social and historical context. The power of images is strong because we still share this belief that photos are faithful records of events. Roland Barthes considered photographic truth a myth, not because the photographs aren’t true but because his understanding of truth (as always culturally inflected) is at odds with the positivist understanding of truth as something that can be independently…
Manipulating images is unfortunately not an uncommon practice. In fact, it has been part of photojournalism about as long as photojournalism has existed. Not only has it existed for many years but it is easier to do than ever with the constant technological advances. The biggest issue with manipulating images is that there is not a solid standard for photographers to follow, and there has never been.…
Before the advent of digital imaging, we rely on paintings and books to record for documentary use. While paintings and books suggest the clear separation of what is truth and what is falsehood, people believe that camera is trustworthy and photos taken from it are the truth because camera is a machine with no emotions. Digital imaging gives better quality images to readers. However, due to the potential of digital photography manipulation, it has clarified that truth is not fixed anymore but has fluidity. There is no absolute truth.…
The evolution of digital photography in the 1990s brought about dramatic changes in the art of capturing photos and their interpretation. Though pictures were manipulated in the past too, digital photography gave photo manipulation added dimensions. There exist varying institutions that make use of photographs to each serve their purposes. In this paper, I am going to talk about the usage of photographs in the form of maps, in terms of art and their use for the purpose of photo journalism.…
Through a picture we have a record not only of our past, but of our present as well. We can consider the medium of photography to be a supreme witness and recorder of the world, and the life we have fashioned upon it. Photographers record wars, injustices, poverty, human misery, and human joy.…