Week 4 [Reading Notes] - Stephen Shore and 'The Nature of Photographs'

Reading Notes:

Shore, S. (2007) 'The Deceptive Level' in The Nature of Photographs by Stephen Shore: A Primer. 2nd edn. New York: Phaidon Press. pp. 36-95

Photography is inherently an analytic discipline. Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture.

A photographer standing before houses, streets, people, trees and artefacts of a culture imposes an order on the scene - simplifies the jumble by giving it structure. He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus.

The formal character of the image is a result of a range of physical and optical factors. These are the factors that define the physical level of the photograph. But on the depictive level, there are four central ways in which the world in front of the camera is transformed into the photograph: flatness, frame, time and focus.

These four attributes mentioned above define the pictures' depictive content and structure. They form the basis of a photograph's visual grammar. They are responsible for the snap shooter's 'mistakes': a blur, a beheading, a jumble, an awkward moment. They are the means by which photographer's express their sense of the world, give structure to their perceptions and articulation of their meanings.

The first means of transformation is flatness. The world is a 3-D; a photographic image is 2-D. Because of this flatness, the depth of the depictive space always bears a relationship to the picture plane. The picture plane is a field upon which the lens's image is projected. A photographic image can rest on this picture plane and, at the same time, contain an illusion of deep space.

- Photographs have (with the exception of stereo pictures) monocular vision - one definite vantage point. They do not have the depth perception our binocular vision affords us.

- When 3D space is project monocularly onto a plane, relationships are created that did not exist before the picture was taken. Things in the back of the picture are brought into juxtaposition with things in the front. Any change in the vantage point results in a change in the relationships.

- Some photographs are opaque. The viewer is stopped by the picture plane. Some photographs are transparent. The viewer is drawn through the surface into the illusion of the image.

- In the field, outside the controlled confines of a studio, a photographer is confronted with a complex web of visual juxtapositions that realign themselves with each step the photographer takes.

The next transformative element is the frame. A photograph has edges; the world does not. The edges separate what is in the pictures from what is not. The frame corrals the content of the photography all at once. The objects, people, events, or forms that are in the forefront of a photographer's attention when making the fine framing decisions are the recipients of the frames emphasis. The frame resonates off them and, in turn, draws the viewer's attention to them. The relationships that edges create are both visual and 'contentual'.

- For some pictures, the frame acts passively. It is where the picture ends. The structure of the picture begins within the image and works its way out of the frame.

Someone saying 'cheese' when having a portrait made acknowledges unconsciously the way time is transformed in a photograph. A photograph is static, but the world flows in time. As this flow in interrupted by the photograph, a new meaning, a photographic meaning, is delineated. 

- Two factors affect time in a photograph: the duration of the exposure and the staticness of the final image. Just as a 3D world is transformed when it is projected onto a flat piece of film, so a fluid world is transformed when it is projected on to a static piece of film. The exposure has a duration, what John Szarkowski in The Photographer's Eye called 'a discrete parcel of time'.

- The duration of exposure could be:
1/10,000th sec = Frozen time: an exposure of short duration, cutting across the grain of time, generating a new moment.
2 secs = Extrusive time: the movement occurring in front of the camera, or movement of the camera itself, accumulating on the film, producing a blur.
6 mins = Still time: the content is at rest and time is still.

Focus is the fourth major transformation in the world of the photograph. Not only does a camera see monocularly from a definite vantage point; it also creates a hierarchy in the depictive place by defining a single place of focus. This plane, which is usually parallel with the picture plane, gives emphasis to part of the picture and helps distil a photograph's subject from its content.

- The spatial hierarchy generated by the plane of focus can be eliminated only by photographing a flat subject that is itself parallel to the picture plane.

- The hierarchal emphasis created by the plane of focus can be minimised by increasing the D.o.F. But there is still one plane that is in focus, with space before and behind rendered with diminishing sharpness. There is a gravitation of attention to the plane of focus. Attention to focus concentrates our attention.

Lecture 3: Louis Porter

Week 4: Lecture 3

Louis Porter - Photographer

Louis Porter (b.1977) is British-born artist who works in the mode of a photographic flâneur, exploring a diverse range of themes including: 
- Urban space
- Photographic archives
- Leisure
- Violence 
His work has been widely exhibited throughout the UK, England, Canada, Austria, China and Australia including multiple solo shows at the Monash Gallery of Art and Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne.
In 2012 he established his own imprint Twenty Shelves, its first publication, The Anatomy of Business, won the inaugural Most Beautiful Books Prize

Overview of Porter's Work
- Photographer/Artist
- Most of his work was produced whilst he was living in Australia.
- The experience of going abroad spurred Porter's interest in photography, and in particular, street photography.
- Became interested in dystopian literature such The Other Side by Alfred Cohen and wanted to create a project around the framework of the city 'Pearl' from Cohen's book
- Carried out in the suburbs of Australia during the summer where the temperature averaged between 20-mid40 degrees.
- Due to the temperatures being so high, most of the suburbs were empty, almost ghost towns 
- Colours such as yellow and blue it's the fastest colour to perceive.
- The project took many years to carry out.

Makes his projects that he is hired to do commercially relate to his own personal projects.
- He aims to focus on the surfaces that are presented to us, looking at structures and frameworks of the environment.

When he was in Beijing, he carried out a project called 'Wires at Night' and 'Red Carpet Security Guards'. 
Another project was 100 flowers, inspired by a communist speech in 1956.
For the 2008 Olympic games there were many flower beds put up in Beijing and this is what Porter focused his project on.

Weegee photographer was a big inspiration for Porter.

Within the archives, there were thousands of mug shots of businessmen. Porter started to categorise these images by hairstyles.

The Small Conflict Archive
Became obsessed with colour, experimented with drum-scanning which are very difficult to use as there are no colour profiles, you had to make comparisons with real life colours.

He chose to photograph subject which are unfinished or poorly painted. He thought there was a hidden pleasure in their incompleteness. 

Other Projects:
- Rupture/Repair
- Signs of Struggle
- Paper Aeroplanes Unraveled
- Digital Wunderkammer
- Exotic Animal Enclosures
- Lost & Found
- The Wall
- Blackout

101 John Smiths
He collected 101 John Smith profile pictures
- By cars, fishing, uniforms, beer, music, guitars

Week 2: Workshop + Practical Session

In this week's workshop, Michael suggested that we read and make notes on McLuhan's chapter on Photography from the book Understanding Media: The Extension of Man. Here are the notes I made on the chapter as well as the discussion we had as a class.

Reading:
Marshall McLuhan (1994) 'The Photograph: the Brothel-without-Walls' in Understanding Media: The Extension of Man, London & New York. The MIT Press; Reprint edition

Marshall McLuhan is an important media theorist who wrote 'Understanding Media', which was influential in the 60s and 70s.
"we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us
"the medium is the message"
"global village"

One might say: "text messaging changes how apples taste."

The word 'camera' comes from the latin word meaning 'room'.

Mediums are extensions of the human body.

Nobody can commit photography alone. It is possible to have at least the illusion of reading and writing in isolation, but photography does not foster such attitudes. If there is any sense in deploring the growth of corporate and collective art forms such as the film and the press, it is surely in relation to the previous individualist technologies that these new forms corrode.

To say that "the camera cannot lie" is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name. Indeed, the world of the movie that was prepared by the photograph has become synonymous with illusion and fantasy, turning society into what Joyce called an "all nights newsery reel," that substitutes a "reel" world for reality. Joyce knew more about the effects of the photograph on our senses, our language, and our thought processes than anybody else. His verdict on the "automatic writing" that is photography was the abnihilization of the etym. He saw the photo as at least a rival, and perhaps a usurper, of the word, whether written or spoken.

The technology of the photo is an extension of our own being and can be withdrawn from circulation like any other technology if we decide that it is virulent. But amputation of such extensions of our physical being calls for as much knowledge and skill as are prerequisite to any other physical amputation.

Perhaps the great revolution produced by photograph was in the traditional arts. The painter could no longer depict a world that had been much photographed. He turned, instead, to reveal the inner process of creativity in expressionism and in abstract art. Likewise, the novelist could no longer describe objects or happenings for readers who already knew what was happening by photo, press, film, and radio.

The Photograph
- To 'commit photography'
- Woodcuts, engraving, prints
- The dots get smaller (pointillism, MOC cool media to hot)
- Visual reports without syntax
- Comparisons with Gutenberg
- A break with Mechanical Industrialism to Graphic Age
- Morse (telegraph to photograph)
- The pinhole camera

Photographs almost become meaningless, they numb the origins of the subject that is being photographed. 

Art photography is a minority pursuit in this day and age.

Lecture 2: Adrian Goycoolea

Adrian Goycoolea - Filmmaker
Born in Brazil to Chilean and British parents, and has lived in Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, New York City and the Midwest

This lecture will look at aspects of filmmaking such as
Experimental
Multi-media Installations
Documentary (Personal/Poetic)
Narrative

Adrian has been an experimental filmmaker for the past 20 years.

Education
- Attended the Universidad del Pacifico, Universidad UNIACC, School of Visual Arts in New York then went to do his postgraduate degree at University of Iowa

Anthology Film Archives
- Founded by Jonas Makes
They have a vault there and do a lot of film preservation from films from the 60s and 70s.
Adrian volunteered here as his friend worked as a projectionist there and he was interested about experimental film. 
Soon he got paid work at the box office there, then he became a theatre manager and film programme for the Anthology Film Archives.

Stom Sogo, Mau, Alex Mendizabel, Lee Elikson, Bruce McClure were all inspirational experiemtnal filmmakers of Adrian's at the time when we worked there

Figure 1: Funk-Taxi Visuals Installation at Taller Boricua Gallery

Funk-Taxi Visuals
Provided multimedia installations for:
- Soundlab
- Afrika Bambaata
- The Roots
- DJ Spooky
- New York Underground Film Festival
- Gales Gates Gallery, NYC
- Taller Boricua Gallery, NYC (see figure 1)



Researching My Thesis Film
- Watched many avant-garde films at Anthology Film Archives.
- Read scientific books about vision, blindness and memory.
- Read theory books around ideas of blindness as it relates to notions of art.
- Look at many paintings that had formal qualities that he was interested in exploring with his film.
- Carried out months of formal experimentation with my single frame technique.
- Sourced home video footage to re-photograph.

Formal Influences
- Gerhard Richter
- Robert Rouschenberg
- Sigmar Polke
- Andy Warhol
- Stan Brakhage
- Ken Jacobs
- Bruce Bailie
- Michael Snow

Memories of a Blind Father
About a man who had lost his vision, so his memories were now visual stills and the older he got, the less visual memories he could recall. This film makes use of Adrian's single frame technique to convey this message.

¡Viva Chile Mierda!
This film makes use of animation and illustration within a documentary with its archive footage and audio clips. It was named one of the 10 best Chilean films of 2014 by Twitch Film.

Adrian's Vimeo Account
https://vimeo.com/user8797883/videos

Screening Notes: John Berger/Ways of Seeing (1972)

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk

Ways of Seeing: Episode 1
This program aims to question some of the assumptions usually made about the tradition of European painting. He considers that way we see these paintings in a 21st-century perspective as we see these painting as nobody saw them before.

By discovering why we see painting with this perspective, we shall also discover something about ourselves and the situation in which we are living.

- A large part of seeing depends upon habit and convention.

- All of the paintings of the tradition (1400-1900) used the convention of perspective, which is unique to European art

- Perspective centres everything on the eye of the beholder. Perspective makes the eye the centre of the visible world, but the human eye can only be in one place at a time.

- With the invention of the camera, everything changed. We could see things which were not there in front of us. It not only changed what we see, but also how we see. It even changed paintings painted long before it was invented.

- Thanks to photography, we can now see paintings in the context of your own life. Before, a paintings uniqueness was part of the place where it is exhibit such as paintings inside Renaissance churches. Everything around them confirms and consolidates its meaning.

- Images now come to you, you do not come to them. It is the image of the painting which travels now. An images meaning or a large part of it has now become transmittable.

- However, you may say, original paintings are still unique due to their physical authenticity. 

- The camera has made traditional paintings possible meanings and destroyed its unique original meaning.

- The uninterrupted silence and the stillness of a painting can be very striking. Because their meaning has no longer attached to them but has become transmittable, paintings lend themselves to easy manipulation by movement and sound.

- In paintings, there is no unfolding of time. Everything is presented simultaneously, unlike a film.

- Music and rhythm changed the significance of picture.

- When paintings are reproduced they become a form of information which is being transmitted and so there they have to hold their own against all the other information that is jostling around them to appear on the same page/screen.

- The meaning of an image can be changed according to what you see beside it or what comes after it.

- Reproductions of works of art can be used by anybody for their own purposes. Images can be used like words, we can talk with them. They are used to describe or recreate an experience.

- Nowadays, until children are educated out and forced to accept mystifications, they look at images and interpret them very directly. They connect any image directly with their own experience. 

- Berger aims to explore the relationship the experience of art has directly to other experiences in life, and to use the means of reproduction as though they offered a language, as though pictures were like words rather than holy relics.



Brian McCabe
Miniclicks in Brighton Jim Stephenson
Luxembourg Rut Bees

New England House, New England Street
Ways of Seeing: Episode 2
- Men dream of women and women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at. Women constantly meet glances that act as mirrors, reminding them of how they look or how they should look. Behind every glance is a judgement.

- A woman is always accompanied. Even when they are alone, they have an 'image' of themselves. From a young age, woman are taught and persuaded to continually survey herself. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, particularly how she appears to men is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.

- In Kenneth Clark's book In the Nude, he says that being naked is simply being without clothes. The nude, according to him is a form of art. Berger has a different interpretation of this. He believes being naked is to be ones self, to be nude is to be seen naked by other and yet not recognised for oneself. A nude has to be seen as an object in order to considered one.

- The story begins with Adam and Eve in the Genesis chapter of the Bible. There are two things are striking about this story: One being that both Adam and Eve become aware of being naked because as a result of eating the apple from the tree in the Garden of Eden, each sees the other differently. Nakedness is created in the mind of the beholder. The other point being the fact that the woman is blamed and is punished by being made subservient to the man. Thus, in relation to the woman, the man becomes the agent of God.

- The nude implies an awareness of being seen by the spectator. They are not naked as they are, they are naked as you see them. 

- The mirror became a symbol of the vanity of men, yet the male hypocrisy in this is blatant. You paint a naked woman because you enjoy looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and call the image vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness to you have depicted for your own pleasure, repeating the biblical example of blaming the woman.

- There's a great difference between being seen as oneself naked or seeing another in that way with a body put on display. To be naked is to be without disguise, to be on display is to have a person hair and skin turned into a disguise, a disguise which cannot be discarded. Their nakedness in oil paintings becomes as formal as their clothes.

- In another tradition, nakedness is a celebration of active sexual love between two people. The woman as active as the man. However, in oil paintings even when the male lover is present, their gaze is still obeyed towards the spectator of that being from a male gaze. The only one to break this gaze is Cupid.

- Furthermore, women had to be shown languid, exhibiting minimum energy. They are there to feed an appetite and not their own. 




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7wi8jd7aC4
Ways of Seeing: Episode 3We look, we buy, it is ours. It is ours to consume, to sell again, perhaps to give away. More often, it is ours to keep. We look, we buy and we collect valuable objects. But the most valuable object of all has become the oil painting.

- Oil paintings often depict things, things which, in reality, are buyable. To paint a thing and put it on a canvas, is not unlike buying it and putting it in your house. The objects within the painting often appear as tangible as those outside it.

- If you buy a painting, you buy also the looks of the thing it represents. Paintings often show treasures, but they have become treasure themselves. Art galleries are like palaces, but also like banks. When they shut for the night, they are guarded lest the image of things which are desirable. The value of paintings has become mysterious. Where, we ask ourselves, does this value come from?

- Those who use new methods of reproduction and communication, those who write books or make television programmes about art, tend to cling to the old approach. Art remains something sacred. A love of art seems, automatically, to be offered as a sublime human experience. 

- If the experience of art is sublime, it looks as if it can be sublimely independent of a lot of other values. So perhaps we should be somewhat wary of the love of art. You cannot explain anything in history or art history by the love of art. 

- A patron cannot be surrounded by music or poems in the same way as they are by their pictures. From about 1500 to 1900, the visual arts of Europe were dominated by the oil painting, the easel picture. This kind of painting had never been used anywhere else in the world before. The tradition of oil painting was made up of hundred of thousands of unremarkable works hung all over the walls of galleries and private houses, rather in the same way as the Reserve Collection is still hung in the National Gallery.  

-  The European oil painting, unlike the art of other periods, placed a unique emphasis on the tangibility, the solidity, the texture, the weight, the graspability of what was depicted. What was real was what you could put your hands on.  

- Works of art in other cultures and periods celebrated wealth and power. Gods, princes and dynasties were worshipped. But these works were static, ritualistic, hierarchic, symbolic. They celebrated a social or divine order. Whereas, the European oil painting served a different kind of wealth. It glorified not a static order of things, but the ability to buy and furnish and to own.

- A certain kind of oil painting celebrated merchandise in a way that had never happened before in the history of art. Merchandise became the actual principle subject of these works. Eating is a pleasure, but these paintings which depicted foods could not be eaten. They are a demonstration of the artist's virtuosity and the owner's wealth.

Livestock, Objects and Houses