Introduction to Photography

Lee Friedlander, Self-Portrait, Haverstraw, New York. 1966. Lee Friedlander

From There to Here

How Do we Get From Here

Early Daguerreotypes (positive image on glass): child, and Niagara Falls

To Here
Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick, Card Game, from Eisbergfreisdtadt (2007) (digital montage from multiple photographs, no digital imagery)

David LaChapelle, Cat House, 1999

(staged studio shots, digital montage)

Jeff Wall, Scene from The Invisible Man (studio set, props)

Photography: Codes and Genres (Types) Photography and/vs. A Photograph

In our culture now, we need to understand the Real or our attribution of Reality as a Code or position among kinds of representations. Taking a picture vs. making a photograph: photographs are made (constructed), not taken (memorialized quotations from reality).
Barthes proposed that photographs were signs without codes, but thats because he was still held by a romantic notion of photography and domesticated images.

Codes and Genres There are many codes (interpretive frames that we learn culturally) and genres (types) of photographs and images.

One major differentiation, now often blurred and fused in photographic work: The straight shot (framed image with existing light) vs. staged, planned, or constructed shots, with artificial light, props, sets, etc.

Some Major Photographic Genres Documentary/Documentation, Evidence Reportage, Photojournalism Narrative (can use any other genre) Landscape, Nature Portrait Family history and rituals, snapshots Street photography Studio and staged photographs Advertising Fashion Fantasy images, Surrealism Erotica, fetish, porn

Earliest Photographic Images

Registering Light (Photography = Light Writing)

Joseph Nicphore Nipce "View from the Window at Le Gras" (circa 1826)

First Daguerreotype, 1837 Louis Jacques Mand Daguerre,

Inherited Theoretical Issues Passivity of the camera device as light writing, transcription of a reality outside and in front of the camera lens. Photographic image as an index (semiotic term), indexical sign, that points to or represents what it signifies. Its value is grounded and justified in the represented thing or reality to which it is true. Photography and reference (registers a true external world), representation, pre-existing reality, memory, record, evidence, documentation, truth. No surprise that photography became one of the main tools of postmodernism in breaking the reality and truth codes of images, and in critiquing those codes.

Alfred Stieglitz and the Art Photography Debate

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality. The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art. --Stieglitz

Periodical Camera Work and associated photographers were influential in establishing photography as an art form, not a mechanical or industrial trade. A debate about institutions, social class ownership and identification with photography, representation and reality, hierarchy of professions, interpretive/active artist status of professional photographers.

The Steerage, 1907

Flatiron Building, NY, 1903

Georgia OKeeffe, Nude, 1919

Winter on Fifth Ave., NY, 1893

Exemplary Artist: Bresson and the Decisive Moment Concept Henri Cartier-Bresson
Model of the "street photographer", with a Leica 35mm camera and using existing light
Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, 1932

Cartier-Bresson as theorist
Strict adherence to indexical value of the photograph, assuming only the framing and interpretation of the photographer Landmark book: Images la Sauvette ("stolen images," "The Decisive Moment)

Photographer as Recorder, Memorializer

Archive of images: Archive | Archive of images at Magnum Photos

The Berlin Wall, 1963

Postmodern photography cut the link to the moment and the index of reality

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, 21. 1978. Gelatin silver print. Staged and shot in studio. No there there before or after the shot.

A photograph uses the codes of the real that weve learned from a long history of photographic mediation.

Gregory Crewdson, Production Still, 1991. C-print.

Photography is now our projected psyche: images of fantasy, desire and fear

Annie Leibovitz / Vanity Fair. The Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair, March, 2006. Keira Knightley, Scarlett Johanssson and Tom Ford.

Consequences of the ubiquity of photographic images and video

What is the status of the photographic image after digital cameras, cell phone cameras, amateur use of Photoshop, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube? Today a photograph is usually a digital image created to be reproduced (in Benjamins concept) A photograph is made to be copied and distributed with no fixed physical medium (in contrast to film and photopaper) The memory of the earlier indexical function is still there, but the power of the image as image is more important.