#mpho406

After looking over the essay questions with my lecturer, I have become familiar with their content and what answers would be appropriate. There is a wide variety to choose from, I have narrowed my selection down to 3 questions related to the lectures I found most interesting:

2. Should we accept the many highly critical readings of the Family of Man exhibition as variously ‘vulgar, idealised, sentimentalises, … ideological’ etc. (Sarah E. James, ‘A Post-Facist ‘Family of Man’, p.138) or is there merit in the far more positive readings of Sandeen, Turner and others?

8. Postmodern photographic practice critiqued, and opposed Modernist notions of photography in a number of different ways. Critically discuss one of these strategies, including a detailed discussion of no more than three examples in your answer.

9.  Critically analyse some of the ways that contemporary landscape photographers are reflecting on the processes and consequences of globalisation. Bear in mind the many different possible definitions of globalisation and focus your response accordingly. Please include a detailed discussion of the work of no more than three photographers.

Essential Reading: 

Essential Reading:

Rorimer, Anne, ‘PHOTOGRAPHY-LANGUAGE-CONTEXT: Prelude to the 1980s’, in

A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation

Essential Reading

Whiting, Cécile (1997).

‘Shopping for Pop’(Chapter 1) in A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture.

I found this a struggle to read, although an interesting struggle. Barthes discourse is highly colourful at times and it it easy to get lost in his terms of expression. However the concepts he puts forward, when they don’t go right over you’re head, are a fascinating insight into the art of photography. It is no wonder so many people have told me that if you should read one book on photography, this is the one.

It seems his overall aim within the book is to develop a new method of observation and from there, a new consciousness through the lens of photography. He is looking for the essential nature of the subjective experience that is photography, defined by the irreducible singularity of an image, indicating to the view what has been.

Barthes discusses the characteristic of certain photographs, describing the ‘co-presence of two discontinuous elements’ which he refers to as the ‘studium’ and the ‘punctum’. The studium refers to the range of meanings that one has available to project onto a photography. It implies that the image is a unified meaning which the viewer can take in quickly without thinking about it. The Studium refers to the interest the viewer shows in a photograph and the desire to explore and understand the meanings within it. To me , I suppose the studium is similar to the eye catching part of a photograph, the section which holds the eye of the viewer.

This session explored photography during the postwar world in the context of the Cold War, both in Europe and the United States and focused on the work of photographers including Ed van der Elsken, William Klein and Robert Frank.

The highlight of this lecture was definitely the discussion of the “Family of Man” exhibition. Overall, the lecture looking at attitudes at the time of the Cold war reflected in photography and art in general. At the time, there was much divided opinion related to the cold war and art became much more subjective as a result.

The Family of Man exhibition looked at the positive side of humanity, curated by Edward Steichen, photos were grouped thematically to offer snapshots of the human experience: lingering on birth, love, and joy but also touching on war, privation, illness, and death. Steichen’s intention was to prove, visually, the universality of human experience and photography’s role in its documentation. I found it fascinating to find the exhibition received negative criticism, with various figures describing it as an almost falsification, too good to be true, not reflecting the true attitudes of man. Surely, that is the point? It doesn’t reflect it accurately, but it should! This should be the perspective we view life from, a universal experience, like droplets from an ocean etc.

Further Notes

Roland Barthes – “The great Family of man”. The myth of the human community. An apparent sense of unity that we are all the same. Politics is forgotten, replaced by universal ideologies.

Allan Sekula – FoM was biased as it had forgottenthe current state that the world was in.

Fred Turner – Show driven by ‘Deeply democratic, even utopian impulse’

Enjoyed looking at Kleins ‘The Americans’ especially his images of children in which his perspective takes away from the stereotypical images of children being cute, innocent etc.

Semiology / Semiotics

- a sign.

 - the study of signs and symbols.

- the relation between written or spoken signs and their referents in the physical world or in the world of ideas.

Camera Lucida and Death

- Barthes writes of the sense of becoming a specter that in the photograph he experiences ‘ a micro version of death ’ .

Studium and Punctum

- Studium: the ordinary, everyday meanings of an image that anyone wold recognise.

- Punctum: contained in those far rarer images.

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Readings;

- Victor Burgin’s essay re-reading Camera Lucida (1982)

- Margaret Nerson’s essay “ What is a Photograph ” (1994)

- Les enfants de Dijon