#mpho506

Photography can be more reliable and cheaper than painting

- Photography originally ‘threatened’ painting by offering photographs to be taken by anyone, of anyone.

- Carte de viste

- Portraiture gave photography an uplift and hope

- Fox Talbots practice provoked that photographs state ownership of items. Photography can be used as a legal tool.

- Photography showed:

- Honorific function  - honouring individuals

- Representative function - pushing people down, identifying criminals, creating specific social order

Stephen Shore is an American photographer known for his images of banal scenes and objects in the United States, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography. 

Originally published in 1982, Stephen Shore’s legendary Uncommon Places has influenced more than a generation of photographers. Shore was among the first artists to take color beyond the domain of advertising and fashion photography, and his large-format color work on the American vernacular landscape stands at the root of what has become a vital photographic tradition over the past forty years. Uncommon Places: The Complete Works, published by Aperture in 2004, presents a definitive collection of the landmark series, and in the span of a decade, has become a contemporary classic. Now, for this lushly produced reissue, the artist has added twenty rediscovered images and a statement explaining what it means to expand a series now many decades old.

The exhibition that we visited at the Photographers Gallery examines the way experts and historians create photographs as evidence in instances of crimes or acts of violence. Eleven cases are presented, spanning the period from the invention by Alphonse Bertillon of ‘metric’ photography crime scenes in the 1800′s to the reconstruction of a drone attack in Pakistan in 2012.

Alphonse Bertillon: Metric Photography Of Ctime Scenes, 1903:

In the late 1800′s, the advances in psychology challenged the reliability of memory to be less of a recording and more of a reconstruction of facts. Photography became merged with calculations and plans that became the start of police technology. Bertillon was there inventor through the use of photographic ‘overhead’ imagery of crime scenes.

When thinking about which methodology best suits the exhibition,The photographs of Alphonse Bertillon were that of recording murder and crime scenes. These photographs became artefacts that told history as it happened and how it was. The photographs were exact representations for how the scenes of criminality were. This deems the practice to be that of artefact making and recording.

Mankind has always seeked answers to their questions. Before the scientific method was created in the 13th century we saw philosophy as the only way to answer the questions beyond our knowledge.  By using philosophy we analyse the information which we have access to as try to work it out answers in different perspectives.

Both resources are great ways to research work, there is something about seeing a work in a physical manner that allows you to be more immersed in its aesthetics. Most of my research is done on the internet, but I am aware that the lazy mans way. 

By looking online you have no context or the view in which the work was intended for. By looking at the piece in a gallery or a catalougue, you not only see the large artwork in its physicality, but you see it as a series in the order it was intended for, allowing for a more narrative like experience of the works.

Discuss what you have learnt in class on researching a visual case study and finding and appropriate methodology in which to analyse it. In this lecture we learnt about many approaches to analyzing a photograph, some of them were gender theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy, art theory and a few others.

I am not sure which methodology to use, philosophy or psychoanalysis. 

Psychoanalysis:

This deals with the way we process the world, the way we interpret pictures and what they mean to our psychi. Knowing about this should be a fundamental tool in picture making as it dictates how someone will react to certain combination of stimuli.

Psychoanalysis studies the brain, and the brain is not only the creator of art but the interpreter, having unlocked the we perceive and appreciate, one can then make more effective art work.

Philosophy:

Philosophy is a topic I really enjoy as it interacts with numerous information in order to create an answer that may be currently out of our reach. Philosophy is a tool depicted in art for generation and ill continue to exist for as long as knowledge exists. 

If I was to take this pathway I would understand better the reasoning's for why the artists create such works.