The Photographer s Eye John Szarkowski

Transcription

1 The Photographer s Eye John Szarkowski

2 The Photographer s Eye The Photographers Eye, by John Szarkowski, was published in Szarkowski was the Director of Photography at New York s Museum of Modern Art from and was personally picked by Edward Steichen to be his successor

3 The Photographer s Eye The book is an attempt to define the characteristics of a photograph What photographs look like, and why they look that way. Argues the importance of looking carefully and bringing every bit of intelligence and understanding as a viewer

4 Photographs Early photographers struggled with the mechanical aspect of photography Many emulated other arts such as pictorial painting Henry Peach Robinson s Fading Away TwoWays of Life by Oscar Rejlander

5 Robinson seamlessly combined five separate negatives to produce this intimate narrative of family tragedy.the scene centers on a bedridden young woman dying of tuberculosis or possibly of a broken heart, as suggested by the Shakespearean title of a preliminary study, She Never Told Her Love.The picture was notorious both for the artificiality of its technique and for its subject matter, which was considered too morbid and painfully intimate to be represented photographically. Robinson s seamless blending of reality and artifice did, however, appeal to Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria, who purchased a print of Fading Away and issued a standing order for every major composite photograph Robinson would make.

6 The Two Ways of Life was one of the most ambitious and controversial photographs of the nineteenth century. The picture is an elaborate allegory of the choice between vice and virtue, represented by a bearded sage leading two young men from the countryside onto the stage of life. The rebellious youth at left rushes eagerly toward the dissolute pleasures of lust, gambling, and idleness; his wiser counterpart chooses the righteous path of religion, marriage, and good works. Because it would have been impossible to capture a scene of such extravagant complexity in a single exposure, Rejlander photographed each model and background section separately, yielding more than thirty negatives, which he meticulously combined into a single large print.

7 Photography Characteristics: Made vs.taken Unlike paintings that were made, based on traditional skills and theories, photographs were selected, or taken Photography is defined not by those emulating traditions of painting It s characteristics are shown in the work of those who purposely break from tradition, or who are ignorant of previous tradition

8 Photography: Art by the Masses The dry-plate process expanded the base of photographers Roll film made photography available to everyone Photography itself began to be the sole influence for new photographers With hand-held cameras came new points of view such as snapshots Photography created it s own vision

9 5 Aspects of Photography TheThing Itself The Detail The Frame Time Vantage Point

10 The Thing Itself Photography deals with the actual Clearer, permanent version of aspects of the world Photograph appears true, lens is impartial, photographer s role ignored Reality is filtered, reduced in size, clarified or exaggerated

11 Photography deals with the actual, though the factuality of a picture, no matter how convincing and unarguable, is different than the reality itself. The subject and the picture are not the same thing, though they seem so afterwards the image, the photograph, will survive the subject. Edward Weston Dorothea Lange Destitute Pea Pickers in California (Migrant Mother) Nipomo, California,1936

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13 The Detail Isolating and documenting fragments gives details meaning and significance Details in photography often reveal compelling clarity Details relevant in photography were too ordinary to paint

14 Lorne Resnick Sisters

15 A Great Day in Harlem Art Kane

16 A Great Day in Harlem (Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Eldridge, Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, et al) Art Kane

17 The Frame To quote out of context is the essence of the photographer s craft. The photographer must decide what to include and what not to include The frame creates new relationships between subjects in the frame by cropping There are an infinite number of croppings in any given situation

18 Eugene Atget, Avenue des Gobelins Paris, France, 1925 The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge. Compositional considerations of line, form and balance extend not only in the four directions suggested by the viewfinder or ground glass edges, but also the spatial considerations of foreground / background relationships the transformation of a three dimensional world into the flatness of two dimensional. These relationships of the edges, in all directions, reflect the intentional visual and conceptual concerns in how photographic meaning is considered. What is contained within the frame is either energized or passive depending on how these edges are considered, allowing the picture to resonate within the edges and/or beyond them.

19 Yuri Dojc O King

20 Gordon Parks Ferry Commuters, Staten Island, New York, 1946

21 Time Photographs are a record of the present time of which they were taken Photographs are not instantaneous They describe shorter or longer lengths of time The photographer selects a decisive moment to capture the image

22 The photograph is static, but the moments of the world flow, interrupted only by the deliberate fragmentation of time by the release of the shutter. This discrete parcel of time is not just a literal moment of time, whether frozen by an exposure of a short duration or the accumulation of movement, but also where the world is transformed by a decisive moment once the shutter is triggered, regardless if that moment of exposure is 1/125th of a second or 6 minutes. The decisive moment, it is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression. -Henri Cartier-Bresson Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind St. Lazare station Paris, France, 1932

23 Elliott Erwitt (New York, NY) New York City. 2000

24 Gary Winograd, New York, NY 1955

25 Vantage Point Photography utilizes unusual angles of view: Bird s eye view Worm s eye view Foreshortening From the back Selective focus & depth-of-field Ambiguity, obscurity

26 Gordon Parks Grease Plant Worker, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1944

27 Elliott Erwitt / Magnum Photos, New York City, 1974 In equal consideration as the frame, the act of choosing the distance between the subject being photographed and the camera (and photographer) offers the uncanny ability of photography to reveal what our eyes would protest as unattainable with simple human vision a point of view different from what our eyes perceive. Onne van der Wal Shaman Ice Boots

28 Laura Williams Joan Jonas

29 Summary Photographer s Eye aspects native to Photography The Thing Itself The Detail The Frame Time Vantage Point Garry Winogrand