CHAPTER 12 PHOTOGRAPHY AND TIME BASED MEDIA

CHAPTER 12 PHOTOGRAPHY AND TIME BASED MEDIA

A History of Time Based Media Photography began in roughly 1838, with still images. The still image generated the idea that it might be possible to capture an object in motion as well. After the first photographs of a horse in motion, created with a trip-wire, were published, film viewing machines were invented. The Kinetescope is one example (kinetic= motion; scope=view) The first projected motion picture available to a large audience debuted on December 28, 1895 in Paris, France. The silent moving image came first, and then sound was added, and then color was added. Television came later, after audiences developed a desire for live action. Like the history of Painting, the medium of time-based media like Photography has increased in immediacy and verisimilitude (semblance to the truth).

Eadweard Muybridge, Annie G, Cantering, Saddled, December 1887, Collotype Print, image size: 7½ x 16⅛ inches. This is part of Animal Locomotion, an 11 volume work of over 20,000 photographs of animals and people performing various actions, such as running, walking, trotting, fetching, and lifting. These photographs influenced a great number of artists in their depictions of people and animals in motion.

Photography Photography may be used to capture reality, and in the medium s beginning, photographs were certainly regarded as informational: as showing the viewer a documented glimpse at something that exists in reality you can photograph anything you see, so it must be there it a photograph exists of it. Photographs, in essence, carry a promise of truth with them they project an authenticity that rarely exists in other art forms. Although this truth is hardly a reality, as photographs are easily manipulated to where the final image is far different than the starting point, it is still important that we perceive them as true. Photography and the camera arts allow artists to explore time and motion. The camera can capture and preserve a moment in time, and in doing so, it allows our eyes to see motion slowed down.

Formal Foundations Photography means writing with light - from the Greek phos (light) and graphos (writing). Photography is inclusive, rather than an exclusive medium. You can photograph anything you see. The urge to make instant assemblages- to capture a moment in time- is as old as the desire to represent the world accurately. As a medium, there is a tension between form and content: the way the photograph is formally organized as a composition, and what it expresses or means. As technology advances and cameras and photo editing applications are readily available (especially through smartphones), it can seem easy to dismiss photography as just clicking a button, but the medium as an art form is MUCH more complex. It requires an eye for aesthetics, and an understanding of light and equipment.

Early Photography Camera obscuras were first used by artists in the 16 th century. They allowed a 3-D space to be projected onto a 2-D screen, but they maintained the color and perspective of the 3-D world. They could capture an image in two dimensions, but they could not preserve it. In 1839, the problem of preserving this image was solved simultaneously by two inventors William Henry Fox Talbot from England, and Louis- Jacques-Mandé Daguerre from France. William Henry Fox Talbot developed a process for fixing negative images onto paper coated with light-sensitive chemicals. The resulting image on paper was called a photogenic drawing. While Talbot was developing the photogenic drawing in England, Daguerre was developing a different process in France. He was able to fix positive images onto polished metal plates, and the resulting image was called a daguerreotype.

Camera is the Latin word for room. By the 16 th century, a darkened room called a camera obscura was used by artists to copy accurately. A small hole on the side of a light-tight room lets in a ray of light that projects a scene, upside down, directly across from the hole. This is essentially the same principle used by the camera today. Above Left: Unidentified printmaker, Camera Obscura. Engraving, c. 1544. Bottom Right: illustration of camera obscura.

Johannes Vermeer Dutch painter, 1600 s Believed to have used camera obscura to create life-like paintings. Essentially, this means that Vermeer traced the image. Do you think that this is cheating?

William Henry Fox Talbot, Mimosoidea Suchas, Acaica, c. 1839. Photogenic drawing. The object (a plant specimen) acts as a stencil, blocking the light-sensitive chemicals it covers on the paper. These un-hardened chemicals can be washed off, revealing the negative image of the object.

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Le Boulevard du Temple, 1839, Daguerreotype. Developed in France, a daguerreotype is one of the earliest forms of photography, developed in 1839, made on a copper plate polished with silver.

Richard Beard, Maria Edgeworth, 1841. Daguerreotype. As photographic portraiture became a successful industry, portrait painting went into rapid decline. Photography replaced painting as the preferred method of portraiture, and it democratized the genre, making portraits affordable and available to the middle and even the working class. Daguerreotypes cannot be reproduced, and they are made on a metal plate.

William Henry Fox Talbot, The Open Door, 1843. Calotype. The calotype process is the basis for modern photography, developed by Talbot in 1841. He used paper rather than a metal plate, and made multiple prints a possibility. He discovered how to make a negative image and develop sensitized paper. The image above marks a turning point in Talbot s view of photography. He considered the image to be more complex than merely documenting the natural world: he saw it as a study in beauty and design.

Julia Margaret Cameron, Portrait of Thomas Carlyle, 1863, silver print. Around 1850, English sculptor Frederick Archer introduced a new wet-plate collodian photographic process that was almost universally adopted within 5 years. It allowed for short exposure times and quick development of prints. Silver nitrate is integral to the process, and the resulting photographs are called silver prints.

Form and Content Consider that a photograph is an abstraction, a simplification of reality. It substitutes two-dimensional for threedimensional space, a brief moment for the continuity of time, and (sometimes) gray scale for color. Photographers also emphasize the formal elements over representational concerns. Photography has the ability to aestheticize (represent something as being beautiful or artistically pleasing) the everyday- to reveal that which we normally take for granted.

Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907 When he shot this groundbreaking photograph, Stieglitz said that he was transfixed not by the literal figures, but by their spatial relationships.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Athens, 1953. The decisive moment Sometimes a photographer waits for an image to happen. Before taking this image, Cartier- Bresson was walking down the street and saw two woman walking in his direction. He waited until they were underneath the statues on the balcony- almost mirroring the women- and released the shutter of his camera. The parallels and harmonies between street and balcony, antiquity and the present moment, youth and age, white marble and black dress, are all captured in this photograph. The form and content are balanced.

Photojournalism The intention of photojournalism is to bring the facts to light. The power of the photograph comes in part from its formal composition. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the Federal government s Farm Security Administration (FSA) employed 15 photographers to document the plight of America s farmers and life in rural areas. Over 77,000 black and white documentary photographs were created in 8 years.

Dorothy Lange Migrant Mother Best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography. This photograph is the most well known of a larger series, shown on the next slide.

The rest of the images tell a larger story of a widowed mother of seven children. Pea crops had frozen over, leaving the mother without work.

Analog Photography and the Darkroom For many photographers, the art of photography happens not in the snapping of the image, but in the darkroom. Pictured below, the darkroom is where film is exposed, developed and sometimes experimented with.

The Photographic Print and its Manipulation The Zone System is a framework for understanding exposures in photography developed by Ansel Adams, where a zone represents the relation of the image s (or a portion of the image s) brightness to the value or tone that the photographer wishes it to appear in the final print. Each picture is broken up into zones ranging from black to white with nine shades of gray in between a photographic gray scale. Dodging decreases the exposure of selected areas of the print that the photographer wishes to be lighter. Burning increases the exposure to areas of the print that should be darker. An aperture is the size of the opening of the lens.

Ansel Adams was an American photographer and environmentalist. His black-and-white landscape photographs of the American West, especially Yosemite National Park, have been widely reproduced.

Ansel Adams, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941. Gelatin Silver Print. Large parts of the sky are burned, so that they develop darker. The village towards the bottom of the photograph are dodged, so that they appear lighter and can show more detail. The end result is an image that shows cohesive space, but also presents some interesting contradictions in time of day.

Jerry N. Uelsmann, Untitled These photographs have been dodged in the development process in order to only expose certain parts of the composition. The artist then exposed a single piece of photographic paper to all three film negatives, creating an image that combines all three layers (see image in next slide).

Here we see the image that combines all three photographic images into one print.

Digital Photography Color photography was (not that long ago) new technology. But the rise in popularity of color images through television, along with new products that allowed for convenient color photography (the Polaroid camera, inexpensive color processing for film), contributed to a rapid increase in the cultural taste for color images. Today, digital technologies have transformed the world of photography, offering conveniences that film cannot and transforming photography into a highly manipulable medium.

Color Photography Until the 1960s, color was mostly ignored by fine art photographers. They associated it with advertising. Artists that use color photography are still concerned will all of the elements and principles of design that black and white photographers use, but they also consider how the power of color can enhance their design. Color photography was not readily available and easy to control until the 1970s, when Kodak introduced new color technologies that provided more reliable results. Previous color images tended to discolor rapidly.

Joel Meyerowitz, Porch, Provincetown, 1977. The artist is capitalizing on the powerful complimentary color contrast to add energy and interest to the image. This design contrast also enhances the differences between the two spaces: the warmth of the porch, and the cool storm on the ocean.

Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits. She is best known for "Complete Untitled Film Stills," a series of 69 black-and-white photographs which were meant to subvert the stereotypes of women in media. In the 1980s, Sherman used color film and large prints, and focused more on lighting and facial expression. Sherman is both the photographer and the model, and uses prosthetics, wigs, makeup, costumes, and elaborate props to create her work. Each body of work is centered on a theme- for example, the fake film stills. Color is an important element in her work (that is not black and white).

Cindy Sherman, Film Stills series (center) and Self Portrait series

Film Film is a thin flexible strip of plastic or other material coated with light-sensitive emulsion for exposure in a camera, used to produce photographs or motion pictures. As images repeat themselves in time across a screen, the medium invites the exploration of rhythm and repetition. Editing is the process of assembling a film. It is like a linear collage. As film became a medium in the 1920s, collage was invented, constructed by cutting and pasting together a variety of fragments.

Fernand Leger, Ballet Mecanique, 1924, film stills. In this film, Leger studied different imagessmiling lips, wine bottles, working mechanisms, and shapes like circles, squares, and triangles. By repeating the same image again and again at separate points in the film, he created a visual rhythm that embodied the beauty of machines in the modern world- a mechanical ballet.

Editing Terminology Shot: a single frame of a film. Cross-cutting: a technique meant to create high drama. Rhythm between shots is increased by moving back and forth between two different events, increasing in pace. Montage: The sequencing of widely different images to create a fast paced, multifaceted image.

Popular Cinema Though films are interesting on an intellection level, they usually aren t the kinds of movie that most audiences appreciate. Audiences expect a narrative to unfold, relatable characters, and thrilling actionentertainment. After World War I, American movies dominated the world screens because they were so entertaining, and the Hollywood industry was born. The first feature with sound technology was The Jazz Singer, October 6, 1927. Between 1930 and 1940, the movie industry produced a wide variety of genres (narrative types), ranging from comedies to horror films. The first animation, which means bringing to life, was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, in 1937. In animation, each film still is hand drawn. In order to appear seamless, thousands of drawings are made for each film, up to 24 per second of film time.

Video Art Video art exploits the immediacy of the medium and critiques popular culture. With the introduction of the handheld video camera in 1965, the Sony Portapak, artists were able to explore the ability to see in time. Previously, film was expensive to make and produce. Video is cheaper than film, and more immediate. What you see in the recorder is what you see on the monitor. Video art exploits this, while commercial television tends to hide it by trying to make videotaped images look like film.

The Computer and New Media Advances in technology have had a tremendous impact on art. The computer screen space is theatrical, interactive, and time-based. The invention of computer video editing programs allow artists to easily view shots, rearrange sequences, and make cuts make faster than older cutand-tape methods. Computer generated imaging, or CGI, was invented in 1993. It was first used by director Steven Spielberg in Jurassic Park, based on a novel by Michael Crichton. A screen capture of Cao Fei s RMB City. Artists like Cao Fei work in the virtual space of the computer. Her online virtual work, RMB City, is an imagined city created in Second Life, combining historical and contemporary Chinese landscapes. She inhabited it as an avator, China Tracey, and invited the public and various artists to explore issues while functioning as their own avatars.