Author: lindamayoux
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The Tourist Perspective
Before photography landscapes for mass market were available as etchings. Postcards were invented in the late 19th Century – objectifying places into commodities that could be consumed and collected for a reasonable price. People often collected postcards of places they could never travel to. By the 1870s Americans could buy photographic prints of faraway places…
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Landscape and the City
!!To be developed with documentary Since the very beginning of photography, the city has provided opportunities for the photographer: landscape and other subject matter. Detachment Daguerre’s. ‘View boulevard du temple’. First example of photograph of a person. Only rendered because he must have remained relatively still to have his shoes shined. Talbot’s views of Paris.…
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Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes was a structuralist, with a particular interest in the semiotics of language and images. Semiotics can be described as the ‘science of signs’. A semiotic analysis of an image or a piece of film is the quantification of how meaning is constructed or a message is communicated. Before writing ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ Barthes…
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Designing a project brief
Project briefs are of different types and allow different levels of negotiation and artistic freedom. (what follows is from the Course Manual and will be revisited in Assignment 5) Commercial (client-led) briefs Any engagement with commercial photographic enterprise will involve a brief of some kind. This may be in the form of a legally binding contract,…
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Territorial Photography
Read Snyder’s essay ‘Territorial Photography’ from W.J.T Mitchell ed 2002 Landscape and Power. Summarise Snyder’s key points. Snyder’s argument: In the 1830s and 1840s photography was dominated by wealthy upper class photographers trained within a fine art tradition. Their work was personal and intended for a small audience as there were no means for mass production. It…
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Semiotics Signifier Signified
(to be looked at again when I study Barthes in my Illustration course) TASK Find an advert from a magazine, newspaper or the internet, which has some clearly identifiable signs. Using the example above to help you, list the signs. What are the signifiers? What is signified? Read: Roland Barthes essay ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ (1977) to help clarify…
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Taking Portraits
If you have access to the relevant equipment, imagine that you have been asked by a client to take a fairly formal portrait photograph – for example a graduation portrait. (Commercial photographers take hundreds of these in a day at graduation ceremonies.) The main point of this exercise is to get to grips with studio lighting so experiment with…
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Journeys
‘Going North’ ‘Going North’ montage For this assignment I wanted to explore a journey that was likely to be ‘unpicturesque’ – one that was characteristic of many journeys on busy roads through rather boring countryside. I travel a lot for my work – currently in Africa and so have photographed many ‘journeys’ – and am…
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Street Photography Methods
Shooting from the hip Take some time out to develop the technique of shooting very quickly. You’ll probably producesome very blurred and even disastrous images, but fortunately mistakes aren’t as expensivein the digital age as they were when Winogrand was working the New York streets.Produce a set of eight images that demonstrate the life and…
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What is a Photographer?
Marius de Zayas (1880-1961) closely allied to the 291 gallery. Photography and Photography and Artistic Photography first published Camera Work no 41 (1913) de Zayas makes a dichotomous distinction between: the ‘artist photographer’ who tries to represent something from within themselves as a ‘systematic and personal representation’ that then applies this to study of external form…