'Response to video 'Errol Morris on Photography'

Response to video “Errol Morris on Photography”

He addresses posing in the video, and said that people sometimes argue whether posing or not posing people makes an honest photograph.  I think that it doesn’t, but I also think that the camera in general has a hard time making an honest photograph.  One of the reasons that I think cameras have a hard time capturing an honest photograph is because the things that are not included in the frame that matter and the things that are included in the frame that should not be.  Also, people tend to act differently when they know that they are in front of a camera.  They are not going to act natural, they are going to try to be aware of everything.  Whether that be how the wind is moving their hair or how their children are standing.  

Errol Morris also addressed the debatable issue of the photographer arranging things in the image, or whether the scene should be untouched.  This issue is a lot like posing people.  I think that it would be nice if the photographer didn’t have to arrange things, but that is also in someones creative license.  If someone sees photography as an art form, then I think that they have the right to arrange the item within the frame how they want to, but they also have to be honest when talking about it and say, “yeah, I arranged those”.  Its similar to saying “yeah, I used photoshop” because most of the time everyone knows anyway, so you might as well own up to it and not look stupid. 

I also agree with Errol Morris when he says that the meanings of photographs are not obvious, and that no one talks to the photographers about it.  But I think that that is true with most art in current times.  I think that people just want the art to be pretty, and they don’t really care what it is really about.  For example, I have attended a few shows that the man who own’s the apple orchard I work at has put on.  I thought it was a very good show, and I wondered about his pieces, but he seemed busy so I didn’t ask about the thought behind them.  When I was working the next day, I asked him about the show, and he said that he was disappointed.  I was surprised because I thought that a lot of people has come to the show and they all looked fairly happy, but he said that it was because they whole 4 hours the show lasted, only one person asked about the thought behind his work.  So we spent the next hour walking around the buildings and him telling me about his work, and I thought that they were really cool!  He does sculpture and they have to do a lot with cycles, just like apples!  I thought it was so cool how his sculptures were just like apple.  And I realized that if I had not asked, I would have never learned that, and I really like knowing that because its so cool.  So I learned to always take the time to ask someone about their work, because in the current public, not many people actually care about the story; they just want it to be pretty.  

But getting back to the article, I agree that no one asks about the thought behind photographs anymore, or art in general.  I think that this is because there is so much art everywhere all the time that is ‘bad’ and doesn’t have any thought behind it at all, that people do not expect there to be a story anymore.  Maybe it is out job as artists to educate people, and show them that not all art is just on the surface.  And to educate all the people who are making ‘art’ that doesn’t have a story; to show them how to make art that actually means something.  Only then, I think, will art be asked about, because there will always be a story, and nothing would be able to be understood by just looking at it.  But unfortunately, people are lazy and greedy, and some only want to make art to sell it.  So the real question becomes, are people making art for themselves and the sake of expression through creating, or are people just making art to please others, and which one is right?

Response to ‘Was of Seeing, Episode 1: Psychological Aspects’

Response to ‘Was of Seeing, Episode 1: Psychological Aspects’

I thought that this program was for people who didn’t really know much about art, and were trying to become educated for one reason or another.  

The narrator used lots and lots of examples of famous pieces, talking about context and place and time.  He tried to prove that as the viewer, our observation of the piece is not the only thing that create our opinions about it.  He used music over Gouya’s “The Fifth of May” to prove this.  He used happy music, and then sad music, and then he put it in the middle of scenes.  All of the efforts didn’t really work because I knew a lot about the piece, as well as most of the other pieces he talked about.

I am pretty sure that I am not the only one that felt this way.  As design students we are all required to take Intro to Western Art History, which all of us did last semester.  So, we all knew a lot about the pieces that were shown.  So I think that even though the points that he was trying to prove were valid, the examples didn’t work on us (the student) because we have already been educated about the pieces.  

I did agree with the narrator that context is everything, even with art.  We have to know a little about the author, subject matter, and time period the piece was made in the create reasonable assumptions and observations about pieces.  I think that is why it is important to take art history classes, even as design students.  Because we are still going to (hopefully) be interacting with painters and sculptors and the rest of the art crowd, and we need to be able to properly discuss works with them.  And we also need the knowledge to help influence our own work and to help educate the rest of the world who is not so artistically inclined. 

Response to ‘Camera Lucida’ by Roland Barthes

Response to ‘Camera Lucida’ by Roland Barthes

I did not like this article, not because I disagrees with everything he said, but because all he did was complain.  It was also difficult to read because every five words there were parentheses with an unneeded snide or sarcastic comment.

However, I kind of agree with him with his statement in the beginning that color in unneeded make up on a photograph.  That might be true sometimes, but surely not all the time.  Color can be a wonderful and horrible thing, depending on the photograph, and the photographer.  If the photographer knows what they are doing, they can use color to aid them.  It can help convey an emotion or mood, or, it can create a false emotion or mood.  But I think that older people are really the ones who live and die by black and white photography, and younger people (for the most part) are the ones all about color.  Yes, color makes photography more difficult, but that doesn’t mean that all the old fartsy photographers have to hate it.  That being said, it is difficult to all of a sudden switch to color.  A lot of these photographers probably started in the darkroom with black and white film.  Today, most photography classes start with digital and start with color.  It is cheaper and more convenient, especially in school systems where money is scarce.  So thats all people my age are use to. And so they all don’t understand black and white photography.  I think that Barthes’ opinion is based on personal experience and pigheadedness.  From his writing, I do not get the sense that he really knows what he is talking about.  He just sounds old and cranky and annoying. 

I do agree with his statements that state that photographs are tied to dates and that they prove that something happened.  For example, when people are small children, we don’t usually remember every little thing that we did; just snippits.  But with photography, we can look at a photo that out parents took of us playing and say “oh yeah.  I must have played with that when I was little.”  But photographs can also create false memories that way.  If we know we did something because of proof from a photograph, we may create a false memory of it, because we have proof of it with the photograph.  

Even though I agree and disagree with Roland Barthes, I still think that he doesn’t know what he is talking about and just spouting his opinion with some good points here and there. 

Response to Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’

Response to Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’

A main point of this article is that “photographs alter and enlarge out notions of what is worth looking at and what we have the right to observe”.  I think that this is true.  As stated in the other articles that we have been instructed to read during this assignment, photography allows people to photograph anything and everything, and they do.  They photograph really pointless things, and then they seem important.  While those photographs make the objects themselves seem important, it also takes away from the importance of the photograph.  People take photographs, print them, store them, carry them around, etc, and take for granted that they are readily available.  They also use them to alter reality without really thinking about is.  People enlarge them, crop them, rotate, alter, edit, and lots of other things.  This also takes the value away from a photograph.  A long time ago, photographs use to be a big deal and really special.  Now they are used everywhere, from police to doctors to students, and they are readily available, and really have to value.  I agreed with all of this as it was stated in the article.  And while the article was pointing out all the ways they were used (and abused) I hadn’t really realized how dependent our current world is on photographs.  For example, in most things that people do, most people prefer photographs over drawings and descriptions.  Such as class power points in high school.  No one would use a drawing of grapes on a slide if they were talking about grapes, and of course they would not stand there and describe the way grapes look; they would want a photograph.  Photographs are used and devalued by everyone.  

They are also widely used to represent things that exist, once existed, or one happened.  They are used to represent the great monuments of the world, and the family vacation people took last year.  They make up our image of the modern world.  I think that without photographs, people would be really lost, but it would make them more imaginative, and less lazy.  Instead of just snapping a picture during a family vacation, they would take time to look around and really take in the moment and environment.  Maybe even take time to remember it more accurately because they would not have a photograph to rely on. 

Update to Personal Art Blog about assignment

http://kellylatham.wordpress.com/assignment-1-photography-as-documentation-mapping-time-space/

Test Assemblage from pictures

“David Hockney on Whats Unphotographable” Response

response by kelly latham

When I first watched this in class, I thought that it was odd.  I also thought that he was just tired of photographs and wanted to do something different.  It wasn’t until after I also read the Szarkowski’s “The Photographer’s Eye” introduction that I understood what Hockney meant when he said, “you are more aware whats at the edges” and when he said that “it was unphotographable” and “photography doesn’t quite show you the way you see it with your eye”. 

When he said “you are more aware whats at the edges”, I now understand that he meant that there is no way you can get everything in the frame that needs to be there.  And when he deemed something unphotographable, I understood that a photograph would not convey it wholly, or truthfully.  And I really not understand what he meant by “photography doesn’t quite show you the way you see it with your eye”.  Because it doesn’t!  Viewer pick what the want to notice out of a photograph, and overtime that might change, but the way you originally saw something and the way it first impacted you can’t change.  You can’t change real memories.  So if one paints it instead, that you can focus on what you wanted to, and leave the rest out.  You can choose what was important to you and share that with the world instead of sharing what you think is important, along with everything you don’t think is important that can distract from what is really important. 

When Hockney was talking about his childhood, then I really understood what he meant by unphotographable.  He is combining memories with current, and that is impossible to do with photographs because you cannot photograph the past.  You can have photographs of the past, but not photograph the past.  Just the present. 

Response to the Masters of Illusion Video

by Kelly Latham

I had seen this video before (or at least a slight part of it) in an art history class last semester.  I thought that it was interesting in that they used current technology and special effects to point out the successes and flaws of the masters and their understandings of perspective. 

Before I saw this film, I just thought that it was a stylistic thing within culture to have everything seem flat and mashed together.  It didn’t dawn on me that they did not actually understand how to apply depth to scenes.  It makes me wonder if human intelligence had just not been enough to understand it, or if they just didn’t have the nerve to mess with they system.  Or maybe they didn’t have the correct tools to create works that would have accurately represented depth and perspective.  

I really liked the part of the video with the inlayed wood venire that created extraordinary amounts of depth.  It looked so cool! And then I just had to laugh when the camera moved to show that if the viewer moves to the wrong spot, the illusion no longer works.  I can imagine that it would be incredibly difficult to paint all that depth, but to use small pieces of wood to piece it together!  I could never do it.  I am not patient enough.  

Response to John Szarkowski’s “The Photographer’s Eye”

By Kelly Latham

While I was reading, a few things in particular stuck out to me; what the snapshot did to photography, what snapshot photography did to history, and how the photographer uses “The Thing Itself”, “The Frame”, “Time”, and “Vantage Point” to manipulate the truth.  

When I first took a photo class, I was always told “take photographs, not snapshots; snapshots are of things, photos are about things”.  So I just always regard anything called a snapshot as bad.  When I was reading this article, I got from it that snapshots were bad because they took away from the art of photography.  People ignored “composition, light, shade, and texture” and just took momentary pictures of what they thought was pretty and then moved on.  I think that that is why people think that photography is so easy; because they can pull of a snapshot.  But they do not know what they should be looking for in a photograph that is meant to be artistic.  

However, because there were so many snapshots being taken, everything started being recorded.  Before snapshots, only important things were painted, so only what rich people deemed important was remembered.  Now, everything was remembered, so everything became important.  I think that that could be a good thing and a bad thing.  Good in that we know a lot more about what was actually going on in history, even down to the little things.  But bad because maybe there were so many snapshots of pointless things that the important photographs were overlooked and mistaken for a snapshot.  Maybe the photograph was more important, and now it is lost, along with whatever was image was more important than the snapshot image.  But the snapshot lives on, possible causing history to remember something that it far less important than what should be remembered.  

Being an amateur photographer with my few classes and lots of personal teaching, I surprised me that the article pointed out how many ways the truth can be manipulated through photography, even thought it is an image from something that actually happened.  For example, in “The Thing Itself” paragraphs, it pointed out that the earth was the real artist and the photographer was the one that had to record it correctly.  It made me think that photographers are just stealing what the earth is doing and calling it their own.  But in recording these happenings, there were hardly recorded the way they were actually seen.  The would use unnatural clarity and made things and items seem significant when they may have been extremely insignificant.  And while the photographer did all this, it was believed that a photographer could not lie.  So, I believed that in doing so, a photograph brings unimportant things to attention while the real important things are left to be forgotten.  Kind of like with snapshots versus photographs.  

In “The Detail” part of the introduction, it talked about that photographers could not tell the whole story, just fragments of the truth.  So once again, the photographer is lying to the viewer.  So to try to get the whole story down, the narrative sequence was made, but that still didn’t cover the whole story, just a fake story that was still missing parts.  “The narratives were not used to make the story clear, they were used to make it real”.  That last sentence confuse me for a while, but then I understood it as giving the viewer enough of the components of the story to make their own conclusions with it, giving them the freedom to make it whatever story they wanted.  So, it made it real to the viewer because they would have the chance to make it whatever they wanted, but it was still not clear what the actual and original story was.  So once again, photographs just lied. 

The next section titled “The Frame” really interested me, because nothing like it had been pointed out to me before.  I did know that it was important what was in the frame, out of the frame, and then there were no distractions at the edges of the frame, but it hadn’t occurred to me that it creates relationships that don’t exist and breaks ones that do.  Because the frame cannot fit everything in the image.  That why its a frame, not the world.  It has edges.  But, without being able to fit everything in, it is not telling the whole truth, so it is lying.

The final section of the introduction to “The Photographer's Eye” is titled “Vantage Point”.  It pointed out that photographers teach us to see from unexpected vantage points.  But, is that a real depiction of the world?  So is the camera once again lying to us?  Or misleading us?  

What I mainly got from this article is with photographs, nothing can be truly and wholly conveyed.  And then I got to thinking.  Can anything truly and wholly convey anything else?  I don’t think so…  Hmm.  This article has greatly troubled my understanding of art and what it represents.  Because, anything and everything that attempts to reproduce something realistically is telling lies about it, because it is not one-hundred percent conveying it correctly, or it is leaving out parts, or can be interpreted be everyone differently.  And if everything is interpreted by everyone differently, then why to artists try to convey what they see through their art, when no one will ever see it exactly the same way?  

Update! Day 6-16 Images from my Daily Creative Challenge!

Full Site Here: http://kellylatham.wordpress.com/ and more information on each individual image as well :)


 
 
 
 

Day 6 Creative Challenge Link Here :)

http://kellylatham.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/day-6-1-6-12-2/

My 2012 Creative Challenge!

I have decided to do something creative everyday of the year for 2012! whether that be drawing, painting, photography, knitting, whatever, i am going to do it atleast once a day :)

here is what i have done so far. :) you can read about them each individually at A Creative 2012 Blog :)