Introduction to PhotographyMartin Irvine

Georgetown University

Andreas Feininger, “The Photojournalist,” 1955. Gelatin silver print.

How Do We Look at Photographs,when the photographic image

is the model for almost all image making?

Lee Friedlander, Self-Portrait, Haverstraw, New York. 1966. © Lee Friedlander

How Do we Get From Here

Early Daguerreotypes (positive image on glass): child, and Niagara Falls

To HereNicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick, Card Game,

from Eisbergfreisdtadt (2007) (digital montage from multiple photographs, no digital imagery)

David LaChapelle,“Cat House,” 1999

(staged studio shots,digital montage)

Jeff Wall, Scene from The Invisible Man(using studio set and props for fictional image)

Photography: Codes and Genres

Photography and/vs. “A Photograph”

“Taking a picture” vs. “making a photograph:”

photographs are made (constructed), not taken

(=memorialized “quotations” from reality).

Barthes proposed that photographs were read as “signs without codes,” but that’s because he was still held by a romantic notion of photography and domesticated images.

Photography/Photographs and Codes of Reality and Realism

Since the earliest invention and uses of photography, the photographic image has been part of the discourse and ideology of modern “realism,” almost defining the category of the representational “real.”

In our culture today, we need to understand “the Real” (our attribution of “Reality” to anything represented) as a Code or position among kinds of representations and codes.

Once we expose (de-blackbox) the representational codes for “the real,” the social power of our media becomes clearer to discuss and critique.

Medium, Codes, Genres

We never experience “photography” but photographs: images with one or many genre codes.

There are many codes (interpretive frames that we learn culturally) and genres (types) of photographs and images.

One major differentiation, now often blurred and fused in photographic work:

The “straight shot” (framed image with existing light) vs.

staged, planned, or constructed shots, with artificial light, props, sets, etc.

Some Major Photographic Genres

Documentary/Documentation, Evidence Reportage, Photojournalism Narrative (can use any other genre) Landscape, Nature Portrait Family history and rituals, snapshots Street photography Studio and staged photographs Advertising Fashion Fantasy images, Surrealism Erotica, fetish, porn

Earliest Photographic Images

Registering Light (“Photography” = “Light Writing”)

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce"View from the Window at Le Gras" (circa 1826)

First Daguerreotype, 1837Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre,

Inherited Theoretical Issues

Passivity of the camera device as “light writing”, transcription of a reality outside and in front of the camera lens.

Photographic image as an “index” (semiotic term), indexical sign, that points to or represents what it signifies. It’s value is grounded and justified in the represented thing or reality to which it is “true”.

Photography and reference (registers a “true” external world), representation, pre-existing reality, memory, record, evidence, documentation, truth.

No surprise that photography became one of the main tools of postmodernism in breaking the “reality” and “truth” codes of images, and in critiquing those codes.

Alfred Stieglitz and the “Art Photography” Debate

“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”

“The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.” --Stieglitz

Periodical Camera Work and associated photographers were influential in establishing photography as an art form, not a mechanical or industrial trade.

A debate about institutions, social class ownership and identification with photography, representation and reality, hierarchy of professions, interpretive/active “artist” status of professional photographers.

“The Steerage,” 1907

“Flatiron Building, NY,” 1903

“Georgia O’Keeffe, Nude,” 1919

“Winter on Fifth Ave., NY,” 1893

Exemplary Artist:Bresson and the “Decisive Moment” Concept

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Model of the "street

photographer", with a Leica 35mm camera and using existing light

“Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare,”

1932

Cartier-Bresson as “theorist”

Strict adherence to “indexical” value of the photograph, assuming only the framing and interpretation of the photographer

Landmark book:Images à la Sauvette ("stolen images," "The Decisive Moment”)

Photographer as Recorder, Memorializer

Archive of images: Archive | Archive of images at Magnum Photos

The Berlin Wall, 1963

Postmodern photography cut the link to the moment and the index of reality

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, 21. 1978. Gelatin silver print.

Staged and shot in studio. No “there there” before or after the shot.

A photograph uses the codes of “the real” that we’ve learned from a long history of photographic mediation.

Gregory Crewdson, “Production Still,” 1991. C-print.

Photography is now our projected psyche:images of fantasy, desire, fear

Annie Leibovitz / Vanity Fair. The Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair, March, 2006. Keira Knightley, Scarlett Johanssson and Tom Ford.

Consequences of the ubiquityof photographic images and video

What is the status of the photographic image after digital cameras, cell phone cameras, amateur use of Photoshop, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube?

Revisiting Bourdieu’s “Photography as a Middle Brow Art” argument:

Picture-taking, being photographed as a social activity.

Today a photograph is usually a digital image created to be “reproduced” (in Benjamin’s concept)

A photograph is made to be copied and distributed with no fixed physical medium (in contrast to film and photopaper)

The memory of the earlier “indexical” function is still there, but the power of the image as image is more important.

Examples and Case Studies

Historical Exemplars: Bresson to Crewdson, Wall, Sugimoto

Matrix “Bullet Time:” digital film and photography convergence

Artists using the “ideology” of the photograph:

Chuck Close, Gerhard Richter, others