Part 1 - Introduction
1.1. Introduction to Ocean of Images
Before 1888, making photographs was difficult, requiring specialized training and cumbersome equipment. In that year, the Eastman Kodak Company introduced an inexpensive, easy-to-use, handheld camera, which promised: “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest.” With photography accessible to a much broader audience, anyone could take a picture. Since then, evolving photographic technologies have made taking and distributing pictures increasingly simple, with the result that photography has become ever more fully integrated into daily life. Now, with the proliferation of digital cameras, smart phones, and social media platforms, trillions of images are shared online each year, adding to those we encounter on television, in print publications, and in advertisements. It can seem that we are submerged in an ocean of images.
Since the 1960s, artists have been exploring both the means and the effects of our constant exposure to images and the power they have in shaping our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Artists demonstrate that images are malleable—that their meaning is not necessarily fixed but, rather, can be determined by a great number of external factors. They are examining the methods and technologies used in making and circulating images, and the ways in which these systems affect how the images are viewed and interpreted. They consider the use and manipulation of images in advertising and the mass media, and, perhaps most importantly, analyze how our engagement with images today affects our relationships with truth and reality.
Learning Objectives
Examine the role of evolving photographic technologies in our past and present visual culture.
Discover some of the ways artists examine—and frequently disrupt—current methods of image production, presentation, and circulation.
Analyze how the use and manipulation of images in advertising and the mass media affects our relationships with truth and reality.
Part 5 - Review & Respond
Review…
The following have contributed to the proliferation of photographic images:
The Kodak Brownie Camera;
The internet;
Digital cameras; and
Social media platforms including Facebook and Instagram.
Sara Cwynar created the film Modern Art in Your Life to explore how values and social norms are constructed and reinforced through art history and the popular images we encounter in our lifetime.
Thomas Ruff made the photographs for his Jpeg Series by downloading images he finds online and blowing them up to many times their original size.
David Horvitz describes Mood Disorder as an artist book that shows what can happen when a copyright-free stock image is posted online.
The series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home by Martha Rosler pairs images of war and of the home interiors.
Carmen Winant's work, My Birth:
Contains over 2,000 found images sourced from books, pamphlets, and magazines;
Is motivated by Winant's own experience of rarely seeing images of women giving birth; and
Appreciates the ambiguity of the title since My Birth could refer to the moment in which she was born, or the moment in which she had her own child.
The Watering Hole by Lyle Ashton Harris features images appropriated from all of these sources:
Pictures of pop cultural icons;
Antique ethnographic postcards with racist depictions of Black men; and
Press and police photographs of Jeffrey Dahmer and his victims.
Gertrude Käsebier belonged to a group of artist photographers known as the "pictorialists” whose goal was to elevate and promote the status of photography as a fine art.
André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri patented the carte de visite.
Artist Edson Chagas makes posters from their photographs and makes them available for people to take and redistribute?