Why is photography considered the main medium of neoliberalism, and how have artists continued to engage with the form?
CLASS 11 > The Photographic Message and Commodity Culture
CLASS 10 > Photography and (Post) Modern Identity in the Digital Age (Part 2)
What compels us to photography everything, everywhere, and all at once?
Examining Artie Vierkant’s THE IMAGE OBJECT POST-INTERNET (2010)
I began by looking at and defining words that stood out as being important, especially concerning the title of Vierkant’s essay…
IMAGE…
IMAGE (n): “…a representation of the external form of a person or thing in art” (Oxford).
Evocation / to evoke
Synonyms: likeness, Resemblance, depiction, representation, bust, portrait, artists interpretation.
(v): “… Make a representation of the external form of…”
Latin: IMAGO
VISUALIZATION, PICTOGRAMS.
(n): “… The general impression That a person, organization, or product presents to the public“ (Oxford). “…public perception, conception, impression; persona; mask.”
(n): “…an optical appearance or counterpart produced by light or other radiation from an object reflected in a mirror or refracted through the lens.”
Reflection, echo.
(n): “… Invisible impression obtain by a camera, telescope, microscope, or other device, or displayed on a computer or video screen.”
M-W: “… Visual representation of something; Such as: (1): Likeness of an object produced on a photographic material; (2): A picture produced on our electronic display (Such as a TV or a computer screen).”
Dictionary.com: “… Image, icon, idle, referred to material representations of persons or things. An image is a representation as in a statue or FG, and is sometimes regarded as an object of worship (Image of a Saint).
2D: Drawing, painting, photograph, print, video, film… 3D: Carving, sculpture, installation.
SELF-IMAGE…
Is the personal view, for mental picture, that we have of ourselves. It is an ‘Internal dictionary’ That describes the characteristics of the self, including such things as intelligent, beautiful, ugly, talented, selfish, and kind, etc. These characteristics form a collective representation of our assets (strengths) and liabilities (weaknesses) as we see them.
OBJECT (THING)…
(n): “… Material thing that can be seen and touched. / “… A person or a thing to which a specified action or feeling is directed” (Oxford).
“… Anything that is visible or tangible, and is relatively stable in form“ (Dictionary.com).
“ Real world objects: your dog, desk, pen, TV, bicycle. Real world, objects, share two characteristics: They all have state and behaviour.
Ask > what possible states can this object be in? What possible behaviours can this object perform?
DOG states: name, colour, breed, hungry…
DOG behaviours: barking, fetch, wagging tail…
BICYCLE states: current gear, speed, pedal…
BICYCLE behaviours: changing gear, applying brakes…
LAMP states: on / off…
LAMP behaviours: turn on, turn off, dim…
RADIO states: on, off, volume, current station…
RADIO behaviours: turn on, turn off, increase volume, decrease volume, seek, scan, tune, record…
THING (n): “…a solid thing that you can hold, touch, or see but that is not alive. INANIMATE OBJECT. (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English).
CORE QUESTION
What is the role of photography in the development and expansion of post-modernism and new media technologies since the turn of the 21st Century?
CLASS 09 > Photography and (Post) Modern Identity in the Digital Age (Part 1)
SHOW-ME-WHAT-YOU-KNOW IN CLASS ASSESSMENT #5
We will consider the ways in which photography changed and proliferated at the turn of the 21st Century with the popularization of the Internet, Digital Photography, and Software that enables photo manipulation. A discussion of how these changes forever transformed global visual culture and impacted contemporary art practices.
1) What characteristics of this artwork make it POSTMODERN vs MODERN? This evaluates how you apply analysis from the course ideas to a new, unseen artwork.
ARTIFACT > Struth, Thomas. “Audience 11, Florence.” Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT, chromogenic print (72 13/16” x 117 11/16”). 2004.
Struth’s work, Audience 11, Florence (2004) examines the collective experience of individuals looking at artworks in an art museum. Struth’s focus on the gallery going spectators moves this picture from the modern into the post modern. There is no traditional artwork being specifically focussed on here, rather, the post modern focus is on an examination of how people engage and see. The result is quite literally Struth using his camera as a mirror to capture a precise moment in time, a reflection of a gallery going public in 2004. There is a revealing of both the whole as a group of people together in the museum, as well as of each individual represented where some people’s gaze is clearly fixed on an unseen art object. Two men in a black t-shirt on the right appear to be in awe of whatever they are looking at; as do a young man in a red shirt with two women to his right appear to also be astonished by what they are seeing; and finally, a girl in a white shirt on the left is holding a book, looking up at the art object in contemplation. Other people’s gazes however, are not on the object. Some seem to be distracted: a group of four people on the right are engaged with each other in conversation (while a young black girl in a red t-shirt watches them); an older couple on the left appear to be figuring out how to use some kind of device (perhaps museum audio guides?); a dark skinned woman behind the couple on the left appears as if she is looking straight ahead into a kind of blank void (possibly tired from a day of tourist activities); and one person isn’t even facing the art object, standing with their back to the scene. Altogether, the image provides a look of various moments of self-consciousness and self-reflection people have in these kinds of spaces. This focus makes this post-modern photograph more personal than the artworks created in the modern moment. Meaning is further created and shaped as the work’s large size makes it feel like the kind of history paintings one could view in a museum like this. As such, this post-modern work looks back at, plays with, and references not only ideas related to the modern, but with ideas related to the entire cannon of art history.
2) Summarize THREE key points that you think best explain the take-away ideas of Grundberg’s The Crisis of the Real for your group’s section. In your response, make sure to include direct reference to how your assigned group image helps to make the argument. This question asses your understanding of core concepts explored in the weekly class reading.
One idea explored by Grundberg is centred on how post-modernism is a continuation of modernism, a natural development, evolution, and shift of how modernism worked. Specifically, Grundberg describes how, “…one can see the seeds of a postmodernist attitude within what we think of as American modernist photography” (12).
ARTIFACT > LEFT: Abell, Sam. “Malboro Man Advertisement, Malboro, 1980s.” RIGHT: Prince, Richard. “Untitled (cowboy).” Guggenheim Museum, 1989.
Grundberg also explores how modern artists began using photography in new ways, primarily with how photographs work as signs that create new possibilities for meaning making. With Richard Prince’s Untitled (cowboy) (1989), he has chosen to focus in on the image of the cowboy from the original advertisement, which removes all ties to the advertisement’s original content and context. As such, the photograph from the advertisement no longer functions in support of the Marlboro brand. With the cowboy riding alone in a dry, arid, desert landscape, he is still a representation of cool, and he operates as only a cowboy - he just is.
Finally, Grundberg describes how meaning making is contingent on what viewers bring to the table, as “…all we see is seen through the kaleidoscope of all that we have seen before.” This allows one to engage with images like Prince’s appropriation of the Marlboro Man advertisements on a post-modern level, questioning the authenticity of the original image, and allowing for contemplation of why it was made. Some may know that this image was appropriated, as they may remember the original Marlboro Man advertisements. Others, especially younger audiences, are likely not familiar with the advertisements, leaving room for them to ask questions about the picture that is presented. Is it a throwback to the idea of the Wild, Wild West, a never-ending landscape waiting to be tamed by European explorers? Or perhaps it is a throwback to the idea of the lone cowboy, such as ones popularized in movie Westerns of the 1960s and 1970s, staring actor Clint Eastwood? Ultimately, for every person that isn’t familiar with the context of the advertisements, how they see Prince’s image will vary greatly from person to person.
3) Critically reflect on your opinion of Richard Prince’s New Portrait series. Do you think his artistic process is fair and legitimate, or do you think his work is somehow unethical? Do you think your opinion would be different before you learned about the characteristics of postmodern art? This question interprets how you have reflected on a major debate in current art history regarding photography. I am looking here for your honest assessment and opinion, so feel free to speak openly and honestly.
ARTIFACT > McKeever, Rob. “Richard Prince’s New Portraits.” Gagosian Galleries / CBC News, 2015.
Richard Prince’s use of Instagram images seems to be fair and legitimate, especially when one remembers how Meta has always been very clear about how its users do not retain any kind of copyright control over the imagery and videos they post to Meta platforms. That control is in Meta’s hands, as it allows them to use people’s imagery for its own ends. This ambiguity also leaves the door open for other people to test the boundaries of that control, which Prince has done with his New Portraits series. But Prince doesn’t simply reshare the Instagram images online. Here, he has changed the context behind how the images exist and are experienced by viewers - moving them from the screens of our smart phones to life size prints hung inside the walls of an art gallery. He has also ensured that comments he has made to each of the comment sections of his selected images are visible in his enlargements, contributing to the dialogue surrounding the images both on and offline, which is a very Post-Internet idea. There definitely would have been a time when I would have hated this kind of approach to making art as I would have viewed it simply as theft. But now I do view them as artworks which adds new dimensions to the original images. His commenting on the photos alerts the original image makers that something might be up, especially if they visit his profile and learn more about who he is. And when they learn that their work is now hanging in galleries, being sold for a lot of money by a world-renowned artist, those Instagram users would be able to leverage that exposure, as their feeds gain notoriety and new views in ways that they would not have been able to otherwise achieve.
4) Please discuss how your assigned artwork / artist fits within the POST-MODERN art movement. In your response, make sure to reference the Grundberg article directly, and you can also reference ideas related to Monday’s lecture concerning Walter Benjamin and Marcel Duchamp to extend your arguments. This question assesses how you are applying core course ideas to your curatorial project.
ARTIFACT > Vierkant, Artie. “Image Objects.”
Artie Vierkant fits into the post-modern as he blurs the lines between what a finished artwork is. During his fluid process of creating an artwork, meaning shifts as the formal mediums used shift. A further blurring of meaning making also occurs when viewers take and distribute their own photographs of the image online, or when they use Vierkant’s augmented reality smartphone app to further alter and change the images they take of his work. This provides both artists and audiences with opportunities to create and play with a plethora of new ideas related to Vierkant’s original work. This ties back into Grundberg’s article and discussion of how images are mediated, as Grundberg states how: “The photograph suggests that our image of reality is made up of images. It makes explicit the dominion of mediation” (13).
Grundberg also notes how our reality is shaped by the ubiquity of imagery, which is something Vierkant is clearly interested in. Specifically Grundberg describes how with “…the postmodern condition: it see s impossible to claim that one can have a direct, unmediated experience of the world; all we see is seen through the kaleidoscope of all that we have seen before” (13). Finally, I found that Vierkant’s work also seeks to, as Grundberg notes: “…problematize the relations of art and culture” (14). Vierkant has democratized the experience of both viewing and sharing an artist’s work of art, allowing for new collaborations and dialogue between both artists and viewers, one that is ultimately contingent on how individual’s conceive of and experience the world around them.
Grade Received: A / A+
CLASS 08 > Photography as Art
Can photography be considered art?
CLASS 07 > Photography and Desire: Public and Private Photography
How does photography operate in the private sphere of our lives, both as individuals, but also as collective bodies (groups, subcultures, class, nations)?
Core Question
How does photography contribute to the naming and “othering” of individuals and groups?
CLASS 06 > Exhibitionism: Photography and the Mobile Imagination
SHOW ME WHAT YOU KNOW - CURATORIAL PROJECT REVIEW
Grade Received: A- / A
Note: More thorough job could have been done on the FORM / CONTENT / CONTEXT question.
Questions to consider regarding your project:
WHAT EXCITES YOU ABOUT THE IMAGE YOU’RE GIVEN?
Would you want to go to your own show?
How will you create something unique?
What do you want to examine and what are the possibilities for your project?
How do you look at the works with intention? With a specific point of view?
How does your idea relate to photography? What is photography’s role in what we see as art?
You must have a tightly curated show. Don’t end up with a project that is too broad, and don’t end up in a philosophical wormhole.
Look at starting a collection of things related to this… a Pinterest board of possible artworks.
Header Photo: Panorama. Mid-Atlantic, November 1993, Allan Sekula, 1993. From Fish Story, 1989–1995. The Getty Research Institute, 2016.M.22. A partial gift from Sally Stein, in memory of her husband Allan Sekula. © Allan Sekula Studio LLC
CORE QUESTION
How do we depend upon, trust, and evaluate photography as evidence?
CLASS 05 > Photography as Evidence
A brief history and discussion of early documentary photography, its significant contributions and organizations, and the major movements and developments in the use of photography, to bring attention to social issues, war, and the preservation of historical events through the mid-twentieth century.
SHOW-ME-WHAT-YOU-KNOW IN-CLASS ASSESSMENT #3
1) From your initial research into your assigned artist, please reflect on what you have found most compelling / challenging / surprising about their background and approach to photography. Here is also where you can tell me how you are feeling a bout the artist assigned to you, and how you are relating (or not) to them so far as an artist you will be asked to curate. This question assesses your reflection of your assigned artist for the curatorial project.
I found it interesting that, like artist Jeff Wall especially, Vierkant approaches his artwork from a very conceptualist lens, where the ideas and concepts behind the work are more important than the finished art object (and with Vierkant, you could ask if the artwork(s) are ever finished, given the mutability of the process behind the creation of the object and how it eventually lives on its own in the world). As a Post-Internet artist, he is very interested in how an artwork exists, both in and out of a world where what is on and offline impacts the meaning a photographic art object holds. Vierkant wants to blur and intertwine the lines of what is online and offline. Like Wall, he wants to engage viewers in new ways so they spend more time seeing, interacting with, and talking about an art object. In 2018 (or so), as a part of his ongoing Image Objects series, he created an augmented reality app that lets viewers record images of the photo based artworks in the gallery, and then play with and manipulate those captured images through various photoshop like choices. Once finished, a viewer can then share their new art object to the platform of their choice, such as Instagram.
2) With the artwork I have chosen for you, please complete a full inventory of the FORM and CONTENT of the work. Next, comment on the most significant aspects of the artwork’s CONTEXT that you have discovered so far. This question evaluates your understanding of FORM, CONTENT, and CONTEXT.
IMAGE > Vierkant, Artie. “Image Objects.”
Usually, Vierkant formally starts by creating various geometrical and curvilinear shapes in a software program such as Photoshop, which often act as frames - highlighted by colourful gradients that in some ways evoke a callback to colour field painting and even the Fauvist works that were interested in exploring bright, wild colours and flat forms. Vierkant then prints these shapes onto a kind of hard plastic surface that is cut to fit the shapes he created. These would then be installed in a gallery, where the installation would be photographed again, and further altered in Photoshop. Here though, it appears that Vierkant has placed various found objects (heavy, dull looking, industrial like objects) on a white plinth inside of a gallery. This installation was then digitally photographed so that it could be brought into a computer, where Vierkant then placed his colourful forms behind and on top of the assorted objects. Some of these electronic forms look to also be superimposed onto the far back wall of the gallery, mimicking the style of his earlier images in this series, with the layered objects on top of the entire image marking a new placement for Vierkant. Finally, the black imagery feels sculptural, with a weight to it, even as it appears to float in the spaces the pieces occupy. The largest piece feels almost figurative, as if it was operating like the profile of a female figure (a nun?) perhaps (another possibility the three black shapes might represent is that of a mermaid). It all serves to transmute the idea of what is real and what is digitally created, superimposed, and altered. The finished piece is an experience through step by step processes, forming an exploration of what an art object is, how it is created, and how it ultimately ends up living in the world.
3) Identify THREE ideas that we have covered in the first classes so far that you can see are somehow related to your assigned artwork. For now, this can be quite broad and may be related to the artists we have looked at to date (past and present) or the readings we have covered. I am looking here to see how you are thinking about your assigned artists in connection to course ideas. This question interprets how you have synthasized and understood your assigned artist’s connection to the course.
First and foremost, I thought about the first class where we asked who is using photography in interesting ways. Vierkant is definitely interested in how the medium of photography and art objects are mediated by people’s immersion in the world of the internet and social media. Secondly, I found it interesting how Jeff Wall talked about the collaborations he has with performers, and how the conversations he has with them serve to impact the direction of his work. Vierkant is also having conversations, although his conversations are with his viewers and they focus on questions of how a photo-based art object is distributed, and at a more basic level, who an art object is. This also ties into questions of authorship, in terms of who can ultimately be called the creator of a work, especially when that artwork is altered by viewers using software such as with Vierkant’s augmented reality app. To this end, I also thought about the question of multiples, and the consequences of how ubiquitous imagery can be shapes one’s experience of any artwork. Vierkant, like Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, and Richard Mosse, is holding a mirror up to society. He’s interested in what is constructed, in an approach that’s not that dissimilar to the approaches of Wall and Sherman. Vierkant is interested in the now, the present moment, about what is socially and culturally happening in our mass media driven society. Finally, I also saw paralleled with Atget, especially with his photos for artists, and how Atget was also a sculptor and a painter. Vierkant is also a sculptor, and he is interested i how there are ultimately no neat divisions between the types of art objects, photography, and mediums he uses.
4) **BONUS** Reflection Question: What ideas came out of the group discussions today that may help push the direction you take in the curatorial project?
I found that there was a nice synergy between the artists we were all assigned. The construction seen with the work by Ozlem Atlin is similar to the construction seen in Vierkant’s work; and Charmain Poh’s use of AI ties into Vierkant in terms of questions surrounding authorship.
GRADE RECEIVED: A- / A
COMMENTS: I need a more clear FORM, CONTENT, and CONTEXT breakdown.
Curatorial Project
To support my search for possible artists & artworks, I’ve created a Pinterest board.
Possible Artist: Douglas Coupland
Art Object: “Gumhead,” an interactive social sculpture on Howe street outside the Vancouver Art Gallery, May 31 - October 7, 2014.
FORM:
Douglas Coupland, Gumhead, 2014, steel, milled foam, resin, gum. An interactive sculpture commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery. Photos: Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gallery
https://strategyonline.ca/2015/01/12/ideas-that-pop/
https://mymodernmet.com/douglas-coupland-gumhead-sculpture/
7ft tall? 10ft tall?
Possible Artist: Didier Vermeiren
“You can only look at a sculpture within the space surrounding it, whatever it is like because the actual material of the sculpture is the space. The space creates the sculpture and the sculpture creates the space.”
Didier Vermeiren
Vermeiren is an artist who primarily works with sculpture but in recent years he has taken up photography as a means of documenting his works in and out of his studio. The documentation hang on the walls of the galleries his sculptures occupy, creating a conversation between the two. Specifically, the Wikipedia article for Vermeiren notes how:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didier_Vermeiren
“His first works, in the 1970s, stood at the crossroads of conceptual art, minimal art and the tradition of modern sculpture. Afterwards, the photographical documentation of his own work became more and more significant, until it became an entire aspect of it, photographs and sculptures responding to each other and generating new works all the while.”
Introducing Artie Vierkant
Individual Curatorial Photography Project
Between Module 4 and 5 of this course, you will be individually assigned a contemporary artist working with photography to engage with in a curatorial project developed in close consultation with the me and the class over the remaining semester. You will receive an instruction sheet that provides more detailed guidance of what I will be looking for, and I will assign your artist based on a balance of your own interests in the themes and ideas raised in the course.
Please find below the name of your artist, along with one artwork that will serve as your entry point into this artist’s work with photography. I have also attached a jpg of the work for you to begin with.
ARTIST: Artie Vierkant, Image Objects (2011-ongoing)
Between now and next week’s class, please do the following:
Research your artist(s) and find out something about their biography, training, and background. If you can, read a few interviews or writings about the artist(s). I have chosen artists who are emerging and/or beginning to establish themselves in the contemporary art world, so be sure to visit their websites, social media profiles, and bookmark and begin building a set of resources so you can understand who your artist is.
Artie Vierkant (b 1986 as Arthur Benjamin Vierkant) is from Brainerd, Minnesota.
Vierkant completed his BA at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009, and his MFA at the University of California, San Diego in 2011. His CV is posted on his website, and its information can be summarized as follows:
Between 2010 and 2018, Vierkant exhibited his work in:
17 solo exhibitions; and
55 group exhibitions.
Vierkant has been featured in 11 interviews and articles in such publications as Artforum and The New Yorker.
In addition to his artworks, Vierkant has worked as an art theorist, writing 9 different articles including THE IMAGE OBJECT POST-INTERNET (2010).
Vierkant has given 9 different artist talks.
And from 2013-14 he was an adjunct professor at New York University, Steinhardt; as well as a visiting faculty member at the Virginia Commonwealth University in the Department of Sculpture in 2012.
From a Wikipedia article about Vierkant, it’s noted that Vierkant is “…an American digital artist based in Brooklyn, New York.” The short article also quotes author Paddy Johnson, who notes how Vierkant’s “…work is the classic conceptualist, fixated on the distinction between the object and its documentation, and theorizing - in classic Baudrillardian fashion - that representation can exist without reference to an original.” The article led me to want to define several terms floated about Vierkant’s practice:
DIGITAL ART: Adobe explains how that digital art is “Any artwork that draws upon digital technology as an important part of its creative process. It encompasses a wide range of techniques from digital drawings, paintings, and illustration, to photos, videos, and even sculpture / installation (my note: graphic design, animation, game design). All can be classed as digital art, so long as they’re created, enhanced, or exhibited digitally. Some artists may also produce prints and exhibit in-person, while others might go straight to a virtual or online environment. In an increasingly online world where children might access a tablet as easily as a colouring book, it’s a gateway for many aspiring creatives. And as you’re not confined by physical materials or media, the possibilities can be seemingly endless.”
DIGITAL MEDIA ART combines art and technology in creative ways.
CONCEPTUAL ART / CONCEPTUAL ARTIST / CONCEPTUALISM: The Tate Museum defines conceptual art as being “…art for which the idea (or concept) behind the work is more important than the finished artwork / art object. It emerged as an art movement in the 1960s and the term usually refers to art made from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.” A 2013 Quora post explained how: “Most art has a concept. It is the driving force behind it that provides content or meaning. Conceptual work is work that is for the most part about the concept.” And Wikipedia describes how conceptual art is: “…art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work are prioritized equally to or more than the traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns.”
ARTIFACT > The Art Assignment. “The Case for Conceptual Art.” YouTube, 26 Jul 2018.
With the artwork I have chosen for you, please complete a full inventory of the FORM and CONTENT of the work. This can and should be done with little need for research (beyond maybe determining scale/materials for form). Once you complete this, work on the CONTEXT of the image as best as you can. I have put resources on Moodle so you can better understand FORM, CONTENT, and CONTEXT if this is new to you, or you need a refresher. Be sure to have this on hand for next class.
ARTIFACT 02 > Artie Vierkant, Image Objects (2011- ). Prints on aluminum composite panel, altered documentation images.
FORM: Vierkant works with several mediums including DIGITAL NEW MEDIA, INSTALLATION, PHOTOGRAPHY, and SCULPTURE, all of which serve as part of the artwork’s form as it exists in the image presented above.
First, in terms of a SCULPTURE, Vierkant works with several found objects that sit as installed sculptural elements on a white rectangular plinth inside the white cube of an art gallery space. A wall runs parallel behind the long back side of the plinth, and another shorter wall appears to run parallel to the left of the plinth. While the left side is seemingly closed off by the shorter wall, the room appears to continue off to the right of the picture frame. On the right front corner of the plinth sits a small, heavy looking, dullish grey block pipe that appears slightly rusted on the left hand side as well as on top of the block itself. Near the back of the plinth, to the left of the small block pipe stands a long, clean looking, glossy black rectangular block with a cylindrical top. Directly in front of this skinny monolith sits a stout, marble green block, possibly a cylindrical shape (but it’s hard to tell). On the opposite side of the plinth, in the back left hand corner sits a much larger shiny, clean looking, greenish-blue block pipe. Next to this, near the very front of the plinth, is the start of a fifth object, which appears as though it might be a long, black object laying flat on the surface of the plinth. But the object is cut off and obscured by Vierkant’s digital elements. Finally, a sixth object sits at the very front of the image, occupying a slice of the lower right hand side of the image. It appears as though it is another heavy, dull grey block pipe, possibly one whose right hand side protrudes upward, possibly turning the block pipe into a corner connector.
Secondly, in terms of PHOTOGRAPHY, Vierkant is known to digitally photograph his sculptural installations, which serve as a foundation for his use of DIGITAL NEW MEDIA manipulations of the image in programs such as Photoshop. Here, Vierkant appears to have added two digital compositions to the far wall of the gallery space. The compositions mimic paintings, albeit digital paintings. The composition on the left is the most visible, a square field of orangey colour upon which a gradient swirl of blue swishes its way upwards like a digital cloud, and a small bit of it even breaks the frame of the canvas, by floating out beyond it on the lower left hand side.
Very bright neon spring colours
CONTEXT: As a Post-Internet CONCEPTUAL ARTIST, Vierkant is interested in exploring the meaning behind what constitutes a photo-based art object and how that object lives on once it leaves the creative hands of the artist. As a conceptual artist, Vierkant’s work references and is influenced by several art movements of the past, including:
THE READYMADE: Vierkant’s use of heavy, industrial like objects calls back to the very roots of modern conceptual artworks as represented by the Readymades of Marcel Duchamp. Wikipedia notes how:
“The readymades of Marcel Duchamp are ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified, as an antidote to what he called "retinal art.” By simply choosing the object (or objects) and repositioning or joining, titling and signing it, the found object became art.
Duchamp was not interested in what he called "retinal art"—art that was only visual—and sought other methods of expression. As an antidote to retinal art he began creating readymades in 1914, when the term was commonly used in the United States to describe manufactured items to distinguish them from handmade goods.
He selected the pieces on the basis of "visual indifference,” and the selections reflect his sense of irony, humor and ambiguity: he said "it was always the idea that came first, not the visual example ... a form of denying the possibility of defining art."”
In Vierkant’s Image Objects, it is safe to assume that Vierkant choose the objects that appear on the plinths with the same kind of “visual indifference,” as Duchamp described as harbouring “…no aesthetic emotion.” By there mere placement in an art gallery, these industrial objects have become art, and carry the added burden of existing to be replicated and altered through the creative possibilities inherent with digital photography and software programs such as Adobe Photoshop (ultimately, film photographs could also be taken of these objects, and they could be further manipulated by the possibilities that exist with the tools in a photography darkroom).
COLOUR-FIELD PAINTING: Vierkant’s use of brightly coloured, computer generated geometric shapes in many ways feels as though they are a throw-back to the ideas and style embedded in colour-field painting, which the Tate notes how:
“From around 1960 a more purely abstract form of colour field painting emerged in the work of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Alma Thomas, Sam Gilliamand others. It differed from abstract expressionism in that these artists eliminated both the emotional, mythic or religious content of the earlier movement, and the highly personal and painterly or gestural application associated with it.”
Wikipedia also describes how colour-field painting:
”…is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favor of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself."
The bright, colourful shapes Vierkant creates and places within the photographically represented space of the gallery, although gestural, feels largely impersonal, and even flat. There are no references to any objective content, leaving room for whatever subjective interpretation the viewer brings to the work.
The gradient colours of the computer generated geometric shapes appear to pay homage to Cory Arcangel’s Photoshop Gradient Demonstrations, a series of artworks created between 2007-15 (a sample of the gradients Arcangel created can be seen in Artifact 02 below). These works by Arcangel are evocatively bright gradients of computer generated colour, where the name of each piece contains the information that anyone can use to recreate the artworks in their own copy of the Adobe Photoshop software program. This sharing of information by Arcangel surrounding the process of creation blurs the line between how the art object exists in terms of how it can be viewed, shared, and recreated. Arcangel is freeing the work from the confines of the four walls of the white cube known as the art gallery, democratizing the image by allowing it to live a life beyond those walls and in the hands of anyone who knows how to use Photoshop. Technically, I could print these art pieces and have them framed, and have an Arcangel hanging in my own home. I could also alter them by changing their size, and superimposing them as an added layer on top of my own photographs, or onto photographs I appropriate on the internet, to give them new life and new meaning. I could even layer them onto an image created by Vierkant and post the result onto my Instagram feed.
ARTIFACT 03 > Arcangel, Cory. “Photoshop CS: 110 by 72 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient "Yellow, Violet, Red, Teal", mousedown y=16450 x=10750, mouse up y=18850 x=20600.” Whitney Museum of American Art, 2009.
Usually, Vierkant formally starts by creating various geometrical and curvilinear shapes in a software program such as Photoshop, which often act as frames - highlighted by colourful gradients that in some ways evoke a callback to colour field painting and even the Fauvist works that were interested in exploring bright, wild colours and flat forms. Vierkant then prints these shapes onto a kind of hard plastic surface that is cut to fit the shapes he created. These would then be installed in a gallery, where the installation would be photographed again, and further altered in Photoshop. Here though, it appears that Vierkant has placed various found objects (heavy, dull looking, industrial like objects) on a white plinth inside of a gallery. This installation was then digitally photographed so that it could be brought into a computer, where Vierkant then placed his colourful forms behind and on top of the assorted objects. Some of these electronic forms look to also be superimposed onto the far back wall of the gallery, mimicking the style of his earlier images in this series, with the layered objects on top of the entire image marking a new placement for Vierkant. Finally, the black imagery feels sculptural, with a weight to it, even as it appears to float in the spaces the pieces occupy. The largest piece feels almost figurative, as if it was operating like the profile of a female figure (a nun?) perhaps (another possibility the three black shapes might represent is that of a mermaid). It all serves to transmute the idea of what is real and what is digitally created, superimposed, and altered. The finished piece is an experience through step by step processes, forming an exploration of what an art object is, how it is created, and how it ultimately ends up living in the world.
Identify THREE ideas we have covered in the first classes so far that you can see are somehow related to your assigned artwork. For now, this can be quite broad and may be related to the artists we have looked at to date (past and present) or the readings we have covered. I am looking here to see how you are thinking about your assigned artists in connection to course ideas. Be sure as well to have these ideas sketched out and with you for next class.
In the first seminar of this course, we looked at several artists working with the medium of photography (Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, and Richard Mosse), and considered the question, What interests them about the medium of photography? For Jeff Wall, he spoke about the relationships and collaborations he has with performers, and in class we spoke to how Wall is interested in getting people to spend more time with an art object. By comparison, Vierkant is interested in developing conversations and collaborations with viewers of his artwork by encouraging them to continue the process of creation by photographing and distributing the artworks through their own online networks. Through his augmented reality smartphone app, he also encourages viewers to spend more time with art objects by photographing it and further altering it before redistributing it online.
In our second seminar of this course, we examined the concept of how artists and viewers talk about ideas by understanding what is constructed (Sherman / Wall). We also noted how it was important to understand What was happening socially and culturally as the medium developed. This is of interest to Vierkant, who through Image Objects he is exploring how an art object exists and moves between the artist and viewer to create a dialogue. For Vierkant, the meaning behind his Image Objects is contingent on what a viewer brings to the conversation, and how they choose to share that dialogue through their interaction and further distribution of the artwork, in ways which blur the distinctions between what exists on and offline. In many respects, Vierkant seems curious about exploring how the medium is the message (a concept developed by Marshall McLuhan) in a Post-Internet world.
In seminar five, our focus moved into exploring the documentary power of photography, and what photography reveals. The question of what defines photography and art, as well as where it is viewed was considered. There was an exploration of how art and photography can be examined for links to the past. Eugene Atget produced photographs for sale as artists studies used by painters, architects, and stage designers. Although Atget was best known for his photographs, he had also worked as a painter and an actor which isn’t that different from how Vierkant works across the disciplines of digital new media, installation, photography, and sculpture. It highlights the idea explored in class about how there can be no neat divisions between the types of photography an artist uses.
ARTIFACT 01 > Troemel, Brad. “Artie Vierkant Portrait for 30 Under 30: Art & Style.” Forbes, 12 Dec 2012.
CORE QUESTION
What is photography’s role in the development of modernism and modern image-making?
CLASS 04 > Seeing and Being Seen
A closer look at the various uses of photography through the nineteenth and mid-twentieth century within the context of photographic seeing, the rise of aesthetic modernism, and modern image-making.
SHOW-ME-WHAT-YOU-KNOW IN-CLASS ASSESSMENT #2
Instructions: Please answer each of the following questions in the booklet provided. Feel free to use first-person voice and make sure to write in complete sentences and paragraphs (no point-form please).
Italicized sentences and paragraphs in questions 1 and 2 below indicate additions I have made when adding these questions to this blog - as they were areas I did not resolve and finish when originally writing the in-class answers.
1) Identify and describe THREE ideas raised in the Charles Baudelaire reading that suggest WHY Baudelaire was critical of photography. This question assesses your understanding of a class reading.
Baudelaire was critical of photography as he felt the medium lacked any kind of imagination or sense of wonder that other mediums of artistic expression, such as painting, had. In Baudelaire's time, photographs existed in a kind of objective representation or truth, they did not leave room for subjective interpretation. At the same time, Baudelaire was concerned that other mediums could also loose their sense of imagination, stating how “Each day art further diminishes its self-respect by bowing down before external reality; each day the painter becomes more and more given to painting not what he dreams but what he sees. Nevertheless it is a happiness to dream, and it used to be a glory to express what one dreamt” (3).
Secondly, Baudelaire did not like how the medium had been directed at the masses. He found that it could be too easily be commercialized, as shown by Daguerre who sold his equipment and processes to anyone willing to pay. He also felt that the process of photography did not require a lot of skill or training, and it resulted in an end product that could be easily reproduced and widely distributed - resulting in a kind of overall laziness to the endeavour. As such, Baudelaire believed that the new medium was too easy for people to enter into, it was difficult to police the boundaries of who called themselves ‘an artist,’ thus resulting in photography having “…contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius…” (2).
Thirdly, Baudelaire… was worried that photography would encroach on the ability of people to recognize and appreciate works of art, asking: “Are we to suppose that a people whose eyes are growing used to considering the results of a material science as though they were the products of the beautiful, will not in the course of time have singularly diminished its faculties of judging and of feeling what are among the most ethereal and immaterial aspects of creation?” (3).
2) Look carefully at this Impressionist painting by Gustave Caillebotte titled PARIS STREET: RAINY DAY (1877). First, identify and describe where you see evidence of ‘photographic seeing’ in this artwork on the level of FORM (how it is composed and put together) and CONTENT (the story of what we are seeing). Second, refer to one idea by either Susan Sontag or Lazlo Moholy-Nagy that you also see operating in this picture. This question asks you to do a visual analysis of an artwork.
ARTIFACT 01 > Caillebotte, Gustave. “Paris Street; Rainy Day.” 212.2 × 276.2 cm (83 1/2 × 108 3/4 in.), The Art Institute of Chicago, 1877.
Formally, Caillebotte’s Paris Street: Rainy Day (1877) is a colour oil on canvas painting, which utilizes several photographic ways of seeing. Firstly, Caillebotte employs a pictorialist feel or style of photography with a soft, cloudy, pastel beige sky, with buildings disappearing into a kind of soft focus the farther they recede into the background. The painting feels wet and damp - there is a slickness to the cobblestones in how they have been rendered by Caillebotte. The painting feels like a snapshot of a random moment in time- with around a dozen individuals moving throughout the shown space, in and out of the frame. One person, his back to the viewer on the lower right hand side of the painting, is moving into the frame and is also partially cropped out of the frame. As this man enters the frame, a couple walks towards us to his left, and they are about to leave the frame as their legs are also cropped out of the frame. Their attention is focussed on something to their right, out of sight to us the viewer. All this feeds the CONTENT, the story of this mundane, banal moment, of a city street filled with everyday people. This is not royalty, history, or religion - it is similar to what we would encounter stepping outside.
In her piece, PHOTOGRAPHY WITHIN THE HUMANITIES, Susan Sontag speaks to the idea that “There are an unlimited number of photographs to take, every photograph feels that” (61) and she continues, explaining how for a writer, “There are not an unlimited number of things to write, except in a very cerebral sense… Every writer has to reach and is constantly aware of how basically it comes from inside; it all has to be transformed in the homemade laboratory that you have got in your guts and your brain” (62). With this idea, one can compare the prospects that a writer has as being similar to the prospects a painter like Caillebotte has - there isn’t an unlimited number of things to paint, and as Baudelaire would appreciate - the creativity for a painter in expressing what they see has to come from inside. In this sense, the ways in which a painter sees is not that different than how a photographer or a writer sees - as it all comes down to the choices they make. As Sontag notes how “…the world is really there; it is an incredible thing, it is all interesting and in fact, more interesting when seen through the camera than when seen wit the naked eye or with real sight. The camera is this thing which can capture the world for you… It enables you to transform the world, to miniaturize it.” Sontag then explains how she feels that writers and painters are not able to do this, but on that point I would disagree as painting, photography, and writing are all about making creative choices that express ideas and reveal the layers that exist in the world around us.
3) Look at these works of photography you were shown today by artists Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Hannah Hoch. What is your understanding of why the photograph was the essential medium that these artists needed to use in order to express themselves as modern artists?
ARTIFACT 02 > Stiglitz, Alfred. “The Steerage.” 32 x 25.7 cm (12 5/8 x 10 1/8 in), Cleveland Museum of Art, 1907.
ARTIFACT 03 > Höch, Hannah. “Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany.” Collage, mixed media, photomontage, 3' 9" x 2' 11 1/2", Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin, 1919-1920.
ARTIFACT 04 > Strand, Paul. “Wall Street.” Photogravure & Platinum Print, 13.3 x 16.5 cm (5 1/4 × 6 1/2 in), Philadelphia Museum of Art / Whitney Museum of Art, 1915.
Artists such as Stieglitz, Strand, and Hoch were modern artists as their work was rooted in the now, in the moment. Stieglitz and Strand used photos they took of specific moments in specific places to capture the feeling of that place. They likely moved through these spaces first before setting up their cameras to capture what caught their attention to create images that told specific stories about those places. Stieglitz conveys the crowded, claustrophobic feeling of people travelling across large distances. And in spite of the crowdedness of the scene, when one takes a closer look, many individual faces convey the feeling of being alone. By contrast, Strand also reveals a kind of loneliness, but here it is represented by the spaces between the dark, deeply contrasted shadows of people walking towards the light coming from the left. They cast loping shadows, and they exist below the cold, monumental, overpowering, and sterile strength of the concrete building towering above them, stretching upwards towards and beyond the top of Strand’s picture frame. The concrete feels smooth, the light hot. It’s a brooding image of an everyday scene. Finally, Hoch has also created a claustrophobic image of many people, compiled from imagery that also represents the everyday, taken from the found photos of leaflets, magazines, newspapers, and other photos she or her friends had taken. She used these modern moments of the now to create new narratives about what they represent, where each image is able to exist as individual pieces and as part of a larger whole in a piece that commented on and mocked life in post-war Weimar Germany.
4) Look carefully at this photograph by Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, titled Climbing the Mast (1928). Identify any THREE ideas from the Moholy-Nagy reading, “A New Instrument of Vision” that you can apply to your understanding of how to read and understand this Moholy-Nagy image. This question interprets how you have synthesized and understood today’s class discussion applied to an image.
ARTIFACT 05 > Moholy-Nagy, Lazlo. “Climbing the Mast.” Gelatin silver print, 35.4 x 28 cm (13 15/16 x 11 in.), Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1928.
Moholy-Nagy’s photograph, Climbing the Mast (1928) highlights many ideas discussed in his essay, A New Instrument of Vision. First, on page 92, he discusses photography’s ability to capture “…flowing light and richly graded shadows.” In Mast, we see a wide range of gradation, from the almost white, brightly highlighted areas of the sails, to the variety of shadows cast onto it by the figure and the ladder they are climbing, as well as the almost black cutout of the figure climbing the ladder which turns black as it rises above them. Secondly, on page 94, Moholy-Nagy discusses how “…new discoveries cannot… be refined to the mentality and practice of bygone periods.” With his image, he has the central figure occupying the top-left hand corner of the photograph, rising upwards - as opposed to a more central-axis that a more traditional image may have pursued (in fact, as shown in ARTIFACT 06, Moholy-Nagy explored more conventional angles that centred the figure before landing on more tightly cropped image presented in ARTIFACT 05). One can feel a kind of vertigo being right below the figure, looking up into the frame. It’s a composition that doesn’t look like the paintings or photographs that came before, or like the photos of the pictorialists. Finally, Moholy-Nagy speaks to the importance of having “…a knowledge of photography” which is similar to what Sontag described at the bottom of page 60 in her article. Both would acknowledge the tone needs to understand how to move through a photograph, to see the infinite possibilities behind its new ways of seeing.
ARTIFACT 06 > Moholy-Nagy, Lazlo. “Variations on Climbing the Mast.” 1928.
GRADE RECEIVED: B+ (78%)
COMMENTS: Very nicely done on questions 3 & 4. Some missing points in questions 1 & 2.
CLASS 03 > The Invention of Photography and the Techniques of Photographic Seeing
What is photography’s role in representations of the modern world and in the development of “modernity”?
CORE QUESTION
What are the tensions around how we categorize photography?
CLASS 02 > History, Technology, Theory, and the Category of the Photograph
Questions of photography as art and/or technology, document, modern object, archival trace etc. will be discussed, together with an introduction to how contemporary debates have shaped the way in which the history of photography is being recast within the broader field of visual culture studies.
Distinctions / Useen elements.
Think of SMWYK as being sketches of what one is thinking - not a finished masterpiece.
Ask what is happenig socially and culturally as the medium developed.
Round 8: Nan Goldin
Examine this multimedia installation segment as part of Nan Goldin’s slide series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985) that contained over 690 photographs played over a curated soundtrack.
ARTIFACT 01 > Faby Lelait. "Nan Goldin "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency(1)" (NYC Moma 03/2009)". YouTube, 16 Apr 2009.
How does the photographic multiple operate here? What is the power of showing photographs in this way?
The multiple can be defined as “…having or involving several parts, elements, or members;” / “…many in number; involving many different people or things” (Oxford). Goldin’s work concentrated on what has become known as the snapshot aesthetic - it’s quick, ephemeral. Can have an emphasis on the grid (as one would see happen with platforms such as Instagram). In some ways there is a reference to the history of cinema.
Goldin released THE BALLAD OF SEXUAL DEPEDANCY in 1985 as a slideshow exhibition with music selected by Goldin. Ideally, the slideshow was always meant to be shown with music. It was released as an artist’s book in 1986. The show is separated into 12 acts, which mimics the idea of acts found in cinema (the cinematic) and the theatre. The multiples shown here are portraits. They reveal vulnerable moments, the lives of outsiders.
SHOW-ME-WHAT-YOU-KNOW IN-CLASS ASSESSMENT #1
Instructions: Please answer each of the following questions in the booklet provided. Feel free to use first-person voice and make sure to write in complete sentences and paragraphs (no point form please).
1) Identify and describe THREE ideas raised in the Susan Sontag reading that stuck with you. Avoid using direct quotations and use your own words to discuss these ideas. This question assesses your understanding of the class reading.
Several ideas raised in the Susan Sontag reading stuck with me. The first idea that stood out for me was how Sontag focussed on defining herself and how she fits into the discourse of photography. She starts by declaring that she is a writer and a filmmaker, and reveals how her discussion of photography is rooted in her interest in it. She also uses a term associated with both photographers as well as other creatives - freelance. She notes how she is an outsider, but one who has closely observed the world of photography for over twenty years. So she has authority rooted in her deep interest, as a junkie who is obsessed with images.
Secondly, I was intrigued by Sontag’s discussion of what photography is. Is it an activity or an art? She examines this question both formally and creatively, and she also examines what arises around the question of the end object itself: the photograph. Sontag also discusses the ubiquitous nature of the medium, even as it stood during the time of her writing this reflection, in the 1970s (and I also found it interesting how Sontag passed away just before the age of social media and the smart devices which have literally put a camera into the hands of anyone connected via a smart device - her ideas in the 1970s definitely apply to the world of photography as it exists today).
Finally, she also discusses the choices that are made in terms of photography existing as a process of creation (both for the photographer capturing / creating an image, and for the viewer who is viewing it).
2) Of the four contemporary artists we have studied to date (Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, and Richard Mosse), discuss which artist's work most intrigues and interests you, and why. Make direct reference to the actual works in terms of any element of FORM, CONTENT, or CONTEXT that most captures your attention, for whatever reason. This question asks you to critically reflect on an artist’s practice and approach.
I find that I am attracted to all of the artists, but ultimately I fund Nan Goldin likely speaks to me the most, especially when I consider where my own artistic practice is today. Formally, the immediacy of the snapshot aesthetic stands out very strongly for me. Goldin’s immersion in the cultures she photographed allowed her to capture decisive moments of authentic vulnerability as expressed naturally by her subjects (in some ways, this immersion tied into the authority Sontag discussed having in relation to the worlds she explored in her writing). Tied to the snapshot was an immediacy Goldin loved which simply wasn’t achievable through the use of sets, fancy lighting, and models (as artists like Jeff Wall and Cindy Sherman worked with). For Goldin, there was just her camera (be it a point & shoot or Polaroid, as opposed to an SLR), and whatever caught the attention of her eye in any particular moment. Through this approach, Goldin captured many multiples of various moments that were unfolding within a specific place, at a specific moment in time. These seemingly simple formal choices helped to feed the strength of the content she produced. Quick snapshots of people as they are, not posed or directed, formed the stories that she told of the places she observed: watching, and recording. Watching, and recording. While there was an ubiquity to the photography of her time, it still wasn’t like today where everyone has a camera tied to their hands in the form of a smart device. As such, it allowed Goldin to reveal unseen moments and experiences as she was likely the only one in her underground group brave and bold enough to record what she saw with a camera.
3) Watch the YouTube video where curator Marvin Heiferman (author of Photography Changes Everything) discusses the complexities of studying and understanding photography. Identify THREE ideas he raises that you think are especially significant to today’s core question (What are the tensions around how we categorize photography?). This question evaluates your comprehension of a new idea related to today’s core question.
ARTIFACT 02 > MoMA. “Marvin Heiferman | Seeing Through Photographs.” YouTube, 10 Feb 2016.
Heiferman discusses how we decipher visual imagery very quickly, within seconds, and we can know what a photograph signifies or represents - even if it is blurry. Secondly, he notes that even though we can do this, many do not understand how images work and how we derive meaning from them. We don’t know the language, we don’t always understand the mediums, which he says can be malleable and even philosophical. This idea ties into what Heiferman explains as people not knowing or understanding the history of photography: what has been done before, especially for those using the medium to tell new stories. In the video, Heiferman cites aerial drone photographers not knowing the history of aerial photography. Not knowing what has come before and the choices that have been made previously can result in new work that doesn’t innovate or push boundaries, let alone simply looking at a subject from even a slightly new perspective.
4) Discuss what any ONE of the following artists (Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Richard Mosse, or Susan Sontag) would likely find the most interesting or relevant to their interests of this viral photograph from the 2011 Vancouver Hockey Riot. This question interprets how you have synthesized and understood today’s class discussion.
ARTIFACT 03 > Rich Lam. “Vancouver Riot Kissing Couple.” Getty Images, 2011.
Nan Goldin would clearly love the snapshot aesthetic of the moment - a photographer snapping multiple images of the enormous chaos unfolding all around them, very quickly processing the overall scene, narrowing in on specific moments to record again and again, snapping away, making (taking) hundreds of photos that night. But then, finding this very decisive moment (to borrow from Cartier-Bresson) and finding that it also pushes back at how Sontag described Cartier-Bresson’s view of photography as promoting a “…fast seeing” by producing an image that has depth (both formally and conceptually) something Wall would love as it lets people slow down, and take it in, which Goldin’s work does achieve because of the gritty nature of the subject matter she photographs. And the 2011 riot was a very gritty moment - one that isn’t necessarily experienced by everyone. But it’s also a moment one wouldn’t associate with the chaos that was unfolding: a tender act of love.
GRADE RECEIVED: A (85%)
COMMENTS: Overall, very nicely done - good analysis and comprehension and connection between reflection and content.
ARTIFACT 04 > Steven Lee. “Grade Received.” 2024.
HEADER PHOTO > Goldin, Nan.
CORE QUESTION
What are the contemporary debates that drove artistic interest in the medium of photography?
CLASS 01 > Introductions & Exploring Contemporary Debates in Photography
ART HISTORY (ARTH) 3140: HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
This course was offered in a condensed format during the Summer 2024 Semester at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, as taught by Dr. Dorothy Barenscott.
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course surveys the history and evolving debates and theories concerning photography and photographic practices from the mid-19th century to the present. Present and past uses of the medium will be discussed in several specific historical, social, and theoretical contexts that expose how photographic images have circulated as both unstable and highly mobile objects within and outside the history of modern art and modernism writ large. While a rough chronological outline will be utilized, the course will be organized within the context of contemporary debates that have recast the history of photography within the broader field of visual culture studies. Therefore, rather than studying photography within the framework of traditional art historical paradigms concerning art producers, patrons, and institutions, this course will tackle the complexities of “photographic seeing” and “photographic reading” as key components in the understanding of photography’s broad cross-disciplinary appeal and historical importance. Through an introduction to critical and historical methods, students will develop the basic tools and terminology for analyzing photographic images, a skill set of crucial importance in understanding the barrage of photographic images and technological stimulus at play in our media-intensive world.
Class 1 Notes
This lecture will provide an introduction to the course - a broad overview of the contemporary debates concerning photography and how they will shape the content of this course.
This class will examine artists working with photography as a medium of expression (LENS BASED ARTISTS), with an eye towards avant-guard artists from the modern and contemporary art movements.
Who are the artists using photography in new, interesting, and challenging ways?
Today’s discussion will look at the following artists to frame the discussion surrounding today’s core question (What are the contemporary debates that drove artistic interest in the medium of photography?):
REVIEW OF FORM, CONTENT, and CONTEXT…
Form means the constituent elements of a work of art independent of their meaning (e.g., the colour, composition, medium or size of a flag, rather than its emotional or national significance). Formal elements include primary features which are not a matter of semantic significance (i.e., which do not carry meaning the way a word does): these include colour, dimensions, line, mass, medium, scale, shape, space, texture, value, and their corollaries. The secondary features are the relations of the primary features with one another: these include balance, composition, contrast, dominance, harmony, movement, proportion, proximity, rhythm, similarity, unity, and variety.”
— Dr. Robert Belton
“MORE SIMPLY PUT, CONTENT IS "WHAT" THE WORK IS ABOUT, FORM IS "HOW" THE WORK IS, AND CONTEXT IS "IN WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES" THE WORK IS (AND WAS).”
Round 1
What is your personal relationship to photography?
Photography has always been a part of my life and more recently, a key part of my emerging artistic practice. I’ve used photography to explore various issues important to me, such as examining
environmental concerns;
our changing landscape; and
portrayals of the self / myself - through self-portraiture and the written word of self-reflective memoir.
I’ve always enjoyed photographing others, but without them necessarily knowing I’m photographing them. I’ve also enjoyed doing photo walks, and engaging with street photography.
Do you like being photographed, or do you prefer to be the one behind the camera?
As I grow older, I find that I have become more comfortable with being photographed. I used to prefer being the one behind the camera until I began doing a subverted selfie project, where I try to take a selfie everyday and pair it with a caption story about how I’m doing on that particular day. It’s become a way for me to explore both the positive and negative aspects of my life, and to shine a light on my health issues such as anxiety, depression, diabetes, and heart disease.
How many photographs do you think you took in the past week?
Over three hundred.
Round 2: Jeff Wall
ARTIFACT 01 > Art21. “Jeff Wall in “Vancouver” = Season 8 | Art21.” YouTube, 19 Mar 2023.
ARTIFACT 02 > Art21. “Jeff Wall: An Impossible Photograph | Art21 “Extended Play”.” YouTube, 30 Jun 2017.
As you watch artist Jeff Wall discuss his photographic practice, pay attention to how he selects subjects for his pictures and what interests him about the nature of photographs. Discuss with the group your impressions following the screening.
When one studies a photographer (or any artist), it’s important to ask WHAT INTERESTS THEM ABOUT THE MEDIUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY?
The video opens with Jeff Wall describing how he’s “…always looking for that picture.” For Wall, the idea of a ‘subject’ is synonymous with the idea of a ‘starting point.’ Wall isn’t the type of artist who carries a camera around with him all the time, and his starting points ultimately become a reconstruction of an event. He notes, “I would have never even known I wanted to make it, till it saw that thing happen, so it’s an accident. The accident connects me to something I wasn’t connected to before.” A starting-point to something he hasn’t done before, something he hasn’t considered. Ideas and subjects can reveal themselves in unexpected ways, with unrealized potentials and qualities. In the Impossible Photograph video, Wall states how “When I realized I liked the subject, the question was, ‘How on Earth could you photograph that?’ The impossibility of seeing it was one of the triggers for it becoming interesting.”
For Wall, he either likes a place or hates it - which leads to mixed feelings that he has for Vancouver. Ultimately, he finds he is working out of his FEELINGS about a place. In other words, whether he has an objective or subjective viewpoint about a starting point, he “…can never really tell which has the upper hand at any given moment.”
Wall knows he isn’t a painter. He stopped painting in 1964 when he was 19 or 20. He tried other things, and eventually exploded into conceptual art, as it had “…potential energies inside the medium that were not being realized…” in terms of size, scale, and other technical concerns. Wall loves the “…beautiful molecular structure and granular surface that both shows itself and hides itself in the image it makes. So there are qualities that are revealed in photography when it gets larger.” Wall saw backlit advertisements and was attracted to the look of that, which he incorporated into how he displays his finished artworks.
Wall works to build replicas of scenes and places. He believes that nothing is fake, as everything you see in a photograph is happening. In the Impossible Photograph video, Wall specifically states how “What you see happening, happened… How it happened (choices about clothing, for example) is secondary to the fact that it happened.”
When creating his images, Wall’s standards are high, as Wall believes that “…there’s really no difference between capturing a gesture by accident and capturing a gesture by design.” Ultimately, he’s not sure that it’s not possible to have fakery in photography (although one wonders how he’d feel about AI). Wall also works collaboratively with his performers and designs a flexible open ended schedule into his shoots to allow for that collaboration and exploration in the creation of an artwork. Wall tries to identify with everyone he photographs to help give the work a sense of authenticity. He explores the potential of colour, and uses it to explore the banal, and the ordinary.
Wall also talks about how the one thing that photography can’t do is capture talking, which is a limiting and elusive element in photography. It can only imply that characters are talking and listening. Furthermore, Wall also discusses how pictures can never narrate, they can only imply a narrative, but they can never deliver it. Wall works to bring people to a certain place and as such, viewers are the ones who ultimately write the story, “…intuiting a narrative for themselves, which will not be the same narrative for everybody.” In the Impossible Photograph video, Wall notes that “…the most beautiful artistry hidden. But there’s no secret… it’s a condition.” And in an interview with PBS, Wall explains how, “I don’t write the story. I erase the story… (so) the process of picture-making is the exact opposite of narrating. What you’re doing is you’re stilling the narrative. You’re ending it. You’re congealing it. You’re stopping it, which means essentially you’re un-writing it. It’s the viewer that will come back in real time and rewrite the narrative.”
To that end, Wall is ultimately cognizant of how people often do not stand in front of photographs for very long. He’s always searching for ways that allow “…works of pictorial art have to be something that can be looked at endlessly.” Ideas can be like flashes, setting off photographic possibilities that has Wall always searching for the next picture.
Round 3: Jeff Wall
Examine this early Jeff Wall photograph (Picture for Women, 1979) carefully. What stories is this one photograph telling us about the nature of photography, or the image-making process? What is this photograph revealing as much as it is concealing?
ARTIFACT 03 > Wall, Jeff. “Picture for Women.” Transparency in Lightbox, 56 1/8 x 80 1/2 inches (142.5 x 204.5 cm), Gagosian, 1979.
FORM: Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women (1979) is a large (56 1/8 x 80 1/2 inches), cibachrome transparency mounted on a light-box. It is nighttime, and the studio space is lit by light bulbs that are giving off a fairly neutral, bright white glow. The large format camera capturing this moment sits on a tripod in the centre of the frame, recording everything that is reflected into the mirror the camera is facing. So what we see is a reflection of everything in the room which has been reflected by the mirror, sent back to us into the lens of the camera onto the surface of Wall’s large format film negative. The centrality of the camera is further emphasized by its positioning between the centre of three windows that are at the back of the room. These windows are themselves centred between two floor to ceiling autopoles (devices that help support lights, grip arms, or booms, and mounts between the floor and the ceiling). The autopoles serve as a framing device that segments the photo into three distinct areas, like a triptych.
The room the figures occupy is somewhat long, and forms an “L” shape, as the far left hand side of the room continues into an area the viewer cannot see. Various classroom like studio chairs, and a work table sit on the old, battered hardwood flooring, taking up the spaces along the right hand side of the room and the far back wall near the darkened windows. Wall occupies the far right hand side of the picture frame, his gaze directed at the woman who occupies the far left hand side of the photo. Wall is a somewhat shadowy figure, as none of the room’s lighting is directed towards him, and there are only four bulbs hanging from the ceiling behind him, compared to seven hanging above and behind the woman in the picture. The low light leaves his skin to appear muted, and his black clothes almost bleeding into the dark, muted colouring of the floor and the chair directly behind him. His left hand, holding the shutter release cable that is attached to the camera, acts as a pointer leading a viewer’s line of sight towards the woman on the left of the picture plane.
His gaze is also focussed on his female model, again leading the viewer’s gaze to her as she stands lit by an unseen lighting source that’s likely just in front of and above her, out of the view of the camera’s lens. It lights her figure, causing shadows from her hair to fall on her shoulders, and shadows from her entire figure to land on the table in front of her. The light brightens her eyes, her upper body, her earrings. The light also brightens the table to her right, until it gradually fades into shadow further to the right. She has an almost passively expressionless look on her face, one that borders on a rather forlorn look, as she stares straight ahead without necessarily engaging a viewer.
CONTENT (STORY): In examining the story being told in Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women, it can be good to start with an examination of the title an artist has given a work of art. In an article written by staff at LinkedIn called How Can You Write Engaging Titles for Your Content? it’s noted that:
“Titles are the first thing that your audience sees and decides whether to click or scroll past your content. A good title can capture attention, spark curiosity, communicate value, and entice action.”
First and foremost, Wall’s title directly tells us that this photograph, this ‘picture,’ is created and exists ‘…for women.’ ‘For’ is an important word to consider. Merriam-Webster notes that it can first be “…used as a function word to indicate purpose,” in this case, the picture’s purpose is to exist for women. It can also refer to something that is “…with respect to,” or “concerning.” In this case, the picture is concerning women.
Secondly, the woman featured in the picture has been prominently placed in the foremost left hand side of the picture frame, and is well lit, making her stand out from everything else that is behind her. The title, her placement, the way she is lit, and Wall himself looking and informally pointing in her direction further emphasizes her importance in the large, backlit picture.
Thirdly, the title references the idea of how men present gifts to women. In this case, the gift is being given by the male artist Jeff Wall, to all women. As such, one story that this picture could be is exploring is how the gift of the picture could represent the artist wishing to give agency back to women, who have a long history of being the subjects of artworks, under the male gaze. This is seemingly problematic though, as Wall is still a male artist, and his model is still under his direction. There maybe some degree of collaboration between the model and Wall, but Wall, as the photographer, still holds a large degree over the balance of the power dynamic that exists between the artist and his model.
CONTEXT: When Wall made this artwork, he was a student at UBC in the 1970s. He has a background in art history, which informs his photographic practice. The large scale presentation of this picture, and its division as a triptych evokes and reinforces the idea of presenting a photograph as a kind of contemporary painting that Wall is interested in exploring.
The picture’s tie to painting is further emphasized when one knows that Wall was inspired by impressionist paintings, and in particular, by Èdouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882 - Artifact 04 below). Formally, Wall’s Picture for Women contains several points of similarity to A Bar at the Folies-Bergere. First, both images are a reflection in a mirror of the scene that’s being represented. Both Wall and Manet are male figures who occupy the right hand side of the picture. Secondly, Manet, like Wall, is also facing the woman in the picture, his gaze directing the viewer towards the woman barkeeper. But in Manet’s work, the reflection appears to be off, we do not see the back of the man, only the front of the woman. Is the man some kind of figment of her imagination (perhaps not, as Dr. Malcolm Park of the University of New South Wales has discovered, Manet’s painting is optically correct, as explained in this 2001 Getty.edu article, Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergere: One Scholar’s Perspective )? Further to this, in Picture, both Wall and his model occupy the same horizontal plain behind the counter - whereas in Manet’s Bar the two individuals are divided by the horizontal plain of the counter which physically separates them. Thirdly, the woman in A Bar is directly lit, from an unseen light source from above her, similar to how Wall has lit his model in Picture. Fourthly, in Picture, while Wall’s gaze is directed towards his model, the permanent recording of this scene is mediated by the camera Wall uses, which feeds a very contemporary use of the camera as a formal tool used to capture pictures of women, primarily for the gaze of male viewers.
ARTIFACT 04 > Manet, Édouard. “A Bar at the Folies-Bergere,” oil on canvas, 96 cm × 130 cm (37.8 in × 51.2 in), The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust), 1882.
Round 4: Cindy Sherman
ARTIFACT 05 > Art21. “Cindy Sherman in “Transformation” - Season 5 - “Art in the Twenty-First Century” | Art21.” YouTube, 18 Mar 2024.
ARTIFACT 06 > MoMA. “How mass media representations shape us | Cindy Sherman | UNIQLO ARTSPEAKS.” YouTube, 13 Nov 2020.
As you watch artist Cindy Sherman discuss her photographic practice, pay attention to how she considers self-representation and portraits and what interests her about the nature of photographs. Discuss with the group your impressions following the screening.
The video opens with Sherman curating the installation of her Society Portraits where she describes how the photos looked so different for her being blown up large. She said they felt more tragic and aggressive, and she asked whether or not she was lost in the picture, and if the figures felt like real people who were distinct from who she was as an individual.
Sherman also describes the roots of her interest in self-portraiture - the point in time when she, at the age of six or seven, recognized herself in family snapshots. It was at this point that she started gathering the photographs together in a photo album that she called A CINDY BOOK where she placed the photos in the book, and circled herself in each photo, writing below them words such as “That’s me …. That’s me …. That’s me.” She did this for several years until she forgot about it. When she was going to college Sherman found the albums again, at which point she started doing the project again, faking the hand writing style she had when she was younger. She played with makeup, and found what it could do in creating characters.
Research also informs her practice. With her clown series, she went online to see how “…one clown can look like different people underneath the makeup.” She asked: Can some be trusted? What dimensions do they represent? What would it be like if one encountered a planet of clowns?
The advent of digital cameras has also allowed Sherman to explore the possibilities for new series of photographs. She also learned how to use green-screen technology which allows her to create and insert different backgrounds that represent the worlds her characters live in. She approaches the backgrounds the way a painter might, selectively adding and removing parts of it as she works.
Sherman also has a huge amount of items in her studio which she uses to create the characters she becomes: hair, makeup, faces, clothing, accessories, and more. When she goes to stores, she tries not to have pre-conceived notions about what she’s looking for. She lets things speak to her as she looks around, she lets things give her inspiration for new works.
Sherman explained how her current practice stems from studies she did in university, where she “…made this book of doll clothes, of myself in my clothes. But then, for a film course I was taking, I wanted to bring the doll to life. So I shot myself doing all the poses. So, from here, I went to do several series where all the characters that had been cut out, and spread out like a deck of cards or something. And from there, I started putting the figures together to tell narratives, which is what the murder mystery pictures were. Just as a movement and character study. But then I got fed up with cutting the characters out to tell stories, so I knew I needed to do it in one shot, alone, because I was always working alone, and how to imply narrative when I was working alone, which led me to the film stills.”
It was interesting to hear Sherman discussed the film stills, as unlike Jeff Wall, Sherman “…didn’t want to make something that looked like art in terms of a painting. I wanted to make something that looked mass produced, and I didn’t want it to have anything to do with art theory. I wanted it to look like anyone could understand it because it looked like it comes from a movie.” Sherman studied how women appeared in films, and found she was drawn to how women looked in European films (which would have been from the European New Wave era of films which were being produced at the time). In those films, the women looked more blank, where the characters are in between a reaction: “…either they have just screened or they’re about to scream, you don’t know as the viewer, what just happened or is about to happen.”
For Sherman, film and television has always been more influential for her than the art world, as well as images found in cheap magazines. She remembers doing arts and crafts projects as a kid while watching films on television.
Sherman has never been that worried about titling her works as she never wanted people having pre-conceived ideas about what a picture might be. It lets the picture have a degree of ambiguity that she likes. In the short, Sherman also discussed how she has never attempted to make fun of anybody she portrays in her works, and she always tries to have compassion for her characters. With some works, she found she experimented with removing herself from the images. In her doll series she completely removed herself but still suggested herself, making people feel as if a part of her was in the work.
With her society portraits, she knew she wanted to make her photos as large as she could, which is something male artists working with photography have traditionally done.
Round 5: Cindy Sherman
Examine these Cindy Sherman photographs from the Society Portraits series (2008-12) carefully. What do these photographs reveal about the current image and media environment we inhabit (under the influence of social media, fashion, film, television etc.. ) that are immediately visible to someone in our contemporary culture?
ARTIFACT 07 > Sherman, Cindy. “Untitled #465.” The Cut / Metro Pictures, 2008.
ARTIFACTS 08 & 09 > Sherman, Cindy. “Untitled #466” (left) and “Untitled #470” (right). Phaidon, 2008.
ARTIFACT 10 > Sherman, Cindy. “Untitled #475.” Phaidon, 2008.
Cindy Sherman’s photographs reveal about the current image and media environment we inhabit (under the influence of social media, fashion, film, television etc.. ) that are immediately visible to someone in our contemporary culture include, first and foremost, Sherman holding a mirror up to society to examine how it operates, by tapping into the current contemporary moment. Questions of whether or not one can be outside the culture one critiques is also raised with these portraits. In class, someone also asked if there was any kind of shame attached to the women who are presented, or if it could be felt by those viewing the photos.
To this end, the photographs definitely appear to reference and speak to the types of exaggerated and constructed women who appear on reality television shows such as the Real Housewives series, of which there are more than two dozen variations airing (or have aired) worldwide. They also reference shows such as Keeping Up With the Kardashians, and Vanderpump Rules. The outfits worn by Sherman appear slightly outlandish, and the settings in which the women exist do appear to be superimposed backdrops, giving the pictures a cinematic and dramatic stage-like feel, which, for me references Drag Race or the Queer Eye series.
Sherman’s Society Portraits also recall for me the actress, comedian, and fashionista Joan Rivers, who often used her knowledge of fashion to inform her insult-shock comedy as she would stand on the runways, and red carpet galas that took place prior to award ceremonies such as the Academy Awards, complimenting and critiquing the stars and models that appeared at these venues. Rivers herself underwent a lot of plastic surgery later in life, something she had been very honest about and self-referenced in her comedy in a self-effacing / self-deprecating way. Rivers’s critiques of fashion and wealth in some ways feeds the kind of celebrity tabloid culture that so many people become obsessed with following. It’s like a separation between low class and high class - or in terms of the art world and the work of artists like Sherman, between low and high art. Rivers also had a successful line of clothing and jewelry accessories she sold online and through television channels like QVC in the US, and TSC in Canada. Some were based on her own designs, others mimicked real pieces she had in her own collection, older pieces from across Europe. Their sales made the aura of the rich and famous accessible to everyday people, who might want to emulate or become closer to the kind of people Sherman is critiquing and examining with her series. Rivers was a part of that ultra-wealthy culture later in her life, after having lost everything she had earned - and for her, it certainly placed her in a position of being within the kind of culture she skewered in her stand-up and fashion critiques.
Finally, one might find a connection to how Donald Trump acted and portrayed himself on The Apprentice, and his desire to have trophy wives, as well as affairs with various women from different walks of life. The backgrounds feel as though they could be taken from his lavishly Godly looking apartment at Trump Tower in New York City, or his estate at Mar-A-Lago in Florida. He and his family perhaps represent the highest level of posing and fakery, a wannabe high class man who has led many failed companies, and has been shown in court to be someone who overvalues himself, his assets, properties, and wealth.
Round 6: Nan Goldin
As you watch artist Nan Goldin discuss her photographic practice, pay attention to how she approaches photographing underrepresented subcultures and what interests her about the nature of photographs. Discuss with the group your impressions following the screening.
ARTIFACT 11 > “Nan Goldin - The Art of the Snapshot.” YouTube,
Impressionists share a symbiotic relationship with photographers.
Goldin’s work focussed on:
AIDS epidemic / “junkies” & the opioid crisis / NY Drag-queens / domestic violence
Using a snapshot aesthetic to explore under-represented sub-cultures
Seeing the unseen
Showing the horror, the reality of a situation, actual subject matter - not staged
“I moved in with the Queens because I worshiped them… basically I found them to be some of the most incredible people in the world. Everybody stigmatized them but I found so beautiful, and so moving and powerful in their lives. They were my supermodels and I wanted them to be supermodels in the world.” - Nan Goldin
She was a part of the subculture she photographed - as a part of the post-Stonewall gay subculture of 1970s New York. She notes, “I’m not crashing. This is my party, this is my family, my history.”
PHOTOGRAPHING FROM WITHIN > Her aesthetics were about embracing HONESTY.
Growing up, Goldin noted how she and her siblings had a huge pressure to be perfect in the things they did. Her parents didn’t know what children were. Eventually, her sister committed suicide at age 11, which led Goldin to leave home at 14.
“You can be whoever you pretend to be.” - Oscar Wilde
At school, she was very shy but discovered photography as a way to work through her fears. “The camera became my first way of talking.” The video notes how Goldin’s natural habitat was always at the edge of society. Photography was a way of remembering and immortalizing.
“Goldin’s photography has always focussed on the subject matter closest to her. Unlike photographers like Diane Arbus who sought out those living on the fringes of society, to Nan Goldin this was home. As a result, her photography resonates in a way no outsiders could. Rather than social documentary, it’s diaristic.” - Video Narrator
“It was not accepted as art at the beginning, because it was so personal; and i came up in a time of black and white vertical photographs about light, so my work didn’t really fit in anywhere.” - Nan Goldin
Was her work too personal? The snapshot aesthetic and lack of technical know-how alienated critics and even other photographers / artists but resonated deeply with viewers. She used colour slide film (deeply saturated colours) as opposed to black and white film used by professionals at the time. Some asked if she was promoting heroin chic (President Bill Clinton) or if she was honestly looking at addiction? Ultimately it did lead to her work holding an authenticity that was impossible to replicate - a look at world’s few would have seen. She also advocated
“The way people respond to the work is very important to me. I show myself battered, and in different countries women have come up to me and said, ‘I couldn’t show myself, I couldn’t talk about it until I saw these images.’ And that’s what the work is really about. At least in those days, something like 90% of women went back to the men who battered them and it was very important to me to have a record of what really happened. And that’s been sort of the motivating force of my whole life with my work, is to make records that nobody could re-edit or deny.” - Nan Goldin
Today, her work serves as a reflection: all of us emulate Nan Goldin with the way they present their life on social media. A lot of her work, such as her look at Queer culture resonates deeply with the cultures of today; and other work, such as her look at the AIDS crisis, provides a history of a period of time that was largely ignored.
ARTIFACT 12 > FABY LELAIT. “Nan Goldin “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency(1)” (NYC MOMA 03/2009).” YouTube, 16 Apr 2009.
HOMEWORK >
Reading Susan Sontag’s “PHOTOGRAPHY WITHIN THE HUMANITIES”
SUSAN SONTAG READING QUESTIONS - Prepare some notes (or even better, print out the article and mark up your own copy with ideas / observations) that help you understand the Sontag reading using these prompts taken directly from today’s PowerPoint slides. They will be very useful to you inn the discussion and assessment on Wednesday…
As I read this piece, I looked up and defined key words that stood out as being important to me…
In the opening of her work, she uses several terms by which she defines who she is as an individual, specifically she declares, “I am a writer and a filmmaker.”
WRITER > author, person who uses written words to communicate ideas and to produce books, articles, stories, etc.
FILMMAKER > cinéaste; refers to a person involved in filmmaking - a person who directs or produces movies for the theatre or television.
She notes how she works independently for herself. She is clear about being an outsider, which is similar to how she described herself in relation to the QUEER COMMUNITY in her book “ON CAMP” > as an outsider, “…an educated outsider” (in many respects, the way she positioned herself as an educated outsider isn’t that different from how Nan Goldin described herself as an observer and part of the cultures and people she interacted with and photographed),
Other terms that stood out for me…
PHOTOGRAPHY > the art, application, and practice of creating images by recording LIGHT, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employed in many fields of science, manufacturing, and business, as well as more direct uses for art, film, and video production, recreational purposes, hobby, and mass communication.
IMAGE > (PICTURE) - “…a representation of the external form of a person or thing in art (also: the general impression of a person, organization, or product presents to the public; the way they appear to others)” (Oxford Dictionary).
Perception; Impression; Portrait; Representation; Effigy; Figure; Icon / Idol; Likeness; Picture; Statue
IMAGE - represents something > drawing / painting / graphic / photograph > MANY TOOLS & TECHNOLOGIES can be used to CREATE IMAGES
HOW AN IMAGE IS CREATED DEPENDS ON THE TYPE OF IMAGE DESIRED AND THE DESIRED EFFECT SOMEONE WANTS AN IMAGE TO HAVE
“The term ‘image’ is often used in fields such as graphic design, art, and advertising to refer to visual content in general. On the other hand, a PHOTO is a specific type of image created by capturing LIGHT on a photosensitive surface, such as film or a digital sensor” (javatpoint.com).
PHOTOS are typically more realistic and detailed than other images and are often used to document real-life events or people. The term “photo” is commonly used in photography, journalism and social media to refer to photographs” (javatpoint.com).
“PICTURE is a more generalized term that can refer to any type of visual representation including drawings, paintings, graphics, and photographs. However, it is often used to refer specifically to photographs in everyday language” (javatpoint.com).
THE MEANING AND USAGE OF THE TERMS IMAGE / PHOTOGRAPH / PICTURE can vary depending on the context and audience.
ARTIFACT > Phoenix Art Museum. “How to Look at an Artwork.” YouTube, 14 Feb 2014.
Ways of Seeing - Ways of Photographic Seeing - TO SEE / OBSERVE
SIGHT: the faculty or power of seeing (n); a thing that one sees or that can be seen. (v) managed to see or observe (someone or something); catch a glimpse of.
CRITIC: a person who expresses an unfavourable opinion of something / a person who judges the MERITS of literary, artistic, or musical works - especially one who does it professionally.
HUMANITIES: “…those branches of knowledge that concern themselves with human beings and their culture with analytic and critical methods of inquiry derived from an appreciation of human values and of the unique ability of the human spirit to express itself” (Britannica).
“…subjective Saturday of humans, our history, culture, and societies.”
“Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture, including fundamental questions asked by humans” (Wikipedia).
Arizona university notes how the humanities “…can include the study of history, philosophy, religion, modern and ancient languages and literature, fine and performing arts, media and cultural studies.”
“Humanities involves the exploration of human experiences, values, beliefs, and ideas through critical analysis and interpretation of texts, artifacts, and other cultural products. The focus is on understanding the human experience and how it has shaped and been shaped by different cultures and societies” (edurev.in).
Arts focus on the production of art while humanities focus on the study of human culture and experience. Arts involve the use of imagination and creativity to produce works of art while humanities involve critical analysis and interpretation of cultural products. Arts are often subjective and open to interpretation while humanities are based on objective analysis and interpretation of cultural products“ (edurev.in).
ART: “The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional power” (Oxford). / “Something that is created with imagination and skill that is beautiful or that explores important ideas or feelings.”
VISUAL INFO
Can photography be both an ART and an ACTIVITY (debate about its merits as an art form)
“…the continuous upgrading of this activity.” (Both FORMALLY / TECHNICALLY and as a medium of expression with infinite possibilities).
Visual arts / Literary arts / Performing arts.
ACTIVTY (n): something you do / state of doing; condition in which things are (happening) being done. A quality or state of being active.
Tension > do I matter? Is my work worthwhile?
Photography as a process of creation. Choices are made.
THE NEW - why does an artist chose photography as a form to convey content as opposed to painting, etc?
IMAGES ARE UBIQUITOUS > “noise” in advertising; “if you use social media, you see (and forward) some of the 3.2 billion images and 720,000 hours of video shared daily… we see ~10,000 ads per day, only a few stand out as relevant.”
COMMODIFICATION / Mass Production / Multiples
Learning to LIVE WITH THE RESULT OF WHAT’S CAPTURED
Photographer assigns meaning by choosing what to photograph
Curation of life… social media… INSTAGRAM
Filmmaker is a kind of photographer working with moving images. Songtag sees with words too, in her novel, short stories, and essays. Writing comes from within, the gut - emotionality)… photographs are what are seen (as mediated by the camera)… but don’t words / thoughts also serve as a mediation on an idea?
Sontag died on the cusp of the social media explosion.
IS ANYTHING ORIGINAL?
People described Sontag as being someone who was adversarial to what she wrote about…
Sontag saw photos of WW2 and the holocaust (Dachau Concentration Camp) as a young child and this impacted her greatly. She was an anti-war activist. PHOTOGRAPHS CAN HAVE POWER (Nick Ut’s Napalm Girl).
DESENSITIZED > RISK > we are impacted by images only and not by the events they represent > to stay powerful, do images have to represent worse and worse?
PASSIVE vs ACTIVE VIEWER
REALISM
Engineering the moment / Missing the moment
FAST SEEING > Jeff Wall worked to push against this
Do a little research…
Who is Susan Sontag?
According to Wikipedia, Susan Sontag was “…a writer, critic, and public intellectual,” who, Britannica notes was “…best known for her essays on modern culture.”
She completed her undergraduate studies, beginning at the University of California, and finishing at the University of Chicago in 1951. She went on to complete a Masters in English Literature, as well as a Masters of Philosophy at Harvard.
What has she published related to photography?
Some of Sontag’s most influential writings have been in respect to the art, practice, and reception of photography. This was explored in detail in a set of essays Sontag wrote between 1973 and 1977, which were then compiled to live together in a 1977 book called On Photography. Wikipedia describes how Sontag’s essays examine “…the history and contemporary role of photography in society… Sontag argues that photography fosters a voyeuristic relationship with the world and can diminish the meaning of events. The book discusses the relationship between photography and politics and the tension between recording and intervention.”
Later in her life, Sontag revisited her earlier thoughts on the medium and practice of photography in a 2004 book she named Regarding the Pain of Others. Wikipedia summarizes this work by noting how the essay “…both underscores their importance and undercuts hopes that they can communicate very much. On the one hand, narrative and framing confer upon images most of their meaning, and on the other, Sontag says, those who have not lived through such things ‘…can’t understand, can’t imagine..’ the experiences such images represent.”
What is her approach to the study of photographs generally and how do her interests allow her to speak as an expert on the subject of photography?
The documentary bio-pic Regarding Susan Sontag notes how Sontag liked to take an adversarial approach to the topics she explored in her writing.
Sontag writes on page 60 of the text, “In some ways I would suggest that photography is not so much an art as a meta-art. It’s an art which devours other art.” What do you think Sontag means by this and how is it relevant to the way we need to approach the study of photographs?
Adrian Piper, American conceptual artist and Kantian philosopher, in her 1973 article, IN SUPPORT OF META-ART, appearing in Artforum, defines ‘meta-art’ as “…the activity of making explicit the thought processes, procedures, and presuppositions of making whatever kind of art we make. Thought processes might include how we hypothesize a work into existence: wether we think subliminally and suddenly lay have it pop into consciousness fully formed; or reason from problems encountered in the last work to possible solutions in the next; or get ‘inspired’ by seeing someone else’s work, or a previously unnoticed aspect of our own; or read something, or experience something, or talk; or find ourselves blindly working away for no good reason; or any, all, or other processes of this kind.” She continues, explaining how: “Generally what is required in meta-art is that we stand off and view our role of artist reflectively; that we see the fact of our art-making itself a discrete state or process with interesting implications worthy of pursuing; that we articulate and present these implications to an audience (either the same as or broader than the art audience) for comment, evaluation, and feedback.”
Widewalls,
What is the new kind of seeing that Sontag believes photography helps promote?
REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG
Briefly describe what your expectations for the film were?
The homework for the first class of the History of Photography course I’m taking has me doing a close reading of critic, filmmaker, and writer Susan Sontag’s essay, Photography in the Humanities. In it, Sontag explores the ways in which photography can be classified. I expected the documentary to explore who Sontag was as a writer, as well as what influenced and inspired her through archival footage and contemporary interviews with people who knew her or were influenced by her.
What did you already know about the film and from what source?
I had purchased this film on Apple-TV iTunes several years ago but had yet to sit down and watch it. I knew Regarding Susan Sontag was a documentary released in 2014, almost a decade after her death from leukemia.
What did you know about the country and historical period/style of its origin?
At the time of this documentary’s release, the American economy was growing rapidly following its collapse in 2008. President Barack Obama was around halfway through second term in office, and the race for his successor was just about to begin with candidates from both parties jockeying to win the nomination to run for President, including Democrat Hillary Clinton, and Republican Donald Trump.
At the 2014 Oscars, host Ellen DeGeneres got Bradley Cooper to snap what would become the most re-Tweeted selfie of all time featuring her posing with several famous A-List celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence, Lupita Nyong’o, Brad Pitt, and Julia Roberts.
ARTIFACT > Cooper, Bradley. “Oscar Selfie.” 2014.
Snapchat was becoming a very popular app among young people, allowing them to talk with friends where the app’s settings could be set to delete conversations and attachments like photos. I also remember that 2014 was the year that we lost comedian Joan Rivers, comedic legend and Academy Award winning actor Robin Williams, and Academy Award winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. The passing of Williams was especially troubling for me as Williams suffered from depression throughout his life and ultimately chose to end his own life. Finally, 2014 saw Russia host that year’s Winter Olympics, which many viewed as a public relations stunt by Russia, basically using slave labour to build its sporting venues.
Did you know anything about the director?
Going into this film, I admit I knew nothing about the film’s director, Nancy Kates. A quick glance at her IMdB profile reveals how her most famous documentary film prior to Regarding Susan Sontag was her 2003 biographical documentary Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, which explores the life of Rustin, a prominent civil rights activist who fought for racial equality, Queer Rights, and also helped organize the 1963 March on Washington. Her Wikipedia entry also chronicles her experience with making a documentary called Their Own Vietnam, which was Kates’s master thesis at Stanford University, presenting a harrowingly honest tale about five American women who served in the Vietnam War. The film won several awards and played at many independent film festivals in the mid-1990s. One other film stood out for me by Kates, and that is her short film called Castro Cowboy, a 7 minute film that explores the life of Christen Haren, a Marlboro Man model who died of AIDS in 1996. The Marlboro Man advertisements would become tied to the work of artist Richard Prince, who would appropriate the ads by re-photographing them, focussing solely on the model and removing all references to the Marlboro cigarette brand.
What was the most important feature of the film you were looking for?
For me, the most important feature of Regarding Susan Sontag I was looking for was how the film would present and explore the life of Sontag. A key question for me was whether or not the film would be as compelling as Sontag herself, who will forever live on through her thought-provoking writings on 20th century culture.
Secondly, I wondered if the film would explore her connection to photography – and why she appeared to be so interested in photography and the world of images that continued to grow exponentially over the course of her lifetime.