VISA 2061 WINTER 2011 Week 12

Your photographic language

“While both photographer and painter produce visual images on two-dimensional surfaces, they differ fundamentally in their ways of seeing. In most cases it is the act of painting that absorbs the painter. But this act is highly subjective. His focus is on the canvas itself; his fancy is purely his own. The photographer’s act is to see the outside world precisely, with intelligence as well as sensuous insight. This act of seeing sharpens the eye to an unprecedented acuteness.”

*Berenice Abbott

http://www.afterimagegallery.com/bresson.htm

http://tinapicard.com/blog/?tag=henri-cartier-bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson 1908-2004 Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, 1932

"To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It's a way of life."

watch clip about Cartier Bresson and the decisive moment

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlUWznm1ufU&feature=related

Wim Wenders

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFT-duedoV4

Robert Frank and Patti Smith music video collaboration

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvBJMWxbfCk

Logos- factual truth

Pathos- emotional truth

Ethos- believable truth

“A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense, and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety. And the expression of what one feels should be set forth in terms of simple devotion to the medium—a statement of the utmost clarity and perfection possible under the conditions of creation and production.”

*Ansel Adams, “A Personal Credo,” 1943

Italo Calvino Six Memos for the Next Millennium Italian writer Italo Calvino (1923-1985) tranlsated 1988

Lightness: a texture that seems weightless. If art is based on human experience- lightness in unifying experience with the medium of transmittal

Quickness: secret of the story lies in its economy. To convey key concepts with immediacy

Exactitude: a precision of detail, fullness, complexity

Visibility: image's ability to convey ideas

Multiplicity: connections between things, convergences, tangential whirlpools of unforeseen consequences and effects

Consistency: Calvino died before completing this one

Art 21, Season 1&2 DVD 7739 Collier Schorr Sally Mann

Video 7127 Lorna Simpson

DVD 9017 The revival of contemporary photography

“ . . . but at the moment of shooting it can stem only from our intuition, for we are out to capture the fugitive moment . . . if the shutter was released at the decisive moment, you have instinctively fixed a geometric pattern without which the photograph would have been both formless and lifeless.”

Cartier-Bresson

Workshop this phrase by replacing “geometric pattern” with other photographic attributes that you identify as being crucial in your photographic language.

You and your photographs!

How your photograph different from the actual scene you photographed?

How much of your image is the product of lenses, shutters, and media?

What are the characteristics of this photograph you have made that establish its beingness? What are the characteristics of this photograph you have made that you care most about?

…. All photographic prints have qualities in common.

These qualities determine how the world in front of the camera is transformed into a photograph; they also form the visual grammar that elucidates the photographer’s message.

What is your message?

What is your visual vocabulary?

Photographs contain signals to our mind’s perceptual apparatus.

Those signals gives “spin” to what the image depicts – those signals lead us- lead the viewer….

What spin is your spin?

Do you want to make photographs that are objects-that exist flat on a wall?

Or virtual on a screen?

Or physically as something to be experienced in space-3D?

What quality of colour attracts you?

What quality of light most ignites your imagination- your memories?

Will you collect photographs or cast them off as you go?

Are photographs a record for your brain that forgets?

What is a photo album? Does such a thing exist anymore?

Does the camera and the photographic frame give you a way to describe the world- to allow you access into the world in a way that is not otherwise available to you?

Does photography crystallize experience? Or knowledge?

Are you thinking about flatness, frame, time and focus?

The world is three-dimensional; a photographic image is two-dimensional.

The photograph bears a resemblance to the world.

Photographs use monocular vision- one definitive vantage point.

This creates relationships that did not exist before the picture was taken.

Some photographs are opaque. The viewer is stopped by the picture plane.

Some photographs are transparent. The viewer is drawn through the surface into the illusion of the image

The frame corrals the content of the photograph all at once.

The frame contains content.

We understand the content through context

A photograph is a “ discreet panel of time.”

What quality of time interests you?

Frozen Extended Still

What are you paying attention to when you photograph?

What draws you – what occupies your conscious and unconscious mind will be visible in the photorgah- allow this to happen?

Your personal mental organization- what's inside your brain- process the visual gestalt of the picture…..

Establish and articulate:

Work habits Work ethics Working process Working methodology

See Charlie Chaplin My happiest years (Charlie Chaplin) Video #0004