CHAPTER 12 ___________________________ PHOTOGRAPHY AND TIME BASED MEDIA A History of Time Based Media Photography began in roughly 1838, with still images. The still image generated the idea that it might be possible to capture an object in motion as well. After the first photographs of a horse in motion, created with a trip-wire, were published, film viewing machines were invented. The Kinetescope is one example (kinetic= motion; scope=view) The first projected motion picture available to a large audience debuted on December 28, 1895 in Paris, France. The silent moving image came first, and then sound was added, and then color was added. Television came later, after audiences developed a desire for “live” action. Like the history of Painting, the medium of time-based media like Photography has increased in immediacy and verisimilitude (semblance to the truth). Eadweard Muybridge, Annie G, Cantering, Saddled, December 1887, Collotype Print, image size: 7½ x 16⅛ inches. This is part of Animal Locomotion, an 11 volume work of over 20,000 photographs of animals and people performing various actions, such as running, walking, trotting, fetching, and lifting. These photographs influenced a great number of artists in their depictions of people and animals in motion. Photography • Photography may be used to “capture reality,” and in the medium’s beginning, photographs were certainly regarded as informational: as showing the viewer a documented glimpse at something that exists in reality – you can photograph anything you see, so it must be there it a photograph exists of it. • Photographs, in essence, carry a promise of truth with them – they project an authenticity that rarely exists in other art forms. • Although this “truth” is hardly a reality, as photographs are easily manipulated to where the final image is far different than the starting point, it is still important that we perceive them as true. • Photography and the camera arts allow artists to explore time and motion. The camera can capture and preserve a moment in time, and in doing so, it allows our eyes to see motion slowed down. Formal Foundations Photography means “writing with light”- from the Greek phos (light) and graphos (writing). Photography is inclusive, rather than an exclusive medium. You can photograph anything you see. The urge to make instant assemblages- to capture a moment in time- is as old as the desire to represent the world accurately. As a medium, there is a tension between form and content: the way the photograph is formally organized as a composition, and what it expresses or means. As technology advances and cameras and photo editing applications are readily available (especially through smartphones), it can seem easy to dismiss photography as “just clicking a button”, but the medium as an art form is MUCH more complex. It requires an eye for aesthetics, and an understanding of light and equipment. Early Photography • Camera obscuras were first used by artists in the 16th century. They allowed a 3-D space to be projected onto a 2-D screen, but they maintained the color and perspective of the 3-D world. They could capture an image in two dimensions, but they could not preserve it. • In 1839, the problem of preserving this image was solved simultaneously by two inventors – William Henry Fox Talbot from England, and Louis- Jacques-Mandé Daguerre from France. • William Henry Fox Talbot developed a process for fixing negative images onto paper coated with light-sensitive chemicals. The resulting image on paper was called a photogenic drawing. • While Talbot was developing the photogenic drawing in England, Daguerre was developing a different process in France. He was able to fix positive images onto polished metal plates, and the resulting image was called a daguerreotype. Camera is the Latin word for “room”. By the 16th century, a darkened room called a camera obscura was used by artists to copy accurately. A small hole on the side of a light-tight room lets in a ray of light that projects a scene, upside down, directly across from the hole. This is essentially the same principle used by the camera today. Above Left: Unidentified printmaker, Camera Obscura. Engraving, c. 1544. Bottom Right: illustration of camera obscura. Johannes Vermeer Dutch painter, 1600’s Believed to have used camera obscura to create life-like paintings. Essentially, this means that Vermeer traced the image. Do you think that this is “cheating”? William Henry Fox Talbot, Mimosoidea Suchas, Acaica, c. 1839. Photogenic drawing. The object (a plant specimen) acts as a stencil, blocking the light-sensitive chemicals it covers on the paper. These un-hardened chemicals can be washed off, revealing the negative image of the object. Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Le Boulevard du Temple, 1839, Daguerreotype. Developed in France, a daguerreotype is one of the earliest forms of photography, developed in 1839, made on a copper plate polished with silver. Richard Beard, Maria Edgeworth, 1841. Daguerreotype. As photographic portraiture became a successful industry, portrait painting went into rapid decline. Photography replaced painting as the preferred method of portraiture, and it democratized the genre, making portraits affordable and available to the middle and even the working class. Daguerreotypes cannot be reproduced, and they are made on a metal plate. William Henry Fox Talbot, The Open Door, 1843. Calotype. The calotype process is the basis for modern photography, developed by Talbot in 1841. He used paper rather than a metal plate, and made multiple prints a possibility. He discovered how to make a negative image and develop sensitized paper. The image above marks a turning point in Talbot’s view of photography. He considered the image to be more complex than merely documenting the natural world: he saw it as a study in beauty and design. Julia Margaret Cameron, Portrait of Thomas Carlyle, 1863, silver print. Around 1850, English sculptor Frederick Archer introduced a new wet-plate collodian photographic process that was almost universally adopted within 5 years. It allowed for short exposure times and quick development of prints. Silver nitrate is integral to the process, and the resulting photographs are called silver prints. Consider that a photograph is an abstraction, a simplification of reality. It substitutes two-dimensional for three- dimensional space, a brief moment for the continuity of time, and (sometimes) Form and gray scale for color. Photographers also emphasize the formal Content elements over representational concerns. Photography has the ability to aestheticize (represent something as being beautiful or artistically pleasing) the everyday- to reveal that which we normally take for granted. Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907 When he shot this groundbreaking photograph, Stieglitz said that he was transfixed not by the literal figures, but by their spatial relationships. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Athens, 1953. “The decisive moment” Sometimes a photographer waits for an image to happen. Before taking this image, Cartier- Bresson was walking down the street and saw two woman walking in his direction. He waited until they were underneath the statues on the balcony- almost mirroring the women- and released the shutter of his camera. The parallels and harmonies between street and balcony, antiquity and the present moment, youth and age, white marble and black dress, are all captured in this photograph. The form and content are balanced. Photojournalism The intention of photojournalism is to bring the facts to light. The power of the photograph comes in part from its formal composition. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the Federal government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) employed 15 photographers to document the plight of America’s farmers and life in rural areas. Over 77,000 black and white documentary photographs were created in 8 years. Dorothy Lange “Migrant Mother” Best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography. This photograph is the most well known of a larger series, shown on the next slide. The rest of the images tell a larger story of a widowed mother of seven children. Pea crops had frozen over, leaving the mother without work. Analog Photography and the Darkroom For many photographers, the art of photography happens not in the snapping of the image, but in the darkroom. Pictured below, the darkroom is where film is exposed, developed and sometimes experimented with. The Photographic Print and its Manipulation • The Zone System is a framework for understanding exposures in photography developed by Ansel Adams, where a zone represents the relation of the image’s (or a portion of the image’s) brightness to the value or tone that the photographer wishes it to appear in the final print. Each picture is broken up into zones ranging from black to white with nine shades of gray in between – a photographic gray scale. • Dodging decreases the exposure of selected areas of the print that the photographer wishes to be lighter. • Burning increases the exposure to areas of the print that should be darker. • An aperture is the size of the opening of the lens. Ansel Adams was an American photographer and environmentalist. His black-and-white landscape photographs of the American West, especially Yosemite National Park, have been widely reproduced. Ansel Adams, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941. Gelatin Silver Print. Large parts of the sky are burned, so that they develop darker. The village towards the bottom of the photograph are dodged, so that they appear lighter and can show more detail. The end result is an image that shows cohesive space, but also presents some interesting contradictions in time of day. Jerry N. Uelsmann, Untitled These photographs have been dodged in the development process in order to only expose certain parts of the composition.