United Kingdom, 1880
Book: Anonymous: Enigmatic Images From Unknown Photographers--Robert Flynn Johnson (Thames & Hudson, 2004).
By presenting a collection of anonymous photographs the author, Robert Flynn Johnson, asks the reader to consider what it is about a photograph that makes it memorable: what criteria do we, as viewers, bring to our evaluation of a photograph that makes it stand out beyond others. What, in short, makes a photograph good?
Johnson breaks down his images into thirteen ways we view photographs:
1) Aide-memoire--using the camera as an visual analogue of a potential memory. The photograph functions simply as a way of recalling and summoning the past.
2) Reportage--The public face of the previous catagory. Images of wars, historic moments, natural disasters, with the camera acting as testimony to the event.
3) Work of art--The camera trying to replicate the classic tropes of painting or sculpture.
4) Topography--This category relates to the former, but in essence tries to capture the effect of "painted landscape."
5) Erotica and pornography--the gamut of sexual images is extensive from titillation to hard core.
6) Advertisement--Photographs programmed for allurement or bait with the idea of temptation into purchase.
7) Abstract Image--A sub-category of painting, but often done in close-up or with cropping so that the arrangement is considered as shape or mass.
8) Literature--"Reading" a photograph as part of a narrative or short story.
9) Text--Photographs of signs, of writing, of comic misspellings.
10) Autobiography--Will all the photographs a person takes in his or her life be as much a record of that individual as anything written down?
11) Composition--Sub-category of the art photograph, with composed arrangements.
12) Means to an end tool--photographs used to illustrate textbooks, used in crime scenes, discarded Polaroids of the professional photographer.
13) Snapshot--A split second in time of the world's history, a capturing of human enterprise and condition.
Ultimately, Johnson feels, there is an inherent melancholy in photographs. Even lives recorded by the camera as vital and present will, over time, become ghosts. Thus, the inevitability of death hovers gently over all photographs.
United States, 1940
1 comment:
What I always find interesting about photography is that you can look at the artwork from a technical and asthetic viewpoint and not take away any pleasure in how you see it.
You can be concerned with the back, overhead,or side lighting; You can see the priority that the photographer placed on the foreground, background, and the subject. What about the camera - small, medium, or large format. digital? F-stop, film, and film speed? Filters?
You can see the beauty of the colors if the photographer uses color film; why did the photographer choose to use black & white film? Both make a statement about the thoughts that went through the photographer's mind.
What we DO see is that we can freeze time forever. We can travel back in time by viewing the past at the very moment that the camera, film, and photographer captured the image. I like to think that that past connects us to a time and place that we may never go to again. That can be sad in its own way but will forever connect future generations to us though we may no longer be here. Photographs allow us to live - on paper as well as in memories.
T-Square
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