Students: Read the following Article completely, then
complete the report as explained at the bottom.
Photography’s Many Roles
Photography and Art
It was only after the turn of the
century that photography began to breach the walls of the gallery and museum
world in
The question remains: if
photography is an art, what kind of art is it? If we call a specific photograph
a work of art does that mean it shows technical excellence? That it reminds us
of a particular kind of painting or drawing? Provides a good record of
something we regard as beautiful, such as a sunset?
Photographs need not be unique,
unlike the Mona Lisa and other paintings, except for daguerreotypes. It's
possible to make a lot of copies, so what does rarity mean? (Some photographers
are now making "limited editions.") And since photographs can be
taken in many ways, what makes one artistic and one ordinary? In the early days
of the twentieth century, photographs imitated painting as the way to claim
artistic status, modelling a photograph on Whistler's famous painting of his
mother, or recording a
Then along came modernism, and photography eventually
caught up, with sharp-focus, and up-to-date notions of subject matter and
treatment. Edward Weston's image of a pepper takes something that is familiar
and common, isolates it to concentrate attention on it, and through careful
lighting and printing makes it look like a monumental sculpture.
Finally . . . along came post-modernism, in the guise of
Andy Warhol, who used photographs as the basis for paintings. Many
photographers were no longer trying to go out and make pictures "from
nature" in the manner of Ansel Adams.
In slightly over a century and a half, photography has gone
from outsider to insider status, but now the rules of the art game seem to have
changed, as "mixed media" (collage and installation art, with
photography, painting, and sculpture joined) and "new media" (video
and computer) disrupt the old-fashioned divisions into painting, sculpture, and
prints and drawings. Photography may be the new kid on the block, but the whole
neighborhood is changing fast.
Photography and War
War photography also raises
questions about freedom of the press, with government control inevitably at
issue. There is always the possibility that censorship by the government and
self-censorship by photographers, editors, and publishers, combine to limit
what we see about any particular military situation.
The history of the century has been the history of changing
versions of the conflict between the government and the press, and changing
photographic coverage. In World War I, censorship was heavy, access to the
front for photographers was limited, and there were relatively few photographs
of actual combat. (Some of the supposed war photographs look staged.) In World
War II, for the first time, photographs of American dead were published. After
initially being held back by censors, a photo of three American corpses lying
on the beach after a landing in the Pacific appeared in Life magazine.
In
The Pentagon and the government learned from what they
perceived as a mistake of allowing the medium too much freedom. The press was
throttled at
That picture was a shocking reminder of what actually
happened. In a world where the United States public and politicians want only
casualty-free wars, the imagery of war is becoming video images showing cruise
missiles and plane-launched bombs, along with official shots of the military in
effect "on parade," i.e., in controlled, even staged circumstances,
and shots — how ironic that term — of refugees, the casualties of war.
In the aftermath of Vietnam, government control of the
media in wartime is once again an acute issue. The situation now resembles that
during the pre-Vietnam era. The military wishes to strictly limit access and
publication; the press insists on the right to see all and show all.
"War photographs" implies more than just pictures
of combat: it can refer to military photographs in general, photographs of
civilians caught in the middle of conflicts, or images of "the home
front." For many people, the photographs of the concentration camps, which
came out only after World War II, were too much. These photographs may be the
most shocking ever published. After them there could be equally graphic horrors
(from Cambodia or Rwanda, for example) but not the initial shock at what human
beings had done, or the shock of seeing it presented so unflinchingly in a
photograph. As war photography and photographs of other extreme situations such
as famines have become increasingly explicit, it has been argued that seeing
such images desensitizes people to the horrors and produces "compassion
fatigue." Some say that even the special realism the camera brings to the
depiction of war can no longer shock, for we have seen too much, and true shock
is no longer possible.
Digital Truth
It is true that The National
Geographic moved two of the Egyptian pyramids closer together on a cover,
to fit the vertical format. And, yes, the cover photo on A Day in the Life
of America was manipulated to move the cowboy closer to the moon, again to
fit the format.
Does that mean photographic truth is at an end? Who says it
ever existed? Photographs have always been manipulated. Usually the results
have not been big whopper lies, pictures that claimed something happened when it didn't, but less serious sins, touch-ups in
ads and portraits. The tabloids have always used a bag of photographic tricks.
In early examples, as when cameras were barred from courtrooms, scenes were
staged and images created through cutting and pasting to show what happened.
The tabloids still use photographic trickery to turn the fantastic into the
supposedly realistic, showing Actor A with Actress B when they never met, or
Elvis alive and well in Country C (or on the moon). With the tabloids
"Believe it or not" can mean mainly "not"; seeing is not
necessarily believing.
When will digital manipulation become a serious problem?
We'll see. So far, no digitally manipulated image has provided the occasion for
a major crisis in the truth-versus-falsehood department. It may happen
tomorrow, or it may never happen as imagined, with someone creating a fake of
something important and getting away with it at first, affecting public
opinion.
Photography has always been awarded a special status for
truthfully recording the world. But that doesn't mean all photographs, all the
time. Digital imaging may pose a serious challenge to traditional photographic
technology — film, cameras, paper. And it may eventually affect how people view
the images they see in newspapers and magazines, or even in family albums.
Right now it looks as if the digital effect on photography is more on
transmission and handling than on image-creation. There was always darkroom
trickery — retouching, double-exposure. It's just that such effects are easier
to produce now, and less easy to detect.
The problem is that with digital manipulation of
photographic images so simple, a slippery slope is created where minor cleaning
up of an image can easily lead to major changes. It is not easy to identify a
point where truth is lost and the picture enters the realm of fiction. In a
world of images showing the most fantastic, imaginary situations in the most
realistic, convincing fashion — think of science-fiction films, or the more
exotic kinds of still advertising images — the balance may be shifting between
traditional straightforward photographs and more spectacular kinds of images
made through digital manipulation. It is possible that audience tastes and our
sense of an image's credibility are shifting as well: do we still draw sharp lines
between news photographs and the other pictures we see in newspapers and
magazines?
There is one other potential problem with digital
imagemaking. In the civil trial for the murder of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown
Simpson, O.J. Simpson cried "fake" when a photo turned up showing him
wearing Bruno Magli shoes, the kind responsible for bloody footprints at the
crime scene. The contact sheet (apparently) was convincing evidence and proved
him wrong. That may be hard proof to come by in the future, when photos on
digital cameras leave no tracks, as it were, and certainly no negative. In the
past the negative was the key physical record of the photographic act and a
guarantee of sorts for photographic truth.
Our sense of the truth to be found in images may be
changing because of digital manipulation. But we still are waiting for our
first great test case of digital truth, that is, digital lying.
Presidential Image-Making
Acting presidential is one thing,
appearing presidential can be another, and in the contemporary United States,
it is hard to know which is more important.
In America, the first president to exploit photography was
not Teddy Roosevelt, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or John Kennedy, though all
were masters of photographic presentation, whether on the campaign trail or
sitting in the Oval Office. It was Abraham Lincoln, whose election was aided by
a Mathew Brady photograph, widely reproduced (in woodcut form as well as
photographic prints) that made him appear more handsome and less gangly. Brady
pulled up Lincoln's collar to cover his long neck, retouched his face to
eliminate the gauntness, and in general gave him what we would now call a
photographic make-over. From that day to this, presidents have struggled to
look good, with official photographers hired by the White House, and a running
battle to control the press at all points even with their telephoto lenses and
general sneakiness and "get the picture or die" attitude.
Nothing is so rare these days as real spontaneity, not the
planned media events that include even the calculated casualness of a walk on
the beach. "Photo-ops" (i.e., "photographic opportunities")
are carefully staged rituals, with each photographer making a nearly identical
version of the same picture. Looking through a newspaper or weekly magazine, it
is hard to find a photograph of a politician that does not appear staged —
although those exceptions are still worth looking for. Far more common,
however, are the endless variations on the same basic image, or copies of previous
favorites. What might once have been spontaneous — JFK with his children —
becomes the model to be copied by later officeholders.
Of course not all presidential pictures are neat, dull
images of handshakes after signing bills into law. For that matter, not all
American political pictures are of presidents. Politics is played in many ways,
and in many places besides Washington, D.C. There are plenty of photographers —
and politicians — to go around, and there are plenty
of photos of all kinds besides the standards. Some carefully staged media
events backfire: Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis looked silly
and out of place, not "presidential," riding around in a tank with an
ill-fitting helmet on his head. Some political photos are funny — one or two of
them intentionally. Most political photos are totally forgettable, some
memorable, and a few key images are totally unforgettable, capturing moments of
high drama in ways that provide a shared sense of history for all. When that
happens, political life somehow escapes control of the spindoctors and image
masters, and manages to recover a sense of immediacy, vitality and
significance.
Advertising and Persuasion
By the late ninteenth century,
advertisers were already convinced that illustrations sold goods, but the shift
to photography came after World War I, during the 1920s as the modern
advertising industry exploded. Photographs were thought to be more convincing
because of their "realism" and "truthfulness."
Advertising photography created an idealized version of
middle-class life that was always white, attractive, happy, and capable of
reaching the next rung on the ladder to health, beauty, luxury, and success. In
the late 1960s some of the race and gender biases of advertising were at last
addressed.
For all of photography's supposed realism and its power to
make fantasy credible, the underlying strength of photography in advertisements
lies in its ability to glorify — and glamorize — the object. A handful of
cigarettes can be made to look like the most beautiful, precious and desirable
objects in the world. A car can be presented as the symbol of a
"lifestyle," the very object needed to prove one's entrance into the
world of the rich, stylish and sexy. Of course, photography can work both ways.
It can make cigarettes attractive. But it can also help create images that turn
people away from cigarettes, by using fashion-model looks as the lure for an ad
that warns against smoking.
It is unlikely that people ever swallowed advertising
claims whole. Yet even when an advertising photograph is recognized as a
performance, it touches real wishes and anxieties and invites belief or wish
fulfillment, at least subliminally. For those in search of identity,
advertising offers a kind of pictorial windowshopping. The innumerable images
show products that promise to create a new sense of self, and they do so with
all the brilliance and conviction photography can offer. Seeing through the
photographic sales pitch may not be that difficult — but resisting it can be.
Social Change
In the late
ninteenth and early twentieth centuries Jacob Riis, a Danish-born journalist,
used photographs to help support his arguments about the need to reform slum
life. The title of his most famous work,
How the Other Half Lives, remains a simple description of how social
photography generally operates, providing a look at the lower classes to awaken
the conscience of the middle and upper classes.
Lewis Hine, known for his photographs of child labor,
thought that photography could be "a lever for the social uplift." He
believed in the realism of photography as a means of providing unquestionable
evidence, although he also used accompanying captions and text to give the
photographs even more punch by providing telling information.
The photographers of the Farm Security Administration
worked for the federal government during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
They were hired to photograph the struggles of the rural poor, and the programs
designed by the government to provide help. In the end, they provided a complex
portrait that went beyond those boundaries, and their work became a model for
many later photographers. As images that attempted to rally support for
government programs, the FSA photographs — now stored in the Library of
Congress — often played on people's sympathies by showing individuals in
trouble, and therefore in need of help, but not in such bad shape that aid
would not make a difference.
Today, photographers continue to use the camera to win
support for social causes: poverty and homelessness, AIDS, the farm crisis, the
environment. Sometimes they work independently,
sometimes they work as photojournalists, sometimes they work for charitable
organizations or government agencies. It has never been easy to find support
for social reform photography, or to find outlets where it can be published.
But many dedicated photographers are still fired by the belief that if they can
show hardship and injustice truthfully, fairly and forcefully, people who see
their pictures will be moved to respond.
Cultural Identity
Given the treatment of members of
these groups in the past (and present), the stakes are always high when it
comes to photographic representation. Where stereotypes are at play, any
picture can create a positive image or reinforce a negative one. The stakes are
increased when the photographer is white, the subject
a person of color, and the audience largely white — and more often than not,
that has been the case.
Someone who belongs to a group may have greater personal
experience and knowledge of its ways and may elicit a more trusting, open
response. Social proximity can lead to a physical and psychological closeness
made evident in the photographs. But insider status is no guarantee of
pictorial success. The results, as always, depend on the individual
photographer and the elements of the specific situation.
Partly as a result of ethnic pride movements and a greater
concern with the ethical and political issues surrounding the use of
photographs, a new wave of photographic work is now being done by members of
different ethnic and racial groups, with a full consciousness of what it means
to participate in self-representation. Some of the work is photojournalism,
intended for publication in newspapers, magazines, and books. Some is art,
intended more for presentation in galleries and museums. In either case, the
photographers show a heightened awareness of the importance of controlling
one's own image and the images that represent one's group.
Photography Report
Technical Requirements:
·
6 Pages, Typed, Times New Roman Font using 12pt
type size
·
Page 1: Cover Page
·
Pages 2-3: The Report Itself (see below for
explanations of content options)
·
Pages 4-5: 2 Photographs Per Page. Each
photograph needs to be a high-quality image found on the internet or scanned
into a computer and inserted into your report using Microsoft Word or some
other computer word-processing program (no cutting out pics and gluing or
taping them to your report).
o
Each Photograph must include a Caption
explaining how the photograph illustrates the topic you’ve chosen.
·
Page 6: Bibliography (Minimum of 4 Sources,
ONLY 3 may be internet sources, the other one MUST BE from a print source (book
or periodical)
Read the 7 Sections of the Handout “Photography’s Many Roles” (the text
above):
1.
Photography as Art
2.
Photography and War
3.
Photography and Digital Truth
4.
Photography and Presidential Image-Making
5.
Photography and Persuasion
6.
Photography and Social Change
7.
Photography and Cultural Identity
After reading each section, select one as a topic to write a report on.
Then, engage
in more research in order to write a report on one of the 7 topics.
A more specific breakdown of the 7 ideas from above follow:
1.
Photography as Art (Explore how photography is
used, and viewed as, an art form from it’s beginnings to today)
2.
Photography and War (Discuss the role of
photography in the world’s wars since its invention and your opinion on the use
of photography in war, ie. To what extent do you think photographers should be
allowed to document and publish war photographs)
3.
Photography and Digital Truth (What are the
implications for the future in regards to manipulating digital photographs?
Discuss the problems you could predict with this technology in the hands of the
masses. Discuss the common uses of digital manipulation in existence today and
what that means for journalists now and in the future. Lastly, explore the
responsibilities that a professional photo-journalist should be aware of in
terms of what is specifically ok to manipulate and what is not.)
4.
Photography and Presidential Image-Making
(Discuss the role that photography plays in politics. To what extent has
photography become a tool for the modern politician.
Discuss ways in which politicians use photography to “fool” voters and make themselves look better in order to get votes.)
5.
Photography and Persuasion (What is
photography’s role in Advertising? Discuss specific ways in which photographic
images are used to sell products and make products more appealing to consumers.)
6.
Photography and Social Change (How is
photography used to affect changes in society? Discuss some specific uses of
photography to affect social change, and explore some ways in which photography
could be used to correct problems in our own society today)
7.
Photography and Cultural Identity (How is
photography used to foster cultural and racial identity? Explore, through
research, some specific ways that specific photographer are using photography
to take control of their own cultural representation.)