Week 7: Photography Flashcards
Photography: an art which imitates art
Pierre Bourdieu:
“photography captures an aspect of reality which is only ever the result of an arbitrary selection… from one sole viewpoint; these are transcribed in black and white, generally reduced in scale and always projected on to a plane.”
Observed that “photography can appear to be the recording of the world most true to this vision of the world, i.e. the most objective recording” nature imitates art art imitates art
Photography and art
Bourdieu views the working classes’ opinion of photography and art as:
“the artistic ideal of the working classes as an ideal of imitation to the same extent as realist painting, the production of reproduction”
Can an art without an artist still be art – do photographs taken in this spirit therefore fit into the realm of art?
Photography is constructed:
Telling subjects to be ‘natural’, yet with theatrical elements
Example of Chinese little girl in monkey zoo who was only allowed to take 5 photos a week (pre-digital photography)
Photography and art
Not all art forms are “equivalent in dignity and value”
Photography seen as vulgar
Painting a picture takes more effort – which means that photography is less of an art
A good picture may be taken irrespective of intention and clumsiness
Photography and art
Taking a picture because “You have film to waste” is seen as bourgeois
Artistic photography however may require blurred and unfocused pictures, which goes against the ‘norm’, possibly for narrative symbolistic purposes
Framing in photos: positioning subject off-centre
“The subordination of the image to a function”
Photography as communication and identity formation
Photography involves imagination, memory and desire
Roland Barthes – four image-repertoires in analogue photography:
“the one I think I am”
“the one I want others to think I am”
“the one the photographer thinks I am”
“the one the photography makes use of when exhibiting his art”
Photography as communication and identity formation
Photography was traditionally understood as having the function of memory
Photography with photoblogs, social media, other forms of mass communications is performed for:
Communication
Identity formation
Photography as communication and identity formation
Photography mediates communications – as a result of digital advances
Photography (personal photography) has changed due to technology, social and cultural transformations
Youths share photographs less as objects and more as experiences
Photo
Pierre Boudieu:
“the great mass of photography works may be legitimately reduced, without being reductive, to the sociology of the groups that produce them, the functions which they assign to them and the meanings which they confer upon them, both explicitly and more particularly, implicitly.”
