Tag Archives: PB2

PB2: A photograph is more than just an image.

Full album here.

A photograph is more than just an image. This statement was partly inspired by the idea put forward by Sean O’Hagan in his article that a photograph is made, and not taken. Photography is more than pointing a camera at something and clicking the shutter, in fact, you can take photos without even using a camera at all – all you need is light and photographic paper. Hubert Damisch also reinforces this idea:

‘Theoretically speaking, photography is nothing more than the process of inscribing… a stable image generated by a ray of light. This definition, we note, neither assumes the the use of a camera nor does it imply that the image obtained is that of an object or scene from the external world.’

He goes on to purport that a photograph does not belong to the natural world; it is a product of human labour. It is also a form of craft, that can be experimented with: in the words of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, ‘the enemy of the photograph is convention.’ Photography is many things: it can be placed in different contexts, remixed, and made in various different ways, but most importantly it is intrinsically linked with humanity, especially with memory and history. This connection to memory and history is essential to photography (Murray) – so a photograph is more than just an image not only in the different ways a photograph can be produced and contextualised, but also in the way it carries meaning for us. A family photograph is not going to have the same impact on someone who doesn’t know the people in the photo, as it is to someone who knows intimately the people in the photograph. Photographs are always going to be a representation of something, and because of this it is impossible for them to be completely objective. It is invariably going to have some personal element, no matter how minute.

I focused on this connection to memory in my exploration of the statement through the media artifact. I found photos of my mothers family in old photo albums. These photos have a lot of meaning to me because of seeing how different my family was in the 60s, and how they have has developed and changed. Someone else who looks at the photo won’t know any of this, so they won’t feel this connection and the same feelings – aside from maybe sharing my amusement for their gorgeous 60s outfits.

I took the photos, scanned them, and placed the copies in Adobe Photoshop. I then drew over the photo with the Paintbrush tool and a Wacom drawing tablet. Thereby, I created an alternate version of the photograph, which is not quite a drawing and not quite a photograph. This process forced me to look at the photo with a level of scrutiny that one wouldn’t usually use to look at a photo, the colours, the shapes, the tiny details in the subject’s faces and expressions. Whilst my hands and eyes were busy, I also had a lot of time to reflect on the photographs and my family situation, and at one point I even had to stop because I was getting too emotional. 

After making these media artifacts, the meaning of the photographs has changed for me. Especially now, they are more than just images.

 

Works cited:

  • Damisch, Hubert (1978). ‘Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image.’ October, Vol. 5, pp 70-72.
  • Murray, Susan. (2008, August 1) ‘Digital Images, Photosharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics.’ Journal of Visual Culture, Vol 7, Issue 2.
  • O’Hagan, Sean (2016, July 3). ‘The digital age reshapes our notion of photography. Not everyone is happy…’ The Observer.
  • Risatti, Howard (2007). ‘A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression’ North Carolina Press, USA.  

 

PB2: Photography is crucial to digital culture.

 

Full album here.

Today, you don’t need to look far to encounter photography of any kind. From when you cheekily check Facebook on your phone before you even get out of bed, in print, on billboards, on the news, a phone camera hovering tentatively above a piece of avocado toast. There’s no denying that photography has made itself a loving home in the 21st century, and this is none more true than when you look toward the digital realm.

Photography is a part of the digital language, of which kids growing up today are “native speakers.” (Murray) Yet, just a short time ago, photography in the way we knew it today was still developing – just as it, like any medium is constantly developing and will continue to do so. André Bazin once called photography an ‘embalmer of time’. In the 19th century, photographs were commonly taken post-mortem, partly because it’s quite easy to get a dead person to sit still for the length of time that was required by cameras of the time, and also as a way to preserve the memory of the person that was lot. This practice, the one of preserving memories – not so much the dead people part – continued into the 20th century, especially with Kodak creating a mass market for amateur photographers to arrange their lives into nostalgic snapshots. (West)

In the digital age, however, photography has become less about rare, ‘special’ personal moments and more about the mundane – like the aforementioned avocado toast, and what Britney Spears wore yesterday. Murray explains that this development has signalled a “definitive shift in our temporal relationship with the everyday image, and (has) helped alter the way that we construct narratives about ourselves and the world around us.” The landscape has changed even more since her reflection on online photosharing platforms in 2008, however – she notes Flickr as one of the largest communities, but social media platforms like Instagram have emerged with an even greater focus on sharing photographs with other users.

It is this integration of photography with the digital landscape, and by extension, our lives, that I explored in my media artifacts. I took a series of photos of my own social media pages, accessed on different devices, and removed all the images from the pages, to demonstrate how alien these sites look without the images that we are now all so used to. I also took a photo of another common scene that is very much linked to the image-sharing culture: people taking photos of the mundane, their lunch, and removed the cameras, in this case mobile phones, from the photo. There is no doubt that photography is crucial to digital culture.

 

Works cited:

  • Murray, Susan. (2008, August 1) ‘Digital Images, Photosharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics.’ Journal of Visual Culture, Vol 7, Issue 2.
  • O’Hagan, Sean (2016, July 3). ‘The digital age reshapes our notion of photography. Not everyone is happy…’ The Observer.
  • Prensky, Marc (2001),”Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1″, On the Horizon, Vol. 9 Iss 5 pp. 1 – 6
  • Van House, Nancy A. (2011, June 9.) ‘Personal photography, digital technologies and the uses of the visual.’ Visual Studies, 26:2, 125-134.
  • West, Nancy Martha (2000) ‘Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia.’ The University Press of Virginia, USA.

PB2: New Media is Less Tangible

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The statement, ‘New media is less tangible’ refers to the idea that digital media is less tangible because you can’t hold the internet in your hand like a book. To a large extent, this statement is very true and applicable to the digital media landscape, but yet, this statement also subtly implies that because of this loss of tangibility, new media is less valuable. This is a notion put forward by many critics of new media, as well as particularly by older generations who look back with some fondness to the age of bulky cameras and photo albums. Indeed, who makes a photo album these days that is not of the Facebook kind?

I decided to explore this statement by focusing on the role of photography, interrogating how it has developed, and whether it has become less tangible, or less valuable. I produced a short animation, presented as an infinitely looping GIF. I photographed myself holding various objects in my hands, including a picture slide, an SLR film camera, a printed photograph, a DSLR camera, and a mobile phone. These objects are supposed to represent an evolution of different mediums spanning the last few decades – the picture slide has been replaced by the mobile phone as a primary medium of capturing memories in photographic form. The photograph I pulled from an old family photo album – it is a photograph of my mother. All theses objects are family possessions that are quite important to me because of their nostalgic value. I enjoyed having the opportunity to rumble through a box of old slides and a pile of photo albums to find these images. Both these processes are very different to the way I search through my own photographs, which are stored online and on digital hard drives.

“… early critics feared a loss of texture and authenticity, features that they believed were inherent in old image technologies and missing in the ‘cold inhuman perfection’ of the digital.’ writes Susan Murray about digital photography. She continues, arguing that digital photography has actually raised our standards for the quality of the image, by taking several photos, editing them, discarding ones that have errors such as the wrong shutter speed. Anyone that has used an analogue film camera will know that with film there are far fewer chances to get the ‘right’ shot, so the level of perfectionism that is present in the photo you took of your breakfast this morning would not be there if you took it with a film camera. But perhaps it is this level of im-perfectionism that makes old media so appealing.

I intend for the viewer of the animation to consider whether this transition to less tangible media, specifically the method of capturing and storing memories through photography, actually devalued media, or merely transformed it. What have we lost with digital media, or rather, what have we gained? Is a loss of materiality really a bad thing?

 

Works cited:

  • Murray, Susan. (2008, August 1) ‘Digital Images, Photosharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics.’ Journal of Visual Culture, Vol 7, Issue 2.
  • Palmer, Daniel (2010) ‘Emotional Archives: Online Photo Sharing and the Cultivation of the Self.’ Photographies, 3:2, 155-171
  • West, Nancy Martha (2000) ‘Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia.’ The University Press of Virginia, USA.