“A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words” – English idiom

Photography is as old as the hills. It can be familiar to you in the age of technology with all the cool kids around posting cool pictures to Instagram. Everybody with a smartphone or a camera can be a photographer now. However, in the early years of photography, it is a completely different story.

The first photographic process was created by Nicéphore Niépce. He first tried camera obscura and paper coated along with silver chloride in 1816 to capture small images. His attempt then failed but he kept trying different ways. The first pictures he made successfully was in 1822 but it didn’t last until today. In the year of 1827, Niepce produced the first lasting picture named a Heliograph using a plate covered with bitumen from his bedroom window. Today this image still exists in the Gernsheim collection at the University of Texas. Nicephore then met and established the partnership with Louis Daguerre and they improved the method together.

Its the start of the history of photography.

Today, photography has become a powerful tool of communication and a form of visual language which can touch many aspects of life. Photography can be so many things: the art of telling a story visually, capturing a moment, an event, a person, a place, an object, evoking feeling or emotion,…It can be the art of providing aesthetic pleasure or the art of selecting time, place and subject. The digital age reshapes our idea of photography. To me, photography simply means capture a beautiful moment in life. It may be easy nowadays to take a picture but it’s certainly not easy to take a great one.

“we are not just photographers today: we have also become distributors, archivists and curators …”

(Kuc, 2016)

And just like Kuc stated, the process of distribution, publication and curation almost become inseparable from the practice of photography.

        2. Provide your own definition (in your own words) on ‘videography’ or ‘video practice’, by referring to the readings, additional research and the practice analyses completed in your blog.

“Videography”, in its very core of meaning, means the process or art of making video films. To me, videography stands for capturing a beautiful footage. The difference between photography and videography is the sound and motion, which is the powerful ability to raise emotion in viewers. There is another term which is usually mistaken with videography: cinematography. You can understand simply that cinematography associates with film making, usually for movies while videography captures the reality, usually for industrial/corporate or hobbies.

First be practiced in the late 60s, videography has growing and gradually turning to be an integral part of modern life thanks to the development of digital technology.

“One of the strengths of video art is that it has never been absorbed by any one of these systems but remains peripheral to all. Video art uses this unique position to function as the research and development wing of media production, as the test market for new ideas and working styles in the festival market, as the avant-guard provocatively speaking out from an alternative perspective on social and cultural issues, as a town meeting on the concerns of the community, and as an artistic practice encouraging audiences to engage with creative forms of media.”

(Kate, 2006)

Under the unstoppable rise of technology and social media, videography is becoming an innovational way of communication which is popular more than ever with the fact that authorising, publishing and distributing process emerging into one.

        3. What differences and similarities did you discover between the way legacy and online photos are authored, published and distributed?

The most noticeable difference between the way legacy and online photos are authored is back to the old time, everything is much more difficult. With the lack of technological development, taking a picture takes time and require a chemical stage, which is called photographic processing, to process after. Photographic processing transforms the latent image into a visible and permanent image. The photographer wasn’t be able to see his works until the photographic processing was done, which can lasts for numerous days to months. It’s probably hard to imagine right now as we have digital camera. Digital camera takes and stores images in its digital memory. And unlike film camera, which was used in old generation with legacy photography, digital camera allows photos to display in screen immediately after taking.

The publishing process of legacy photos are also much more limited compared to online photos. Newspaper was the easiest way for photographer to publish legacy photos in the old time, which also required certain conditions. Other ways could be publishing in art exhibitions or his own photobooks. Now, with Internet, everyone can publish photos online to websites, social media accounts,…in a free and easy process.

Distribution now almost emerge into one with publication nowadays. Social media and Internet network makes the second users publish photos online, everyone can access, give feedback and share it widely. Internet became the main hub to publish and distribute photos.

“Dan considered Twitter “the center of the iphoneography world.” It is a place where anyone “can comment on photos within seconds of upload.” Since, at the time these interviews were conducted, Twitter posts were simple 140-character texts, iphoneographers would post a link to an image hosted somewhere else, usually Flickr, Tumblr, or a personal blog.”

(Halpem, 2016)

      4. What differences and similarities did you discover between the way legacy and online videos are authored, published and distributed?

Similar to photography, there were many factors prevent legacy videos being authored. Equipments to practice videography were limited, expensive and undeveloped in old days. Most videos were taken with handheld equipments, which was uncovenient and heavy. After that, videographers had to use huge size equipments to edit the most basic videos. Videography used to be considered only as a way to record artist’s performance to deliver to worldwide audiences. Only after Herbert Marcuse proposed that mass media had a strong relationships to social control and could lead to a fundemental change in society, media and other art forms started growing. Technology has also been developing, enables newer and more modern video equipments to be created.

“Immediately after its release, the use of portable video equipment exploded in many directions simultaneously. It was a brand new medium with no history of its own but with tremendous potential to carry out several different cultural and political agendas.”

(Berry, 2018)

All that long history form the digital age of videography nowadays. Everyone with a camera or a smartphone can record a video. Everyone know basic skills to edit and share a video after that. It lead to the booming of online videos, videoblogging, videobloggers and vlogging community.

“In the years since, online video has been transformed from an expensive to distribute mediaform to one which can be networked, shared, downloaded and re-used with ease.”

(Berry, 2018)

As Youtube become one of the largest search engine, all Internet users can create his own channel to publish and distribute videos. Even without Youtube, there are numerous other platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Vimeo,…with the network specifically designed and updated regularly to improve the publishing and distributing process. In constrast, the publishing and distributing process of legacy videos were seperated and complicated. Most videos went through a professional production stage and had to be in television, physical copy,VHS, galleries or exhibitions to be published. Exhibitions or galleries also only lasted for few months, making the distribution process to audiences become limited.

The only similarity in the way legacy video and online video being authored, published and distributed are they both “depend entirely on physical technology both during production, distribution and consumption’ (Berry 2018, p.19).

References:

Kuc, Kamila, and Joanna Zylinska, editors. Photomediations: A Reader. Open Humanities Press, 2016, http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/ titles/photomediations/ (pp.7-16 Photomediations: An Introduction by Joanna Zylinkska)

Horsfield, Kate. Busting the Tube: A Brief History of Video Art. Video Data Bank, School of Art Institute of Chicago, 2006, pp. 1–9, http://www.vdb.org/content/busting-tube-brief-history-video-art.

Halpern, Megan and Lee Humphrey, Iphoneography as an emergent art world. New Media and Society, 18 (1), 2016., 62-81. DOI: 10.1177/1461444814538632 (Via RMIT Library – Novell access required) http://journals.sagepub.com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/doi/pdf/10.1177/1461444814538632

Berry, Trine Bjorkmann. ‘Situating Videoblogging’. Videoblogging before YouTube, Institute of Network Cultures, 2018, pp. 9–22, http://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Videoblogging-Before-YouTube-web.pdf.