1. Changes to Syllabus:
Wed. Mar 25 – Chapter 12: Photography & Time-Based Media
Mon. Mar 30 – Chapter 13: Sculpture
Wed. Apr 1 – Chapter 14: The Crafts as Fine Art
Mon. Apr 6 – Chapter 15: Architecture, Journal # 4 due
Wed. Apr 8 – Exam 2 Review Session
Mon. Apr 13 – Exam : Chapters 9-15 (we will not be covering Ch. 16: The Design Profession)

2. Chapter 12 – Photography and Time-Based Media
Thinking Ahead:
What is photogenic drawing?
What is the Zone System?
What is editing in film?
What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of video art?

3. Photography
So far in Part 3 we have discussed two-dimensional media: drawing (Chapter 9), printmaking (Chapter 10), and painting (Chapter 11).
The remaining two-dimensional media are photography and the other camera arts: film, video, & computer- and internet-based media.
Photography and the camera arts allow artists to explore the fourth dimension- time and motion. The camera can capture and preserve a moment in time, and in doing so, it allows our eyes to see motion slowed down.
Photography began, in about 1838, with still images. Photographers quickly wondered whether it was possible to capture the object in motion as well.

4. Eadweard Muybridge, Annie G, Cantering, Saddled, December 1887, Collotype print, image size: 7½ x 16⅛ inches. Muybridge captured the locomotion of animals. In this case, he took photographs of a trotting horse to settle a bet about whether there were moments in the horse’s stride when it was entirely free off the ground.

5. Photography
Of all the arts, none seem to have more elements of realism and objectivity than photography, film, and video.
Because photography can make an objective record of the world, it has many uses besides art.
How many of you own cameras? What kinds?
Have you ever purchased a disposable camera just to “capture a moment”?
What kinds of photographs do you take? Family? Friends? Vacations? Events?
How is photography important in documenting your life?

6. Early Photography: Camera Obscuras
Camera obscuras, or “darkened rooms,” were first used by artists in the 16th century to copy nature accurately. They were portable, allowing the artist to set up in front of any subject matter.
A small hole on the right side of a light-tight room admits a ray of light that projects a scene, upside down, directly across from the hole onto a semitransparent white scrim.
Essentially, they allowed a 3-D space to be projected onto a 2-D screen, but they maintained the color and perspective of the 3-D world. The major drawback of the camera obscura was that while it could capture an image in two dimensions, it could not preserve it.

7. Above Left: Unidentified Photographer, Camera Obscura. Engraving, c
Above Left: Unidentified Photographer, Camera Obscura. Engraving, c Bottom Right: illustration of a camera obscura.

8. Many early inventors were able to capture an image temporarily, but it was not until 1826 that French inventor Joseph Niepce created (and kept) the first image on a light sensitive surface—a photograph titled View from the Window at Le Gras. Niepce was the first to make a permanent photographic image. It took 8 hours to expose.

9. Early Photography: Daguerre in France
Niepce died in 1833, and another Frenchman, Louis Daguerre, perfected his process, significantly reducing the exposure time from hours to minutes.
Daguerre announced his photographic process to the world in He was able to fix positive images on polished metal plates, and the resulting image was called a daguerreotype.
Disadvantage of the daguerreotype were that it required considerable time to prepare, expose, and develop the metal plate. It also could not be reproduced.

10. Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Le Boulevard du Temple, 1839, Daguerreotype. Developed in France, a daguerreotype is one of the earliest forms of photography, developed in 1839, made on a copper plate polished with silver.

11. The invention of photography was not well received by painters
The invention of photography was not well received by painters. Many portrait and landscape artists felt their careers were doomed, because of photography’s ability to represent the world.
Richard Beard, Maria Edgeworth, Daguerreotype. As photographic portraiture became a successful industry, portrait painting went into rapid decline. Photography replaced painting as the preferred method of portraiture, and it democratized the genre, making portraits affordable and available to the middle and even the working class.

12. Early Photography: Talbot in England
While Daguerre was developing the daguerreotype in France, William Henry Fox Talbot was developing a different process in England.
Talbot developed a process for fixing negative images on paper coated with light-sensitive chemicals. The resulting image on paper was called a photogenic drawing.
Using paper rather than metal plates like Daguerre, Talbot’s process made multiples prints possible.

13. William Henry Fox Talbot, Mimosoidea Suchas, Acaica, c. 1839
William Henry Fox Talbot, Mimosoidea Suchas, Acaica, c Photogenic drawing. The object (a plant specimen) acts as a stencil, blocking the light-sensitive chemicals it covers on the paper. These un-hardened chemicals can be washed off, revealing the negative image of the object.

14. William Henry Fox Talbot, Photogenic drawings.

15. William Henry Fox Talbot, The Open Door, 1843. Calotype.
The calotype process is the basis for modern photography, developed by Talbot in Talbot discovered that exposed sensitized paper held a latent image that could be brought out and developed by dipping the paper in gallic acid. The image above marks a turning point in Talbot’s view of photography. He considered the image to be more complex than merely documenting the natural world: he saw it as a work of art in its own right.

16. Julia Margaret Cameron, Portrait of Thomas Carlyle, 1863, silver print
Julia Margaret Cameron, Portrait of Thomas Carlyle, 1863, silver print. Around 1850, English sculptor Frederick Archer introduced a new wet-plate collodian photographic process that was almost universally adopted within 5 years. It allowed for short exposure times and quick development of prints. Silver nitrate is integral to the process, and the resulting photographs are called silver prints. Cameron was interested exposing the “soul” of his sitters. She was also interested in the artistic potential of the medium, and used techniques such as blurring and deliberately shooting an image out-of-focus to make her photographs appear more painterly.

17. Form and Content
Every photograph is an abstraction. By emphasizing formal elements over representational concerns, the artist underscores the abstract side of the medium.
Photography has the ability to aestheticize the everyday—to reveal as beautiful that which we normally take for granted.
The tension between the way a photograph is organized formally as a composition and what it expresses or means.
Can an “art” photograph be journalistic or function as an historical document?

18. Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907. Photogravure
Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, Photogravure. A photogravure is an intaglio printmaking process where the copper plate is coated in light sensitive material, it is exposed, etched, and then printed. Stieglitz’s The Steerage emphasizes formal elements over documentary concerns. The artist is interested in spatial relations and geometric shapes.

19. Charles Sheeler, Criss-Crossed Conveyors – Ford Plant, 1927
Charles Sheeler, Criss-Crossed Conveyors – Ford Plant, Gelatin silver print.
The geometric beauty of Stieglit’z work deeply influenced Charles Sheeler, a leader of a 20th-century art movement called Precisionism (due to its clean, crisp, and clear painting style).
Like Stieglitz, Sheeler took photographs that expressed more aesthetic than documentary concerns.

20. Joel Meyerowitz, Ten Grapplers Daisy-Chaining at Dusk, November 5, 2001, from Aftermath, World Trade Center Archive, Phaidon Press, 2006.
Meyerowitz’s photograph is photojournalistic, but its formal qualities also demonstrate its aesthetic power.

21. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Athens, 1953.
The decisive moment: “By releasing the shutter at that precise instant, you had instinctively selected an exact geometrical harmony, and that without this the photograph would have been lifeless.”

22. Truths and Photography
Are all photographs truthful?
Photography may be used to “capture a moment in time,” and in the medium’s infancy photographs were certainly regarded as informational: as showing the viewer a documented glimpse at something that exists in reality.
Photographs, in essence, carry a promise of truth with them – they project an authenticity that rarely exists in other art forms.
However, the reality portrayed by a photograph is often constructed.
Although this “truth” is hardly a reality, as photographs are easily manipulated to where the final image is far different than the original, it is still important that we perceive them as true.

23. An-My Lê, Small Wars (Ambush I), 1999-2002, Gelatin silver print.
This photograph depicts the activities of a group of men who meet regularly in VA and NC to recreate the Vietnam War. The ambush is not real; it is a reenactment, or a “Vietnam of the mind.”

24. Timothy O’Sullivan (negative) and Alexander Gardner (print), A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 1863, from Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the War, published Albumen silver print.
Photojournalism/ Documentary photography?
Photograph taken in the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War.
O’Sullivan often staged his photographs in order to heighten the dramatic effect of the image.

25. Jeff Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai), 1993
Jeff Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai), Fluorescent light and display case.

26. Sakino Hokusai, Shunshuu Ejiri, from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, Color woodblock.

27. Jeff Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai), 1993
Jeff Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai), Fluorescent light and display case.
Wall employed professional actors, staged the scene carefully, and shot it over the course of nearly 5 months. The final image consists of 50 separate pieces of film spliced together through digital technology.
What sorts of transformations can you describe?
What does this say about the nature of film as a medium?
Where does “truth” lie? Can we, or should we, trust what we see?

28. The Photographic Print and its Manipulation
Photographers can control their prints after the initial exposure by experimenting in the dark room.
Is manipulation an “honest” technique, considering that we are prone to “believe” photographs?
Does manipulation add to the “artistic” quality of the images?
Are these questions even relevant today, considering easy access to software that allows users to endlessly and effortlessly manipulate digital images?

29. The Photographic Print and its Manipulation
The Zone System is a framework for understanding darkroom exposures in photography developed by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer in the 1930s. A zone represents the relation of the image’s (or a portion of the image’s) brightness to the value or tone that the photographer wishes to see in the final print. Thus, each picture is broken up into zones ranging from black to white with nine shades of gray in between – a photographic gray scale.
Dodging decreases the exposure of selected areas of the print that the photographer wishes to be lighter.
Burning increases the exposure to areas of the print that should be darker.
An aperture is the size of the opening of the lens.

30. Ansel Adams, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941
Ansel Adams, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, Gelatin Silver Print. Large parts of the sky are burned, so that they develop darker. The village towards the bottom of the photograph is dodged, so that it appears lighter and can show more detail. The end result is an image that shows cohesive space, but also presents some interesting contradictions in time of day.

31. Jerry N. Uelsmann, Untitled
Jerry N. Uelsmann, Untitled. These photographs have been dodged in the development process in order to only expose certain parts of the composition. The artist will then expose a single piece of photographic paper to all three film negatives, creating an image that combines all three layers (see image in next slide).

32. Here we see the image that combines all three photographic images into one print.

33. Color Photography
Until the late 1960s, color was largely ignored by fine art photographers, who associated it with advertising.
Color photography was not readily available and easy to control until the 1970s, when Kodak introduced new color technologies that provided more reliable results.
At this point, fine art photographers began to explore the use of color photography.
Artists that use color photography are still concerned will all of the elements and principles of design that black and white photographers use, but they also consider how the power of color can enhance their design.

34. Joel Meyerowitz, Porch, Provincetown, 1977
Joel Meyerowitz, Porch, Provincetown, One of the first photographers to exploit new color technologies. The artist is capitalizing on the powerful complementary color contrast (deep blue sky and the hot orange electric light) to add energy and interest to the image. This design contrast also enhances the differences between the two spaces: the peacefulness of the porch, and the wildness of the night.

35. Annie Leibovitz, Karen Finley at her home in Nyack, New York, 1992
Annie Leibovitz, Karen Finley at her home in Nyack, New York, Chromogenic print.
Note the strong complementary color contrast between the red robe and the green hues of the chair and socks. This image also plays with the public’s reactions to female sexuality. How does staring at a photograph of a naked woman differ from staring at a painting of a naked woman?

36. Degas, After the Bath, Woman Drying Her Back, 1896
Degas, After the Bath, Woman Drying Her Back, Gelatin silver print
Edgar Degas used photography as a reference study for his pastel drawings. Does the content of the artwork change (considering it is very similar subject matter), based on the change in medium, and our perceptions of it?

37. Digital Photography
Color photography was (not that long ago) new technology. But the rise in popularity of color images through television, along with new products that allowed for convenient color photography (the Polaroid camera and film and inexpensive color processing for Kodak film), contributed to a rapid increase in the cultural taste for color images.
Today, digital technologies have transformed the world of photography, offering conveniences that film cannot and transforming photography into a highly manipulable medium.

38. Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (House in the Road), 2002
Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (House in the Road), C-print mounted on aluminum.
Is this an image of a real event, or is it staged? Crewdson refines each shot digitally, and creates the final photograph by digitally assembling the various shots.

39. Eleanor Antin, Constructing Helen, from Helen’s Odyssey, 2007
Eleanor Antin, Constructing Helen, from Helen’s Odyssey, Chromogenic print.
To create this image, Antin digitally transformed his female model into a gigantic sculpture. Antin’s print is a parody of late 19th-century academic paintings like Alexander Cabanel’s Birth of Venus (next slide).

40. Alexandre Cabanel, The Birth of Venus, Salon of 1863, Oil on Canvas.

41. Although we can recognize digital manipulation as a reality in many images we see, there is still a powerful ingrained remembrance of a photographic image as “the truth.” Much of advertising uses this to its advantage, by manipulating images into unrealistic products, but by presenting them as authentic, and as real.

42. Film
Moving pictures and experiments in stop-action photography contributed to the development of film in the 1920s.
As forms and shapes repeated themselves in time across the motion picture screen, the medium seemed to invite the exploration of rhythm and repetition as principles of design.

43. Fernand Léger’s Ballet Mécanique, 1924. Film.
Cubist artist Léger’s Ballet Mécanique illustrates how artists were attracted to moving pictures.
He repeats the same image again and again at separate points in the film to create a visual rhythm.

44. Film
Cinema brought a new level of psychological narrative into photography, with editors playing an important artistic role. In cinema, the editor interprets the director’s point of view and sees the film from the audience’s standpoint too.
Editing is the process of arranging the sequences of a film after it has been shot in its entirety. It is a sort of linear collage. Collage, constructed by cutting and pasting together a variety of fragments, was itself invented around the same time as film (in the 1920s).

45. Film
All photography, even still photographs, implies a story, but in cinema, images are linked by the editor into sequences that dramatize the story. Cutting from one shot to another to tell the story is the key to narrative continuity, which is very different from real time.
Editors have the ability to represent different kinds of time within film. Flashbacks and crosscutting, for example, may be utilized to enhance the plot of the film.
Recall the last film you viewed and how time was represented. The average actual time it takes to watch a movie is 2 to 3 hours, yet the time represented within the film may be days, months, or years.
The arrangement of the filmed sequences and the use of camera angles (aerial, worm’s eye, eye level) and camera shots (full shots, medium shots, extreme close-ups, long shots, iris shots, pans, traveling shots) contribute (or take away from) the narrative of the film.

46. D. W. Griffith, battle scene from The Birth of a Nation, 1915.
The first great master of editing was D.W. Griffith, who, in The Birth of a Nation, essentially invented the standard vocabulary of filmmaking.

47. D. W. Griffith, battle scene from The Birth of a Nation, 1915.
Griffith sought to create visual variety in film:
The image of the battle scene reproduced here is a long shot – a shot that takes in a wide expanse and many characters at once.
Griffith also uses an iris shot – a shot that is blurred and rounded at the edges in order to focus the attention of the viewer on the scene at the center.

48. Sergei Eisenstein, four stills from Battleship Potemkin, 1925.
One of the other great innovators of film editing was Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.

49. Sergei Eisenstein, four stills from Battleship Potemkin, 1925.
Instead of focusing on narrative sequencing, Eisenstein sought to create shock in his film.
He wanted to emphasize action and emotion through enhanced time sequencing.
He called his technique montage – the sequencing of widely disparate images to create a fast-paced, multifaceted image. .

50. Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho, 1993.
The opposite of Eisenstein’s work.
Gordon’s is an extreme slow-motion video projection of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic film Psycho.
Projects Hitchcock’s original film at 2 frames per second, extending the playing time of the movie to a full 24 hours! (the duration is 24 hours)
Each action is excruciatingly extended. c

51. Which actors/actresses do you consider stars?
Popular Cinema
After World War I, American movies dominated the screens of the world like no other mass media in history.
The name of the town where these entertainments were made became synonymous with the industry itself – Hollywood.
Fox, Paramount, Universal, MGM, Warner Brothers
Sound-on-film technologies introduced in 1926/27.
Star – an actor or actress whose celebrity alone can guarantee the success of a film.
Which actors/actresses do you consider stars?

52. Orson Welles as Kane campaigning for governor in Citizen Kane, 1941.
Welles – a Hollywood star, produced, directed, wrote, and starred in Citizen Kane.
One of the greatest achievements of American popular cinema.
The film used high-angle and low-angle shots, editing effects, including dissolves between scenes, and a narrative technique, fragmented and consisting of different points of view, unique to film at the time.

53. William Cameron Menzies, storyboard for the burning-of-Atlanta scene from Gone with the Wind, 1939.
1939 – the emergence of color as a major force in the motion picture business.
Menzies, a Hollywood art director, created storyboards – panels of rough sketches outlining the shot sequences for each of a movie’s scenes.
Storyboards help determine camera angles, locations, lighting, and editing sequences well in advance of actual shooting.

54. William Cameron Menzies, storyboard for the burning-of-Atlanta scene from Gone with the Wind, 1939.
Argo storyboards:

55. The burning-of-Atlanta scene from Gone with the Wind, 1939.

56. Walt Disney created feature-length animated films in full color
Walt Disney created feature-length animated films in full color. In order for motion to appear seamless, and not jerky, thousands of drawings needed to be executed for each film, up to 24 per second of film time!
The first was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937.
Animation – “bringing to life,” the process of sequencing still images in rapid succession to give the effect of live motion.

57. Video Video art is far less expensive than film.
Video is more immediate than film– what is seen on the recorder is simultaneously seen on the monitor.
1965 – the inexpensive hand-held video camera, the Sony Portapak, allowed artists to explore video
Video art can be instrumental in documenting performance art.
Video often suffers from the threat of rapid technological change, quickly rendering media extinct.

58. Nam June Paik, Video Flag, 1985-96
Nam June Paik, Video Flag, video monitors, 4 laser disc players, computer, timers, electrical devices, wood and metal housing on rubber wheels.
Video installation
Korean-born artist Nam June Paik’s first video, Global Groove, was created in 1957, the same year Sony introduced its first video camera, the Portapak.
Paik had to reengineer his video installations because of outdated video equipment.

59. Nam June Paik, TV Bra for Living Sculpture, 1969
Nam June Paik, TV Bra for Living Sculpture, Performance by Charlotte Moorman with television sets and cello.
Video, which is short-lived and temporal, is used to document performance events
Performance art – theatrical work by artists staged in gallery or museum spaces.

60. Trisha Brown, Walking on the Wall, from Another Fearless Dance Concert, March 30-31, Performance, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Video used to document Performance art
Dancing on the walls of the Whitney Museum of Art suspended in harnesses from the ceiling.

61. Homework due Monday, March 30:
Multiple choice homework for Chapter 13: Sculpture