1. Introduction to Photography Martin Irvine Georgetown University
Andreas Feininger, “The Photojournalist,” Gelatin silver print.

2. How Do We Look at Photographs, when the photographic image is the model for almost all image making?
Lee Friedlander, Self-Portrait, Haverstraw, New York © Lee Friedlander

3. How Do we Get From Here
Early Daguerreotypes (positive image on glass): child, and Niagara Falls

4. Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick, Card Game,
To Here
Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick, Card Game,
from Eisbergfreisdtadt (2007) (digital montage from multiple photographs, no digital imagery)
David LaChapelle,
“Cat House,” 1999
(staged studio shots,
digital montage)

5. Jeff Wall, Scene from The Invisible Man (using studio set and props for fictional image)

6. Photography: Codes and Genres
Photography and/vs. “A Photograph”
“Taking a picture” vs. “making a photograph:”
photographs are made (constructed), not taken
(=memorialized “quotations” from reality).
Barthes proposed that photographs were read as “signs without codes,” but that’s because he was still held by a romantic notion of photography and domesticated images.

7. Photography/Photographs and Codes of Reality and Realism
Since the earliest invention and uses of photography, the photographic image has been part of the discourse and ideology of modern “realism,” almost defining the category of the representational “real.”
In our culture today, we need to understand “the Real” (our attribution of “Reality” to anything represented) as a Code or position among kinds of representations and codes.
Once we expose (de-blackbox) the representational codes for “the real,” the social power of our media becomes clearer to discuss and critique.

8. Medium, Codes, Genres
We never experience “photography” but photographs: images with one or many genre codes.
There are many codes (interpretive frames that we learn culturally) and genres (types) of photographs and images.
One major differentiation, now often blurred and fused in photographic work:
The “straight shot” (framed image with existing light) vs.
staged, planned, or constructed shots, with artificial light, props, sets, etc.

9. Some Major Photographic Genres
Documentary/Documentation, Evidence
Reportage, Photojournalism
Narrative (can use any other genre)
Landscape, Nature
Portrait
Family history and rituals, snapshots
Street photography
Studio and staged photographs
Advertising
Fashion
Fantasy images, Surrealism
Erotica, fetish, porn

10. Earliest Photographic Images
Registering Light (“Photography” = “Light Writing”)
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce "View from the Window at Le Gras" (circa 1826)
First Daguerreotype, 1837 Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre,

11. Inherited Theoretical Issues
Passivity of the camera device as “light writing”, transcription of a reality outside and in front of the camera lens.
Photographic image as an “index” (semiotic term), indexical sign, that points to or represents what it signifies. It’s value is grounded and justified in the represented thing or reality to which it is “true”.
Photography and reference (registers a “true” external world), representation, pre-existing reality, memory, record, evidence, documentation, truth.
No surprise that photography became one of the main tools of postmodernism in breaking the “reality” and “truth” codes of images, and in critiquing those codes.

12. Alfred Stieglitz and the “Art Photography” Debate
“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”
“The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.” --Stieglitz
Periodical Camera Work and associated photographers were influential in establishing photography as an art form, not a mechanical or industrial trade.
A debate about institutions, social class ownership and identification with photography, representation and reality, hierarchy of professions, interpretive/active “artist” status of professional photographers.

13. “The Steerage,” 1907
“Flatiron Building, NY,” 1903

14. “Georgia O’Keeffe, Nude,” 1919
“Winter on Fifth Ave., NY,” 1893

15. Exemplary Artist: Bresson and the “Decisive Moment” Concept
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Model of the "street photographer", with a Leica 35mm camera and using existing light
“Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare,” 1932

16. Cartier-Bresson as “theorist”
Strict adherence to “indexical” value of the photograph, assuming only the framing and interpretation of the photographer
Landmark book: Images à la Sauvette ("stolen images," "The Decisive Moment”)

17. Photographer as Recorder, Memorializer
Archive of images: Archive | Archive of images at Magnum Photos
The Berlin Wall, 1963

18. Postmodern photography cut the link to the moment and the index of reality
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, Gelatin silver print.
Staged and shot in studio. No “there there” before or after the shot.

19. Gregory Crewdson, “Production Still,” 1991. C-print.
A photograph uses the codes of “the real” that we’ve learned from a long history of photographic mediation.
Gregory Crewdson, “Production Still,” C-print.

20. Photography is now our projected psyche: images of fantasy, desire, fear
Annie Leibovitz / Vanity Fair. The Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair, March, Keira Knightley, Scarlett Johanssson and Tom Ford.

21. Consequences of the ubiquity of photographic images and video
What is the status of the photographic image after digital cameras, cell phone cameras, amateur use of Photoshop, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube?
Revisiting Bourdieu’s “Photography as a Middle Brow Art” argument:
Picture-taking, being photographed as a social activity.
Today a photograph is usually a digital image created to be “reproduced” (in Benjamin’s concept)
A photograph is made to be copied and distributed with no fixed physical medium (in contrast to film and photopaper)
The memory of the earlier “indexical” function is still there, but the power of the image as image is more important.

22. Examples and Case Studies
Historical Exemplars: Bresson to Crewdson, Wall, Sugimoto
Matrix “Bullet Time:” digital film and photography convergence
Artists using the “ideology” of the photograph:
Chuck Close, Gerhard Richter, others