- Documentary Photography as a genre dominates photography
- document signified evidence
- old photography became popular because it showed one world to the other, the darker continents to the white
- pictures separate the audience (us and them)
- Nachtweys pictures however are neutral
- Kilburn photo - it becomes part of our history not subjective - people want to catch the world in both war and photography
- Breson - photos are composed not trying to take over the world not lazy - purposeful
- Riis - middle class photographer went around photographing workers and poverty - book 'How the Other Half Live'
- superficially photography is working to get the image sensationalising the subject
- not the invisible eye - not neutral - people are posing
- not a depiction of reality - more of themselves - or is it? - is it more how they want themselves to be seen or how they see themselves?
- battle of what the subject and photographer wants the image to look like 'this is why you never feel you like like you do in a picture
- OTHERING - two ways of image
- to stamp your claim on the world
- to get the most out of the subject
- director Roy Stryker
- depression - 11 million unemployed
- mass migration of farm labourers 'Oakies'
- employees weren't allowed to take pictures of what they want, they were given 'shooting scripts' instructive of what to take
- documents but with an agenda - not neutral
- they were selective about their final image - a lot of struggle with what the subject, the photographer and the F.S.A wanted
- Lamprey - photography documentary in an anthropologic sense
- othering again
- photography about power and angenda
- branding the other - criticising
- photography with a colonial agenda - to mark or scrutinise
MASS OBSERVATION (1937-1960's)
- Tom Harrison (anthropologist)
- Charles Madge (poet)
- not just going into the world but people sending them information - people having an input (perhaps a more accurate and shared documentation)
- lots of stereotypes relate back to Mass Observation
- providing horrifying images of what things were like
- unfair to question the reality of the scene
- Capa gets questioned about the blur on the photo being aestheticised
- we never got to see all the pictures he took
- when its aestheticised it becomes untrue
MAGNUM GROUP
- founded in 1947 by Cartier Bresson and Capa
- ethos - what is the photographers role in certain situations
KEY FEATURES
- they offer a humanitarian perspective
- they tend to portray social and political situations
- they purport to be objective to the facts of the situation
- people tend to form the subject matter
No comments:
Post a Comment