Blogpost #13: Criticizing Photographs & Baudelaire’s Poems

Through this piece, Barrett moves from discussing description as presentation of data to description as criticism/evaluation. In each component of description, Barrett shows how the critic adds a layer of interpretation and judgment to the description. Thus, description accomplishes the dual roles of conveying basic information about the artwork, as well as information about the critic’s opinion of the artwork. He also discussed formal elements, impact and effect of the medium, comparing style across multiples works/multiple artists, and using external information to add to the analysis.

One part of this piece that I particularly liked was the discussion of subject matter vs. subject. The examples Barrett picks out show how accurately describing the subject matter can require a more in-depth analysis of the contents of the image. Simply describing the elements of the image could give an incorrect impression of the photograph’s subject matter and the overall subject.

Another thing that caught my attention is how the context of the situation can be used in the evaluation of the image, and how critics differ in the extent to which they feel context should be used in evaluation. I tend to think it’s dangerous to read too much into images based on background information or ideas of the symbolism it contains — one of my mom’s artist friends used to comment on how he didn’t even know his art did all of the things that critics said it did. At the same time, I can also see how aspects of the photographer’s life can play into the photos he takes, and can be useful in interpreting his photographs.

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Baudelaire’s poems:

• Invitation to the Voyage: it felt almost like a lullaby or some kind of chant meant to lull you into blindly believing in the apparent beauty. I just pictured everything being covered in a soft, golden light, and mist rising from a river, and flowers and fragrances. Probably some angels singing. I think the beauty must be false though — there has to be something wrong, but I don’t know what it is. This reminded me of The Ones Who Walk Away from Olemas (by Ursula K. Le Guin).
• Correspondences: this one felt more ominous, even though the image sounded beautiful, perhaps because it was more solemn. I pictured monks in a forest.
• The Stranger: this reminded me of The Invisible Man (by H.G. Wells) for some reason. I felt like it was a man who had gone insane or was otherwise incapacitated and just didn’t have any connection to the world. He just spent all day staring up at the sky and watching the clouds go by, so that’s the only thing he could relate to.

 

#12: From Pigment to Light

It is refreshing to read an account that does not drag photography through the mud as “un-artistic.” Moholy-Nagy, creator of photograms, states that “it is quite unimportant whether photography produces art or not.” Unlike many of the previous authors we have read, Moholy-Nagy is a proponent of photography and the innovative uses of the medium. He lists many of the novel uses of the photographic medium, and discusses the need to allow experimentation and innovation in order to bring the future of the medium into the present.

He lauds how photography can bring new experiences of space, light, color, and time to the viewer. Considering his additional work as a painter, I see this as a rejection of the Baudelaire school of rejecting photography as “apart” from art, and acknowledging it as what it is: different, but still an important method of recording imagination.

#10: Baudelaire On Photography

Charles Baudelaire, poet and essayist, has been called the “father of modern art criticism,” and in On Photography seems to be a staunch enemy of photography as an art form.

Baudelaire looks upon contemporary artistic photography as a disease of the masses who are unable to understand art and confuse representations of reality with that of imaginative artwork.

He has no qualms with photography as a medium, and is quick to acknowledge its use as the “very humble servant” or those who need “an absolute factual exactitude in his profession” but fears that it will supplant and corrupt art.

His dislike of photography is interesting in contrast to his friendship with Nadar, an early French photographer, who took the portrait above and many other photographs of the famous of his age.

Baudelaire’s fears may have come to pass, as photography is now a widely-used and accepted art form, though I personally disagree that it has been used to usurp the arts outside of it. Society may still have strong regard for the photographic image, but I believe we still understand the imaginative and impressionistic arts.

#9: Vera Lutter

Vera Lutter is the modern master of the camera obscura. In “The Room and I,” Schmidtt-Wulffen describes her works and her inspiration for the use of the then-archaic camera obscura, rather than the modern photographic camera.

Her images, mainly left as the negatives they are captured as, are haunting. Exposed for days, and sometimes weeks, they create a foggy impression of the world on a timescale beyond that of human perception.

Even her studio images have no people, as her movements within the rooms she captures are on too quick a timescale to be visible in her final works. She explains, “you are invisible when you take photographs,” showing her perceived relationship between herself and her works. With this mindset, she creates wondrous images of the modern world with an old technology.

#7: Lentil Soup & The Mirage

In Lentil Soup, Coleman shows how the lens is a “defining technology” in human communication. The West, he argues, has become a photographic culture, in addition to a lens culture. The fascination of the permanence of photographic images first captured the minds of the common people. Coleman further argues that this is a natural progression for a seeing being: “having evolved an eye, it was natural for a toolmaking creature to develop an instrument with which to enhance its scope.”

Lens and seeing have long captivated scientists and photographers. In the West, magnifying glasses and simple spectacles had been produced by the 13th century. The Renaissance further developed interest in imagery and scientific information. In the 16th century, the camera obscura was developed and compound lens systems were invented.

In 1610, Galileo first looked up into the night sky with a telescope, and chose to believe what he could see over what he was told. And Western culture was reshaped by lens-based information, impacting both art and science.

Art was reconsidered as being that which should reflect nature, the art of God. Photography was used to show the world in as realistic a state as possible. Photography soon became ubiquitous and “Western society’s daily diet now includes a hefty serving of ‘lentil soup.'”

Minor White describes the work of Alfred Stieglitz, who felt that photography could be used as a metaphor, what he called an equivalent: “An accurate photographic rendering of a certain cloud, he would say, could be a portrait-an Expressionistic portrait in which the features could not be identified yet which would still be evocative of the person’s uniqueness as known by Stieglitz.” White further emphasizes how we must use our minds to allow us to see what the photograph is showing us, and that it is a representation, not truly reality.

Blogpost #11: Pinhole Cameras

This is a response to the lecture “Artists Working with Pinhole Cameras or Without Cameras.”

Vera Lutter’s image of the Giza pyramids was the first image that really stood out to me.

In addition to being from a pinhole camera, this image is also a negative image rather than a positive. At first, I didn’t realize this image was negative because the shading on the pyramid and the landscape look so natural. The thing that gives it away is the dark background (the sky). The background is also affected by the shape of the pinhole, which creates a circle around the center of the image. I think this dark circle is what makes the image so captivating — it brings a lot of interest and drama to the scene. I think it’s really cool how this integral part of the image is the product of the methods Lutter used to create the photograph.

I was also really struck by Abelardo Morell’s use of camera obscura in his photographs.

His earlier images were black and white, and featured the upside-down outside world projected into the room. Later, he used color film, and used a prism to flip the projection of the outside so that it was right-side-up.

Even though the concept behind the images is the same, the difference between the two is very noticeable. In the first image, the upside-down outside is distinct from the room. Features of the room (and what is in it) affect the image of the outside, but it is very easy to see what is going on outside vs. inside. In the second image, the image of the outside world seems to blend into the room. At first glance, it seems like the image of the bridge is painted onto the wall rather than projected onto the entire surface of wall + bed + nightstand + floor. An especially confusing photograph is this one:

Like the previous image, the right-side-up projection of the outside looks like a painting… but it’s projected onto an actual wall painting. It’s really hard to tell what’s being projected from the outside and what’s painted on the wall, and the combination creates a very beautiful result.

Our first, very own class exhibition!!!

From Pigment to (Age of) Light!

Both the articles- Age of Light and From Pigment to Light describe the experience of photography and its interaction with human beings. As evident from the title, Moholy-Nagy discusses the advent of photography from the roots of painting in his article, “From Pigment to Light”. He states his opinion that the invention of photography and the modern use of optical means have led to the emergence of many -isms. This, he says, is with the anticipated delay in implementing the new-found results of various experiments. Coming from an engineering background, I find this interesting and hard-to-believe. My own experiences have shown that most people are enthusiastic about trying to apply anything new and interesting to different ideas. However, I side with Moholy when he states that the dependence on digital and computational technology might create a situation where we see a decline in manual forms of art. Everything manual and “old-school” would be one day appreciated as “vintage”, which I can already see happening with respect to black-and-white and analog photography.

My first impression of the Man Ray’sarticle, “Age of Light” is that it is painstakingly tough to read with all kinds of colloquial words in play. I appreciate his views but feel that they would have made much more impact (to me personally) had it been expressed in a simpler way. Contrary to Moholy, Man Ray discusses more on the human experience of photography- both personally and communally. I really liked his comparison of a photographer to a child pointing at an object and naming it. He rightly states that the first step to participation in anything is the awakening of an internal desire and this individual desire is what drives a communal desire and universal participation. However, Ray also expresses that it is important to solve larger problems before addressing the smaller ones. I disagree with this opinion of his. I strongly feel that in almost all the cases, it is easier and beneficial (from the point of implementation and achieving results) to start addressing the smaller problems and those which are close to each one of us personally and then scaling up to address the larger problems.

Images without Cameras… Lutter vs Morell

The two most striking artworks I was fascinated by from the lecture’s discussion were of Vera Lutter and Abelardo Morell. My fascination arose out of contrasting reasons for both- The sheer magnitude of preparation, time and organization involved for the work of Vera Lutter vs the utmost simplicity and literally a temporary nature of the work and the process of photography of Abelardo Morell. And the common point between them that makes it even more interesting is that they hail from the same age of photography and most of their work is spanned between the 1990s- till date.

The artwork of Vera Lutter was unique given that her final form of photography stopped one step before that of conventional photography- her negative print from the pinhole was her final work of display, reproducibility being her major concern. On the contrary, Abelardo Morell took his work one step ahead of the conventional pinhole photography and added another layer to the photos by trying to marry the outside and the inside of a room-space. Another feature of contrast is that Lutter works in unimaginably high exposure times, in the scale of days. However, Morell works with extremely low exposure times in order to limit the amount of light being captured, in the scale of hours and minutes and lesser. However, there is a commonality in their photography that they are very closely linked to architecture and sculpturing, with Vera beginning her career as a sculpture and Abelardo working with spaces inside hotel rooms. The below artwork comparison is interesting, with both the photographers aiming to capture the Brooklyn bridge in New York, with varying means and ideas.

Figure: Brooklyn Bridge as seen from the eyes of Vera Lutter and Abelardo Morell

While trying to read more about these two artists, I found that they worked on the same project once, though not together. Its called “Taken with Time” (2006, a camera obscura project), where they both worked on a single topic of showing time in Philadelphia contrary to what the normal eye sees, along with Ann Hamilton. I found their approaches to the same project so interesting again. Lutter worked on capturing the scenes of a train station in Philadelphia, while Morell created a camera obscura image of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was an interesting read on their styles and means of photography. I suggest anyone interested, to read the small article referred below.

http://www.colettecopeland.com/pdfs/Taken_with_Time.pdf

Lewis Carroll and Charles Baudelaire!

An interesting fact is that both these articles were written at almost the same time- that time when photography was taking its advent. Hence the focus on photography and its impressions and perceptions of people. The poem by Lewis Carroll somehow gives me the feel of existential crisis. This is especially to do with the fact that the poet is repeatedly rejected, as evidenced in his first metaphor of milk and water. Rejection only seemed to increase as the poem progresses further. Each of the metaphorical representations could be interpreted as schools of photography. I especially liked the part where Carroll likened the process of photography to the strengthening of a poem. I think that the way a subject and the expression of the poet of the subject gives the poem its beauty is the same way that a photo is developed.

On the other hand, Charles Baudelaire was very cynical about photography and by reading his article, I could feel him being threatened by photography and how it could curtail free creative approaches. He goes to the extent of saying photography is really for lazy and untalented artists, which in fact shows his own lack of depth in understanding what photography actually is. I think this is an effect of considering an artform to be greater than other, instead of looking at how different art forms can work complementary with each other. His thought of a battle between painting and photography is actually very narrow-minded and reflects his inhibitions towards accepting photography as anything greater than an aid to explaining things, even though he fears that it actually grows much greater than that.