Hunter-gatherers in Malaysia have an impressive sense of smell
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2018/01/18/hunter-gatherers-masters-smell/#.Wn4ECJOplD0
Researchers have found that an indigenous people in Malaysia have a much better capacity to smell because their language uses more abstract words to describe smells like colors instead of comparisons (such as “smells like apple”).
I think in Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes brought up two ideas that really resonated with me. Firstly, there was the concept of the studium and the punctum and how they were part of every photograph (albeit different for each person) and secondly, there was this idea that a photograph is forever linked to its subject matter and how people tend to read photographs as an accurate and direct representation of their subject matter as opposed to other forms of art where the artist is largely responsible for the contents of the final piece.
I appreciated that Barthes acknowledged that while all photographs are packed with many different meanings and readings (the studium), the punctum is very subjective meaning that there really is no such thing as a good or bad photograph. Barthes anecdote to explain this talks about how there is a picture of his (then recently-deceased) mother that he thinks perfectly embodies everything his mother was (in his eyes), but it would not mean anything to most people reading the book since we don’t share the same relationship with the subject matter. When I thought about this idea more, I realized that earlier this semester, I had actually had the reverse of this scenario happen. I took a picture of my friend lying on his couch in his pajamas, and I thought it was a pretty bad photo because to me, the only thing I read immediately from it was what is described above. However, Lara, not knowing who my friend was or where he was in the photo, loved the photograph because she was able to see details and nuances in the photo that I had missed because I had already initially read the photograph as just my friend on a couch and wrote it off as a meaningless picture.
On the note of the photo of Barthes’ mother and how this photo could encapsulate the essence of who his mother was to him, it’s interesting how this means that everybody has a different image of everybody in their heads and how it’s likely that the photograph that I thought was the quintessential depiction of person X is different from the photograph that person X thinks perfectly captures their own essence. Tying this into today’s world and its heavy use of social media, it’s interesting to see the types of pictures that people post and how it shows what they think their essence is. The selfie is a strange concept because you are both the photographer (not in the sense of the photo composer, but actually the person seeing “through the lens”) and the subject matter creating this unprecedented situation where the subject matter can control exactly what they look like. When people posts pictures of activities they did the past weekend on social media, the entire concept is criticized for creating a life for yourself that is overly-perfect, overly-dramatic, etc. — basically, it is likely that your actual life differs from how it is portrayed on social media. However, the selfie allows it to go deeper than that. When you post a selfie on social media, you are posting a portrait of yourself that captures the essence of who you think you are or who you want to be. At least for younger people, their social media persona is largely a part of their real-life persona and how people perceive them and this means that by posting enough selfies, someone can start to change how someone else sees them in essence. I’m not entirely sure what the implications of this are, but it is a testament to how much social media has assimilated itself into the real world.
As we discussed in lecture on Tuesday (before we watched Dr. Strangelove), social media has taken over our lives — everyone from small children to people who are our parents’ age seem to be heavily involved and invested in some sort of social media. I shared the (disturbing) story of how my brother now has an alarm on his phone to remind him to send some form of snapchat to his friends in order to maintain his ‘streaks,’ but it later became clearer to me that this isn’t that weird for children his age nowadays and at some level, my activity on social media is similar. I think almost all social media use is to garner some sort of social attention/acceptance and to create a sort of social status among your peers, but we sometimes talk about that like it’s a bad thing; however, I think desiring these things and acting with these things in mind is pretty standard human behavior regardless of what “time” you’re from.
In the 70s when it became popular (in America) to oppose the government, live freely, and be accepting of drug use, plenty of people were worried and disturbed by what the youth was becoming, but this happened because humans constantly evolve and that’s the direction they wanted to go in at that time. When we look back at that now, it doesn’t seem that bad — if anything it seems like it was a necessary change in lifestyle to afford us some of the freedoms and liberties we have today that we enjoy very much. In the same ilk, I think our generation likes to acknowledge the impact of social media and the “damage” it has done to society in an attempt to feel self-righteous. But at the same time, I think that if we were given the option to delete all social media from our lives or keep it the way it is/in the same direction it’s headed, very few people would choose to completely rid our society of social media. Social media and the change it has brought isn’t necessarily bad, but people hate change (especially when they are left behind). I don’t think that kids twenty years from now will be worse off than kids now because who am I to define what good kids are, but they will definitely be different and I think that is what all the hooplah about the impact of social media is about.
At first, I was slightly unsure what the resurrection of photos reading had to do with the myth of Narcissus, but after I thought about it for a while, I sort of understood another point from the resurrection of photos reading about (unrealistic) beauty standards and the pursuit of beauty in society.
I felt like the three readings together were meant to display the sort of danger in being able to edit photos with the goal of making people look better. Of course when the technology of retouching photos was first introduced, it must have been widely embraced as you could get rid of imperfections or add/modify certain features of somebody (as is mentioned in the Photo Resurrection reading), but what this also did, which only became apparent to us in the future, was create a sort of vanity within society that made it chase and yearn for a beauty that wasn’t necessarily possible. Whenever I had heard the Narcissus myth, it was slightly different — the moral of the story was essentially to not love yourself too much. But, these versions had a slightly different moral. It seemed more like they were trying to say that if you obsess over a beauty that you can’t have, it could (literally) be the death of you.
In our society today, awareness of this problem has been raised more and more. It is well-known that advertisements and published photoshoots are heavily edited to increase the beauty of the models in them, but when professional models can’t even achieve certain standards of beauty and are subject to “retouching” in their photos, it becomes apparent that there is a problem. I read an article recently where the main point was essentially that we are in an “Instagram” age and that it is more about the photo and the perception of who we are/were than about the truth. In some sense, it is sad that the truth and the candidness that made photography very different from artforms before it has been lost with the ability to alter photos after they have been taken.
I really enjoyed the discussion we were having in class on Tuesday, and was actually kind of disappointed we had to stop it to watch the movie (which ended up not even working lol). The point I was trying to make had to do more with popular art and what was the most popular form of the art at the moment. Obviously when photography came about, people didn’t completely stop painting realistically, but because photography could produce the same type of image as a realistic painting but much more quickly, impressionism became a lot more popular. I think that today “contemporary” painting leans much more towards the abstract side because hyperrealistic paintings can’t offer us anything that photography cannot except for the pure awe that a viewer has when he/she realizes that the image was painted and not a photograph.
I think that a similar thing might happen to film photography soon in the sense that much of the produced art will shift over to something that can’t be easily replicated through digital photography methods. Dorothea Lange produced one of the most iconic photographs ever of the Great Depression in America using film photography (see below), but I wonder if she would have used digital photography had the technology been as accessible as it is today. In the case of her photography, the notable parts of her photos aren’t specific to darkroom techniques, so I would see no reason for her to continue to shoot in film if it were easier and faster to shoot in digital. Of course, there is the argument that it is simply fun to spend time in the darkroom and not know exactly how a photo is going to turn out until it is developed, but I think that it’s important to have a purpose for the method and techniques used to produce a piece of art. For example, nobody really makes their own paints anymore (like they used to do hundreds of years ago) unless it added a significant layer to how you would perceive the painting.
With all that being said, looking at my own final project, I had to ask myself why I should/would continue shooting in film. Over the course of the semester, I have actually come to really enjoy spending time in the darkroom from developing rolls to actually making prints, but is that enough of a reason to keep shooting in film? My current vision for my project is a series of candid shots and portraits of people in various places and exploring how race could make you read a situation or photograph differently. For this, I’m not sure if any darkroom techniques are really relevant to the project and so, I wouldn’t see why it would be better to keep shooting in film when I could get more shots, possibly better quality shots (in terms of focus), and easier editablility with digital photography.
I was interested in the reading because the past few times I’ve spent in the darkroom, I’ve experimented a little with (from what I understood in the reading) photomontage, and I just think that both collage and montage are great ways to make images since one is literally breaking the barrier of the camera and creating images that weren’t necessarily or could not have been produced with the camera by itself. I was not super interested in the author’s detailed explanation of the differences between the two techniques, since ultimately, he just gives a conclusive answer as to what the difference between the two were, but I did appreciate the short section at the end where he talks about the similarities between the two techniques and generally, what type of message/purpose both techniques are attempting to achieve. It was also interesting to look up the artists the author spoke about and to see what their works looked like.
I was particularly interested in Barbara Kruger. I’m pretty familiar with her because the skateboarding/streetwear brand ‘Supreme’ ripped off her style for their now very famous logo, but after the reading, I was prompted to look more deeply into her actual work. I really like the monochrome paste-ups that she made (before she started using digital techniques to plot out her work) because of the simplicity of the collage itself. Rather than being many different photographs together (like something by Hannah Hoch), it’s one or at most two actual images overlaid with some text that contextualizes the image beneath it or makes you see it in a different light.
Of course these readings talk a lot about how the invention of digital photography influenced the evolution of the photography as an art and also simply as a means of recording information, but I was particularly interested in how they spoke of the overall evolution of photography and what it has become now/the steps it took there. I was really amazed at the anecdote at the end of the Fred Ritchin chapter where he speaks of the most photographed barn. I found the idea of not seeing the barn fascinating because I think that I can relate to that and its ubiquitous in today’s world of instagram. There were a couple points in the anecdote, but my main takeaway was that nobody really goes to the barn to see the barn anymore, but they go there to take a picture of it. Almost contrary to what the intended use of the camera was (to capture a moment), taking a picture of this barn (that nobody really knows anything about) is almost creating a moment out of nothing simply by taking the photograph. (Ritchin actually talks about this earlier in the chapter.)
Back on the note of what digital photography did for the art of photography, I find it kind of funny, if not ironic, that with all the convenience issues that digital photography solved by digitizing the process, it also created many bigger, harder to solve problems with the entire art itself. Similar to how the invention of the camera forced painting to evolve and forced painters to make paintings that couldn’t be created with the new apparatus, I feel like there are skills and other intangible things that (film) photographers used to do that aren’t relevant anymore. Bresson’s eye and his ability compose a picture perfectly through his impeccable timing are rendered almost obsolete when one now has the ability to review a photo to see what was good/bad about it and take as many photos as you want within a certain period of time with the only limiting factor being the shutter speed the camera is set to. Equally, why would anyone go through the trouble of developing analog photographs if the same image/effects could be achieved and even improved using digital cameras and programs?
Probably the most obviously fascinating part of Vera Lutter’s work using the camera obscura is the fact that it’s practically life-sized when you first see a print. Her method of turning an entire room in her apartment/flat into the camera obscura means that when the printed image is developed, it’s likely to be just about the same size as you would perceive it had you yourself been looking out of her camera. I think I’ve often discussed how the camera is used to deceive and how different photography techniques have been developed to change or influence our perception of a situation through a photograph, but I feel like Lutter’s technique is actually several steps in the other direction. It seems as if the/her pinhole camera is intended to give her audience an almost exact replica image of what she can see from her room.
That brings me to the second point, however, that it’s important to note from where she takes the picture. Of course, different windows all have different levels of lighting and different views of certain monuments. If anything, as the reading alludes to, the picture is giving us a lot more information about her room (which she turned into a camera obscura) than it is about the subject (matter?) itself. With some knowledge of the relative size of what’s in the picture, you can gauge and infer a lot about the position of her room, its distance from the monument itself, and much more, which is a super interesting part of her work.
Barrett’s chapter on criticizing photographs is about how a critic’s responsibility when criticizing a photograph is both to describe what can be seen and gathered from the photograph and to judge it, but of course, it has to be an informed judgment. These two parts are essential to the critique because without a well-described photograph, it is basically impossible to make a substantiated opinion about the photograph itself and/or make an argument for a certain opinion (because of a lack of evidence), but the judgment itself is also necessary to continue to push the art forward and treat it as a piece of work rather than just a collection of photographs.
I liked how he touched on the language that different critics used and how small nuances could mean so much. For example, he talks about the way in which Douglas Davis critiques Richard Avedon’s “In the American West” series, saying that Davis appreciates the aesthetic and attention to style that Avedon has, but the fact that that was all that was said in that regard meant that Avedon didn’t succeed in truly documenting “The West.” I thought it was very interesting how much one could infer a lot about what wasn’t said in the critique when you step back and look at all the things the photographer might have been aiming to achieve with the photograph/series.
Invitation to Voyage: At first, I pictured a quaint, country-side family living in perfect peace, but the line about luxury and order completely pivoted my view to an almost exaggerated, noble household (in the days of nobility).
Correspondence: I just picture a forest and a lot of greenery
The Stranger: I picture a crazy man who is completely happy with his life, despite the fact that he is a social outcast and potentially ostracized by all society around him — kind of like an insane conspiracy theorist.
I think that both readings (‘The Age of Light’ by Man Ray and ‘From Pigment to Light’ by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy) are talking about the things that photographs can show us that paintings and other art forms before photography could never have shown us. Both of them speak of the unprecedented precision photography has and its ability to represent a scene as exactly as possible.
While the subjectivity of photography and the large amount of control the photographer holds over the overall appearance of a photograph must be acknowledged, it has to be said that when the snapshot is taken, the photographer can only do so much to dictate the forms in the photograph. A similar point was brought up in the Bresson documentary (I think) about how a common mistake made when drawing is that the drawer has memorized the shape of a certain facial feature and simply draws that instead of drawing exactly what he/she sees in his/her subject. This mistake could never be made in photography because even if the photographer has a preconceived idea about how a nose should look, for example, the photographer cannot make the nose look like that in the photograph if the nose does not in fact look like that in real life.
Overall, photography has opened the world up to a new way of seeing and a way of seeing scenes that had never been seen before. When painters made paintings, they used their own ideas of what they wanted a scene to look like to choose forms or choose how much light would be present in different areas, but the art of photography forces the final piece to be one in which everything is exactly how it was relative to everything else at a given time.
4.341 INTRO TO PHOTOGRAPHY AND RELATED MEDIA 