When photography began to gain not only popularity, but accessibility, it became a topic of discussion on its place in art. Whether if it should be considered a fine art or whether its place lied in documentation. However, even with documentation, a broad assumption was that there could be an immediate trust. Gardner’s Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter proved that was not always the case, that although documenting the truth of the brutality of the Civil War. The addition of the shotgun that added the idea of fighting until the last minute was actually fabricated creating a disillusion. That photography is meant to depict a standstill truth subject, but viewers of photography can forget that it is still an artwork. That a photo is an image set and
The original thought that photos were far superior to other visual aids have been re-evaluated in consideration of graphic artwork. The invention of photography initially provided the belief that a photo was simply a reproduction of the original. The progression of improved photographic equipment supplied the photographer with the choice of what to include or exclude from a picture. As an example, Jacob Riis transferred his belief of a sturdy, upstanding family with high morals into his photos by taking pictures of families in their apartments. However, his photo labeled “Five Cents A Spot” reflect an alternate picture of men and women packed in one apartment supported his viewpoint of the people’s poverty. Considering the subject matter of his reports it is a small wonder that his photos were not connected with a direct bias for both article and
The documentary film connected to the writings of Crimp, Wells, and Bates as they showing us how profitable the modern photography became. As the video mentioned, that in this modern day, Gregory Crewdson creates and sold his superb photographs for large amount of money, such as over $200,000. In addition, a single photograph can be priceless or worthless as sold for over $200,000, has amused me because I didn’t know it was cost that much. However, the readings explains how photography developed in the modern day and enlighten that the photographers developed their various photographic methods of making photos, while the film tells us where and how the photographers are making their money from. While watching the film, I realized that the arts
The 1800’s witnessed technology changing the scenery of war. The invention of photography was the prominent new technology used in the war. The Photographic History of the Civil War volumes gave people insight how surgeons operated back then and how to improve modern medicine, the horrors of the battles, and
Question: In what ways did Mathew Brady change people’s perception of the Civil War? This investigation evaluates the ways in which photographer Mathew Brady changed the American perception of the Civil War. The focus of the investigation is on the growth of photography during the Civil War, a small bit of background on Mathew Brady, and his involvement on the battlefield as a “battlefield photographer”. The technological advancements in photography during the Civil War are noted in this investigation. Also, connections between the advancements in early photography and how Mathew Brady used these advancements to change the public perception of the War are explored. Different
In Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War, the haunting image “Harvest of Death” catches one’s eye with the seemingly endless field of corpses. The jarring facial expression on the figure in the foreground draws one into the narrative of the piece. However, our initial understanding of the image’s narrative is limited to what we can see and what we know of the circumstances surrounding it. While we know it was taken during the American Civil War, by simply looking at the photograph, we cannot know who is depicted. In black and white, it is difficult to even tell what side of the conflict these fallen soldiers fought for. We can interpret the image for our own readings, but we cannot tell what the artist intended us to see or what message he wanted to impart with it. These unknowns, however, are addressed in the related text associated with the image. These short passages can tell us a great deal about the photographer’s intentions and influence the way we read the image. Through the excerpt, we not only learn the intended meaning of the photography, but we also learn about Gardner’s political intentions and the key points he wanted his viewers to note within the image. Published as a pair, Gardner used his text to contextualize his images and inform the way we perceive them. This is clearly illustrated in “A Harvest of Death” and its accompanying passage.
“How was/is the photograph used in the battle between two legacies [within the African American community]—self affirmation, and negation?” What does the director mean when he states that there is a “war of images in the American family album”? Through the Lens Darkly: In the historical documentary, “Through the Lens Darkly”, Thomas Allen Harris examines the impact of photography within the African American community. For Harris and many other African American photographers, photography was a tool of empowerment, enabling them to take photographs that accurately reflected themselves. Photographs, since their creation have always been caught between a battle of realities, propagating both positive and negative reflections of ourselves. While cameras are weapons of empowerment, they also are weapons of falsehood, no more seen than in the negative portrayal of African Americans throughout history.
This book has presented the evolution of photographer as an agent for just causes and the environment is no exception. I started with the historical developments and ideological importance of the photograph as a social construction (see Ch. 1). I offered a reflection of past practices of social documentation to arrive at photos constructed purposefully to shed light on some aspect of society and advocate for social reform. Discussed in Chapter 2, these early photographers put in motion the photograph as part of agency for change. This premise continues today, but extends to all mediated content and emerging technologies. Then as now, photographers believe what they are seeing is unfair, unjust, or discriminatory so they document with
Photography was still a new and developing art form and journalistic tool at the start of the civil war, the first commercially successful photographic process had only been available for twenty years (daguerreobase) . And although the civil war wasn’t the first war to be photographed, it was the first to be extensively photographed, and possibly the most affected by it. Images of soldiers, battle fields, and leading figures taken by photographers of the time provided the American people with a comprehensive visual of what the war really looked like.
Consequently, Sontag ventures into the subject by assessing the question, “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” That is the question Virginia Woolf is asked by the lawyer in her book Three Guineas (1938). This question serves as the basis for Sontag’s exploration of the essence of war photography
‘A picture says a thousand words’ this analogy often refers to photographs with immense amount of detail and meaning that it doesn’t need words or any description to exemplify its context. A photograph in particular engages an indicative role into promoting an issue that’s typical of the time. A photograph that highlights copious meaning is evident in Lawrence Beitler’s ‘Lynching of young blacks’. A role of a photograph is to provoke emotions and empathise within the subject of the picture. To do so, famous photographs often accommodate numerous conventions including the historical context, symbolic codes and technical codes. These codes and conventions operate simultaneously to epitomise the significance behind a
The violent markings of the photo album and its images, however, produce an equally powerful message that jars the memory as it disrupts and distorts the photographic chronicle of her life and that of her family and friends. The result is a complex visual experience that addresses the use of images in producing knowledge and making history.
In the Civil War, photos were a huge part of recording what happened in american history. Before the Civil War, they only way of recording what happened was through journals. Although, through those, nobody could really see how awful the war could be. Through pictures, people can see what the scene looked like and can imagine how bad it really was. “But they have also, increasingly,
In le message photographique ( Communications 1, 1961), roland barthes states that photography is a ‘message without a code’. According to him, the photographic image, as a reproduction of reality, functions, in a first and more fundamental level, according to the regime of ‘denotation’. The denotative impression that an image arouse, Barthes observes, is so intense to make any description impossible considering that ‘describing’ an image means to add to the denoted message a ‘codified’ message of second level: the verbal language. The denotation, however, does not exclude connotation, instead, it is exactly the paradox of photography: the coexistence of two messages - one without a code, the other one codified. Connotation always has an historical-cultural
From recording historic moments in time to savoring the special memories in one’s life, photography has long been a tool used for documentation. Common examples include the photographs seen in textbooks, museums, and even those that we keep in our photo albums. Such photographs, or slices of time, are evidence of an already occurred event, that when looked back on, one would associate feelings and formulate stories of before and after relative to the photograph at hand. Recently, however, the true meaning of a photograph and what’s depicted have been questionable as the interpretation and perception of such photographs can be altered with simple editing and software that is now readily available to the public. In his photographic essay, “Harlem Gang Leader”, author Gordon Parks managed to take photographs that functioned both as historical documentation and, to some extent, personal memorabilia. Gordon Parks had a vision of gang members that he wanted to share, but with the curators at Life Magazine, this vision became blurred and seemingly manipulated through the process of selecting and cropping of photographs that resulted in an apparently different perspective of the subject matter.
Art imitates life, everywhere we find art. Speeches are an art form in their own. They summarize the events going on in the country at that given time. Some artists have been so enchanted by some of the presidential, political, activists that they produced art as an expression of their opinion of a certain idea. The Civil war was the most photographed conflict of the 19th century. Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, George Barnard and Timothy O’Sullivan were pioneers in photography. What they captured was history with their cameras and equipment. Seventy years later, Margaret Bourke-White transformed photojournalism during the most historic time period of the 20th century, as the first woman war correspondent