Literary Techniques In Hold Still By Sally Mann

Uelsmann’s work was not well received in the photography community. His creations were not considered photography; however, he was well received in the art community. John Szarkowski hosted a solo exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967. Uelsmann was considered “iconoclastic” and “set out to convince critics that photography offered alternatives to the conventional “purist” sensibility…” Uelsmann debated that photos could “evoke elusive states of feeling and thinking triggered by irrational and imaginative juxtaposition” (Kay). Uelsmann has succeeded in finding a following among photographers and artist alike. In the past forty years, Uelsmann’s work has been exhibited in over 100 solo shows throughout the US and overseas. He has permanent instillations in museums worldwide (Taylor). Uelsmann’s photos are now revered for their original technical form as well as their surreal matter (Johnson).

Before starting this project, I knew very little about photography, photographers, or exactly how much impact photographical images have had on our society. I have never taken a photography class, or researched too in depth about specific pictures or photographers. This project has allowed me to delve deeper into the world of photography in order to understand just how much influence pictures can have over society’s beliefs, emotions, and understandings’. I have have chosen two highly influential photographers, Diane Arbus and Dorothea Lange, who I have found to both resonate with me and perfectly capture human emotions in way that moves others.

Carr constructs what one could think of as a fabricated photographic archive, created by combining the photographs of “trophies” with untraditional portraits of herself and the men in her immediate family, alongside personal family photographs. Exploring the involvement men have had in her life; these images, like objects stored

These two skills are what makes her work extraordinary and undoubtedly art of the highest caliber. First of all, the integrity of her images is questioned after learning that they are largely staged. This argument is invalid because photography--much like sculpture and painting-- requires models and careful staging in order to get the desired result. This helped her to protect her subjects, and she did this by “carefully composing photographs to ward off the evil eye” by using focal points and light. The Perfect Tomato is the perfect example of the use of lighting in Mann’s photographs. Her daughter, Jessie, gracefully poses on the Mann family lunch table with a meal of tomatoes surrounding her. Jessie’s nude body is the focus of the photograph with the bright, white light illuminating her figure, and the surrounding background of the image is very dark and heavy. The lighting gives an angelic quality to the photograph which distracts the mind from the fact that the child is nude. Examples such as these occur in all of Mann’s works. Unfortunately, these clear reasons why Mann’s work is ethical and beautiful are not enough for her

In the essay, “Rereading Edward Weston: Feminism, Photography, and Psychoanalysis”, Roberta McGrath introducing Edward Weston as a photographer who is “strange and his artworks have been dominated by his own writing”. Edward Weston provides his photographic work with the perception through his writing and journals, “The Day Books”, that consists of his life through photography, his children, his desire for women and the health foods, and his hallucinations. McGrath discusses the issue of the feminism in the art world and suggests that men were forbids to viewing art without the sensual connotations, while she didn’t explain how women view men. McGrath discusses how Weston’s oeuvre is in the connection of the feminism and Psychoanalysis. In

Sally Mann photographs the things that she is closest to. “The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best, unless you photograph what you love, you’re

No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman's photography is part of the culture and

Sally Mann’s style incorporates black and white photographs of her children, which are presented with “ordinary moments of childhood, suspended in time and transformed into aesthetic objects, takes on a distorted, even uncanny quality” (Arnason and Mansfield 719). Sally Mann photographed The New Mothers in 1989. This photograph’s most dominant elements are value and space. Having the photographs black and white really enhances the visibility of values. Most of Mann’s work is outside and has a define depth of field to blur out the background and emphasize the focus of the children. This compositional style helps to identify the high and low key values within the photos. The clothes, the reflection of the sun on the girls’ hair, and the girls fair skin are the part of the image that show high-key values, while the rest of the photo in more middle and low-key values. The intense depth of field increases a feeling of space for the viewer. In the photo you can see that the two young girls and their stroller is all in a line horizontally. Behind the girls you can notice they are outside in a open area because of the blurred grass and trees behind them. This photograph’s most dominant principles are movement and variety. The depth of field and lack of distraction in the background of the photo allows your eye to focus and move around with the subjects in the photo. The height of the subjects forms a triangle shape, which is

In John Berger’s essay “Another Way of Telling,” Berger argues that photographs contain a “third meaning.” Berger claims that the third meaning is personal and relies almost completely on the individual viewer. As a result, no photograph can convey the same message to any two people and no two photographs can convey the same message to any one person. Here, the validity of Berger’s assumption crumbles. All photographs communicate one absolute truth.

How else to get attention for one’s product or one’s art? How else to make a dent when there is incessant exposure to images, and overexposure to a handful of images seen again and again? The image as shock and the image as cliché are two aspects of the same presence. Sixty-five years ago, all photographs were novelties to some degree. (It would have been inconceivable to Virginia Woolf—who did appear on the cover of Time in 1937—that one day her face would become a much reproduced image on T-shirts, book bags, refrigerator magnets, coffee mugs, mouse pads.) Atrocity photographs were scarce in the winter of 1936-37: the depiction of war’s horrors in the photographs Woolf discusses in Three Guineas seemed almost like clandestine knowledge. Our situation is altogether different. The ultra-familiar, ultra-celebrated image—of an agony, of ruin—is an unavoidable feature of our camera-mediated knowledge of war.

The characters Sherman portrays, lighting, clothing and expressions are cliché of what is present in cinema, so much that viewers of her work have told Sherman that they ‘remember the movie’ that the image is derived from, yet Sherman having no film in mind at all.[iv] Thus showing that her word has a pastiche of past cinematic genres, and how women are portrayed in cinema and photography and how Sherman has manipulated the ‘male gaze’ around her images so they become ironic and cliché.

When considering photography one can examine a variety of aspects, there are subtleties built into each moving piece that constitutes a photograph. From the mechanisms of the camera to the motivations of the photographer or the contexts where the photograph is exhibited there is an intentionality in each element that affects how the photograph is interpreted and how photography as a whole influences our society. Examining the nuances of photography and their implications on the world as a whole are Susan Sontag in On Photography and Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. They are both significant figures in photography criticism and their differing ideologies establish a foundation on which to begin critiquing photography. While Barthes asserts death as the core of photography and its influence on the subject, Sontag acknowledges death and aggression in the act of photography yet ultimately centers in on surrealism as the essence of photography.

In “Ways of Seeing”, John Berger, an English art critic, argues that images are important for the present-day by saying, “No other kind of relic or text from the past can offer such direct testimony about the world which surrounded other people at other times. In this respect images are more precise and richer literature” (10). John Berger allowed others to see the true meaning behind certain art pieces in “Ways of Seeing”. Images and art show what people experienced in the past allowing others to see for themselves rather than be told how an event occurred. There are two images that represent the above claim, Arnold Eagle and David Robbins’ photo of a little boy in New York City, and Dorothea Lange’s image of a migratory family from Texas; both were taken during the Great Depression.

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.

memoir of one’s existence. It is the recollection of memories. The past is the keeper of our