Homework revelations:  everyone hits a wall, we’re examining where you hit it and why. Three levels of usefulness for a differential. Is it a token or technicality, does it allow a shift in emphasis, or does it allow a full radical restructuring of the image. Note that space is the biggest problem for most students. Tend not to get close enough to zone 1 foreground subject. Note that focal length is more forgiving than depth of field. Note that space can be misaligned in two ways, first not being close enough to zone 1, and second not having a zone 3 far enough away. Brick wall overcast day. Be a walking cyborg with a number flashing how many animates can be made from one position, but if you shift angles how that number suddenly changes. That’s the skill, the vision being developed here. ALIGNMENT is everything. 

-now we combine technical restructuring WITH compositional bias. Either you compound them and they reinforce each other, or you contradict them and they add depth and complexity.

-thought experiment on paradox or hypocrisy of manipulation in photography, example of the two images that are 98% different but fine in-camera vs the two images that are 2% different but done in post. The latter makes people more uncomfortable, but in a logical, measurable sense, it shouldn’t, the latter picture has been changed far less. How can we reconcile this disconnect. Is there a fundamental difference? One explanation could be that we’ve built a very tenuous balance of cognitive dissidence in our culture, whereby we know waaaay deep down that a photograph isn’t total reality or absolute truth, that too many decisions have to be made when making a photograph, and even if two people start with the noblest intentions in recording truth, at some point in that flow chart of decisions they’ll make slightly different decisions and end up with different images, and thus neither image is total truth, so every serious academic investigation into the matter will always yield the conclusion that a photograph is always an expression, a sum of personal choices, and not an absolute record of reality. But the flip side is that we really like using this medium as a tool for information and education. We use it as evidence in court cases, we use it to inform people of world events and make them feel like they’re educated on what’s happening in the world, and we use it in textbooks so that children can correctly say they know what the Eiffel Tower looks like. We like using it as this tool and no judge in the world is going to look at a clear piece of photographic evidence and say “we’ll, clearly this is you doing the robbery, sir, but as we all know, every academic investigation...”  So we’ve carefully built a cognitive dissonance about this. We put both of these ideas into separate boxes, we never bring them into the same room, we stick our fingers in our ears and go LA LA LA LA!!! And then every once in a while a photographer sticks these two things into the same room and we FREAK out, because we suddenly have to deal with the fact that photographs have never ever been an absolute record of reality, and we don’t like to think about it.  So we often react hatefully to overt manipulations, photographers who unapologetically admit to manipulating the image, and we often reward the photographers who keep their manipulations as clandestine and invisible as possible. They allow us to maintain our cognitive dissonance.  Another explanation could be...

-Semiotics. We live in a world where things are built and designed and made in order to reference something other than themselves. Signs, words, symbols, all have been created to stand in reference to an idea or thing, when that thing is absent. Semiotics is the study of how that reference is made and how it makes sense to us,  Three semiotic modes from Charles Sanders  Pearce.  Iconistic. Sign RESEMBLES the thing it references. Desktop icons. Oil painting of me. It shares something INHERENTLY with the referent (they share an appearance or form), and can be understood without experience or having to learn it. Indexical. Sign doesn’t not resemble the referent, but is inherently linked to it, usually by consequence. Smoke does not resemble fire but always accompanies it, it is a TRACE of fire. This requires experience or learning. Symbolic.  Sign does not resemble the referent and also is not linked to it inherently, the meaning has been ASSIGNED by our culture.  A medical snake/staff, a Nike Swoosh, etc. These are all recognizable signs, but not inherently linked, only assigned. You especially have to learn these, in fact have to be culturally assimilated, as while people of all cultures will eventually come to associate smoke with fire, not all cultures view a check mark as representing athleticism.  So which one’s photography.  All three? How? Iconistic is easy. How can it be indexical. Because the image does not always RESEMBLE what was there in reality (our last homework assignment proves that), but it is a consequence of what was there, a trace left behind of the physics that were in that scene, imprinted on your sensor. Symbolic? Not because we can shoot symbols (crucifix for instance). How can the image ITSELF be symbolic mode of signification, not the content?  Archetype. Remember the “dreamy” picture from last week? Nearly everyone in our culture associates that image with dreamy. Why? Dreams don’t actually look out of focus. In our culture it became a metaphor for how hard it is to remember the details of your dream, so we LITERALLY put it out of focus. After a few generations this trope is so common we all associate it with dreams, even though doesn’t resemble an actual dream (icon), nor is it an inherent consequence of dreaming (index), but because it has been assigned that meaning by our culture and we all now learn it (symbol). The hero shot is another good example. If you show these images to someone from 500 years ago, they don’t read them as dreamy or heroic. We do because we’ve been assimilated into that reading. So two big notes here, 1) perhaps this reconciles the previous paradox in that the person who thinks it’s more ethical to change the image 98% in-camera can’t stand the barely post-processed image is an indexical theorist. It had nothing to do with HOW MUCH the image was changed,  but more fundamentally HOW the image was changed, and everything is fair game if it was done in-camera, because every manipulation is a consequence of the physics that WERE present in that scene. And the person who is fine with the post-processed change is an unapologetic symbolist. They believe that no image is reality, ever, so why even uphold that pretense, perhaps it is even dangerous to pretend an image is even related to reality. And once you’ve let go of “maintaining reality,” as a priority, as it falls down your hierarchy, what moves to the top of your concerns is how effectively and how concisely the image communicates the idea you intended. Your primary concern is now how clearly the image communicates it’s sign value. The indexical holds onto the need to maintain a link between the image and reality because they believe there should be some limits on how an image REPRESENTS reality. The symbolist doesn’t believe an image ever should even try to represent reality, and therefor we should concentrate on using developing photographic language more effectively and concisely. The other massive note here is that 2) you could probably loosely view these modes of semiotics as three stages of photo history. When photography is first invented, it’s seen as iconic, because the picture looks like the thing. Then in the 20th Century we got a little more clever and realized the image doesn’t always resemble the reality, but it is drawn from it, or inspired by it. Then in the 21st Century we’ve become increasingly symbolic, depending more and more on archetypes to deliver the communication we need. But if you think about it, that evolution was necessary. By definition the medium couldn’t have been symbolic from the outset, as the definition of symbolic communication requires that people are culturally assimilated, that they all speak the language. And until we first developed theses archetypes, and then also repeated them endlessly until they were familiar, how could photography be symbolic?  Those other stages had to come first.

-History of Photography as a progression of 3 eras. 1) 1839: Age of Science: both because all practitioners had to be scientists, and also because it was thought of as a science by the public. Semiotically, any meaning these images have probably was assigned after the fact, and not purposefully WILLED into the image. 2) 1884: Film democratizes the medium, one pillar falls, you don’t have to be a scientists to practice, but second pillar still standing, the public thinks of it as a science (like if MRI machines were suddenly made really cheap, artists might start using them, but public still thinks of them as science). Photographers make a grab for artistic credibility by mimicking an already established and credible art form, painting. But painting itself started skewing abstract AS A REACTION TO PHOTOGRAPHY. Either pessimistically, painters saw this new technology that could do their job better than they could (portraits, illustrations, surveying, etc,) and so they had to “pivot” to having a different value other than representation (expression, abstraction perhaps), or you could optimistically see the advent of photography as FREEING painters from the tyranny of having to represent the world the way the human eye sees it. If they want to paint something from multiple perspectives they can (cubism).  Photography took that bullet for them, like a magnet that attracted all the clients who want direct representation which allowed painters to sidestep that and grow into expression.  Either way, by the mid 1880’s we’re knee-deep in Impressionism and post Impressionism.  So photographers mimic that popular look with PICTORIALISM.  3) Second pillar (the public paradigm) finally falls with photo secession.  Steerage is neither a staged tableaux, nor an overtly impressionistic aesthetic, it doesn’t borrow from paining at all. And as usual, people “rioted,” they thought you can’t call it art unless you do something arty. You can’t just shoot “reality” and call it art, without doing something overtly arty with it. But now we’re VERY used to that. That’s how we understand and define artistic photography in 2020

Photo-sessionists decide to dwell not in the part of the vein diagram where photography and painting overlap (as had been done in pictorialism) , but instead the opposite, in the part of the vent diagram where they DON’T overlap.  So now Photography is becoming its own medium, not piggybacking or copying painting. 

Next movement is Straight Photography, then Modernism (Diane Arbus basically says, oh you think you were so liberated Secessionists, you were a slave to structure, you made hackneyed symbolic structures like separating classes with a literal line- amazing that Steerage went from causing riots because it wasn’t artistically authored ENOUGH, to being criticized for being to overt and too symbolic within 50 years). Color photography is even less structured. They say, oh you thought you were so liberated Ms Arbus, you weren’t free at all, you had to wait until you found strange or compelling subject matter before you would allow yourself to snap a picture. This general Hegelian progression of 1) lifting once invisible restraints, and 2) moving as far away from pictorialism and painting as possible. 

Arrive upon Stephen Shore. We often hear boring, or dull, or “I could do that.” Consider we hear “I could do that” in most art galleries today, but for different reasons. For painters and sculptors it’s because their work is too abstract, if they don’t try to represent or reference something familiar to us, then we have nothing to compare the work to, and therefore we can’t measure how successfully they hit their target. They’re asking us to trust that they hit the abstract target in their heads, that no one else has ever seen, and we’re often uncomfortable doing that, because we may be falling victim to artistic fraud. But in photo galleries people say it because the image isn’t abstracted ENOUGH. Score one for Susan Sontag, because by that metric photography does seem to be defined by how much you abstract.

Three explanations how we went from overtly expressive pictorialism to mundane unauthored Stephen Shore in exactly 100 years. 1) Photography and Painting polarizing from one another. Painters figure it out first, in 1840, they think it’s best they aren’t compared to photography so they begin moving away from it. For a while, photography is like a kid sibling awkwardly chasing after painting saying “wait for me” until in 1901 photography has the exact same revelation of “holy shit we don’t want to be compared to painting” and start moving in the opposite direction. 100 years of that kind of polarizing, as each side gets more insular and concentrates on dwelling in their own part of the Venn diagram, you end up with totally abstract painting and totally mundane photography. 2) Photography outrunning Photography. Shore’s images are not boring, but UNPERSUASIVE.  They don’t try to convince you of anything. Pictorialism tried to NARROW your interpretation of the subject and lock in a particular meaning forever, by imbuing the image with a specific mood or association. Modern art photography doesn’t.  But does that mean we don’t se persuasive images in 2020? Of course we do, just not in art photography. We see them in occupational photography.  Commercial and journalism. It’s hard to believe it’s a coincidence that as occupational photography has become more persuasive, more on point, more dialed in, that art photography has moved in the exact opposite direction, like a seesaw. It could be that artists are cynical of persuasive imagery. It could also be basic evolution. As artists created image constructs that garnered  very reliable reactions out of the audience, occupational photographers took note and coopted their methodology. Once you take away every persuasive mechanism, all the artists have left is unpersuasive images (come and take that!!, they say). 3) Postmodernism. Back to semiotics. Structuralists re-examine the relationship between the signifier and what it signifies, and they come to this conclusion. Signifiers never reference anything in the real world, they don’t “point” to anything in the real world, they reference other signifiers, or more specifically they reference the IDEA of something, signifiers always reference an idea we have in our minds, not anything in the real world. Signifiers reference our current SYSTEM OF SIGNIFICATION. Postmodernists come next and argue that all signifiers are then empty until we assign them a reference. Ford F-150 might reference labor, masculinity, or poor fuel efficiency or douchebagery depending on what other signifiers you combine it with. But it has no SET meaning. Meaning is in flux and relative to both circumstance and our current system of signifiers. And assigning reference (assigning meaning) is exactly what artists are for. We can even RE-ASSIGN meaning.  Photographers they’re especially suited to reassigning meaning to things we’ve all already seen. So some interpretations of postmodern photography include that a) they want to expand or unlock something’s meaning, not limit or narrow it. This quarter pounder with cheese has a thousand potential meanings and we don’t want to limit that potential, whereas a commercial photographer wants it to have one meaning. b) it’s maybe easy to take compelling subjects and deliver the to an audience. A monk lighting himself on fire already has obvious and well digested cultural meaning, so just snapping a shot of it makes the photographer just a delivery boy. Also, an image like that simply rides along established human consciousness that already exists. But getting the viewer to see profound meaning in an everyday item might be more difficult to do, and might do more to expand human consciousness. 

Either way, whichever of these three explanations you buy, hopefully you have a better understanding of why when you walk into a contemporary art gallery, these are the photographs you’re likely to see. Perhaps also a discussion here about the merits of these images, but also the dangers of fraud. When the genuine article becomes so simple that it is indistinguishable from  fraud, fraud becomes rampant. 

-Sebastiao Salgado. Most famous documentarian ever (some would say photojournalist). His images borrow more pictorialism of painterly syntax. Controversial for two reasons, 1) images are very staged, so some people see him going to Africa and asking dying children to “please die over here in this light for me” which he absolutely IS doing. But others might defend this by saying that if our culture has spent thousands of years probing and experimenting for what kinds of visual imagery will stimulate the sympathy cortex of people’s brains, what was all that for if we can’t put it to good use in the real world and do some good with it? Those conclusions, those findings, and that knowledge has to stay in the inactionable world of fine art and academics where they can’t actionably do us any good? (recall they discussion from last week in which we discussed how photography sits between fine art theory and real world consequences). 2) he’s controversial because he’s an unapologetic symbolist. He’s saying he wants his images to effectively and concisely convey the message they need to convey, that they need to reference the correct idea in your head very effectively, and if you think a photograph has to be grounded in some impossible and abstract notion of REALITY that’s YOUR baggage. Deal with it. He’s unapologetic about being a symbolist, and that scares us in the same way that post-processing scares us. It once again brings those two cognitively dissident ideas into the same room and crushes the fragile balance we tried so hard throughout the last century to achieve. But increasingly within our culture, we’re being asked to let go of the pretension that a photograph is a reality, and are being encouraged to accept that it is always an expression, it’s part of an increasingly familiar visual language and that’s all. People like Salgado don’t care about your 20th Century hang ups.

But look at Salgado and look at Shore. Our most popular documentarian and our most popular artist. If aliens landed tomorrow they’d say we have our wires crossed. But if you’ve been paying attention to this lecture, this should all be pretty predictable really. As commercial and journalistic photographers have discovered increasingly effective ways to persuade us, artists have reacted in the opposite direction.

Homework: control and vary. Same subject, vary structure. A shot has to be unpersuasive (transparency theory, iconistic, Stephen Shore), and B image has to be as far from that as you can make it. The key insight here is that these images have to be ALIGNED differently. Stephen Image has to be aligned a BWOD image, or you can’t make it appear neutral, he aligns his shots so that he CANT make decisions about space or light.  So the idea here is that the structure of your shot depends on alignment, as we discussed in the last homework review, but now also the IDEOLOGY or the mode of authorship of the image is dependent on alignment as well. Alignment is everything.