-Homework discussion: progression of the course has so far been Meaning < Structure < Differentials < Alignment. You can make that more succinct and just say Alignment leads to Meaning. Taxonomy: 1) Aesthetic Appropriation, whereby the author of the image takes the visual elements of the scene and appropriates them into their own sense of preferred design. 2) Contextual Organization, in which the author takes the narrative information of the scene and creates clear emphasis and perhaps even mandates how the scene should be read. But stops short of ADDING an idea that was inherently not present or observable or interpretable if one were standing in front of that scene (in other words, while different people might have different interpretations if they were standing witness at the actual scene, the image made is an interpretation that was PLAUSIBLY AVAILABLE to anyone standing there.  3) Re-narrating the scene, in which the author has manipulated the image so heavily, and used such an archetypal bias, that they have changed the narrative or the meaning of the shot into an idea that was NOT AVAILABLE to the neutral mind standing witness at the scene.  Another way to defines these three types is to say that one of them deals with visual relationships, and two with contextual relationships, and the difference between the two contextual categories is that one references the subject against other parts of the scene and one references the subject against an archetype.  Visual, emphasis, and archetype.  So when we look at students images, even though they were not assigned to do this, nearly every image they’ve brought pretty cleanly fits ,one of these three categories. They often laugh at how obvious it is, and how people could NOT see it. This could be be because these are the three most common types of images we’ve seen in our culture and so subconsciously they are mimicking them, or it could be that there is something so inherently logical about these three categories that humans will always keep coming back to them (a theme/dilemma we will explore for the rest of the curriculum). Also, a macro theme of this curriculum is that we carefully built these categories and ideas from their foundations upward, and now that we recognize these different tasks, it’s easy to take any task and look backward at what goes into each task. A lot of the endgame strategies in this curriculum do exactly that. Continuing with the homework analysis, we sort each students work into the three categories, if they have an equal amount of each they are probably well-rounded, if they lean heavily toward one category it could be because that’s their inherent style and sensibility, but it could also be what they default to because their habits are neglecting a lot of other strategies or because they aren’t as comfortable with some ASOP material. Compare hero trope to creepy trope. First time we break down an archetypal structure. The concept of MODULES is key here. Both images begin with [upward and wide angle] which makes something look big, that’s one module, that’s one pair of maneuvers that are linked as one maneuver. But then hero takes that module and goes [bright highlights in color] and creepy trope takes that module and adds [dark shadows in B&W] in order to make something look sinister. We’re adding modules together to create complex images, but very easily and reliably. Modules also help take an image that requires 4 or 5 decisions and groups them into only 2 decisions, perhaps (more set theory, like on the last day of P1, we’re making the more complex a lot simpler through grouping). This is how you can get very complex images deliberately without having to wait for a happy accident. This is where fluency is born. But this breakdown of the creepy trope serves another advantage, it also allows us to discuss tone of voice. Renewing our analogy with language, the subject is the content, and the structure of the image (archetype) is the tone of voice. And when people speak, we usually match the content to the EXOECTED tone of voice (like the images of graveyards in the creepy trope, and a war memorial in the hero trope). If the two don’t match, we trust the tone of voice more than the content. If someone says “get out guys the building’s burning down” in a light hearted happy way, we don’t feel any fear, and if someone says “yes, please come closer, I have a surprise for you” in a creepy voice, we trust the voice, not the content. Same is true of photography. If you shoot a children’s play set in the creepy trope, people think there must be something unsettling about the play set. So images again can be assessed by whether your content matches the tone of voice, or whether you juxtaposed them. And if the latter, once again, there’s potential for complexity when contradictory strategies are used. Compounded strategies are simply, certain, and serve only to re-enforce. But not only can you get complexity, but you can also get innovation of uniqueness. If you want to be an artists who does something truly unique or new, you can wait around for a random whim of creativity, or you can fully understand which tones of voice (structures) are normally used for what content and why, and then you can begin applying structures we wouldn’t normally apply to your content (Bill’s sports shots). Innovation can be conscious and not random. Finally, the gradient from snapshot to organized info, to archetype, to fully authored image in front of lens. In terms of journalism, our boundaries for this have moved over the past century. Used to be just the snapshot. Then we included organizational structures for emphasis. Now we see evidence that NatGeo and Salgado are pushing us into archetype. Will we get to fully authored images some day? Austin Monthly says hi.  So good evidence we’re moving toward a SYMBOLIST society when it comes to photography.

-Introducing commercial photography. Last week we mentioned persuasive vs unpersuasive images, and we demonstrated that art photographers have the ability to choose between them, but for a hired commercial photographer, you have no choice, you can’t make an image unpersuasive. Further, when discussing the concept of style, which is defined by making the same decisions over and over again because they always yield the same reliable outcome, one way to define an artist is that they choose their own style, once they’ve chosen it they may be beholden to it forever for identity and branding purposes, but they did get to choose their style at the beginning. Occupational photographers don’t get to choose their style. The industry gives them their style, the set of decisions they have to make over and over because they’ve been proven to produce a reliable outcome. You’re hired to get reliable results, you don’t really try an off the wall unproven method when your images are needed by this Friday. So commercial photographers are given their style, and most of them are pretty trapped within it.

-Studio basics: no compromise...at all. Any compromise you make suggests a gap in your knowledge. Also, total inversion of P1. We don’t capture light, we create it. We don’t conform our camera settings to the scene, we set our camera settings how we want and then we conform the scene to them. If P1 and P2 have been a bit of game theory, first assess the differentials and assets of your scene, and then assess how they can be aligned so that they are maximized, this a game, and you’re gaming the properties of the sce to your advantage as cleverly as you can...but this is a finite game. You’re calculated a list of possibilities in your head and whittling the image down to which result you want. You’re choosing from a finite list, and therefore the skill is about knowing how many possibilities there are, the bigger list you can make, the better your selection will be. But that’s subtractive. Studio photography is additive.

-Evolution of commercial formulas. They’re so logically evolved and then refined into effectiveness that you almost can’t stray from them because 1) they are so logical and effective and anything else you do is almost definitely less effective, and 2) the audience has seen those formulas so many times that any departure from them just confuses or surprises the audience.  Facial key lighting and three point lighting are a perfect example, try lighting the human face any other way and see what happens. The paradox here is that this formula is so fine tuned that many modern photographers learn to mimic it without ever really understanding its underpinnings, which means the industry is now populated by a lot of photographers who have merely been trained to repeat a task and don’t actually know anything about photography, which is frustrating and infuriating, but the flip side is that the people who originated these formulas were BRILLIANT, and they did a near perfect job schematically designing them that we almost can’t top it. So each formula has a genius-level schema, but also simultaneously allows morons to mimic it. 

-the task of the studio lighting photographer is to take what’s there in real life and to then intercept the phenomena emanating from it, to bend and alter that phenomena before it hits the sensor. Or to put it another way, between what’s really there, and the VIEWER’S PERCEPTION, we intervene, we intercept its phenomena and mold them into something else before they hit the viewer’s perceptions. Once you understand that that’s the underlying task, studio methodology makes much better sense.

-Homework is both control and variation again, same subject different construct, and also yet again an extension of last week’s assignment. Goal is both to get you used molding and forming a subject with studio techniques, and also to run into some problems using domestic lighting equipment. Every piece of studio equipment exists to solve a problem, and if any of you want to learn studio photography, you want to know the problems before you know the solutions, otherwise you’re just learning stupid techniques by simply and mindlessly doing what we and the industry dictate.