week 2 - art and photography
TRANSCRIPT
Art Still Matters: Art in the Contemporary Australian ContextShepparton Art Museum2015
LECTURE 2: ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY
The decisive moment
Eddie Adams, Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing Nguyễn Văn Lém on February 1, 1968, 1968
The Punctum
Indexicality
Francis Galton, Composite portraits showing
"features common among men convicted of crimes of violence,”
c1885
Geoffrey Ratchen’s “crises of photography”
1. Technological threat of digitisation
1. Theoretical crisis around our understanding of culture and knowledge and ethics
The death of print imaging
• Proliferation of images in contemporary culture
• The history of photographic image making to the present day is grounded in the agency of light
• Print imaging has no one fixed or linear history
• Instead this practice embodies a multiplicity of meanings
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 1980
“I wanted to explore photography not as a question or a theme, but as a wound.”
Nan Goldin, Suzanne in the bed of her parents, Swampscot, MA, 1985From the series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
Art in the Post Medium Age
“…where the boundaries between disciplines is so blurred that the aesthetic qualities of the medium have been annihilated.”
-Anne Marsh, “The Digital Menace” Photofile, no. 91, 2010, pp 52-57: 52
Types of Images
• Analogue: an image that is exposed on light sensitive material and developed in chemically emulsive form which shows the physical forms (traces) of its making
• Digital: an image that is produced through the electronic recording of light that is calculated as bits of ones and zeros