Topic 2TIME / SPACE
After reading, "The Annihilation of Time and Space" from Rebecca Solnit's book River of Shadows and watching Chris Marker's film La JetÃƒÂ©e post your response in the forum.
Please have your response posted by 7pm on Sunday.
Using black and white analog photography, put together a sequence of five images experimenting with the representation of time and space. At one extreme photography isolates an instantaneous moment and plucks it from the continuous stream of time which characterizes unmediated experience. Photographers like Harold Eugene Edgerton and Henri-Cartier Bresson emphasize the capacity of the camera to freeze time. On the other hand, however brief, an exposure is always a duration, a moment during which time passes, during which light is collected by the lens and projected back onto the film plane. The photographic image is a manifestation of this passage of time, an accumulation of light. Strategies such as long exposures, the series, and motion, can work to make manifest this durational characteristic of photography. Photography also manipulates space, bringing together faraway places, people and objects, and giving us access to perspectives and visual information that we are unlikely, or unable, to access with our unaided eyes.
Keep in mind some of the ideas and tensions within photographic representations of time and space that Solnit discusses:
- Mechanical time vs. natural or bodily time
- Freedom, lightness and flexibility of photographic images vs.connection to a specific place and time
- Photography as analytic and exact vs. a way of telling a story or creating a fantasy
- Photography as a way back to what is lost or obscured through technology (nature, bodies, connection)
PORTRAIT: STRATEGIES OF REPRESENTATION
Photographic Assignment: Produce five to ten images exploring the conventions and possibilities of the photographic portraiture. You may choose to make one longer sequence or several shorter ones. The meaning of your photographs will come from their relationship to one another, the formal and visual choices you make, the content you include and the relationship of your images to historical and contemporary photography. Use all of these aspects of the photograph as tools for affecting the way the viewer interprets your subject. Look at the portrait slide shows for ideas. Some approaches to portraiture you might consider drawing on, using in combination with one another, distorting, or playing with:
The group or family portrait, showing the relationship between people, expessing a sense of group identity, showing people where they live, in the midst of daily rituals or special events.
The typology, showing individuals as examples of a particular type, showing the roles people are given in society.
The psychological portrait, showing the emotional state of your subject, or the feeling that passes between the two of you as you photograph.
The body as form and light, relating to the body as something visual or tactile, picking out shapes and textures, looking at the relationship between the body and its environment.
The physiological body, the athletic body, the material body, the body as something that acts or is acted upon.
Forum post: Read and respond to Allan Sekula's essay "The Body and the Archive".
Forum posts are due by 7pm Sunday February 6.
Topic 4GROUP / INDIVIDUAL IDENTITY
Forum posts are due Sunday, February 20. See details below.
Topic 5GELATIN SILVER PHOTOGRAPHY
Please post your forum response by Tuesday, February 22 at 7pm.
For details refer to the Notes on the Gelatin Silver Process forum.
Topic 6CONSTRUCTING COLOR
We will work on this assignment in class February 23rd and 28th. You may need to do some work outside of class in order to complete it for critique on March 2.
Due March 2.
Topic 7GROUP / INDIVIDUAL IDENTITY
Due March 7
Through your photographs explore visual expressions of group and individual identity in portraiture.
Some ideas and questions to explore:
- How we identify an individual as a member of a particular group?
- What dynamics exist between individuals within a particular group?
- Individuality as an expression of human dignity (e.g. August Sanders, Lewis Hine), or of alienation (e.g. Robert Frank or Diane Arbus).
- The empowerment and sense of connection in belonging to a group, compared to the repression of individual characteristics that don't fit with group identity.
- Groups that reflect an order imposed from above, or outside the given group, as compare to groups that embody the connections, alliances, and dissonances with in a community.
- Keeping in mind Kracauer's Mass ornament essay and Bookchin's project, consider the relationship between the represented body (shown in the images you make), the movement or organization of bodies at work (Lewis Hine, Lee Friedlander), and the body of the viewer.
- Be thoughtful about how you present your work and how it will affect the way your viewer relates to the image. For example a small image tends to encourage one on one more intimate viewing, while a large print can be viewed by a group. Feel free to try projecting your image, a book like format, or a sculptural method of presentation.
- Refer to the image below for ideas, along with the slide shows posted onder the Strategies of Representation assignment.
- How we identify an individual as a member of a particular group?
Project Proposals Presentations, Due March 28 and 30
For the remainder of the semester you will work on a photographic project of your own design. Prepare a 20 minute project proposal presentation, leaving 5 minutes for questions.
Include visual sources. This can mean the work of other artists, images from mass culture, the built environment, family photographs, etc. Discuss at least one non-art influence. This can be an author or an idea that you are exploring in another course at Marlboro or can extend beyond your academic life. Make sure you can explain the sources you are drawing on to those who are unfamiliar with the material you are discussing.
Next explain how you plan to execute this project. What technical choices will you make? What kind of shooting process or dynamic with your subject will you initiate? What kind of visual / formal language will you use? Will you use text or other materials besides the photographic image? Is their an experience, feeling, or idea that you want your project to convey? Try to articulate what motivates you as an artist, in general and in terms of this project. What questions do you try to ask or to answer with your work? What do you hope to get out of this project? What experience do you hope to instigate for your viewer?
Topic 9Bellow is a forum for you to post material, images or text, relevant to your critique. You can also use it to respond to other peoples work.
Topic 10Artist Statement, Due Monday, April 25
The assignment description is bellow, along with some examples of artist statements. Other great resources for artist writings available in the library are: Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art : a sourcebook of artists' writings /by Stiles, Kristine ; Selz, Peter Howard. Documents of Contemporary Art series, published by MIT Press, titles include, Appropriation, Participation, The Sublime, The Archive, Faliure, Chance, Utopia, Beauty, The Everyday. See the complete list at: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/browse/browse.asp?btype=6&serid=159