~ Typology ~ Assignment 4

I have finally found my inspiration for a typology to carryout for the rest of the school term as part of our fourth assignment.  In these pieces I am pulling influence from Robert Smithson's Mirror Displacements and Earthworks.

A Little Late

But interesting to view nonetheless...

The Image-World

"Photography does not simply reproduce the real, it recycles it -  a key procedure of a modern society.  IN the form of photographic images, things and events are put to new uses, assigned new meanings, which go beyond the distinctions between the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false, the useful and the useless, good taste and bad.  Photography is one of the chief means for producing that quality ascribed to things and situations which erases these distinctions: "the interesting."

-From The Image-World, by Susan Sontag

Karl Blossfeldt ~ Original Forms of Art

Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) was a German instructor of sculpture who used his remarkable photographs of plant studies to educate his students about design elements in nature. Self-taught in photography, he devoted himself to the study of nature, photographing nothing but flowers, buds and seed capsules for thirty-five years. He once said,"The plant never lapses into mere arid functionalism; it fashions and shapes according to logic and suitability, and with its primeval force compels everything to attain the highest artistic form."
Blossfeldt's photographs were made with a homemade camera that could magnify the subject up to thirty times its actual size. By doing so he revealed extraordinary details within the natural structure of the plants. In the process he created some of the most innovative photographic work of his time. The simple yet expressive forms captured on film affirmed his boundless artistic and intellectual ability.

Published in 1928 when Blossfeldt was sixty-three and a professor of applied art at the Berliner Kunsthochschule, Urformen der Kunst (Original Forms of Art) quickly became an international bestseller and in turn made Blossfeldt famous almost overnight. His contemporaries were enchanted by the abstract shapes and structures in nature that he revealed to the world. In 2001 Urformen der Kunst was included in "The Book of 101 Books" as one of the seminal photographic books of the Twentieth Century.

These rarely seen, subtly toned black and white photogravure images are now recognized as vital contributions to the history of photography and they remain as intriguing today as they are beautiful.

       

   

Typology

"Typology is the study of types, and a photographic typology is a suite of images or related forms, shot in a consistent, repetitive manner; to be fully understood, the images must be viewed as a complete series."

Kristine McKenna, “Photo Visions”, Los Angeles Times, 29 Dec 1991.

"While there are many great bodies of work employing this method, there is also a lot of crap. Let’s be honest, for people who have no real conceptual thinking in their work, the typology can become an easy trick. It gives work the illusion of cohesion and intellectual rigour."

Cara Philips in her blog Ground Glass : Typology [12 May 2008]

Visual Consumption By Jonathan E. Schroeder page 56 {GoogleBook}

The Digital Age

Richard Hammond on: photos

The arrival of the digital camera has done many things for many people. Granted, it's buggered the job up pretty badly for the companies to whom we used to send our films for processing, and it has rather killed off the glorious anticipation of waiting for the returned wallet of freshly minted snaps to drop through the letterbox - before turning out to be a load of blurry shots of rainy days in Cornwall.

But the digital revolution means I no longer have to endure long, cramped hours in the airless cupboard under the stairs, sloshing bits of photographic paper around in trays of developer and fixative to coax an image out of my poorly exposed rolls of Ilford Fp4 and emerge with the shots that would hopefully make my name as a creative visionary.

Anyway, point is, we can now take snaps on our digital cameras or our phones, blazing away without a care in the world, rather than cringing with guilt at the expense every time we hit the button and consume another frame on a roll that holds only 12, 24, or - if you were feeling flush - 36 opportunities to nail that award-winning shot.

I think this is a good thing. Our photos are freer, more innocent, less considered and - without wanting to sound like an art student - perhaps more revealing of our relationship with the subject and the wider world around us. Millions of different, disparate lives will be charted through a limitless stream of quality images detailing every party, glitch, loss, success and moment of joy, pain or boredom.

It is these seemingly worthless shots of everyday life that will probably more accurately recall our days in the future. All of this is well-known and certainly not news to the brigade of merry snappers who fill this magazine with finely crafted photographs every month. But I would contend that the greatest change effected by digital photography is not the way we take photographs, but how we store and look at them. I don't know about you, but my phone has little room left in it to store fripperies like telephone numbers, crammed as it is with photos.

I would contend that the greatest change effected by digital photography is not the way we take photographs, but how we store and look at them

These are the photos a chap would, in years gone by, carry in his wallet. Soldiers would keep a photograph of their loved one in the breast pocket of their tunic. Well, now they can carry a bundle of snaps that would, in old-school printed form, fill up an entire rucksack. I have thousands on my phone. There are some of my wife and kids, a couple of my home and one, for reasons best examined elsewhere, of James May and Jeremy Clarkson bending over a sofa together while a South African nurse bears down on their exposed backsides with a syringe.

But the majority of the 2,986 photos on my phone are of my cars and motorcycles - both currently owned and those long since passed into other hands. And not just one shot of each, there are dozens. Each vehicle has its time with me recorded in staggering detail: beauty shots profiling the car or bike's best angles and most tantalising details, shots of us on holiday, at home together or engaged in some intimate act of maintenance or repair. I consult these photos often, using them to illustrate points in conversation or for reference - much to the delight and fascination, no doubt, of those with whom I'm talking.

Given the impressive storage capacity of digital devices, I think we're missing a trick here. I carry pictures of my car with me, so why don't our cars carry pictures of us? What a fabulous and useful reference it would be if we could, when considering buying a used car, take a look at images of every previous owner stored on a chip, perhaps as part of the dash. That little old lady might be revealed as an altogether racier creature who cared rather less about service intervals than the advertisement would have us believe.

What if you recognised someone? Or they looked like you? It would be mega. And it would put the car into context, give it some meaning and give it a past all of its own. I would love to see every one of the people who have owned my old E-Type since 1962, if only to admire the moustaches and flat caps. A car would come to you rich in history, the more the better. It would prop up the used car market and save jobs. This system must be introduced. It will probably happen this year.

This article was first published in the February 2012 issue of Top Gear magazine

In the Beginning

The first version of a stable photograph with an exposure ranging from 8 hours to 3 days was captured by Joseph Niépce, a French entrepeneur, who teamed up with Louis Daguerre in 1829.

 View from the Window at Le Gras, 1826-27

This image is the one most often circulated and is a heightened copy of the original, with accentuated contrast.

 

Although Niépce had made salted images using a camera obscura as early as 1816, he was unable to preserve them.  In 1817, he turned his attention to guaiacum, a resin produced by a small evergreen in tropical America, that would change colour and harden (become insoluble) upon exposure to sunlight.  Niépce applied varnish to an etching, making the paper support translucent.  Once the paper had dried, he placed it in direct contact with a pewter, copper, or tin plate coated with a thin layer of bitumen of Judea (which exhibited light sensitive attributes).  The plate was then exposed to direct sunlight in contact with the varnished engraving and subsequently immersed in a bath of oil of lavender (today sold as an oil to instil feelings of love and peace), thinned with a white kerosene solvent, that dissolved the unhardened/unexposed bitumen of Judea.

Cardinal d'Amboise, 1827, Heliograph

By 1822 Niépce successfully produced a copy of this engraving by exposing a glass plate coated with bitumen of Judea that he had placed in contact with an engraving on paper.  Bitumen of Judea is a photosensitive agent (light hardens it) that is natural asphalt, like tar.

In 1824, Niépce put a lithographic stone, coated with bitumen of Judea, inside his camera obscura, and after a rather lengthy exposure, made the very first "fixed"continuous tone image...a landscape.  Unfortunately, this image was immediately lost when Niépce attempted to etch the stone for lithographic printing.

* Christopher James, The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes, Delmar Cengage Learning, 2007 

** The National Media Museum/Science & Society Picture Library, London

Pin-up Beauty

A collaboration between Eizo, a medical device supplier, and Butter, a Euro ad agency from Berlin/Dusseldorf, created a cheeky x-ray pin-up calendar in 2010; gives new context to Tom Wolfe's 'social x-rays'! 

"I'm tired of all this business of beauty being only skin deep.  That's deep enough.  What do you want - an adorable pancreas?" ~ Jean Kerr, Writer

Camera Obscura

In 1490, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) supposedly made the first recorded drawing of a camera obscura and its operation in his Codex Atlanticus (1478-1518 c.)  He was presumably aware of how an artist could use this contraption in order to chronicle real-life by drawing the image projected by the camera obscura.  However, because da Vinci wrote with his less-dominant hand, and backwards, it took about 300 years before anyone managed to decode his inspirations and confer proper credit for them.  When his thoughts were finally deciphered, it turned out that his words were as beautiful as his paintings and works in marble.  He wrote of the camera obscura,

"Who would believe that so small a space could contain the image of all the universe?  O mighty process!"

* Christopher James, The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes, Delmar Cengage Learning, 2007 

 

Cigarette Girl

Robert Demachy, Cigarette Girl, gum bichromate print and reproduced as a photogravure, 1902

Robert Demachy was an artistic foce in the 1880s and began to interpret his work in gum in 1894 as it allowed him to use considerable handwork and was similar to the feelings he had when looking at Impressionist painting.