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Archive for December, 2009

Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before -Michael Fried (2009)

Posted in Photography Criticism, Photography Theory, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 29, 2009 | 1 Comment »

I became interested in Michael Fried’s recent tome of photographic art criticism after reading an interview with him in Aperture magazine. I thought it would serve as good overview of the work of a whole assortment of contemporary  photographers. It certainly did that – and much more besides. In 1967 Michael Fried published a controversial [...]

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The Rhetoric Of The Image – Roland Barthes (1964)

Posted in Photography Theory, tagged , , , , , , on December 21, 2009 | 2 Comments »

This essay is a classic semiotic text where Roland Barthes analyses an advertising image and uses it as a means of teasing out how different messages are conveyed by a system of signs. The ad he uses is the Panzani advert, within which he finds a rich layering of meanings. Barthes commences by remarking that [...]

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The Subject As Object: Photography and the Human Body – Michelle Henning (2000)

Posted in Photography Theory, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 17, 2009 | 1 Comment »

After finding aspects of Stuart Hall’s text difficult to grasp in parts I turned to a chapter from Photography: A Critical Introduction (edited by Liz Wells) to try and get a better handle on the relevance of psyschoanalytic theory to photography criticism. It explains Freud’s take on voyeurism and fetishism clearly and concisely. Representations of [...]

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Stereotyping As A Signifying Practice – Stuart Hall (1997)

Posted in Photography Theory, tagged , , , , , , on December 13, 2009 | 2 Comments »

This entry discusses an extract from the book Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. In it, Stuart Hall examines stereotyping and how this practice is employed to construct negative representations of people and groups. We routinely make sense of the world using types – broad categories of things with common characteristics. This allows us to [...]

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The Documentary Debate : Aesthetic or Anaesthetic – David Levi-Strauss (1992)

Posted in On Documentary, Photography Criticism, tagged , , , , , , , on December 6, 2009 | 2 Comments »

In this article Levi-Strauss writes about the relationship between aesthetics and politics in social documentary photography and essentially mounts a defence of the role of the aesthetic within this genre. He starts by observing that the right in America have always recognised the subversive, and deeply political role, of the aesthetic in art and this [...]

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