In this essay from 1972 John Berger questions the effectiveness of graphic war photography and in doing so anticipates many of the debates about documentary that were soon to come. It was originally published in New Society magazine and subsequently reproduced in the 1980 collection, About Looking. Writing during the closing phases of the Vietnam [...]
Posts Tagged ‘photography’
Photographs of Agony – John Berger (1972)
Posted in On Documentary, Photography Criticism, tagged david levi-strauss, documentary, john berger, luc delahaye, photographs of agony, photography, sebastiao salgado, war photography on January 2, 2010 | 5 Comments »
Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before -Michael Fried (2009)
Posted in Photography Criticism, Photography Theory, tagged art, jeff wall, michael fried, modernism, ncad, objecthood, photography, theatricality, visual culture 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 [...]
The Subject As Object: Photography and the Human Body – Michelle Henning (2000)
Posted in Photography Theory, tagged fetishism, freud, michelle henning, ncad, photography, Photography Criticism, psychoanalysis, stuart hall, visual culture, voyeurism 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 [...]
Stereotyping As A Signifying Practice – Stuart Hall (1997)
Posted in Photography Theory, tagged ncad, photography, representation, ross o'carroll-kelly, stereotyping, stuart hall, visual culture 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 [...]
The Documentary Debate : Aesthetic or Anaesthetic – David Levi-Strauss (1992)
Posted in On Documentary, Photography Criticism, tagged art, david levi-strauss, documentary, martha rosler, ncad, photography, Photography Criticism, visual culture 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 [...]
Post-Documentary, Post-Photography – Martha Rosler (2001)
Posted in On Documentary, Photography Criticism, tagged documentary, martha rosler, ncad, photography, Photography Criticism, visual culture on November 29, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Martha Rosler is a visual artist whose writings on photography theory have been widely influential over the last two decades. In this essay, her concern is with how documentary photography can continue to function in the postmoden world. The traditional practice of social documentary photography as a means of helping underprivileged, dispossessed or marginalised groups [...]
The Image World – Susan Sontag (1977)
Posted in Photography Theory, tagged ncad, on photography, philosophy, photography, realism, susan sontag, the image world, visual culture on November 7, 2009 | 7 Comments »
Susan Sontag’s On Photography is a text that every photography theory student grapples with at one point or another. I read it myself a good year before starting this course but if there was ever a case of something you read going in one eye and out the other this was it. Second time around [...]
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