Assignment 2

Frame

Vantage Point

Detail

Fast Shutter Speed

Slow Shutter Speed

Hand Held Night Photography

Night Photography with Tripod

Depth of Field Aperture set at F8.0

Depth of Field Aperture set at F4.0

Flash

The Thing Itself

What I got out of John Szarkowski's statement that the factuality of images, "no matter how convincing and unarguable, is a different thing than reality itself,"is that sometimes what seems to look like a simple scene, has a greater meaning behind it. For example, the photo I took may seem like a garden and field with a rock in the foreground saying "Let it Rain." However, The "Let it Rain" rock is telling the viewer that in order for our fields and gardens to be bountiful with crops we need the rain to come and help the crops grow. The image doesn't always just show the obvious, the viewer may need to think about the photograph to find the deeper meaning it is trying to tell.

Toilets!

This photograph was taken at the business Heitsche Crushing. It is a pile of toilets that have been broken or just ones that are no longer used. They will eventually be crushed into stone that people will buy. 

The Photographer's Eye

In The Photographer's Eye, John Szarkowski tells of what photography looks like and why it looks the way it does. He compares photography to paintings and tells of how they differ. Szarkowski tells of how photography has become another way to make pictures. However, the two processes of making that picture is completely different. With painting, the end picture is "made," the artist can pick and choose how the final product looks depending on the skills and attitudes the artist decides to use, but with photographs the end picture is "taken," the artist could only choose the scene. Because photography had become easy, something new, and interesting, it was estimated that three million daguerreotypes were being produced, in 1853. Many people had learned to use the daguerreotypes and made skilled and sensible photographs, yet other photographs were made because of accidents.

Painting had become a thing of the past because it was difficult and expensive, while photography became easy, cheap, and you could record anything not just important events. Learning to photograph was not difficult at all. There were two ways to learn how to photograph back then. One way was to learn from working with the daguerreotype. By working with it, the photographer could find out simple ways to eliminate problems that would arise. The second way would be to learn from other photographers who already knew much about the daguerreotype.  

While learning and working with the daguerreotype, the problems that the photographers had to overcome were “The Thing Itself,” detail, frame, time, and vantage point. “The Thing Itself” and detail go hand in hand. They both tell of how photography was to be considered to be the truth. When taking a picture, the photographer could only document what was there and couldn’t add anything to the picture. Most people back then were used to being able to insert wanted objects into the scene, however, with photography they had to learn that what you see is what you get. That is why photography was such a great aid in the wars, photos told the truth, real story of what was happening in the war. The issue with the frame was that the daguerreotype could only get so much into the picture. The photographer had to pick and choose what he was going to have in the photo and what he was going to get rid of, it forced him to make decisions. Time, another issue, dealt with how long it took to take a picture. If the subject moved at any point in time, the photography would come out to be blurry or a person could have extra limbs. Lastly, the final issue Szarkowski tells us about is vantage point. Using different vantage points helps the audience look at scenes from different viewpoints, but are still able to see the story behind the photograph.
            I believe Szarkowski does a great job in helping people learn about the development and growth of photography. He is able to teach both about the history of photography but also helps teach about how to make a good photo today.

Materializing New Space Exhibit

In the Materializing New Space exhibit, I really liked the Nesting prints. The way they layered each of the different elements they used in the prints, I found it to be very interesting. Just by looking at it you could tell that there had to be many painstaking hours put into them, especially, the Steal A March. Having this piece as the piece that everyone sees when they first walked into the exhibit really catches the audience’s attention and throws them right into the artwork. The large size of this piece allows you to see each and every detail within nature and the creatures that are living there. It displays the main focus of the Avian Flying Apparatus and allows you to see the final product of what all the instructions are trying to make in all the Avian prints. I find myself awestruck when I look at the pieces with layer after layer of different elements. They are all very fascinating.

The pieces that stood out to me the most were the Nesting prints. I loved the idea of using different elements to make one entirely new piece. My favorite of all the Nesting prints was the Nesting #3. The way the nest is made from the shredded instruction sheets was noteworthy; you could still somewhat read a little bit of the instructions. It was almost as if the nest could have been made by the birds that weren’t superior and it was almost a way to get back at those birds that were “superior” with their made wings. There also was so much detail put into the flowers, leaves, and twigs that surrounds the nest that you can tell it was drawn in, but it makes you look twice because of the detail. I really find this piece interesting because of how well every element was layered into the final piece.

The New York Stock Exchange Project was the pieces that I didn’t quite understand. By looking just at those pieces, I would have never interpreted that they were supposed to represent the New York Stock Exchange and how it differed over time. However, the idea of making graphs from bricks is a unique idea, especially incorporating the different elements they like to use, the real-life objects and then computerized objects. I would have liked to ask Kennedy and Urquhart how they came up with the idea of using the bricks to illustrate the change in the market. I would have also liked to ask if the stocks they invested in were determined by another element that we may not be able to see, such as a stock that they had a connection with. But all in all, I found this exhibit to be very fascinating and enjoyed looking at the different elements involved.