PHOT 150 | Introduction to Photography examines the nature of photography and visual literacy through the personal exploration and making of photographic images as well as the critical discourse of photography’s role and function in society and culture. Students will engage in photographic practice as a means to respond subjectively as well as objectively to the conceptual and aesthetic experiences of the photographic image as a visual document of creative expression and communication. Historical and contemporary photographic works from the contexts of the family album, art photography, commercial / advertising photography, photography and media, and cyberspace will be examined and discussed to further cultivate and refine each students’ visual literacy of the photographic image.  Digital camera required.  Satisfies Grossmont GE – Area C requirements.

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PHOT 151 | Intermediate Photography builds on the foundations of photographic seeing, thought and analysis, and the advanced uses of analog and digital photographic materials and processes, including black and white, grayscale and color. Students will focus on developing a personal photographic vision through the use of photography’s aesthetic attributes and a refined sense of technical execution and craft.  Discussion and advanced practice with small format cameras, advanced image exposure methods, artificial lighting techniques, image optimization and use of the dynamic tonal range with advanced film processing and digital imaging techniques, and photographic printing practices in both darkroom and digital environments.  Prerequisite: “C” or “Pass” grade or higher in PHOT 150.

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PHOT 152 | Advanced Photography explores various advanced analog and digital photographic imaging systems, including medium- and large-format cameras as well as well emerging technologies, in further providing a foundation within the medium. Conceptual, aesthetic and technical principles, theories and strategies will be examined, including the application of one’s photographic vision with advanced digital capture and medium- / large-format camera systems, appropriate image exposure, processing and printing applications, and advanced natural and artificial lighting techniques.  Prerequisite: “C” or “Pass” grade or higher in PHOT 151.

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PHOT 154 | History of Photography A survey that examines the role and function of photography and its cultural history, including its relationship to art, science, social sciences, travel, fashion, and mass media.  Topics of discussion will focus on the important cultural, aesthetic and technical considerations in photography within the historical and contemporary contexts of works by photographers from the United States, Latin America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.  Such topics will include Looking At and Understanding Photographs, The Origins and Development of Photography, A New Aesthetic – 19th Century Photography, Photography and Modernity, Lens Culture and Mass Media as well as The Globalization of Photography in the Digital Age.  Satisfies GE – Area C and Area 3 (IGETC) requirements.

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PHOT 166 | Image and Idea is an in-depth exploration of photographic imaging with an emphasis on relating the current technologies to traditional and historical processes while directing the students’ energies toward a balance of image and idea. Students will develop a language specific for the communication of meaning within their photographs, pushing the medium beyond its pictorial qualities and engaging it into the service of ideas. Lens- and time-based concepts will challenge students’ ongoing work developed in previous classes, as they further examine present day realities, the function of memory, our cultural history, gender identity and the new visceral nature of the medium through contemporary methods, technical strategies, and alternative approaches thus achieving a stronger personal vision.  Prerequisite: “C” or “Pass” grade or higher in PHOT 151.

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PHOT 167 | Lens Culture examines the nature of photography and culture as revealed by the camera lens in society, within the contexts of public, street and documentary photographic practices. Students will examine and engage in photographic practice that explores the photograph as a visual document of “evidence and truth,” the camera as a mechanical eye in the realm of surveillance, spectacle and propaganda, as well as the nature of “public” photography with camera phones, photo booths, and paparazzi practice.  Analog and digital cameras as well as emerging technologies (ie. cell phone cameras) can be used.  Various presentation possibilities will be explored, including photographic prints, the use of technology with the web and blogs as well as self-published digital photographic books and magazines.  Prerequisite: “C” or “Pass” grade or higher in PHOT 150.

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PHOT 168 | Media and the Photographic Profession is an introduction to the profession of photography, addressing the topics and skills associated with the demand for photography in such media fields as editorial and commercial. Primary technical emphasis will be on artificial lighting in the studio and on location, covering objectives inherent in advertising, portraiture, fashion, illustration and tableaux genres. Students will control and construct images for the camera with the purpose of persuasion, promotion and publicity, gaining invaluable insight as they investigate these traditions of images created for the various media outlets. Basic business practices will be introduced as students generate a model for self-promotion within the competitive practice of professional photography. Prerequisite: “C” or “Pass” grade or higher in PHOT 151.

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PHOT 252 | Photographer’s Portfolio examines the practice and process of becoming an active and working photographer with a heightened understanding of personal vision, aesthetic sensibility and refinement of technical skills. As one’s personal practice of photography continues to become more engaged and begins to evolve with a greater sense of maturity, it becomes necessary for the photographer to further develop insight into who they are as a photographer and their working process. Skillful control of modern technological options and clear understanding of historical and contemporary issues within the medium will be applied with a high degree of critical analysis in the production and interpretation of the student’s photographs. A final portfolio, including a print, portfolio book and/or website, will be produced describing the depth and scope of the student’s interest, craft ability and vision.  Prerequisite: “C” or “Pass” grade or higher in PHOT 151.

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John Gossage from The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler / Map Of Babylon

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“Is the great photographer characterized by style?  There is a presumption, with the recent art market interest in the medium, that photographers who are artists rather than mere photographers distinguish themselves as such by exhibiting a marked style.  Style equals branding, and branding means sales, so we get the fairly common phenomenon of the photographer who hits upon one extraordinary image and then repeats it, with minor variations, for the rest of his or her career.

Or are the really great photographers drawn from the ranks of those who reject visual style in favor of visual sensibility, those who recognize that the medium is profligate rather than reductive, and more akin to the film or the novel than the painting?  Those accordingly, who tend to put content before form.

Style in photography – at its best – should emanate from a particular response to a particular subject and a particular set of circumstances, acted upon by a particular sensibility.  So we can identify almost immediately a Robert Frank, a William Eggleston, or a Robert Adams, but we cannot ascribe to them a particular style, a predetermined aesthetic, as we can to so many other photographers who take care that their look, pared down to the reductivity of a signature, make them easily branded in the market.”

– from John Gossage, the Photographer as Auteur, by Gerry Badger in The Pleasures of Good Photographs

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Assignment

Shoot images that reveal your “style” or “sensibility” as a photographer through your conceptual concerns, ideas and/or curiosities, your photographic vision as well as your sense of technical execution and craftsmanship.

In considering your photographic vision and use of camera aesthetics, give particular attention to your use of the photographic frame, vantage point, moments of exposure and the role and use of light to reveal your interpretation of the thing itself and details as they relate to your “style” or “sensibility” as a photographer.

It is essential that your efforts reflect a sense of considered thought, active visual exploration and is articulated with a cohesive vision and photographic sensibility.

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Requirements

For the critique (see Calendar for Due Date) and evaluation, please complete the following:

Minimum of four (4)  – finished photographic prints that reveal your “style” or “sensibility” as a photographer through your conceptual concerns, ideas and/or curiosities, your photographic vision as well as your sense of technical execution and craftsmanship.

All photographic prints are required to be made in the Grossmont College Analog | Digital Imaging/Photography Labs.

Turn-in all critique materials in a manila envelope for evaluation and feedback.

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© Paul Turounet, Detail from Estamos Buscando A – We’re Looking For, 2002 – 2004, a site-specific installation in Tijuana, BCN, Mexico

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An Object Itself

The photograph is an object. They are sometimes large, sometimes small, and sometimes they are objects contained only in a visual sense.

They exist within themselves apart from their maker, whether they are collected in photo albums, boxes, on museum and gallery walls, reproduced in publications or within the cyber-world. It is in these places where we come to experience photographs that influence our understanding and interpretation of visual meaning.

Like other visual arts mediums, the photograph has its own physical characteristics as an object. These include a support and a surface. While a photograph has a plane, it may contain a sense of depth as an object and it may not, depending on the context in which it experienced, whether on a museum wall, in a photo album, in a publication, on a digital monitor or as part of a public installation.

Supports could include paper, plastic, metal and various objects, while the surfaces incorporate light-sensitive silver halide materials into the gelatin emulsion that may also incorporate dyes and pigments, revealing a tonal description. And now, there is the digital realm to consider and contemplate, and the nature of the pixel containing all the possibilities of description and meaning, whether it is on a computer monitor or contained in a cell phone.

These attributes define the essence of a photograph. The formal qualities of a three-dimensional vision contained in a two-dimensional plane with boundaries, determining what is seen and what is not. The support in which it is presented on, suggesting its texture and shape. The surface, whether a black and white or color photograph, further articulates its descriptive qualities and meaning.

It is this range of descriptive possibilities, the effects of chemical and digital processes and the role of the light source that will further communicate the possibilities of visual engagement and pleasure (beauty) and the interpretive meanings suggested.

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What’s Inside

What’s contained within the viewfinder frame lines is one of many deliberate and considered aesthetic choices. These choices include the thing photographed, the specific details that are included to heighten and hold our visual engagement, what the photographer chooses to include and exclude, the voice that is doing the seeing and speaking, the particular moment the shutter is released as well as the nature in which what is being seen is revealed. John Szarkowski spoke about these photographic aesthetic attributes in The Photographer’s Eye as The Thing Itself, The Detail, The Frame, The Vantage Point, and Time. Three additional attributes essential to understanding the aesthetic considerations of a photograph include Light, Focus and Color. The use of these aesthetic considerations (choices) will reflect the photographer’s intentions and set the range of possibilities of meaning and purpose.

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Thing Itself

© Dorothea Lange / Library of Congress, Destitute Pea Pickers in California (Migrant Mother), Nipomo,  California, 1936

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Photography deals with the actual, though the factuality of a picture, no matter how convincing and unarguable, is different than the reality itself. The subject and the picture are not the same thing, though they seem so afterwards – the image, the photograph, will survive the subject.

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Detail

© Gregory Crewdson, Untitled, 2001, from the series Twilight

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The photograph is tied to the facts of things. These facts, either discovered, found or created do not reveal the story, but offered scattered and suggestive clues that go beyond simple description, but rather propose the possibilities of a not so obvious undiscovered meaning.

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Frame

© Eugene Atget, Rue des Ursins, Paris, France, 1923

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The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge. Compositional considerations of line, form and balance extend not only in the four directions suggested by the viewfinder or ground glass edges, but also the spatial considerations of foreground / background relationships – the transformation of a three dimensional world into the flatness of two dimensional. These relationships of the edges, in all directions, reflect the intentional visual and conceptual concerns in how photographic meaning is considered. What is contained within the frame is either energized or passive depending on how these edges are considered, allowing the picture to resonate within the edges and/or beyond them.

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Vantage Point

© Elliott Erwitt / Magnum Photos, New York City, 1974

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In equal consideration as the frame, the act of choosing the distance between the subject being photographed and the camera (and photographer) offers the uncanny ability of photography to reveal what our eyes would protest as unattainable with simple human vision – a point of view different from what our eyes perceive.

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Time

© Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind St. Lazare station, Paris, France, 1932

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The photograph is static, but the moments of the world flow, interrupted only by the deliberate fragmentation of time by the release of the shutter. This discrete parcel of time is not just a literal moment of time, whether frozen by an exposure of a short duration or the accumulation of movement, but also where the world is transformed by a decisive moment once the shutter is triggered, regardless if that moment of exposure is 1/125th of a second or 6 minutes.

“The decisive moment, it is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event 
its proper expression.” -Henri Cartier-Bresson

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Light

© Philip-Lorca diCorcia, from A Storybook Life, 2003

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As photography utilizes light-sensitive materials, whether analog or digital, the photograph needs light (and the lack of light) to reveal (and obscure) its visual sensibilities and concerns of content. The presence of light and its level of intensity serve as visual guides in seeing what is in a photograph.

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Focus

© Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21, 1977 – 1980

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Not only does a camera see from a definite vantage point, it also creates a hierarchy by defining a single plane of focus. This plane, which is usually parallel with the film plane in the camera, provides a sense of emphasis within the photograph as controlled by the literal focusing of the camera’s lens, depth of field and the distance from the camera to the subject.

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Color ..|.. Tone

© William Eggleston, Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973

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In the introduction to William Eggleston’s Guide, John Szarkowski suggested, “for the photographer who demanded formal rigor from his pictures, color was an enormous complication of a problem already cruelly difficult. Its failures might be divided into two categories.”

The first category offered is described as black and white photographs made with color film – an inattention to the role and function of color. The second category of failure is photographs made of beautiful colors in pleasing relationships – color for the sake of color.

Color is not a separate issue, “but rather as though the world itself existed in color, as though the blue and the sky were the same thing.”

An additional possibility in considering how to utilize color is the compositional tension that can be created to articulate photographic meaning through the descriptive nature of color in revealing details as well as the color of light to imply mood and psychological tension.

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© Frederick Sommer, Livia, 1948

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It is important to keep in mind that grayscale is also a tonal scale of color – black, white and a range of grays.  Just as with color, the tonal range of grayscale informs the photograph in both descriptive and interpretive contexts.  Whether the image reveals a full tonal range, as with the zone system developed by Ansel Adams, or a compressed one to suggest a sense of greater contrast, this tonal range determines not only the descriptive qualities of the highlights, mid-tones and shadows, but also affects our emotional and mental response to the picture.

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Thinking About Photographs – The Difference between Taking and Making

© Christian Boltanski, Monument – Odessa, 1990

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All photographs are considered and intentional choices. These choices are suggested by a need or desire to secure a moment, an experience, a revelation, a curiosity, or a discovery on film and contain it as an object in a photographic print.

The shutter release is not simply pressed and the photograph taken, but rather made, through a process of mental construction – visualization – interpreting the actual, reality, the thing itself and translating it into a visual language, a photographic language, through the intentional use of aesthetic choices unique to the medium. This mental construction elaborates, refines and embellishes – from looking and the gathering of visual information to seeing and a careful study, analysis and organization of that information.

The quality and intensity of a photographer’s attention to seeing determines the vitality and visual engagement of a photograph. When viewing a photograph, will the viewer just glance or pause and also see? This attention to seeing, the thing itself, the detail, the frame, the vantage point, time, light, focus and color, will resonate the photographer’s visual and conceptual concerns. However, these formal considerations made in a camera need to be translated to the photograph, whether a photographic print or digital file, where the importance of tone and description will further articulate the visual sensation as well as the intellectual and emotional attention. It is a complex, ongoing, spontaneous interaction of observation, intuitiveness, searching, imagination and intention.

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For additional discussion on thinking about and understanding photographs, click on Seeing Photographs

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Paul Graham, Pittsburgh, 2004 from A Shimmer of Possibility

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“Many photographers of ambition seek that extra ten yards, and strive for narrative content, seeking to become authors as well as auteurs.  Lewis Baltz once said that, “it is useful to think of creative photography as a narrow but deep area lying between the cinema and the novel.” “

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Paul Graham, installation of Pittsburgh, 2004 from A Shimmer of Possibility at Carlier | Gebauer

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“Narrative as understood by film theorists involves the linear arrangement of events, selected and sequenced in a logical order, especially in a temporal sense.  Cause and effect is the keynote, a story that proceeds logically and sequentially in time.  Films having a beginning, a middle and an end – preferably, from a Hollywood point of view, a happy, or at least a resolved ending.

Jean-Luc Goddard agreed with that, but with a decided sting in the tail.  ”A film should have a beginning, a middle, and an end,” he famously remarked, “but not necessarily in that order.”  That, of course, is nonlinear narrative, (elliptical narrative), defined in a nutshell.”

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Alex Prager, 11:45 PM, Griffith Park and Eye #4, (Roadside Victim), 2012

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“Linear narrative is inherently populist, accentuating the familiar, the known, and the predictable.  We can go further and say that it offers reassurance and solace.  We usually know where we are with the linear narrative, any plot twists merely delay the inevitable resolution.  Therefore, we can say this form predicates a certain conservatism, whereas nonlinear narrative, by its very nature somewhat more uncertain and unpredictable, is much more radical in concept, both formally and politically.”

– from Elliptical Narratives:  Some Thoughts on the Photobook, by Gerry Badger in The Pleasures of Good Photographs

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Christian Patterson, installation of Redheaded Peckerwood at Robert Morat Galerie

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Assignment

Visually investigate the idea and possibilities of narrative and photography.  Explore utilizing various cameras and/or materials (analog and digital, black & white or color), the use and function of text and/or other materials, including found objects or letters, as well as presentation strategies (multiple-image and/or image scale) to inform your curiosities and ideas. In shooting your images, focus your energies on creating visually engaging compositions as suggested by your use of the photographic frame, point of view, details, moments of exposure, light and handling of materials.

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Requirements

For the critique (see Calendar for Due Date) and evaluation, please complete the following:

1 – 2 Digital edited contact sheets with a minimum of 24 images that reflect your interpretation of the idea and possibilities of narrative and photography through your photographic vision and sense of technical execution and craftsmanship (Due at time of scheduled individual critiques).

1 – 2 Digital edited contact sheets with a minimum of 8 images that reflect and begin reveal a tighter edit of your interpretation of the idea and possibilities of narrative and photography through your photographic vision and sense of technical execution and craftsmanship. (Due at a time between individual critique and scheduled class critique).

Minimum of 5 – finished photographic prints made in the Grossmont College Analog | Digital Photography Labs.

If you have an alternative presentation idea | concept in mind, such as the use of internet or mapping, follow-up with me.

Turn-in all critique materials in a manila envelope for evaluation and feedback.

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Additional Photographers’ Work to Consider

 Antonio M. Xoubanova

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 J. Carrier

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 Ron Jude

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  Whitney Hubbs

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  Roe Ethridge

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  Daniel Shea

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