Assignment 3: Color

Barrett, Criticizing Photographs, Ch 4: Types of Photographs, 3rd ed, 2000

Bill Owens Suburbia

This is Barrett’s most ambitious chapter yet as he does more than review the ideas of others, but sets out his own classification scheme.  Before doing that, he reviews some of the systems that have come before, noting from the very beginning of photography a process distinction between science and art.  This is reflected in arguments about how photographs are made:  pictorialist or purist (manipulated or straight)  He notes a number of categorization schemes to suggest how such systems develop and change over time as new photography methods, subjects, and concerns emerge, develop, and decline.  

Review: Master Photographers: Bill Brandt, BBC, 1983

Bill Brandt, Nude London 1952

For the second episode of this series we are introduced to another German immigrant,  Hermann Wilhelm Brandt, who in his adopted country of the UK went by Bill Brandt.  The film is copyright 1983;  Brandt died in December of the same year, age 79.  His frailty is evident.  It is often difficult to hear his thin whispering voice.  He seems reluctant to speak, and says as much in a direct question from the interviewer. 

Monitor Profiling

I've now entered the murky world of color adjustment and monitor profiling.

My tutor has requested prints for Assignment 3.  Last week I had three trial prints made at a local Kodak Express printer.  The results were both exciting and disappointing.  It's been so long since I had images printed that holding a photograph I had labored over was thrilling.  The color and brightness, though, were not what I expected and when I got home and compared the print to the computer screen image, the differences were notable.  Overall the prints were less bright and less vibrant than what appeared on screen.  I suppose this is because computer screen default settings use higher brightness and contrast.

Barrett, Criticizing Photographs, Ch 3: Interpreting Photographs, 3rd ed, 2000

From a book I recently reviewed. The photos signify Guan-yin, the female goddess of compassion in Eastern Buddhism. The one on right, by including the altar, connotes sacredness through objects of ritual devotion.

Barrett begins by noting that photographs are not “facts about the world” but images in need of interpretation. Photos are about something, created for some communicative purpose.  “Each photograph embodies a particular way of seeing and showing the world.”  He quotes Ernst Gombrich on there being no such thing as an “innocent eye” and cites Barthe’s two practices of signification:  denotation and connotation (showing and implying).  A photograph may show something quite clearly, but its implications - how it is shown and for what purpose - may not be so clear.  Photos made in a straightforward, realist manner are in most need of interpretation as their intent may be concealed beneath the “reality.”  

What then is interpretation?

Review: Master Photographers: Alfred Eisenstaedt, BBC, 1983

Alfred Eisenstaedt, Premiere at La Scala, Milan, 1933

People often don’t take me seriously because I have so little equipment.  

Master Photographers is a 1983 series from the BBC profiling six photographers:  Alfred Eisenstaedt, Bill Brandt, Andreas Feininger, Jacques Henri Lartique, Andre Kertesz, Ansel Adams.   The series format has the subject in his studio or office with a stack of preselected printed images.  The interviewer (not identified in the credits) asks questions from time to time, but otherwise the subject discusses the photos he has prepared.

Review: The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn, BBC, 2007

The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn is a 9-episode BBC series exploring what must be the world’s most ambitious photography project.  Conceived and funded by French financier Albert Kahn, the plan was to send photographers to capture everyday life in every corner of the planet.  This was at the turn of the 20th century when travel wasn’t so easy, when there weren’t yet any airports, hardly any trunk roads, and no Hilton Hotels, Starbucks, or Lonely Planet guides.  More ambitious still, the project was to document local cultures using both motion camera and the world’s first reliable still color camera, the autochrome.  The series writers make it sound as if Kahn, whose Paris home served as repository for the collection (and is now a museum housing the same), was prescient in his understanding of how profoundly the world was changing and wished to document disappearing ways of life.  Could anyone at the turn of the century understand the radical upheavals just around the corner?  Several of the interviewees say as much about the people captured in Kahn’s collection, how innocent they appear in light of the catastrophes that would soon befall them.    

Exercise 25: Colors into BW Tones

The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate how color is turned into black-and-white tones.  The brief calls for shooting a single image of a subject of red, green, blue and yellow, and then in post processing applying those same color filters to observe the shift to tones.