Image Or Imagination The Problem Of Photographic Represenation

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject Communications - Theories, Models, Terms and Definitions, grade: 1,0, University of Tubingen (Englisches Seminar), course: Key Terms for Studying Culture, 39 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Altered pictures have always caused much controversy. Even when photography was still in its infancy, manipulative arrangement was already an issue. Nowadays, digital photography in particular faces an erosion of trust because newsmagazines and newspapers make frequent use of various manipulation techniques, which fiercely challenges the shared belief that photographs record the world objectively and truthfully. Oddly enough, even though a picture may ′lie′, it is still used as evidence in the courtroom or understood as a valuable historical document. In my analysis of photography′s oscillation between image and imagination, with the two terms representing something traditionally thought of as real on the one hand and something thought of as constructed on the other hand, I want to address these questions and analyse how and what a picture represents. I argue that meaning is to a large extent constructed by the viewer and does not exist as an inherent quality. Consequently, whether an altered picture is seen as fraud or merely as an optimisation is a very subjective matter and strongly depends on contextual information. The viewer′s judgement is influenced by the path through which the image is mediated and the context in which it is embedded, but his judgement is also dependent on what the image means to him, not only on what he sees in it. This is not to say that photographs can under no circumstances be used as evidence. However, what can be said is that their truth-value is often overestimated. In any case, manipulation is not a side-effect that coincided with the birth of digital photography. Selection, framing, and other adjustments have always played an important role in film photography. After a gen

As the prototypical exemplar of modern visual technology, photography was once viewed as a way to enable vision to bypass imagination, producing more reliable representations of reality. But as an achievement of technological modernity, photography can also be seen as a way to realize a creation of the imagination more vividly than can painting or drawing. Photography and Imagination investigates, from diverse points of view focusing on both theory and practice, the relation between these two terms. The book explores their effect on photography’s capacity, through various forms and modalities of imaginative investments and displacements, to affect even reality itself.

A richly illustrated exploration of the imagination in photography featuring the work of over sixty international artists.

In this book, Hariman and Lucaites provide an account of how photojournalism creates a distinctive and valuable way of understanding the modern world, plus example of how the public spectator can think about and with photographs in order to develop that understanding. Coming off the banner success of their No Caption Needed (2007), The Public Image takes that book forward with the express purpose of promoting visual literacy as a civic skill. In the end they aim to enlarge the conceptual scope of photography as a mode of experience, a medium for social thought, and a public art. Public thought needs both good writing and good photography, and this indicates the contemporary shift in talk about photography from what photographs are to a more direct concern with what photographs do. The authors take up a series of Big Issues, such as the recorded image as real and as artifice, the tangle of photography with modernity (here they touch on digitization and globalization), the manner in which the photograph operates as a medium for social thought, the photograph s intimate relationship with warfare, and they conclude with a chapter on the supersaturation of the image world (abundance is an important theme, and characteristic sign of cultural vitality)."

"Examines three projects in late nineteenth-century scientific photography: the endeavors of Alphonse Bertillon, Francis Galton, and Etienne-Jules Marey. Develops new theoretical perspectives on the history of photographic technology, as well as the history of scientific imaging more generally"--

How to read photographs: the new essential primer In 1973, John Szarkowski, the revered director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, published his classic volume Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, offering a wide-ranging and accessible history of photography and an engaging primer. Now, American photographer and educator Stephen Frailey has borrowed Szarkowski's concept and format for his new book, Looking at Photography: 100 great images and a page of text for each. Frailey picks up where Szarkowski left off, updating the project to take stock of significant photographs from the early 1980s to the present day. Through a focused discussion on each individual work, Frailey articulates the themes and emerging sensibility of contemporary photography. Artists featured in this volume include Tina Barney, Jeff Wall, Steven Meisel, Nan Goldin, Helmut Newton, Martin Parr, Tim Walker and Wolfgang Tillmans, among others. Stephen Frailey (born 1957) is a photographer, writer, curator, editor and educator. His work has been shown, published and collected internationally. He served as the Chair of Photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1998 to 2018, and is the co-chair of its MPS Fashion Photography Program. In 2003 he founded the Auction for Photographic Education in Afghanistan to create a photography department at Kabul University. In 2007 he founded the photography magazine Dear Dave, and is its Editor in Chief. He is currently the Director of Education at Red Hook Labs.

Media philosopher Vilém Flusser proposed a revolutionary new way of thinking about photography. An analysis of the medium in terms of aesthetics, science and politics provided him with new ways of understanding both the cultural crises of the past and the new social forms nascent within them. Flusser showed how the transformation of textual into visual culture (from the linearity of history into the two-dimensionality of magic) and of industrial into post-industrial society (from work into leisure) went hand in hand, and how photography allows us to read and interpret these changes with particular clarity.

This updated edition profiles twenty of the world’s leading street photographers and teaches readers how to capture profound urban moments. In recent years, photo sharing on social media has rejuvenated street photography, and its spirit has been reborn. The Street Photographer’s Manual is about the possibilities of street photography as a medium, and how it can be approached in an accessible way. The book begins with an overview of street photography, examining its past, present, and future, and looking at how the genre has changed over time. The reader is then introduced to twenty of the most acclaimed international street photographers. This new, revised edition features six new photographers: Troy Holden, Merel Schoneveld, Melissa Breyer, David Gaberle, Michelle Groskopf, and Craig Whitehead. Integrated within the profiles are twenty fully illustrated tutorials, including how to shoot a face in a crowd and how to train your eye to observe and capture the unexpected. The Street Photographer’s Manual shows you that being a street photographer is partly about looking for luck. But luck requires inspiration—and that is where this book is indispensable.

A photo documentary about the amazing but endangered culture of Venice Beach