The Genius Of Photography (Assignment 3)

What is photography for? Is it art? Is it science?

After watching the first episode of “The Genius of Photography” I can not really come to a conclusion of how to answer the above questions. Yes photography started out because scientists were experimenting with chemicals and different people were trying to record different things and use it for their own gain but it also evolved. For me just watching that first episode makes me feel that photographers of that time just thought they had the next ‘get rich quick’ scheme and wanted to start exploiting it, especially George Eastman who founded Kodak. I understand that because of these ‘schemes’ photography has become what it is but it still seems to me that everyone was just out for a quick buck.


Episode 5 talks a lot about styles which would suggest that photography is an art form but it then also talks about how people shoot and strips away bits and pieces making it seem quite scientific.


It also talks a lot about diary type photography and recording images from your own life or the lives of those around you and in that sense again it comes back to being scientific. Scientists have to record everything from every experiment so as to learn something and as photographers we record important event or even just those little events that happen in our lives so to learn from them (or in the case of the big major events photographed by photographers so that lesson can be learnt in future years)


***Notes***
What is photography for?
capture a moment
glimpse an essential self
Is it art?
Is it science?
photography always transforms what it describes, thats the art of photography to control that transformation.
photograph is about the frame you put around the image, what you put in.
1839-invention of photography
A mirror with a memory
chuck close
degre vs talbot
registers everything... all seeing but undiscrimating
the thick detail of london life. photography is unique to capture this
Darwinian type struggle
nadar
photography was also making an impression on real artists????!
Killed by William burke nyc polic department
Steal and exploit other people’s faces
Diana Arbus
Portrait of Picasso
Photographs with intimacy- larry clark ‘Tulsa’
I love the idea of Cindy sherman’s work. Denying her on identity. Is her work self-portraits? Its almost as hard to answer as is photography art or science. Just because she is in it does it make it a self-portrait? Queen of no identity.
Medium that engages directly with life