Stieglitz or Steichen?

In a history of the twentieth century - who had the greater influence on the direction of modern photography?


Alfred Stieglitz or Edward Steichen ?

Make your case with approx 1,000 words

Submission: Monday 12th November - 12 noon: lecture theatre 1

History Part 3: Modernism & Propaganda

We covered a lot of ground in this lecture:

Documentary projects used the veracity of photography to publicise and inform:
Mass Observation - UK documentary project 1937 - 1953
Farm Security Admistration - massive US project
Florence Thomson - the "Migrant Mother"
Walker Evans - the Robbie Williams of the FSA
August Sander - Faces of the Twentieth Century (before the Nazis put him in prison)

Wikipedia on Propaganda
Nazi propaganda

Some images have become iconic:

Joe Rosenthal's picture at Iwo Jima
Associated Press counter accusations of fakery

Flags of our Fathers - Hollywood movie with a twist
Team America World Police

William Eugene Smith perhaps the World's greatest photographer

Minamata - Smith never fully recovered from being beaten up while trying to photograph the plight of a Japanese fishing vilage being poisoned by an untouchable and unaccountable chemical industry in the 1970s

The Family of Man exhibition in 1955 (curated by Edward Steichen)

Cross Light Portrait - remake & Corporate recce

Portrait Assessment:
Tues 13th Nov - 10.00am Room 187

Corporate sequence Work in Progress discussion:
Tuesday 13th Nov - 1.15pm Studio 19

Please bring your workbook with research, rough pictures and your shooting plans/story strategy

Deadlines are scheduled to help you manage your time. If you miss them, work will mount up.

Tutorials - Tuesday 30th October

In Room 187:

9.00am Anna Kozak

9.15am Vikki Melville

9.30am Lyndsey Fitzpatrick

9.45am Stephen Kavanagh

George Lange

Take a look at the work of George Lange

Here's a slideshow of his Corporate work

Portrait Studio Booking

A booking sheet for Studio 19 on Wednesday am and pm is now up in the ground floor corridor

Studio 19 will be open tomorrow (Weds) from 9.00am - and Angela will be around in the afternoon

Brian Griffin: Thursday 25th October

Free Lecture:

Hawthornden Lecture Theatre
Weston Link
National Galleries of Scotland
The Mound

6pm - no latecomers

Zone

This is a Zone ruler of 'reflected light luminosity':


John Blakemore describes each Zone like this:

Zone 0 Featureless black
Zone I Very dark black - no detail
Zone II First sense of separation in dark areas but no detail
Zone III Clear detail in darkest areas
Zone IV Dark hair, shadow in landscape
Zone V Mid-tone (18%) grey, tanned skin, grass or stone
Zone VI Caucasian skin
Zone VII Whites retaining full detail, skin in sunshine
Zone VIII Bright surfaces, whites with little texture left
Zone IX Glaring surfaces, highlights without detail


John doesn't bother with Zone 0 and neither will we

John's Zone book

The Zone system on Wikipedia
The Zone system explained by American nerds

You can take a reflected light reading off anything - if you can visualise what "Zone" it is, and adjust your exposure setting accordingly. I'll explain more soon.

For next Monday, please try to shoot the negatives for a Zone ruler: four stops over and four stops under a Zone V (grey card exposure) of an evenly illuminated, textured surface. You should have 9 frames of increasing density.

(Remember... it won't go wrong if you follow the instructions...)

BW info

This is Kodak Tri-X

Not to be confused with the much newer (and turbo-charged) T-MAX films 100, 400 and 3200 ISO

Here are some of the links to the areas I skirted over:
Silverprint - the best materials retailer (and genuine advice)
Ilford photo click on 'products'
Fuji pro - links to film info pdf + data guide
Kodak pro
Kodak B/W films
Kentmere - excellent papers
Fotospeed - excellent too + lith material specialist

Modern films are brilliant. T-Max 100 & 400 are amazing - but it gets expensive if you use T-Max developer everytime (which you should, or else there's not much point). So, age-old Tri-X in cheap D76 actually works really well if your follow this recipe...

Kodak Tri-X 400 - rated @ 200ISO
Dev 8 mins in D76 1dev+1water @ 20deg C
(Rating Tri-X at 200 ISO deliberately lets more light in, which saturates the silver halide crystals, reducing their size. Cutting the development to 8 mins - a little less than Kodak recommend - compensates for what would otherwise be overexposure)

Also:
Kodak T-Max 3200 - rated @ 1600ISO
Dev 9 mins in T-Max dev 1dev+4water @ 20deg C
(The same grain-calming technique works here too)

Naked vs Nude

Manet's Olympia

This is an enormous subject - worthy of a whole semester to itself. It's impossible to give a complete and balanced overview, but here are a few ideas and links. Please make some notes in your workbook.

Joel-Peter Witkin

Wikipedia on JPW
JPW gallery
8mm

Lois Greenfield

John Berger Notes on 'The Gaze' from "Ways of seeing"

Sally Mann

Laura Mulvey biography

Cross light demo

Daylight preset in daylight: f8 @ 1/8th on 200 ISO

Tungsten preset in daylight: f8 @ 1/8th on 200 ISO

To increase dramatic effect, you can darken the background (and deepen the blue colour) by underexposing - here's what one stop looks like (f8 @ 1/15th)

Shine your tungsten lamp on the model and try to match the same exposure: f8 @ 1/15th - the tungsten lit areas will register as 'correct' colour

Moving the lamp closer will make the effect of the tungsten light brighter

Compare with this portrait shot in exactly the same place in just daylight on daylight preset: f8 @ 1/8th on 200 ISO


Assessment: Tues 23rd October 1.15pm
Required:
One cross lit portrait - printed on A4 paper
Working prints
Exposure details + workbook notes

Corporate sequence assignment

See me for a hand-out describing details of the Corporate sequence assignment

To help with ideas take a look at the photographs that Brian Griffin made of the Broadgate station redevelopment in London



More of Brian Griffin's work is here

Make some notes on your personal reaction to his style

Remember the 'shape' of the storylines we discussed in the movie discussion.

Linear (beginning to end, in chronological order - Classic Hollywood narrative)
Cyclical (joining up the beginning and the end)
Disjointed (beginning somewhere in the middle, before returning to the start)
Slow reveal (releasing the information slowly)
Titles, captions, twists, details...

Deadline for ideas: Tues 23rd October @ 1.15pm in Studio 19
Submission of completed sequence: Tues 18th December

Basics

Well done with the question paper. Remember, it was anonymous, so no-one knows how you did - except you.

If you need any help with one or more areas, you might want to look at the appropriate link:

Aperture & Exposure

Exposure & 18% grey card

Lenses & focal length

f stop ratios

ISO

Film

If you know of any links you think are particularly good, please share them by clicking on the 'comment' link next to the pencil icon and post the URL

The Amateur and Modernism

I was very pleased to see so many of you this morning. Thanks. I hope you find the Monday morning sessions useful.

Here are a few links to some of the areas we touched on.

Pictorialism is the peculiar form that photographers with artistic aspirations felt their work needed to take for Photography to be regarded as 'Art'. The leading group called themselves The Photo-secession

A collection of links about Alfred Stieglitz:
Wikipedia on Stieglitz
The Steerage
Gallery 291

We'll return to Edward Steichen in the next lecture. He had some interesting ideas: Steichen quotations

Modernism is when a medium stops pretending to be something it isn't, and celebrates its own strengths. The Museum of New Mexico have a Modernism microsite - which you can explore

Disruptive Technology is an interesting idea about landmark inventions that cause a seismic change

Paul Strand's white fence


EdwardWeston.com

Portraiture - Weds 10th

Angela's Portraiture class will be in Studio 22 at 1.15pm on Weds

Tuesday 2nd October

No classes on Tuesday morning - Matthew is unavailable

Pauline will demo the digital back in Studio 19 at 2pm

Location Workshop discussion of Movie 'beginnings and endings' will happen next week

Basics

Well done with the question paper. Remember, it was anonymous, so no-one knows how you did - except you.

If you need any help with one or more areas, you might want to look at the appropriate link:

Aperture & Exposure

Exposure & 18% grey card

Lenses & focal length

f stop ratios

ISO

Film

If you know of any links you think are particularly good, please share them by clicking on the 'comment' link next to the pencil icon and post the URL

Snaparazzi

Snaparazzi

We are all photographers now

Daguerre
Fox Talbot
Amateurs

Yale University Photography lecture notes
A very good resource - worth a read, and full of links to areas we will cover in later weeks

Please make some notes in your workbook about Daguerre and Fox Talbot