migrant mother

Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange, 1936

image as a icon


 this powerful image by Dorith Lang is called the migrant mother. It is a series of a images that where captured showing the struggle some family's faced during the depression. Many people where in poverty and some where in more poverty then others like this family. It is a series of 5 images and if you see the other 4 you can see the full extent of their poverty. Just by the look of distress, disrepair and uncertain on the mothers face is compelling enough, the look of where is the next meal coming from or what dose the future have in store for my children. This is a iconic image because the history and story behind it are so dramatic and intense It becomes inspirational, here is a mother with 3 children with no money and living in a tent struggling to stay alive. The one picture makes you think about how better off we and our problems seem so much more pathetic.


the photographers account




The way lang stated  "There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled
around her and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so
she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it" i believe this comment is cruel in some sense like the way she led the mother on with a tiny bit of false hope that she might just help her out. on that note thought if she was talking about helping her out she might of meant just giving out the of awareness of people in their situation. Although If lang was taking a photos of people at their lowest points in their life, she could of at least taken down their names to give them a little gratification 

my image 

reading the image 


This photo i took was of my friend Ryan, I had taken it for a location documentary folio last semester. Ryan is on the verge of becoming a pro body boarder he spends all day everyday searching up and down the coast for the best swell and he never stops till he finds the perfect wave. In this image i got the great example of him doing what he does best, with a up and go liquid breakfast in one hand and looking down the beach critically judging every wave that breaks on the shore line. In a social perspective people who live on the coast and surf would know exactly what is running threw his mind. 


as a gendered image


He has the look of the classic stereo typical surfer guy, scruffy hair, mustache with a good fashion sense. I believe this image could work easily as well if the subject was a girl but its harder to find a women who has the lifestyle that he lives. I know plenty of girls who surf but none who have the dedication that he dose. Also to thinking if i did use a girl in the image would i have to have her positioned differently in the image?. It is much more easier to portray the "surfer guy" then the "surfer girl" I think.

revolutionary photography

This image of a hand and lake was apparently created by Pierre Boucher especially for the book by Marcel Natkin, Fascinating Fakes in Photography, 1939

the way boucher assembled this photography is he used 2 images of hands and layed them in a spot of the photo of the lake where the ripples are, to give a sense of drowning,despair and loneliness. some one slowly sinking into the deep dark shadows of a mysterious lake all alone. its so interesting to uncover the origin and ideas of the concepts of photoshop was created

photography and colonialism

i choose this image by john william lidnt because it has such a interesting prospectives, the way the lidnt positioned the main subject making him more dominant, having his spear and boomerang at the ready. he did everything in such a way it looks like he is protecting his wives from the outside world. i think its just a bit to sugar coated, its a perfect image for the classic western society view of less 'devolved' society as they would say. i can understand he was trying to get all of their things like tools and cubbys in the image but the 'scene' he created looks just to fake

if he used these image in a commercial scence i would strongly dislike them but because he didn't turn him images into post cards like the other photographers that changes my feelings towards his work allot more

pictorialism

i had allot of trouble understanding this text, there was to many names and dates but never the less it was still interesting

pictorialsm was a photography movement around the 1850, it started to increase interest in the 1900s. the style they aimed for was to have a "painted" sort of look, they would often print on textured paper and tend to steer clear of the "commercial glossy paper". the movement valued to have more control over there own images like developing and process unlike the "snap shooter" who would get their images developed at the shops.

by developing their own photos this would allow them to high light and blur and make any adjustments to the image where ever they pleased. iv tended to notice most pictorial work has sort of a 'darker' 'gloomy' sense to it

Frederick Evans
‘York Minster: In Sure and Certain Hope’
1903

http://artblart.wordpress.com/2009/01/26/truthbeauty-pictorialism-and-the-photograph-as-art-1845-1945-exhibition-at-george-eastman-house-new-york/

the genus of photography

what is photography? what is art? what is science?

these three questions has been a hot topic for hundreds of years, but still their is no solid answer for all of them. because for everyone its something different. photography it falls into both categories of art and science, as much as it is expression and a means of visually displaying peoples ideas,feelings,thoughts and ideas it also involves sciences in a major degree.

photography for me is a way of expressing ones three dimensional ideas and converting them into a two dimensional image. there are just some things that cant be explained in words but they need to have a photo to back them up.

their is so much more to the camera than we can grasp. its a technological genius invention, who would of thought you could grab a scene from life and place it on a flat surface, its freezing time in some sense. photography was more of a science brake thought when it first came out, but now in a modern day society we are in a media rich filled world that thrives on images, the camera is just part of everyday life now.

art is something that can never be perfectly described in words, its something that it has such a broad range. it has been practiced for millions of years, soon as creatures became aware of their surrounds, thats when it was created. as the ages slowly moved on science and art slowly get merged together, and as more time goes on the "science and art" gets more technologically advanced, ie photography.

the early development of photography

concepts and first attempts

-essentially it was a 19th century development

-a photograph is best described as a effect made by light on a chemical substance

-if light or some other invisible wave length of energy is not used to make the final picture of chemicals mean, in definition its not a photograph

-some of the first light sensitive mediums where white leather and white paper coated in silver nitrate,done by thomas wedgewood 1802

-1816 joshep nicepce made printed out negative images on paper using the camera obscura

-louis jacques monde daguerre teemed up with niepce to work on a common goal

-1830 they found a quicker way to expose but still not quick enough

joseph Nicephore Niepce

-1816 did more testing with light sensitive paper

-did images with camera obsura

-made various light sensitive plates

dagurreotype

-soon discovered that silver iodine plates could be exposed using mercury fumes and it only took a few minutes to expose and could be stabilized with sodium chloride

-this discovery was called the geguerreotype

-in 1939 this discovery was announced to the world and it became the basis process in the 19th century

photography on paper

-william henery fox talbot began his own experiments with with silcer chloride in 185 witch led him to discover how to make unexposed areas less sensitive

-images where treated with a strong sodium chloride solution and a dilute potassium iodide whitch resulted in colour

-it could be preserved for years

the face for acknowledgement

-race between daguerre and talbot got acknowledgement

-daugurrotype proves more successful

bayard ponton, herschel

-bayard claims to the french government he invented photography

-he created a direct positive process but very slow so the daugurrotype was still in favor

-1839 mungo ponton in scotland, discovered a light sensitive material but not very effective. but later on pontons work led talbot to discover gum printing and several other photomechanical processes

improments to daguerrs and talbots processes

THE IMPROVED DAGUERREOTYPE

-daguerres original process of 1839 was to slow it took 20 minutes to expose so they used different mixtures of chemicals to create a faster exposure and they also to designed a faster lens for quicker exposure

-1940 the faster lens was created by max petzval, the petzval lens became the basis portraiture lens for the next 70 years

THE CALOTYPE

-1841, talbot changed his formula to use silver iodine, which is more sensitive to silver chloride. the word 'calotype' comes from the greek word 'kalos' meaning beautiful. these negatives could be retouched in graphite or inks to prevent the transmission of light. he fixed his positives in hypo resulting in colours that ranged from deep orange to cool brown. he got paid work for these process and later on he published a book called 'pencil of nature' in 1844

the business of photography

-less calotypes were made then the yearly production of daguerreotypes

-the daguerreotypes where created in the early 1850s

negatives on glass

-1847 niepcotype in france, abel niepce de saint victor. experiments with starch then egg albumen as a binder for silver iodine on glass plates

Who is Looking at the Family

a short reflection in relation to your own family album, and how do you thin family photography has changed since this exhibition was created 17 years ago?

I have many family albums but they are all lost in the ether, i think the last place i saw them was a box at my old house at the coast. Their was a individual album for each my brothers and sister so 5 or more albums, and on top of that their was other family albums!. I clearly remember they had many great memories of things like pets we used to have, houses we used to live in, people we used to know and family holidays we went on. i can recall their is a family album we have of when mum,dad my brother and i went around Australia but i have no clue where it is? its quite a shame really because i have so many memories from that trip. In that sort of sense it feels like i have lost part of my childhood, and not until i find those albums i wont remember all of these hidden memories i have. like Williams said "closed doors where open and memories exhumed"

i think family photography has changed since the exhibition immensely. Soon as the digital camera was brought around pictures became cheaper and more regularly available, so in that kind of sense family photos became less scripted because if was a bad picture or someone was pulling a funny face it would be less expensive to develop, so it gave room for error and faults if some was mucking up. when you look up family photos from 18 years ago, they all look so 'tacky' and 'fake' everyone is in a line pulling a cheesy grin dressed in their nice clothes but now days the family photo is of people out in a park or the at home it just looks so much more genuine