-
Follow
Following
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Kara Walker’s art installation, A Subtlety includes several dramatic figures alluding to African American involvement in the sugar trade constructed from white sugar and molasses. The most prominent piece of the installation is a large Mammy Sphinx featuring prominent breasts and buttocks all made out of white sugar. Other figures include children made of molasses … Continue reading
Multiple primary sources explore the portrayals of subjectivity in photography. For the purposes of this course, four primary sources were examined in depth. Each approaches subjectivity from a different angle. #iftheygunnedmedown is a tweet campaign which emerged following the 2014 fatal shooting of Michael Brown by police. When news of the killing first broke on … Continue reading
In “Virtually Me”, Smith and Watson build upon concepts from their book to provide a toolbox that attends to the way users create themselves online. The authors define the self as a marker of reflexivity, both online and offline. The self is constructed by the user, and represents the user – but it is not … Continue reading
Catherine Zuromski accomplishes a surface reading of the snapshot photography genre, specifically in the domestic setting. She divides her collection of observations and interpretations into two distinct sub-categories: snapshot photography as image-object, and snapshot photography as a set of practices. The album keeper, or owner of the photographs has the agency to organize, embellish and … Continue reading
Agency How does an author “writing back” to hegemonic institutions/dominant narratives allow her to gain agency? Audience/Addressee Who does the text address; are there multiple audiences? What kind of reader does the text ask you to be? Authority/Authenticity Is the narrator authoritative? Does the narrator defer to an established authority figure to give clout to … Continue reading
Taking the stance that photographs are “weapons in an ideological struggle” (15), Rugg argues that photography, like autobiography, allows its subjects a kind of control over perceptions of selfhood both privately and publicly. We tend to understand photographs as a special kind of sign, believed to have a more realistic relationship towards between signified and … Continue reading
The Getty Museum YouTube series and the Allversity lecture on the history of photography both touch on the history of the daguerreotype, focusing on its role in the canon of photography as well as the technical aspects of producing these silver-faced copper plates. The daguerreotype process is a method of image capturing that places an … Continue reading
“Essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.” –Susan Sontag, On Photography In “Melancholy Objects”, one of many essays featured in her 1977 collection On Photography, Sontag analyzes the photograph as a cultural and historic object to establish distinct ideological and ontological paradigms between American and European photography. Despite these aesthetic and philosophical distinctions across time and … Continue reading
The chapter, “Portrait Path” in Risto Sarvas and David M. Frohlich’s From Snapshots to Social Media – The Changing Picture of Domestic Photography traces the history of early photography from the 1803s to the 1890s. Over this period, photo technology evolved to suit consumer demands and allow for new affordances, but also reflects current trends … Continue reading
The beginning of the article explains how collodion wet plates were replaced by dry plates in 1871 which made it possible to mass produce the plates and sell them pre-processed. George Eastman however saw there was no monopoly potential in dry plates and was set out to invent a complete system of roll film, roll … Continue reading
Rhetoric of the Digital Image 