Photography and Time-Base Media

Another type of two-dimensional media is photography and camera art, this type of media allows the artist to explore the fourth dimension – time. Camera record the world around us, and the history of the camera is a history of technologies that record our world with ever0inceasing sophistication and expertise. Photography started in 1838 with still images, but the still images generated the though that might be possible to capture the object in motion as well. The Kinetoscope, which was invented by Thomas Edison and W.K. Laurie Dickson was the first continuous film motion-picture viewing machine. The process of silent moving images progressed into “talkie” and then added color.

Photography
• Photography – from the Greek phos, “light,” and graphos, “writing,” literally “writing with light”
• You can photograph anything you can see
• Creation is the process of asseblage
• Photography is a process of asseblage, instant collage

Early History
• Camera – Latin world for “room”
• Camera obscura – to copy nature accurately (A small hole on the side of a light-tight room admits a ray of light that projects a scene, upside down, directly across the hole onto a semitransparent white scrim. )
• Major drawback – While it could capture the image it could not preserve it.
• Problem was solved in 1839, by fixing negative images on paper coated with light sensitive chemicals, a process that he called photogenic drawing.
• In France a different process, which yielded a positive image on a polished metal plate, was named the daguerreotype.
• Not only did photography replace painting, it had democratized the genre
• Disadvantages of the daguerreotype – Required time to prepare, expose, and develop the plate. Iodine was vaporized on a copper sheet to create light sensitive silver iodide. The plate then had to kept in total darkness until the camera lens was opened to expose it.
• Calotype – The first photography process to use negative prints.
• Wet-plate collodion – A photographic process, developed around 1850, that allowed for short exposure times and quick development of the prints.

Form and Content
• By emphasizing formal elements over representational concerns, the artist further underscores this abstract side of the medium.
• Greatest source of photography’s hold on the popular imagination lies in this ability to anesthetize the everyday – to reveal as beautiful that which we normally take for granted.
• Power of the photograph often comes from the aesthetic power of the work lent to it by its formal compositions.

The Photographic Print and Its Manipulation
• Zone System – A frame work for understanding exposure in photography developed by Ansel Adams, where a zone represents the relation of the image’s brightness to the value or tone that the photographer wishes it to appear in the final print. Thus each picture is broken up into zone ranging from black to which with nine shades of gray between – a photographic gray scale.
• Aperture – the size of the opening of the lens
• Dodging – decreases the exposure of selected areas of the print that the photographer wishes to be lighter
• Burning – increases the exposure to areas of the print that should be darker

Color Photography
• Formal tensions of black-and-white photography are not necessarily lost
• Color was ignored til 1960’s
• Joel Meyerowitz, Porch – By releasing the shutter at this precise instant, Meyerowitz not only captures the contrasting colors of the scene, but the also underscores the tension between the peacefulness of the porch and the wildness of the night in the contrast between the geometry of the house and the jagged line of the lighting bolt itself. New Technologies: Digital Photography
• Rise of color photography coincides with the growing popularity of color television
• Polaroid camera and film, and inexpensive color processing for Kodak film, both contributed to a growing cultural taste for color images
• Andreas Gursky, 99 Cent – He saturates our view with a wild view of undeniably attractive color. As literally “full” as the image is, emotionally – and spiritually – it remains empty, a view into our own human isolation.
Film
• Film – a form or shape repeats themselves in time across the motion picture screen, the medium seemed to invite the exploration of rhythm and repetition as principle of the design.
• Repeating same image over and over again creates visual rhythm that, to his mind, embodied the beauty – the ballet – of machines and chine manufacture in the modern world.
• Assembling a film, the process of editing, is sort of a linear collage
• Editing – The process of arranging the sequence of a film after it has been shot in its entirety.
• Shots – In film, a continuous sequence of film frames.
• Full shot – Shows the actor from head to toe.
• Medium shot – From waist up
• Close-up – The head and shoulders
• Extreme close-up – A portion of the face
• Long shot – A shot that takes in a wide expanse and many characters at once.
• Iris shot – The frame slowly opens in a widening circle as a scene begins or slowly blacks out in a shrinking circle to end a scene.
• Pan – The camera moves across the scene from one side to the other.
• Traveling shot – The camera moves back to front or front to back.
• Flashback – The editor cuts to narrative episodes that are supposed to have taken place before the start of the film.
• Cross-cutting – An editing technique meant to create high drama.
• Montage – The sequencing of widely disparate images to create a fast-paced, multifaceted image.
The Popular Cinema
• Audiences expect a narrative, or story, to unfold, characters with whom they can identify, and action that thrills their imagination.
• Movies dominated the screens like not mass media in history after WW1
• Hollywood – Name of the town where entertainments were made
• Star – In popular cinema, an actor or actress whom celebrity along can be guarantee the success of a film.
• Different types of film genres – narrative types, comedies, romantic drams, war films, horror films, gangster films, and musicals
• 1939 Marked the emergence of color as a major force in the motion picture business
• Storyboards – Panels of rough sketches outlining the shot sequences (help determine locations, lighting, movie’s scenes)
• Animation – “bring to life” In film, the process of sequencing still images in rapid succession to give the effect of live motion.
• Auteurs – “authors” of their work

Video
• Expensive to explore film as a medium
• 1965 Introduction of hand held camera (Sony Porapak) – able to explore the implications of seeing in time
• Video cheaper and more immediate
• Video art exploits this immediacy, commercial television tends to hid it by attempting to make videotaped images look like film.
• Performance art – A form of art, popular especially since the late 1960s, that includes not only physical space but also the human activity that goes on within it.

Computer-And Internet-Based Art Media
• Image on a computer monitor is literally two-dimensional, the screenspace occupied by the image is, increasingly, theatrical, interactive, and time-based.