Text book notesart appreciation PDF

Preview

Summary

Art appreciation notes...

Description

Color Photography Photography began as a primarily black-and-white process. Indeed, for the first 100 years, black and white was the only practical option for photographers. Through much of the twentieth century, technical problems with color persisted: Film and printing papers were expensive, and color prints faded over time. Even when fairly accurate color became practical, many photographers felt that color lacked the abstract power of the black-and-white image.

The development of color photography began in 1907 with the invention of color transparencies. In 1932, the Eastman Kodak Company began making color film. The key invention came in 1936 with Kodachrome film, which substantially improved the versatility and accuracy of color photography. Later progress improved the relative permanence of color prints.

Through the 1960s, most art photographers disdained color film. At first they did so because the chemical development processes yielded unstable prints that faded or evolved toward red over time; later, because color photographs were associated with family snapshots and tourist photographs. But when William Eggleston exhibited his color work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976, the world took notice and a new branch of art photography was born.

Eggleston’s pictures from the Los Alamos Portfolio are elegant compositions of everyday things. In Untitled (Nehi Bottle on Car Hood; fig. 9.14), two cars block out an abstract composition of off-balance diagonals against a paved background darkened by wedges of shadow. The soda bottle seems perfectly positioned to both anchor the composition and capture the sunlight; its red color further lends it emphasis. The blue car, being a cool color, tends to recede. Besides the skillful arrangement, the photo rivets our attention because it immediately evokes a world: a casual social setting in some American rural area on a warm afternoon. To prove the validity of Eggleston’s commitment to color photography, all we have to do is imagine this work in black and white.

9.14 William Eggleston. Untitled (Nehi Bottle on Car Hood). From Los Alamos Portfolio. 1965–74. © Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York. Pushing the Limits Artists have recently explored a variety of techniques to go beyond photography’s assumed limits. British artist Susan Derges lays large sheets of photosensitive paper on the bottom of shallow ponds at night, and captures the look of the night sky through the water. She often shines a flashlight on the paper through surrounding bushes to compose ghostly night scenes with their shadows (fig. 9.15). She thus creates landscapes of a new kind, as if we were looking up from below the water’s surface. Trevor Paglen pushes the limits of the camera in a way that highlights contemporary questions about government secrecy. For his project called Limit Telephotography, he approached secret government installations, getting as close as he could legally as a private citizen. Many of these facilities are in remote locations in

the desert West. He then photographed the secret sites with the best equipment commercially available. One work from this series is Open Hangar, Cactus Flats, NV, Distance ~ 18 miles, 10:04 a.m. (fig. 9.16). The results are unsurprisingly blurry, but still tantalizing because his cameras can see far better than the unaided eye. Cactus Flat is a secret military installation where controllers pilot reconnaissance drones in war-torn or forbidden areas of the world. It is also part of the Tonopah Test Range, which is described rather mysteriously on its website as “the testing range of choice for all national security missions.” Paglen’s photo represents the citizen’s eye, straining to learn even a bit of information about what our government is doing.

9.16 Trevor Paglen. Open Hangar, Cactus Flats, NV, Distance ˜ 18 miles, 10:04 a.m. 2007. C-print. 30″⨯36″. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

Vietnamese-born artist Binh Danh invented his own method of recording photographs onto plant material. He takes or borrows photographs and then attaches them to leaves from his garden. He then places the leaf and photo between layers of glass, and exposes them outdoors for up to several weeks on the roof of his house. The sunlight transfers the photographic images to the leaves, in a process he calls chlorophyll printing.

Danh most often uses images of the victims of warfare in Southeast Asia to create haunting works that memorialize the dead. The face that emerges from the leaf in Iridescence of Life #7 (fig. 9.17) came from the Genocide Museum in Cambodia, which holds thousands of photos that the Khmer Rouge methodically took of their victims. In this work Danh embedded the printed leaves in resin, and paired them with butterfly specimens. The resulting work seems fragile, precious, and beautiful. Danh said, “I have tried to show how like plants humans are; we participate in the kinetics of events and the process of creating memories by absorbing the history around us—and, like leaves, we wither and eventually die. The residue of our existence nourishes the memories of the living like a decaying leaf nourishes the soil.”2

9.17 Binh Danh. Iridescence of Life #7. 2008. Chlorophyll print, butterfly specimen, and resin. 14″⨯11″⨯2″. Courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery.

Danh’s interest in chemical photo processes also led him to explore the ancient medium of the daguerreotype (see Binh Danh: Exhuming the Landscape on p. 155).

CREATORS Binh Danh: Exhuming the Landscape

9.18 Photo of Binh Danh. Courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery.

If a photograph is a repository for memories, then Binh Danh (b. 1977) is creating them for both himself and his viewers. At the time of his birth in Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge regime in neighboring Cambodia was eliminating dissidents of all kinds in a genocide that eventually claimed nearly two million victims. Danh migrated to the United States with his refugee parents in 1979. His unique versions of photography poetically reconstruct a difficult past.

“I am half Cambodian,” Danh said. “My father is Cambodian and my mother is Vietnamese. The Khmer Rouge were pretty much exterminating any foreigners in the country, including people who wore glasses, who drank milk, who were artists, or Buddhist monks, Catholic nuns.”3 Because he has no memory of his homeland, he reconstructed it through the landscape. “You could call me a landscape photographer, because I’m looking at the landscape, but instead of just photographing the landscape, I’m looking into the landscape, into the earth, underneath the soil, into the cells of plants.”4 The daguerreotype process is difficult to carry out in a remote location. Danh described it: “I go to Yosemite with a van, which I have converted to a darkroom. I call the van ‘Louis’ after Louis Daguerre. I’m in the van with a [silver] plate, which I have polished to a high finish. I sensitize the plate with iodine vapor. When the iodine comes into contact with the silver, the plate becomes light sensitive. From there I put it in a plate holder with my camera and go hiking. I’ll find a spot and make an exposure, come back to the van and develop the plate.”6 Exposures take between one and two minutes, so he has to avoid shooting on windy days.

Viewers who see these images, as with any daguerreotype, also see themselves reflected in the silver plate, placing themselves in the image. The plates that Danh uses are larger than most nineteenthcentury plates, partly to facilitate this mirroring quality for viewers. Danh further explained, “These specific photographic processes allow me to exhume the landscape and all of its metaphors. I consider this work social documentary. For me, social documentary examines historical events and their relation to our contemporary lives.”7 Danh took an interest in the daguerreotype process, in...