intro to photography - Reframing Photography

INTRO TO PHOTOGRAPHYThis intro photo class has an experimental, philosophical approach. This course has anexperimental, philosophical approach that encourages students to devise their own definitions ofthe medium by asking questions about vision, light/shadow, reproduction, editing andpresentation. Presentations, demos, and assignments teach a range of practical skills andconceptual approaches. Students leave with a comprehensive, critical understanding ofphotography that they can take in many directions.The following list describes the course projects and skills taught. During the class, theseprocesses are accompanied by an examination of the ways that each device or action is part oflarger cultural ideas and trends and by a presentation of relevant artists’ works. Studentsrespond critically to these ideas and materials by putting them into practice in conjunction withother personal or conceptual influencesPROJECTSRedefining The Photographic (make a photo without a camera, printer or paper)Reading ResponseHomemade Viewing Device (invent a viewing device)CritiquePortable Camera ObscuraPinhole PhotographyAlice in Wonderland Sequence (sequence of images responding to narrative)Camera Scavenger Hunt (learn features of the 35mm analog or digital camera)Digital Editing ToolsShadow Play (experiment with light and shadow)Low Tech (reproductive processes on the edge of photography, printmaking and painting)Distributed Book (create a side-stitch book)Flip-BookSLIDESHOWSCamera & LightVisionLight & ShadowSeries & SequenceReproductive ProcessesPRACTICAL SKILLS LEARNED• Understanding of optics and the mechanics of different types of cameras• ability to construct and operate a camera obscura and pinhole camera• familiarity with their digital camera’s features, and ability to control image quality• ability to control sizing, resolution, color setting, color casts, tonal range, and contrastwith digital editing software.• ability to make a digital contact sheet• ability to create a digital print• knowledge of black-and-white darkroom contact printing and processing• ability to set up and control lighting intensity, contrast and color• use of photocopier• knowledge of image transfer processes (wintergreen oil, acrylic and inkjet transfers)• ability to bind images using the side-stitch technique• understanding of photography and motion and the ability to create animations

CONCEPTS LEARNED• greater understanding of the possibilities of “photography”• critical grasp of the nature of vision and how it is mediated by the eye/brain and byconstructed devices• familiarity with a range of artists’ works involving photography• appreciation of the dynamics between translating a text to image• ability to consider narrative that is presented as part of a series or within a sequence• awareness of the psychological and cultural significance of light and shadow• understanding of the democratic, monetary, and aesthetic connotations of photographicreproduction• knowledge of several critique strategies and approachesPROJECT 1: REDEFINING THE PHOTOGRAPHICStudents make a “photograph” without using a camera, a digital printer or darkroom, or any kindof paper. This is an introductory project listed in the Reframing Photography Projects as“Photograph Without Paper / Printer / Darkroom / Camera”.I often give this project on the first day of class because it asks students to reconsider how"photography" can be defined. Rather than reducing photography to its physical form (a printedimage), students begin to consider and identify conceptual characteristics of photography.I give very little introduction to this project so that they really need to find their own way. A greatoutcome of the assignment is the conversation that takes place when students present theirwork from this project. It's interesting to learn significant experiences everyone has had withphotography, and what the medium has enabled or affected in their lives. When I begin with thisproject, students seem to become more philosophical and better equipped to make conceptualleaps in their work in future projects, whatever the technical parameters of those projects maybe.Reframing Photography, Photographic Analogies, from the essay “Copying, Capturing,and Reproducing”, page 171.Author Susan Sontag agrees that photographic images possess the presence of the original subject.In her essay “The Image-World,” she notes that past societies saw an object and its image as havingdifferent physical characteristics, but a similar “energy or spirit”.(2) While paintings may provide animage that is merely an appearance of the thing painted, “a photograph is not only an image (as apainting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled offthe real, like a footprint or a death mask.”(3) Like a fossil, a photograph offers a trace of an objectnow resigned to the past. As physical imprints, fossils and photographs hold significant power; whilewe know they are not identical to their pre-fossilized selves, we understand that they are powerfulreplacements. As their referent disappears, the remnants become as important as the original. Indoing so, they essentially become similar to the source itself. Since my grandparents’ deaths, thefew photographs I have of them have become increasingly valuable, to the point where, where I seethem, I almost feel as though I am visiting my grandma and pappy…..(2) Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1989), 155. originally published in 1977. (3) Susan Sontag, On Photography, 154.

PROJECT 2: READING RESPONSEStudents post responses to weekly readings. This project is listed under the title “ReadingResponses” within the Reframing Photography Projects.The reading responses encourage students to process and analyze the ideas and information,and allow them to expand on these ideas. They are a helpful way for instructors to keep track ofwhether and how students are interpreting the readings and how they are making connectionsbetween these topics and their own artwork.PROJECT 3: HOMEMADE VIEWING DEVICEMake a viewing device that corrects/emphasizes your own habits as viewer. This project islisted under the same name within the Reframing Photography Projects.This project is helpful before we begin to work with cameras as it slows students down and asksthem to consider their own vision. The project gives students control over how their vision isaltered and how the world is seen. Hopefully, when we then start working with camera obscurasand digital and analog cameras, they’ll see these tools more critically.Reframing Photography, Visual Technologies, from the essay “Seeing, Perceiving andMediating Vision”, page 27Our inattention to the influences of tools such as the eye and brain, visual conventions such asperspective, and our constructed environment is somewhat understandable. More surprising,perhaps, are the ways we use visual technologies daily, yet rarely notice how these devices organizeour world. We arrange friends within the camera’s viewfinder and consume TV narratives withoutactually regarding the technology that constructs the images. Just as we see without recognizingthe process of seeing, we bypass the technology that mediates visual encounters and go straight tothe picture. When the tools that produce the images are taken for granted, we become less awareof the photographic way of seeing. In The Reconfigured Eye, William J. Mitchell explains that while wemay think we control the mechanics of photographic construction—cameras, lenses, and otherparaphernalia—it is actually these devices that determine the way we “see the world”: “While wehave been using the tools, operations, and media of photography to serve our pictorial ends, theseinstruments and techniques have simultaneously been constructing us as perceiving subjects.” (88)…. (88) William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-­‐Photographic Era (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992), 59.Reframing Photography, Learning to Assemble Vision, from the essay “Seeing,Perceiving and Mediating Vision”, page 13The neurologist Oliver Sacks writes that “most of us have no sense of the immensity of thisconstruction [our visual construction of the world], for we perform it seamlessly, unconsciously,thousands of times every day, at a glance.”(30) The complexity of this process becomes dauntinglyapparent within Sacks’s account of Virgil, a blind man in his fifties who, following cataract surgery,regained the use of his eyes. When the bandages were removed, Virgil experienced a world of sensafor the first time since childhood. However, Virgil still depended upon his prior faculties as a blindman (sound, touch, taste, smell) to understand the sensa. For example, he recognized that a brightcolored blur comprised a man only upon hearing the man’s voice. He could experience thephenomena of light and color, but could not process them into the appearances of objects. His needto relearn the world according to the codes of a sighted person illustrates that seeing is a learnedexperience, based on memory and accumulated encounters in a visual world. Like Virgil, aphotographic camera cannot distinguish a person from a bicycle and does not know that one is aliveand the other inanimate. The eye of the camera is directed by an operator who selects, remembers,and perceives….. (30) Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) 127.

PROJECT 4: CRITIQUEStudents critique Homemade Viewing Devices and, later, Alice in Wonderland, Low Tech, andFlipBook.See:Tools, Materials, and Processes: EDITING, PRESENTATION, AND EVALUATION - Evaluation, page 469.PROJECT 5: PORTABLE CAMERA OBSCURASStudents make a portable camera obscura out of a cardboard box and with a utility knife,needle, drill/drill bit, heavy duty tape (black or duct), and a dark towel/t-shirt.We take the cameras obscura outside to a nearby pond and spend some time just looking.Outside of class, I ask students to spend time documenting what they saw in the cameraobscura with any materials of their choice.Reframing Photography, Visual Technologies, from the essay “Seeing, Perceiving andMediating Vision”, page 28The camera obscura is a key visual tool that provides a model for understanding vision during the17th and 18th centuries. In the 5th century bc, the Chinese philosopher, Mo-Ti (470–390 bc),described the basic principal at work in the camera obscura: that light, traveling through a pinholeinto a darkened room, would project an inverted image of the scene outside that chamber. Hereferred to this darkened room as a “collecting place” or the “locked treasure room.”89 Both termsemphasize what was assuredly a magical display of lights—in color, upside down, reversed from leftto right, twinkling and ephemeral from motion—and downplay the images’ connection to the outsideworld. Mo-Ti’s “treasure room” appeared to offer a wondrous miracle. His description of thesephenomena would be redefined in future centuries as the camera obscura, a dark room widely usedby scientists, magicians, and artists….Reframing Photography, Constructing a Portable Camera Obscura, from the “Tools,Materials, Processes: VISION”, page 52Small or portable camera obscuras can be made out of any light-tight container: wooden boxes,books, tents, etc. The following directions explain how to elaborate upon the design of the room-sizecamera obscura by turning a cardboard box into a portable camera obscura.For a basic portable camera obscura, find a box that can be closed on all sides and that, when fittedover your head, has at least 5 inches of room to spare from the top of your head to the top of thebox, and at least 12 inches between your eyes and the front of the box (the image plane).….PROJECT 6: PINHOLE PHOTOGRAPHY + ALICE IN WONDERLANDStudents build a pinhole camera and use it to visually translate a portion of a chapter of Alice inWonderland. The Alice assignment is listed in the Reframing Photography Projects as “Alice inWonderland: Collaborative Sequencing”.Pinhole photography provides students another way of capturing the images they’ve just viewedin their cameras obscura. The distorted, dreamlike quality of the images suits the surreal qualityof Lewis Carroll’s story, which provides an introduction to narrative, sequence, and story-telling.Reframing Photography, Pinhole Cameras, from the “Tools, Materials, Processes:

VISION”, page 72.Pinhole cameras are lensless cameras, constructed and used as early as the 1850s. The camerabody has a small hole in one side, through which light passes and forms an image inside the camera.Because there is no lens to sharpen the image, pinhole images are fairly soft, which gives them aromantic quality. This is why they were popular in the 1890s with Pictorialist photographers whowanted photographic images with the hazy look of paintings. Interest in pinhole photography fadedfor many decades, and then revived in the 1970s when the first histories of photography werepublished and artists began to look at older processes.See also:The pinhole as lens, page 58.The basic pinhole camera, page 78.Printing images: Traditional processes, page 261.Reframing Photography, Series and Sequence, from the essay “Series and Sequence”,page 319.Grouping photographs in series allows for organization and comparison—powerful tools that allow usto grasp a diversity of information. Grouping individual photographs into series makes possible, forexample, the entire discipline of Art History, which posits a linkage between objects as diverse as aCycladic figurine and Bernini’s statue of David, or the Great Ziggurat of Ur and Frank Gehry’sGuggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.PROJECT 7: CAMERA SCAVENGER HUNTStudents become familiar with their camera’s manual and learn to control their camera’sfeatures. The assignment is listed in the Reframing Photography Projects as “CameraScavenger Hunt”.There are several versions of this assignment, one that focuses on the technical features anduse of the viewfinder to frame, while the others complement the technical aspects withconceptual prompts.Reframing Photography, Small-format Cameras, from the “Tools, Materials, Processes:VISION”, page 71.Small-format cameras are the most common size of camera, with the most variation in features andcost. The main differences between small format cameras are whether the viewing system is singlelens reflex (SLR), rangefinder/ viewfinder, or LCD screen, and whether the camera is analog or digital.Cameras with automatic systems enable quick shots without the need to fuss with camera controls.Manual cameras, or cameras with a manual mode, allow you to selectively focus and/or chooseaperture and shutter speed.See also:The 35mm SLR camera body, page 82.The digital camera body, page 84.Camera controls, page 94.Film speed, page 232.Digital sensors, page 233.

PROJECT 8: DIGITAL EDITING TOOLSStudents become familiar with editing tools in Camera Raw and Adobe Photoshop. They canread about digital editing techniques and/or follow along with a class demo. The resource ofimages to correct is listed in the Reframing Photography Presentations as “Bad Images.”Sometimes, I’ll ask them to use the tools they’ve just learned to edit and reprint three or fourimages previously submitted in the class.See:Making a digital contact sheet, page 306.Digital printing, page 284.Digital resizing, page 382.Using Variations to learn to identify color casts, page 406.Using curves to correct color, page 407.Using Camera Raw to correct color casts, page 243.Using Levels and Curves to adjust tonal range and contrast, page 392.Making a gradual tonal adjustment, page 399.Digital burning & dodging, page 401.Creating shallow depth of field in a digital image, page 97.How to straighten images with the measuring tool, page 92.How to record and play an action, page 466.PROJECT 9: SHADOW PLAYStudents experiment with light and shadow by creating a three-minute performance using onlylight, shadow, a backdrop and props. This project is listed in the Reframing PhotographyProjects as “Shadow Play”.This project asks students to consider light and shadow as materials that form the subject ratherthan as secondary to the subject. Students learn to control contrast, intensity, and color.Reframing Photography, Light is Radiation, from the essay “Light and Shadow”, page115.Our bodies note and respond to the effects of light and shadow—from the uplifting feeling ofsunlight on our faces (which triggers the body’s production of Vitamin D, an important nutrient), tothe cooling effect of shadow on a warm summer day. (Interestingly, in a photograph, colortemperature has to do with the actual temperature of the physical process taking place, althoughthe results are the opposite of what we might expect: higher temperatures produce a more intenselight, with more of a blue cast, while a weaker, cooler light has a reddish cast.) Indeed, the naturalpatterns of light and dark drive the circadian rhythms (or “biological clock”) of humans and otheranimals. Winifred Gallagher writes that the “origins of the influences of light on our activity arerooted far back in the evolutionary past … [the] very survival of our species has depended onmatching the workings of our bodies and minds to the demands of the day and night.” (16) ….(16) Winifred Gallagher, The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions and Actions (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 29. See also:Tools, Materials, and Processes: LIGHT AND SHADOW, page 137.

PROJECT 10: LOW TECHStudents learn low-tech reproductive processes and use them to create a book. This project islisted in the Reframing Photography Projects as “Distributed Book” and “Side-Stitch Zine”.This process expands the notion of reproduction by using inexpensive processes such aswintergreen oil transfer, inkjet transfer, rubbings, and contact paper and gel medium transfer.The assignment emphasizes common methods between photography, printmaking, andpainting and allows students to play with photographic images in painterly or mechanical ways.Reframing Photography, Photographic Analogies, from the introduction to “Copying,Capturing, and Reproducing”, page 169.Which is more valuable, the original or its copy? The essay “Copying, Capturing, and Reproducing”begins by considering some of the earliest negative impressions, fossils, and then continues to minethe historical and contemporary questions surrounding the value(s) of reproduction. This distancebetween the original and its after image is described by analogies from Genetics, in which thevariance from offspring to offspring resembles the variations from copy to copy, while still bearingclear resemblances to the source (the original). We also consider the position of photography as asingular object or a tool of mass reproduction. Whereas the value of an autonomous object lies in itsrarity, photography is a medium defined by reproduction, which posits much of its value in copies.The ubiquity of reproductions, from cartes de visite to digital files, has enabled political campaigns,the culture of celebrity, social revolutions, and Facebook.See also:Rubbings, page 219.Image transfer and rubbing techniques, page 223.Acrylic lifts, page 228.The book, page 445.PROJECT 11: FLIP-BOOKStudents create a flipbook. This project is listed in the Reframing Photography Projects as “FlipBook”.For this project, students consider an alternative method of presentation that incorporatesstillness and animation. The project asks them to consider narrative, illusion, truth/fantasy, andmovement, and the challenge of working with a large number of images.Reframing Photography, The Flip Book, from the Presentation section of “Tools,Materials, Processes: Editing, Presentation, and Evaluation”, page 464.A flip book is a simple way to animate images. Also referred to as flick books or folioscopes, flipbooks can be approached as small films, with similar considerations of direction, scenery, andlighting. The sound of the fluttering pages mimics the sound of a film reel turning, and therectangular format is similar to a film screen. Unlike video or film animations, the flip book turns theviewer into the animator. The viewer brings the still images to life, controls the speed (by shufflingthrough slowly or quickly), and the orientation (by viewing the action forwards and backwards).See also:Nineteenth-century viewing devices and their optical legacy, page 38.Motion, page 341.Batch processing, page 467.