Ch 3/4 of The Photograph As Contemporary Art ~ Charlotte Cotton

Ch 3 & 4 Notes

Ch 3 – Deadpan

• ·         Deadpan Aesthetic: cool, detached, sharp photography
• ·         Not an obvious meaning behind the images
• ·         First popular in the 1990’s
• ·         Contemporary art
• ·         Locations: industrial, architectural, ecological, and leisure areas
• ·         ‘Germanic’
• ·         Bernd Becher of Dusseldorf, Germany
• ·         Showed social and political issues
• ·         Gursky – monocular perspective of the world à not just stepping back a large distance
• ·         A dominant position
• ·         Analyzing the world through thoughtfulness and precision
• ·         Bridget Smith à architecture in Las Vegas
• ·         Takashi Homma à newly built suburban houses
• ·         Jacqueline Hassink à Mindscapes à investigations of architecture
• ·         Lewis Baltz à ‘New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape
• ·         Style has capacity for capturing the wonder of the man-made world
• ·         Naoya Hatakeyama à heavy industrial spaces
• ·         Toyo Ito à engages with conceptual thinking
• ·         We engage with depiction of passing seasons or memories
• ·         Certain angles make a perspective or experience more evident
• ·         Landscapes can be used as metaphorical meaning
• ·         Clare Richardson à Sylvan series à farming communities in Romania
• ·         Ruff à portraits of no emotion à inhibits lots of emotions in us
• ·         Diijkstra à newborns with their mothers à vulnerability in the Netherlands

Ch 4 – Something and Nothing

• ·         David Weiss à Quiet Afternoon à table-top assemblage
• ·         Gabriel Orozco à impossible, witty images oc sculptures, or animated conversations
• ·         Jason Evan à New Scent à weather conditions effect the physical image
• ·         Details are given subtle visual intrigue
• ·         Nigel Shafran à Sewing Kit à balancing act of domesticity
• ·         Jean-Marc Bustamante à Something is Missin gà taken in many cities  to show landscapes on edges
• ·         Architecture Is most interesting in abandoned and deteriorated places
• ·         “what they’ve left behind”
• ·         Subtle details can change the way we begin to look at life
• ·         Roe Ethridge à confident and diverse à twists in image types
• ·         James Welling à infinite possibilities à intellectural substance
• ·         Must see things from several vantage points to know them