Gregory Crewdson Brief Encounters Analysis

Teju Cole, in his essay “Against Neutrality,” dissected the tones behind photography- which he believes are thought of as unbiased towards the subject. The power of words and of photos is crucial to Cole’s essay. He states that images can “make a grim situation palatable” because of the photographer’s craftiness in selection (Cole 1). To anyone who isn’t an experienced photographer these tricks can be hard to see but Cole provides further insight from the historian, John Edwin Mason. Expectantly, Mason sheds light behind the misconception on photography, how the “manipulation in photography isn’t really about Photoshop or darkroom tricks”, but the style, angle and other aspects of taking photos (Cole 1).

The photograph is a very powerful medium. The French painter Paul Delaroche exclaimed upon seeing an early photograph “from now on, painting is dead!” (Sayre, 2000). Many critics did not take photography seriously as a legitimate art form until the 20th century. With the

There has been a long standing argument as to whether photography can be paralleled with traditional art forms such as painting, lithography, and sketching. The frame of reference of this research is the concept of photography as an art form. Through scholarly and practical research, I will compare different ideologies of how photography has been accepted and thought of since its invention, as well as visual examples of work that portray both photographic and artistic qualities. With the main question within this topic being can photography be considered art?, the objectives I seek to clarify are the grounds for which one defines art and for which one defines photography.

In our Unit 2 reading, it explains the art of photography and how it has really complimented paintings an artwork from painters such as Paul Delaroche. As many artists thought that “arts of painting” and “arts of photography” would leave little room for the creative representations painters and photographers provide. However, it turned out that Delaroche and many other were wrong and paintings and photos still thrive.

Between the use of film or digital photography, film is the more effective method when looking for originality and creativity. With the adoption of digital photography, the younger generations, as well as the older and more current photographers are becoming lazy. These groups must recognize that the art of the photograph is being jeopardized by the digital camera and the camera phone. For the current photographers as well as amateur photographers, this essay will serve as testimony to film as well as other chemical methods, and how they shouldn’t be ignored, but preferred. The digital era has had a massive impact on the art world and all of its mediums, but for photography this impact has resulted in the removal of the human from the photograph making process. This intimate process is what makes it an art form. All of films imperfections and unique qualities, as well as its monetary value and scarcity are just a few factors that have made it so precious. To replace this entire process with a microchip is offensive and undermines the importance of the process that is needed to make a photograph. Anyone can take a picture but you must make a photograph, and this skill is being simplified to a digital camera. The impact of the digital era on photography has hindered the process of making a photograph; painting the art form obsolete in today’s society.

When photography began to gain not only popularity, but accessibility, it became a topic of discussion on its place in art. Whether if it should be considered a fine art or whether its place lied in documentation. However, even with documentation, a broad assumption was that there could be an immediate trust. Gardner’s Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter proved that was not always the case, that although documenting the truth of the brutality of the Civil War. The addition of the shotgun that added the idea of fighting until the last minute was actually fabricated creating a disillusion. That photography is meant to depict a standstill truth subject, but viewers of photography can forget that it is still an artwork. That a photo is an image set and

This brings us to our discussion of the meaning behind photography, especially the difference between perceived intention and the artist’s actual intention. If someone were to consider Eads ' numerous selfies, one might assume that she has lost touch of her authentic identity and is struggling to build real relationships, as Lucie Hemmen, a Santa Cruz clinical psychologist argues in the article (qtd. in Yadegaran). It is arguable that Lucie

The definitional meaning in any form of art is dependent on the receiver, and their own perceptions. In Chapter Thirteen, Photography’s discursive space, contributed by Rosalind Krauss, analyzes perception of photography and the attempt to transform revelation from one perceptional context to another. For example, an illustration of a mountain may represent beauty to one observer, while another observer may identify the photograph as a geographical documentation.

Art is such an eternal concept and part of our lives. It lives on through generations, transcending many periods, and can speak through many mediums. Art is a way of expression, when nothing else can capture, but is something that can be interpreted in many ways. I chose photography—that which best portrays mankind, in that it hides nothing and only shows what is there to begin with. “It is the language most readily understandable to all and our most important form of communication among nations and cultures.”(Schuneman; Koner 59-60) Two excellent representations of this is a street

Photographer Elliot Erwitt once stated, “To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.” This quote has deeply guided me in my analysis of what I call a cycle of art creation. When one pays close attention to the artwork of a particular artist, one is able to distinguish certain details that prove it is the artist's work. To me, it is significant to be able to establish an artist as their own rather than just another person following the trend. Each artist, whether they notice it or not, has a series of repercussions in their art; there are details that continue to reappear in

For many centuries since their inception, photographs and photography struggled to find its own niche, inspiring heated debates over their value and place in the artistic world. Today, they are viewed as an instrument of artistic expression, inspiring change and thought, reflecting our tastes and interests, as well as social and political realities. The photograph has the ability to inform and educate, as well as to evoke emotion. With its ability to capture a moment in time photograph is a time capsule enclosing the secrets of the people and times that it captured.

Photographers involved in this technique look at photography as more of a true artistic impression than as anything else. The argument compares an artist using brush, paint and canvas to create a work of art, while the photographers use a camera, film to do the same.They see the camera as a tool, like a paint brush that is used in the creation of art.

While we may experience an array of subjective emotions when looking a photo, we generally accept the idea that it depicts the truth in a way that narrative and other images (e.g. paintings) cannot. It is for this reason that photographs are frequently “prized as a transparent account of reality” (Sontag 2003: 81). We can contextualize this association between photography and the truth socio-historically: “photographic techniques came of age in parallel with post-enlightenment science” (Jones 2013: 32). Consequently, photography became bonded with the ideals of post-enlightenment, such as veracity and a lack of bias. This bond was strengthened as photojournalism emerged in the 1920s and 1930s and images became the hallmark form of bearing witness, foolproof evidence that an event occurred (Åker 2012). Today, we frequently demand images as proof (consider, for example, the public outcry that followed when the Obama Administration refused to release images of Osama Bin Laden’s corpse). We also know that images have developed a profound influence on our everyday social interactions; most social networking sites enable users to share images with friends and family, allowing them to narrate their experiences with pictures rather than (or in addition to) words. These images, of course, are intimately related

Graham Clarke, in his book “The Photograph as Fine Art”, states that “photography can be considered as fine art”; which is a statement that I entirely agree with. People all over the world take photos everyday, so why is someone considered an artist while the other is just a person taking photographs? A lot of characteristics differentiate an artist from a hobbyist or a memory collector, such as the ability to properly execute his artistic visions and capture them in an photograph. Another characteristic is how he chooses to structure his photograph and how he positions the objects inside the frame. Artists observe their surroundings in a different way and capture moments in creative and beautiful photographs. “There is a major difference between a snapshot and a photograph. A snapshot captures a moment in time; a photograph captures the emotions, feelings, and beauty from that moment in time”1.

Brooks Jensen began to wonder whether the photography can be referred to artwork. Obviously, more cameras plus more pictures unequal to more art in the contemporary society because numbers of photos dose not mean quality of art. Even though with the development of camera products and the improvement of camera filters, these factors cannot instead of emerging the real value of photography. The real value of photography is not use the good camera products to shot or take one photo optionally, it is always based on the individual experience and insight of our own value how to cognize the world. And to pursuit the quality of photography, we should be slowing down our hand to shot, firstly to think about what we want to make audience understand,