Analysing and looking at images. First we looked at Stephen Shores "The Nature of Photographs' in which he explains how to 'read' images. Stephen Shore is one of the photographers on your list and he has been working with photography for a long time. MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) is spending a large part of their photography budget this year to buy up his work for their collection. He is now in his 60's but is still commissioned to do work: he teaches, exhibits internationally, makes books and recently had a series of very short moving image pieces published with Phaidon as an app. If you haven't already, look at this book on your reading list and see how a working photographer analyses images. (It's in the library and so is the next book). Roland Barthes, on the other hand, is a French philosopher and comes from another direction. He asks what is special about photography and why should he (or we) be interested it? His book - Camera Lucida, also on your reading, considers the different ways you can understand images and how they affect individual understanding and interpretation. Roland Barthes explains two very different ways in 'the studium' and 'the punctum'. I suggested that everyone should use this approach to reading images somewhere in their blogs. Look at the above photograph and try to understand what it is of and how you feel about it. If anything.
http://seesawmagazine.com/shore_pages/shore_interview.html
Shore, S. (2007) The
Nature of Photographs by Stephen Shore, Phaidon
Barthes, R (2000, 1981)
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Vintage
