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Brayden Schrader

Documentary and Photography

David B

Feb 7 2019

Activism

Photography is a never ending subject and will continue to change everyday. There are so many different types of ways to photograph something and how to do it. One big subject of photography is Documentary. I like in the beginning of the book how it states that basically every photography is documentary, because it's kinda true. No matter what the photograph is its documenting something. Whether it's a piece of candy or homeless people, it's still evidence in front of the camera that you captured. This entire subject is hard to process, because where do you draw the line? What really is classified as documentary?

The book talks about documentary being a journey, and I fully agree with that. I think in order to fully say you're doing something for documentary you have to have spent a good amount of time studying that subject, and only focusing on that. You can't just photograph the mountains once and call it quits and say boom I did a documentary on the mountains. You've gotta revisit those mountains time after time to see the change and to show how that place has evolved or changed. To me, the best galleries of documentary are the ones who spent months and months even years at the location, shooting everything they could.

I think one of the biggest problems today about how documentary has changed is simply photoshop and image manipulation. People thrive to get that best image, and best composition, and are willing to do anything they can to get in the spotlight. Because of this people will tend to move things around in the frame or delete something in the frame to make it that much more appealing to the eye. Us photographers understand that little things can distract the eye or engage the eye even more to the photo, and that's why I think it's so hard to do Documentary photography. Whatever your eye sees, needs to be the picture. You cant remove something or alter how it looks, because that's not documentary anymore.

Still to this day I believe war photography is hands down the best documentary to me. It doesn't matter how many times somebody shows me a war photograph, I'm instantly appealed to it. I think im very intrigued by it mainly because I've never seen anything like this before. The photographs shows nothing but the truth of what happened. It shows the thousands of people who gave their life for this country, and how this country was built and formed. People forgot very quickly about our past and what has happened to get where we are today. The war photographs will forever be around to show the world and show the brutal honesty of what happened. There is no sugar coating anything or something fake. What you see…. Is what happened…

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Brayden Schrader

Documentary and photography

David Blumenkrantz

Feb 21 2019

Bergamot Station

Looking at photography or any types of art work in a gallery always seems to make the work that much better. Going to the Getty or downtown to Broadway you just get a feeling of this is the best work, and this is amazing - to me anyway. Having the artwork hung up and strategically placed by professionals just adds to the presentation. The Bergamot Station is a another prime example on how a place can add to the artworks presentation.

The Bergamot Station is located in SoCal, and is one of the largest art gallery complexes in the area. This beautiful place is located in the heart of Santa Monica, and takes up eight acres on land. If that doesn't explain to you how big it is then I don't know what else will. Because of the huge facility, the Station can host many different presentations of art including contemporary art, architecture, along with presenting a bunch of photographers instead of just one or two like some galleries do.

One of the exhibitions that I wanted to look at a little bit closer for you guys is the “The Family of Man.” This body of work was initiated by the one and only Edward Steichen and went on to tour the world for many years. Millions, and millions of people saw these photographs around the world reaching over 91 cities, and 38 different countries. That's insane. During this time period, life you could say was not the best. There were plenty of wars going on and plenty of people dying, and I feel as if that was one of the main reasons he decided to take this idea seriously and show so many pictures of people, and families. The exhibition did a great job showing the wide scope of human experiences and interactions between one another. Many people who looked at the exhibition believed that the work showed peace and the fundamental qualities of mankind. Again, these photographs came out around the Cold war, so I can understand why these photographs represented life, and peace to people. Having a wide variety of photographs that show love, children, death, work, play, pain, and pleasure showed the “essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.”

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Brayden Schrader

Blog 14

Photography has come a long way and it continues to advance each and every day. It's crazy to think how much it's changed, by simply going from the dark room to mass editing in a photo lab with hundreds of people on computers. It's also kinda cool how the entire shooting process has changed. From loading film and taking 1 shot at a time, to holding down a trigger and having 2,000 CR2’s saving on a SD. It's really quite fascinating looking back on how far the photo world has come. Today I’m actually going to be talking about your own link that you provided. ( http://world.time.com/timelapse/ ) I'm always fascinated by pictures of the other planets, mainly because I want to know what's out there, along with millions of other people I promise.  Going into the information about this post; The most recent member of the fleet, Landsat 8, went aloft in February. At an altitude of 438 miles (705 km), the satellites can make one orbit of Earth every 84.3 minutes. Doing this for  up to 41 years, maintaining a photographic record of your travels, and you compile a whole lot of pictures — millions of them, which have since been digitized into petabytes, or billions of bytes of data.Consider: a standard TV image uses about one-third of a million pixels per frame, while a high-definition image uses 2 million. The Landsat images, by contrast, weigh in at 1.8 trillion pixels per frame, the equivalent of 900,000 high-def TVs assembled into a single mosaic.

Being able to get our hands on these images are beneficial in so many ways. One of the biggest ways It helps out is just proving what is real and what isn't. We know what the moon and sun look like thanks to telescopes. Along with pictures of mars and plenty of other moons and galaxies in the solar system. Having these huge images can prove what is really out there, and along with helping out with providing information about future life on other planets or some crazy shit. It's really crazy seeing how big the world is and how small we really are. You can even see us like it's crazy to think about. I believe lots of these photographs so what the real world looks like if you get out. That's what so special about photography, you can make a moment be remembered for for ever. Having pictures of these icebergs is something good to have. Think 50 some years from now and global warming melted them all. We have pictures and documentation of how they looked. Hope you guys enjoy the pictures I provided here, and I hope you enojoyed the blogs I put up for you guys. I sadly, will be taking a leave from this page, but dont worry Ill be backkkkk ( Terminator 

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Brayden Schrader

Blog 13

“As a methodology conceptual photography is a type of photography that is staged to represent an idea. The 'concept' is both preconceived and, if successful, understandable in the completed image.”

Conceptual photography has got to be one of my favorite genres we looked at / have to do a blog about. I really like that the genre can range from so many different types of photography, witches makes every  photo unique in its own way. I like how every photo has one big meaning, and everything in the photo helps to convey the message the artists tried to create or vision.

The Conceptual photographer I’m going to cover for you guys is Hiroshi Sugimoto.

This first image is one of my favorites he took. To me I think this image is all about the power and purity of the world. It shows the big ass bear in razor sharp focus on his fur and face. You can see just how big he really is, and how he's just 10x bigger than the seal he's about to snack on. Sugimoto wanted to capture the real time moments and display the natural history that happens. I also really enjoy the photograph he took of the electric chair. I'm not really sure why I’m appealed to it, but It's crazy to think about how real it is.

The last Conceptual photography I want to look at is by Gregory Crewdson. I really enjoy the way he makes all his photos chromatic and very cinematic. Crewdson's ideas are geared towards the disturbing and surreal events. His photographs are elaborately staged and lit using crews familiar with motion picture production and lighting large scenes using motion picture film equipment and technique. However just because it's staged doesn't mean things like this don't happen, and I think that's why I like the images so much. I like the message and the reality he's trying to bring across. Crewdson’s photography became a convoluted mix between his formal photography education and his experimentation with the perspective of life and death.The photograph with the bus flipped over has got to be my favorite one. It's so true and real to me, I can totally see the kids all just surrounding the bus having zero clue what to do. The location goes perfect with the photograph and helps the story line, just a small little town with the mountains in the back.

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Brayden Schrader

Blog 12

Modernism - “A general term used to encompass trends in photography from roughly 1910-1950 when photographers began to produce works with a sharp focus and an emphasis on formal qualities, exploiting, rather than obscuring, the camera as an essentially mechanical and technological tool.” Modernism spans from history paintings to still lifes, to landscapes. The traditional sculpture and academic paintings dominated most of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Modernism art also can have a personal expression allowing a huge variety of artists and kinds of artwork created. The only problem with modernism is that most of the pieces were mass created and the values behind the pieces were very alike. “With modern art, there is this new emphasis put on the value of being original and doing something innovative,” ( says Ho ) I think this quote is perfect at describing the modernist style. I also believe that modernism photography was heavily focused on the shapes, lines and the true reality in front of the lens. I believe that Alfred Stieglitz was a key photographer, and was one of the best photographers at the time, if not the best.  

Postmodernism started in the late 20th century and focused more on philosophy and criticism. This is where it marked the start of the end of modernism. Postmodernism focused more on “what really is art” and they challenged everything like everything to be art. The word “banal” is often used in relation to postmodern photography. Banal means “ordinary” or even “boring.” As traditional photography focuses on subjects that are interesting, unusual, or beautiful, the choice of banal subject matter is an obvious one for postmodern photography. Again, the idea is to challenge the viewer. The artist asks a question or, rather, forces the viewer to ask, if the subject is ordinary or boring, whether the image is still a work of art. I think in general Postmodernism is just a body of work that wanted to challenge the old art. The artists wanted to contradict some aspects of modernism and reject the previous artistic trends. Artists used different colors and text in abstract ways which was not known of in modernism. Again, I believe Postmodernism was all about exploring the different types of art and breaking out of the boundaries of the typical “modernism” shot.

These are some of my favorite postmodernism photographs. The one that always comes to my mind first is the urinal. I'll always remember the story behind it and how it changed the world for forever. What really is art? I can remember sitting in class with my teacher learning about it. I also really enjoy the huge ass balloon animal. If you remember we actually saw one similar along with a big ass table at that museum next to Walt Disney Hall. I really enjoy looking at that stuff. Its crazy what people come up with and how they can make some strings or random pieces hanging from the ceiling look like a face and then a building from a different angle. I love being creative and that's why I can enjoy looking at all different types of art pieces.  

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Brayden Schrader

Blog 11

Hey there guys, today I’m going to be writing to you about an Art exhibit. Not only are these pieces of work beautiful, but they are on display at the Getty Museum. In my mind I think this adds to the presentation of the work. Something about being at the Getty makes it feel that much more special, and or fancy.

The body of work were looking at is “Sally Mann.” This body of work is created by Sally Munger which is her real name, born on May 1, 1951. Sally is an American photographer who grew up in Lexington, Viriginia. She was introduced to photography by her father which then led her to photographing the 3 litte girls. These photographs have gotten a bunch of reactions - from happy to extremely pissed that this is child porn. I think personally that these pieces of work are directly linked to the “deconstruction” type of photography. I say this, because Sally wasnt scared to test the boundaries and limits of what she could take pictures of. She addresssed the big problems in the south like childhood, and death and showed that through her pictures.  This exhibition considers how the legacy of the South—as both homeland and graveyard, refuge and battleground—has shaped the artist’s career and continues to inform the American experience.

Mann also grew up surrounded by  American Civil War, allowing her to take some amazing photographs. To me, the battlefield pictures are the most interesting. Nearly a third of the battles had been fought in her home state, so death was crawling all around her. Mann had her own unique photgraphy style that help add to her style and theme or the photos. Mann used a nineteenth-century process for producing glass negatives of the landscapes, embracing technical imperfections for their dramaticrossings”  resonance. The battlefield pictures were taken with an antique lense along with a low angle shot to help with the foggy, unsettling history of what happened here. Sally Mann did a great job deconstructing the south with “A Thousand Crossing.”

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Brayden Schrader

Blog 10

de·​con·​struc·​tion | \ˌdē-kən-ˈstrək-shən  \

Definition of deconstruction

1: a philosophical or critical method which asserts that meanings, metaphysical constructs, and hierarchical oppositions (as between key terms in a philosophical or literary work) are always rendered unstable by their dependence on ultimately arbitrary signifiers also : an instance of the use of this method a deconstruction of the nature–culture opposition in Rousseau's work

: the analytic examination of something (such as a theory) often in order to reveal its inadequacy

Deconstruction is a form of criticism first used by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1970s. Jacques challenged that there is not one single intrinsic meaning to be found in a work, but rather many, and often these can be conflicting. A deconstructive approach to criticism involves recognising, discovering, and understanding the underlying and unspoken and implicit assumptions, ideas and frameworks of cultural forms such as works of art.

I think it's very interesting how Jacques talks about our language and how we have to continually modify it, and change it so we can understand it, but we will actually never get the perfect meaning. There's always something else that could be tied to it or wrong or flawed. I find it very interesting on the fact if you look too closely at the text it might lose its meaning. I think Deconstruction plays an important role on how we look and visualize things these days.

“The very meaning and mission of deconstruction is to show that things–texts, institutions, traditions, societies, beliefs, and practices of whatever size and sort you need–do not have definable meanings and determinable missions, that they are always more than any mission would impose, that they are always more than any mission could impose, that they exceed the boundaries they currently occupy..A “meaning” or a “mission” is a way to contain and compact things, like a nutshell, gathering them into a unity, whereas deconstruction bends all its efforts to stretch beyond these boundaries, to transgress these confines, to interrupt and disjoint all such gatherings.Whatever it runs up against a limit, deconstruction presses against. Whenever deconstruction finds a nutshell–a secure axiom or a pithy maxim–the very idea is to crack it open and disturb this tranquility. Indeed, that is a good rule of thumb in deconstruction. That is what deconstruction is all about, its very meaning and mission, if it has any. One might say that cracking nutshells is what deconstruction is. In a nutshell.”

I think this quote does a wonderful job explaining why Deconstruction is important and will always be found. NO MATTER what it is we can always challenge the meaning or stretch the boundaries of it. NO matter what is we can find a different meaning in it or find a different mission behind it. Reading about this can really alter how you think about things.

Watching this video I had changed my mind a bit on how I think of the ownership of the art. It's weird to think about just because you wrote the book yourself does not mean that you're not copying someone. Those words had to be created and textualized by someone before you. I think he stated it perfect on how photographs only have meaning if you understand whats going on. For prime example the circle in the sand could mean absolutely nothing to someone if they have no clue what a smiley face is. Everything in this world can be seen or interrupted a million different ways and it's crazy to think of that. Just think that a red and green light is so easily read in our minds, but some people across the world literally have no clue what that even means. Pretty cool video!

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I can’t seem to post the original photo. It keeps telling me my post is flagged and its inappropriate? Anyway, Im not sure what to do about that... Sorry 

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Here is the painting and Pepsi Ad I was talking about. 

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The first big problem that occured with the photo was a painting. The painting cropped out much of the image and just shows a man throwing a molotov cocktail. Joy Garnett painted this image in 2003 and exhibited it as the piece called Riot. Now as you can see this is where the problem occured. Susan had no intentions of conveying a riot out of her photograph, and Garnett had just taken the photo, changed it to a completely different meaning, and did not ask for her permission. It doesn't just stop at paintings though. The photo was altered and put on matchbox covers, in newspapers, and in campaigns to fundraise money. The list continues on, and on. It was only a matter of time a  company would try to make a new advertisement using that photo. My personal favorite one is the one with Pepsi. How crazy is it that a Molotov cocktail turns into a pepsi bottle, and then somehow turned into an ad that makes people want buy their product. Like look at the starting point of the meaning of the photograph, and now its a Pepsi Ad. Wow.  I'll be posting some of the pics below to show the difference in what the photo was to what the photo has been altered to.

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Brayden Schrader

Blog 9 Many photos have been altered and / or copied throughout many years. One photo for prime example is the “Molotov Man.” Taken in 1979, Susan Meiselas traveled throughout Nicaragua during the Nicaraguan Revolution. This photo was captured for a reason, and meant a lot to the history of the Nicaragua. This photo shows the man throwing a bomb at the Somoza national guard garrison. This fight was legendary and showed that the Sandinistas would soon have power over the garrisons. That's why Susan took this photo at the time, and why it meant so much to her. Unfortunately this photo was altered and changed for many things.

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Man With a Movie Camera is a famous film from 1929. The movie stars a man that travels around a city with his camera bag slung up over his shoulder. The film is a documentary of day to day life in the Soviet Union, occasionally featuring the Camera man himself. Dziga Vertov, incorporates jump cuts, odd angles, split screens, double exposures, extreme close-ups, and a rapid-fire montage to document the interaction of the ordinary Soviet citizen with the hectic rhythm of life. With these film techniques he travels throughout Moscow, Odessa and Kiev from sunrise to sunset capturing and documenting his journey. Vertov includes the modernity of the city, along with the great big buildings and cities. The film ends up to be a grand tour of the cities.

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Vladimir Tatlin was one of the beginning Constructive photographers. Vladimir was a Soviet painter and architect. One of his most famous pieces is the Tatlin Tower, or other known as the Monument to the Third International. The tower had special features that tested designs and new looks. People have never seen these spiral looking buildings before. This building was symbolic, and was going to challenge the Eiffel Tower. Vladimir had unique ideas that nobody would even try to do such as the building rotating, and constantly moving. I believe he made a significant change to the world of architecture.

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Brayden Schrader

Blog 8

Constructivism goes way back, in fact it was originated in Russia during the year 1913. Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that rejected the normal idea of autonomous art. Vladimir Tatlin wanted to think more, and go beyond what normal art was. Tatlin wanted to “construct” art and play with the abstract dimensions in art.

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The person I picked is Zhang Xiaogang. His haunting paintings engage with the notion of identity within the Chinese culture of collectivism. His work centres around the concept of family, taking inspiration from family photos from the Cultural Revolution period. It is as though through memory, Zhang is creating an extremely personal version of China’s history. I personally really do like these images. Each image has a strong subject that really pulls my eye to. The way he picks and selects which exact colors he wants and the location is un real. He has a perfect sense of framing and proportion to the size of the image. Another thing I really like about these photos, is that I can make up so many different stories to what is happening in the photograph. The photograph is open to so many interpretations, and visions to what the piece of work is conveying. However, I would like to see him trying out different locations, and maybe spicing it up. Maybe try a different living room lay out, or make a scene in a bathroom or kitchen. These are just some of the images I like and was referring to.  

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Brayden Schrader

Blog 7

Located in California Ansel Adams and the f/64 gang used their own techniques to get great work. They believed in the shooting style “Purism.” The gang of guys believed every single photograph needs to be in razor sharp focus. Nothing in the photo can be blurred or not sharp. Ansel Adams believed the camera could see more than the naked eye, so they decided to exploit this. These f/64 members believed in only high apertures hence their name. They used large format cameras, and stayed as far away from painting as they could. For many years in America they strived, and did well. This group has left their legacy, and people still look up to these legends.

Pictoralists on the other hand believe in a little different approach. Going back to 1864, the Pictorialism genre began to grow. This genre allows for the use of any tools or methods to create the image. LIterally anything can be done or said in these images. Each style has their own unique style and look. For example the F/64 members are great at landscapes. Although both are effective they both have their negatives. This is where people tend to argue which way to use, because some people take the editing too far and make the photos way too fake.