Within the first reading titled The Modern Public and Photography,
Charles Baudelaire makes mockery of multiple titles of artworks. He states that we are moving downward
in progress; that every day we are losing skills that are simply obtained by
patience. Baudelaire then goes on to talk about how the people that make up
France and incapable of feeling the “ecstasy” that artists could show in true
art and therefore the artists bow down to the French society and give them what
they want. He mentions the ideas
of realism and reproduction of nature through painting and statuary. He is completely against the idea of
reproduction through photography. Baudelaire
believes that photography has become the go to industry for those who have
failed at being painters for various different reasons. He believes that photography should
only be used for keeping our memories and that painters are now forced to paint
what they see and not what they dream of.
On the other hand in the second
reading, Photography and Photography and
Artistic-Photography, Marius De Zayas thought of photography as the “herald
of a new artistic age”.
Photography is stated as not being Art or as being an art. Art is stated
as being the Idea and Photography as being the Nature. It is said that through nature comes
ideas. The reading discusses how
some artists get their inspiration from museums and therefore they build on the
past; except for Picasso (an artist of the time), who searches for new
forms. Europeans conducted
experiments using Africans by having them draw from nature; those experimented
on always gave importance in decorative items that represent abstract
expression. It is stated that form
can only be “transcribed through a mechanical process, in which the
craftsmanship of man does not enter as a principal factor.” Photography is said to be the
representation of concrete facts. It is later stated that although photography
is not Art but that photographs can be made to be Art.
The third reading titled, The Paradoxes of Digital Photography, by
Lev Manovich starts by discussing technologies that have all extremely changed
what a photograph is now. Manovich
then goes on to talk about how computer graphics simulates sets and actors in
movies and that film may soon disappear but not cinema. He also talks about that a difference
between traditional and digital photography is the amount of information that
is included in an image. He
mentions a program for Macintosh called Live Picture that can allow someone to
work with a photo at any size. He
discusses the difference between a film-based photograph and a grid of pixels
taking up computer space on a hard-drive.
Manovich says that 3-D computer graphics can technically be digital or
synthetic photography. He states
that the goal of computer graphics is not exactly realism but more
photorealism; that they are attempting to depict something either from the real
world or something made up as realistically as possible. He uses Jurassic Park as an example to
get his points across.
