Summary Of Andre Bazin's The Ontology Of The Photographic Image

In today’s society, we are constantly being bombarded with visual art forms. Whether they be classical paintings from the Renaissance, a towering and modern skyscraper, or even a cheesy 90’s R&B music video, they all have one thing in common. According to Carolyn Dean’s definition, these would all fall under the category of “art by intention.” In her essay “The Trouble with (The Term) Art” she advocates a distinction between art by intention and what she deems “art by appropriation.” The difference is that one work was created with the intention of being consumed for visual pleasure, while the other was not. However having been educated in the Western school of thought, many art historians cannot help but project their rigid definition of art onto civilizations that may have

Marcel Duchamp stated that "It was his achievement to treat the camera as he treated the paintbrush, as a mere instrument at the service of the mind” (Biography.com, 2017). In addition, the photogram might seem expressive and abstract, yet on the contrary, it is the precise medium to document the everyday objects in an unrepeatable and somehow uncontrollable way. The artist cannot predict how the selected objects will be recorded under the light sources that were tampered with. From the first glance, the image completely dissociated from its original subject, allowing one’s memory to fill the gap. Yet below its surface, the image is an accurate documentation that captured a moment of psychical intensity. It revealed a new visual experience, using objects in the simplest way. One can say that the use of this medium disclosed reality more preciously due to its invisibility and mysterious representation (The Museum of Modern Art, 2017).

The earliest forms of art had made it’s mark in history for being an influential and unique representation of various cultures and religions as well as playing a fundamental role in society. However, with the new era of postmodernism, art slowly deviated away from both the religious context it was originally created in, and apart from serving as a ritual function. Walter Benjamin, a German literary critic and philosopher during the 1900’s, strongly believed that the mass production of pieces has freed art from the boundaries of tradition, “For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependance on ritual” (Benjamin 1992). This particular excerpt has a direct correlation with

Throughout human history people used to capture the reality of their time, express their feelings and share their impressions by copying both literally or figurative the mundane. The so-called artists have had different impacts in society all along the centuries. Only a few are currently taught in school, although the reverberation of their work is still impregnated in XXI Century. Nowadays, the term ‘artist’ can be used in reference of painters, sculptors, writers, singers, choreographers and other professions whose production are considered valuable culturally speaking. One of the main problems is that their work produce such a magnificent impact on the audience the artist is set aside and usually forgotten as a person, so they feel their rights to be violated.

Art had played an important role in building up civilizations from all over the world through thousands of centuries. It is and will always still the way of projecting artists’ ideas and thoughts into meaningful and tangible objects which we called “work of art”. In addition, It was the path through all these years that dug its way to reach to our current century to show us the beauty of every single era starting from the Upper Paleolithic Period of time (42,000 – 8,000 BCE) reaching to our contemporary artists of today.

Susan Sontag discusses the difference in viewing art in physical form versus viewing in through a lens. Throughout the essay “In Plato’s Cave”, Sontag thinks both Plato’s cave images and photographs represents, “the mere image of truth” (Sontag 3). With that, Sontag repeatedly uses the terms “truth” and “reality”, but does not define what these terms mean to her. The impression Sontag left for these terms is that “truth” or “reality” stand for nothing more than what we can see. Being said, the difference between what we can with our own eyes and what we can see with a camera is reduced to the physical/mechanical differences between the human eye and body camera/lens.

Intro Text: Society, As Told Through Still Life is an exhibit of works that aim to portray different facets of life through the use of objects. Since the conception of photography in the 1830s, the use of people and the landscapes in which people reside are often used to depict human life. However, the use of found objects in still life are seen in certain themes, such as the vanitas, a Dutch genre of painting that embodies the use of objects to showcase death and the inevitability of change. This exhibit features work that uses still life to convey motifs ever-present in human existence. These motifs range from ideas that mimic the familiar and perennial vanitas genre, to ideas of contemporary phantoms that plague people today. Objects that

Over the course of the year, I have written a multitude of Monday Memoirs. However, there are a few that I think stand out above all the rest. One of these is about a man who picked up a wallet he found, but left it there are ran for his life. The main character, Nicholas, is followed by a strange figure. He is unable to escape, and Nicholas is taken away in a mysterious car. I put a great deal of effort into this writing piece, and that is why I believe it turned out as well as it did.

With images, words, and sounds been almost endlessly reproduced and distributed, various critics of modern culture suggest that traditional ideas about art and authenticity are no longer applicable. The problem is said to have been noticed back in the 1930s in the popular essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that was concerned about what would happen to the “aura” of unique works of art when photography and other techniques if anybody could make unlimited copies of images. With the rise of digital technology, copying ability became vast and complex and hence the idea of originality is thrown into

Photographs are re-collections of the past. This essay is about photography, memory, and history and addresses the relationship between photographic images and the need to remember; it is based on the notion that seeing is a prelude to historical knowledge and that understanding the past relies on the ability to imagine. At the same time, the role of thought and imagination in the production of society--as reflected in the earlier work of Louis Althusser (1970), Maurice Godelier (1984) and perhaps more significantly, Cornelis Castoriadis (1975), suggests yet another role for photography in the construction of a social and cultural reality. Photographs in capitalist societies contribute to the production of information and participate in the surveillance of the environment where their subjective and objective qualities are applied to the private uses of photographic images in the perpetuation of memory.

I will be addressing the framing of the February 2014 article entitled “A softer side to policing: LAPD squad working to build trust.” In this article, the journalist lays out the signified and the framing to which he will place them in to reshape public opinion. In this framing, the Los Angeles Police and the population of the Jordan Downs Housing Complex are the signified.

In this time of life, where things have changed to a better world, it still exist massacre, what it's called death penalty. "United Stated is one of the six nations that commonly continue with this dramatic scenario" (Human Rights).Debates and political issues have been put into effect to stop this cruel and inhuman punishment. Since early years people have the belief of killing each other to solve their problem; what's the idea of slaughter if pain would not be applicable? We should keep them breathing to make them suffer the same way they cause the suffer ness of us or other people.

Benjamin’s death in 1940 at the age of 48, is rumored to be a suicide when the Naza’s took office, but is still a mystery. His ideas and concepts however, would live on for decades to come. Much of what he wrote about when discussing art came essentially after the development of photography and film. In his work, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin addresses his perception of the changes in art and the aesthetic experience congruent with societal changes. He writes with concern of how the great artworks are viewed after the introduction of photography and film. His idea of mechanical reproduction changed the art world as society knew it, particularly in how the public views artwork and the value of that work as more and more people are able to own, view and discuss it. This paper will specifically look at aspects of Benjamin’s groundbreaking essay and how educators can relate his ideas to the practices in their art classrooms.

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.

Art critic Robert Hughes once said, “People inscribe their histories, beliefs, attitudes, desires and dreams in the images they make.” When discussing the mediums of photography and cinema, this belief of Hughes is not very hard to process and understand. Images, whether they be still or moving, can transform their audiences to places they have either never been before or which they long to return to. Images have been transporting audiences for centuries thanks to both the mediums of photography and cinema and together they gone through many changes and developments. When careful consideration is given to these two mediums, it is acceptable to say that they will forever be intertwined, and that they have been interrelated forms of