Textual Analysis Of Blow-Up

This photograph is unique in introducing a new means of expression through photographic essay, recalling both artistic expression, as well as journalistic

This idea hinges on the conceptualization of artists using their art not just to tell a story, but also to act as a sight of personal and political rebellion. Though the idea of using art to make a political statement is nothing new, it becomes increasingly significant when the film’s historical context is addressed. The beginning of the film places the viewer in 1920’s Mexico a few years after the end of the Mexican Civil War. In a global context, this also places the viewer in a world recently rocked by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia just as few years before.

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).

‘A picture says a thousand words’ this analogy often refers to photographs with immense amount of detail and meaning that it doesn’t need words or any description to exemplify its context. A photograph in particular engages an indicative role into promoting an issue that’s typical of the time. A photograph that highlights copious meaning is evident in Lawrence Beitler’s ‘Lynching of young blacks’. A role of a photograph is to provoke emotions and empathise within the subject of the picture. To do so, famous photographs often accommodate numerous conventions including the historical context, symbolic codes and technical codes. These codes and conventions operate simultaneously to epitomise the significance behind a

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.

Ever since the camera was invented in 1839, the very nature of photography has been questioned. With the increasing advent of photographic technology, photography has become an egalitarian expression of society and community. With one press of a button, an image is captured for eternity, bringing to question the inherent artistic quality of photographs. If we can so quickly capture an image, can this be deemed art? Art is to promote fantasy, and dream, to incite anger and joy. Thus, surely photography is an art, as seen through its capturing of beautiful verdant landscapes, and the horrendous

This essay aims to further extend Pasolini’s argument on the long take through a textual analysis of the Zapruder film and comparing it to a two minute extract of The Eternal Frame.

He explains how various disciplines – such as photography, film, and typography – were not “immune to the programme of Modernism”1. The author uses an example of such through a photographer called Aleksandr Rodchenko, who viewed photography as a chance to shift away from conventional painting through objective realism. He discusses the ‘belly-button’ viewpoint, and how this paved the way for objective realism in photography: “this viewpoint gave me an impression of its massiveness [the Eiffel Tower] and constructiveness.” . Ultimately, Rodchenko was advocating for an extension for the way in which photography defined reality. At this time, other artists used photography in purely abstract forms, for instance, experimentation in paintings. Pop art is also outlined in the book as a major reaction against the elitism of International Modernism in the 1950s and 1960s. Pop Art is distinguished as an extension of the Dadaism movement, through its socially concerned

In conjunction with the towering Tyrell Corporation headquarters, the enormous neon advertisements make it clear that consumerism and escapism are the city’s driving cultural forces. Two of the ads that are repeated throughout the film, “Enjoy Coca-Cola” and an image of a smiling pill popping woman, both promote a blissful, uncaring attitude. Moreover, every inch of signage in the city is a shade of neon, regardless of language. The result is an almost psychedelic cacophony of glowing, unnatural colors. The city’s design offers no pretenses about its artificial nature and is deliberately made to look as unnatural as possible, without even a simulation of open space or greenery.

Within a situation based around a real landscape there may be many conflicting opinions perspectives, which can be emphasized further by the specific media of production used. An example of this in filmic media is how Giosue and, to and extent, the audience views the concentration camp in Life is Beautiful. The happy atmosphere Guido creates in juxtaposition to the place around him is captured through film and creates the two significantly different views of the camp. The journey to the Interior uses textual media and describes in detail a hill landscape, which Atwood links back to her subconscious. ‘The hills which the eyes make flat as walls’. The description of the real hills as a landscape creates the two different perceptions of the story, one as a visual representation that the reader can picture, and the other as a metaphor for Atwood’s mind, which connect the readers with her on a profound level. The media of production helps to portray certain attitudes towards landscapes, connecting the audience emotionally with the story and

But just as every painting is not a piece of artwork, Demachy argued that not every photograph could be art either. Instead, he proposed that we look beyond mediums to see how artworks share a kinship of sorts in their ability to find beauty in the “ugly and commonplace” by being a “transcription...of nature.” As Demachy points out, the rise of popular photography should not undermine photography’s potential for art making, just as the availability of charcoal and paint sets had not threaten painting’s

Throughout the years, I have become more appreciative of the different forms of art that come from the art community. In a sense, it is in comparison to a student, who grows intellectually and spiritually. Prior to the film, I had no relation let alone hardly any information on the poster making business. Moreover, from the given film, “Just like being there” directed by Scout Shannon expands the mind of the watcher through the origin and the upcoming of the many artists in the American gig poster scene.

It creates an illogical connection between ‘here-now’ and the ‘there-then’. As the photograph is a means of recording a moment, it always contains ‘stupefying evidence of this is how it was’. In this way, the denoted image can naturalise the connoted image as photographs retain a ‘kind of natural being there of objects’; that is, the quality of having recorded a moment in time. Barthes stresses that as technology continues to “develop the diffusion of information (and notably of images), the more it provides the means of masking the constructed meaning under the appearance of the given meaning’ (P159-60).

First of all, I really like the opening sentence. It immodestly caught my attention and made me want to read more. It explains how it can be easy to forget that we all live in a physical world. We are actually part of something, not just an imagination. It then goes on to explain that we live in such a digital age, and everything we hear, see, games, apps, videos, news articles, and photographs are produced by us, real humans. But the things that we consider genuine do not actually exist. This really makes you think, what does this mean? Well, for example I am reading this on my laptop, and the letters I am reading an typing are conceived as impulses or energy rather than things. Old photos have been scanned and made digital. Even though we can hold the printed image physically, it has a place in the world. It’s occupying space. The mid 1940’s has physical presence as well. The images I am about to talk about are accurate representations of a city struggling to rebuild and again some sense of “normality” after suffering destruction of WW2. The damage of the images, like the spot, mold, etc, are eerie but they provide another way to consider what we call “real.” All of the things McAvoy captured, did happen. Yet, after the war, the only to you could find was hunger, cold, and depression. His images were taken and transformed into something else that was “ear-abstract, ghostly works, within which one can still see remnants of the robust photojournalism that McAvoy

His images are rich in detail, and there is not a thing in the frame—not a stain, not a lampshade—that he does not carefully select. And yet, this abundance of detail is balanced with a striking lack of information—the settings are ordinary (a suburban kitchen, a living room, a dark street corner)—and, more importantly, the frame is de-contextualized: we