Photography is a hybrid form of art informed by science, social science and the humanities. Also it is the most diverse and democratic of the visual arts. Photography is multiple functions, contexts and meaning within and beyond the art world. This can cause it to sometimes overlap in interesting ways. With art photography accounts there is a very small percentage of the photographs that exist in the world. There are a variety of different types of camera from the camera obscura to the Synoptic Survey Telescope. Also there are different types of photographs from the daguerreotype to the ephemeral Snapchat. With technology evolving it has so many opportunities to make and to experience photographs. They have developed the materials, manufacturing, travel, prints, digital media that they use with photography. From even the earliest forms of photography, it has the offspring of science, technology and nature. This may have considered a hybrid kind of picture-making. Photography has multiplied and diversified as everyone is using photography everyday. Nowadays it’s not artists and theorists using photography. People want to document their lives and their own existence. For example people take photographs when they go on holidays or at formal gatherings.
PHOTOGRAPHY, ISN’T JUST A PRETTY FACE
Photography impregnates our lives. For example the most obvious and common evidence is a 12 week ‘dating’ scan. This is generated via sound instead of light. Photography plays a big part into our family history as we are drawn into the photograph and wonder where they are. It also confirms our own sense of place by giving us clues and resemblances inherited through photographs. Many people hand down photographs of their family members to their children. These photographs that are passed down to them and they will get to see how the photographs have adopted their new poignancies.
IT’S NOT JUST A FAMILY AFFAIR…
Vernacular photographs and precious snapshots have helped to provide a rich inspiration to so many artists. For example artists like Trish Morrissey, Irina Werning and Richard Billingham. These artists have taken inspiration from family photographs and they have disrupted expectations and they have added new layers of context and meaning.
LIFE LESSONS THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY
Most of the photographs that we have encountered were targeted at a much wider audience. However some photographs that are a news outlet or on social media can still have a significant influence on us individually. People’s imagination is informed by their own experiences and photography helps to enable us to see and experience so much more. These experiences can be abstracted illusions however they are convincing. Photography has helped people to be informed about what is going on in the world. By having inventors, pioneers and discoveries who have allowed people to see through their lenses of what they are looking at by taking a photograph.
For example, Wilson Bentley was a self-educated farmer who attracted world attention by pioneering work with snow crystals. He had adapted a microscope to a bellows camera and he was the first person to photograph a single snow crystal in 1885.
Another example is Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was a German physics professor who had discovered the X-ray in 1895. The X-ray could pass through the human tissue however it couldn’t pass through the bones or metal. So he had explored the medical use of the X-ray by making a picture of his wife’s hand on a photographic plate. This was the first photograph that was done of a human body part by using an X-ray. He didn’t have artistic intentions for his discovery of an X-ray photography.
Artists and photographers “borrow” from sciences and humanities so that they can utilize their visual vocabulary for alternative means.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
WEBSITES:
PhotoPedagogy. 2020. Threshold Concepts. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.photopedagogy.com/threshold-concepts.html. [Accessed 30 November 2020].
PhotoPedagogy. 2020. Threshold Concept #3. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.photopedagogy.com/threshold-concept-3.html. [Accessed 30 November 2020].
Kathryn Salsbury photography 