OU blog

Personal Blogs

New photo

MoMA Photography Course Discussion Week 1-2

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Steve Bamlett, Sunday, 27 May 2018, 18:01

How do the photographer’s intentions—whether artistic, scientific, commercial, or personal—influence the final image?

This is not so straight-forward a question as it might seem, since so many variables are involved. If the photographer has an 'intention' that need not be the sole purpose that the image produced serves. This could be because:

  1. The photographer has multiple intentions. If, for instance, a work (such as a collage of the moon's surface) is commissioned for scientific purposes - to record (as accurately as possible) a panorama of the surface - then other purposes could be possible. Some may be public, others private, some conscious, and others unconscious: they may simultaneously be there in fact (at least for the photographer-as-viewer).
  2. The image's purpose or intention could be said to be entirely opaque and, if existent at all, reconstructed by the viewer and hence different for different viewers and types of viewer. This is certainly the case in Atget's work - even in the eclipse scene, the presence or absence of a knowledge of the contextual loss of the Titanic a day before the photograph was made can be seen as 'intentional' but may not be so. This raises the question whether the determinant influence on the picture might not be the viewer's alone - as might be the case in the commentary this week on the picture.
  3. Photographs are not the product of one agency but several. In that case where any conception of 'intention' will be dispersed amongst different agencies. We could say that about multiple prints of the same negative (Ansell Adam's Moonrise) where our commentator infers an intention based on Adam's advancing age that changes somewhat, as Adams' identity changes or varies. Here, in fact, lots of agentive processes within one person are potential.

How does the scale of a photographic print affect our relationship to its subject?

When the scale is fixed 1:1, as in Atget's process, then scale will be preconceived. The preconceptions can be multiple but the framing of the event will have been much more conscious because cropping is not available. Issues of focus arise here too but I don't have enough technical knowledge to comment. Scale can be 'read' as a sign of the intention of the photographer or commissioner. In a recent Tate Liverpool exhibition a reviewer points out that comparisons of Schiele's large expressionist figures belittle Atwood's co-shown photographs precisely because of scalar issues. Are ambitions vis-a-vis, say, artistic purpose, betrayed by scale? There are clearly interactions between determination of subject (ontology and meaning) based on a photograph's scale - what is the 'subject' of Adam's Moonrise against various printings for instance in relation to static scale. Does it matter about the size of a surface photogravure image of a part of moon, in terms of viewer's impression?

Permalink Add your comment
Share post