43,191 research outputs found

    Invented Worlds: India through the Camera Lens of Waswo X. Waswo

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    Introduction : photography between art history and philosophy

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    The essays collected in this special issue of Critical Inquiry are devoted to reflection on the shifts in photographically based art practice, exhibition, and reception in recent years and to the changes brought about by these shifts in our understanding of photographic art. Although initiated in the 1960s, photography as a mainstream artistic practice has accelerated over the last two decades. No longer confined to specialist galleries, books, journals, and other distribution networks, contemporary art photographers are now regularly the subject of major retrospectives in mainstream fine-art museums on the same terms as any other artist. One could cite, for example, Thomas Struth at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (2003), Thomas Demand at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) (2005), or Jeff Wall at Tate Modern and MoMA (2006–7). Indeed, Wall’s most recent museum show, at the time of writing, The Crooked Path at Bozar, Brussels (2011), situated his photography in relation to the work of a range of contemporary photographers, painters, sculptors, performance artists, and filmmakers with whose work Wall considers his own to be in dialogue, irrespective of differences of media. All this goes to show that photographic art is no longer regarded as a subgenre apart. The situation in the United Kingdom is perhaps emblematic of both photography’s increasing prominence and its increased centrality in the contemporary art world over recent years. Tate hosted its first ever photography survey, Cruel and Tender, as recently as 2003, and since then photography surveys have become a regular biannual staple of its exhibition programming, culminating in the appointment of Tate’s first dedicated curator of photography in 2010. A major shift in the perception of photography as art is clearly well under way

    Reframing the Canadian Oil Sands

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    Hedging and Blending of Advertising Design Elements in Nigerian Newspapers: An Aesthetic Analysis

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    The study made aesthetic judgments on four select newspaper advertisements employing the visual analysis approach and hedging it on subjectivity and universal validity planks of Kant’s theory. The ads were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively using a modification of the Likert scale which helped reduce the elements of background, colour, layout, typography, words and message into measurable terms. It found that aesthetic experience are better heightened with a dynamic blend of textual matters and visuals, while colours should play the role bleeding to help intensify the message rather than adding expressive ‘beauty’. Class of the consumers as influenced by content of the advertisements, context for consuming the advertisements as well as cognition were found to be very significant is saying which advertisement was ‘good’ or ‘very good’. However, all four advertisements had different level of appeals. It recommended amongst others a dynamic blend of the advertising elements so as to maximize the aesthetic experience of the individual and ultimately meaning construction and sharing. Key words: aesthetic, advertisements, ad elements, taste, appeal, meaning construction

    6 Seconds of Sound and Vision: Creativity in Micro-Videos

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    The notion of creativity, as opposed to related concepts such as beauty or interestingness, has not been studied from the perspective of automatic analysis of multimedia content. Meanwhile, short online videos shared on social media platforms, or micro-videos, have arisen as a new medium for creative expression. In this paper we study creative micro-videos in an effort to understand the features that make a video creative, and to address the problem of automatic detection of creative content. Defining creative videos as those that are novel and have aesthetic value, we conduct a crowdsourcing experiment to create a dataset of over 3,800 micro-videos labelled as creative and non-creative. We propose a set of computational features that we map to the components of our definition of creativity, and conduct an analysis to determine which of these features correlate most with creative video. Finally, we evaluate a supervised approach to automatically detect creative video, with promising results, showing that it is necessary to model both aesthetic value and novelty to achieve optimal classification accuracy.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figures, conference IEEE CVPR 201

    Polaroid, aperture, and Ansel Adams: rethinking the industry-aesthetic divide

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    This article takes the history of Polaroid photography as an opportunity to question a presupposition that underpins much thinking on photography: the split between industrial (ie useful) applications of photography and its fine art (ie aesthetic) manifestations. Critics as ideologically opposed as Peter Bunnell and Abigail Solomon-Godeau steadfastly maintain the existence of this separation of utility and aesthetics in photography, even if they take contrasting views on its meaning and desirability. However, Polaroid, at one time the second largest company in the photo industry, not only enjoyed close relations with those key representatives of fine art photography, Ansel Adams and the magazine Aperture, but it also intermittently asserted the ‘essentially aesthetic’ nature of its commercial and industrial activities in its own internal publications. The divide between industry and aesthetics is untenable, then, but this does not mean that the two poles were reconciled at Polaroid. While Aperture may have underplayed its commercial connections and Polaroid may have retrospectively exaggerated its own contributions to the development of fine art photography, most interesting are the contradictions and tensions that arise when the industrial and the aesthetic come together. The article draws on original research undertaken at the Polaroid Corporation archives held at the Baker Library, Harvard, as well as with the Ansel Adams correspondence with Polaroid, held at the Polaroid Collections in Concord, Massachusett

    Absorbing new subjects: holography as an analog of photography

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    I discuss the early history of holography and explore how perceptions, applications, and forecasts of the subject were shaped by prior experience. I focus on the work of Dennis Gabor (1900–1979) in England,Yury N. Denisyuk (b. 1924) in the Soviet Union, and Emmett N. Leith (1927–2005) and Juris Upatnieks (b. 1936) in the United States. I show that the evolution of holography was simultaneously promoted and constrained by its identification as an analog of photography, an association that influenced its assessment by successive audiences of practitioners, entrepreneurs, and consumers. One consequence is that holography can be seen as an example of a modern technical subject that has been shaped by cultural influences more powerfully than generally appreciated. Conversely, the understanding of this new science and technology in terms of an older one helps to explain why the cultural effects of holography have been more muted than anticipated by forecasters between the 1960s and 1990s

    Subverting the racist lens: Frederick Douglass, humanity and the power of the photographic Image

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    Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, the civil rights advocate and the great rhetorician, has been the focus of much academic research. Only more recently is Douglass work on aesthetics beginning to receive its due, and even then its philosophical scope is rarely appreciated. Douglass’ aesthetic interest was notably not so much in art itself, but in understanding aesthetic presentation as an epistemological and psychological aspect of the human condition and thereby as a social and political tool. He was fascinated by the power of images, and took particular interest in the emerging technologies of photography. He often returned to the themes of art, pictures and aesthetic perception in his speeches. He saw himself, also after the end of slavery, as first and foremost a human rights advocate, and he suggests that his work and thoughts as a public intellectual always in some way related to this end. In this regard, his interest in the power of photographic images to impact the human soul was a lifelong concern. His reflections accordingly center on the psychological and political potentials of images and the relationship between art, culture, and human dignity. In this chapter we discuss Douglass views and practical use of photography and other forms of imagery, and tease out his view about their transformational potential particularly in respect to combating racist attitudes. We propose that his views and actions suggest that he intuitively if not explicitly anticipated many later philosophical, pragmatist and ecological insights regarding the generative habits of mind and affordance perception : I.e. that we perceive the world through our values and habitual ways of engaging with it and thus that our perception is active and creative, not passive and objective. Our understanding of the world is simultaneously shaped by and shaping our perceptions. Douglass saw that in a racist and bigoted society this means that change through facts and rational arguments will be hard. A distorted lens distorts - and accordingly re-produces and perceives its own distortion. His interest in aesthetics is intimately connected to this conundrum of knowledge and change, perception and action. To some extent precisely due to his understanding of how stereotypical categories and dominant relations work on our minds, he sees a radical transformational potential in certain art and imagery. We see in his work a profound understanding of the value-laden and action-oriented nature of perception and what we today call the perception of affordances (that is, what our environment permits/invites us to do). Douglass is particularly interested in the social environment and the social affordances of how we perceive other humans, and he thinks that photographs can impact on the human intellect in a transformative manner. In terms of the very process of aesthetic perception his views interestingly cohere and supplement a recent theory about the conditions and consequences of being an aesthetic beholder. The main idea being that artworks typically invite an asymmetric engagement where one can behold them without being the object of reciprocal attention. This might allow for a kind of vulnerability and openness that holds transformational potentials not typically available in more strategic and goal-directed modes of perception. As mentioned, Douglass main interest is in social change and specifically in combating racist social structures and negative stereotypes of black people. He is fascinated by the potential of photography in particular as a means of correcting fallacious stereotypes, as it allows a more direct and less distorted image of the individuality and multidimensionality of black people. We end with a discussion of how, given this interpretation of aesthetic perception, we can understand the specific imagery used by Douglass himself. How he tried to use aesthetic modes to subvert and change the racist habitus in the individual and collective mind of his society. We suggest that Frederick Douglass, the human rights activist, had a sophisticated philosophy of aesthetics, mind, epistemology and particularly of the transformative and political power of images. His works in many ways anticipate and sometimes go beyond later scholars in these and other fields such as psychology & critical theory. Overall, we propose that our world could benefit from revisiting Douglass’ art and thought
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