The Language of Photography
A Practical Guide to Understanding How Photographs Communicate
by
Bob Rogers
Chapters
Introduction
The question for photographers today is still the same as it was one-hundred-and-fifty years ago: how do you make an image—where do point and when do you shoot? To answer that question one needs first to understand that photography communicates, has power and meaning, when its imagery is based not only on the chemical/digital rendering of what is occurring in front of the lens, but also on a shared visual language that has evolved over the last five centuries. In the same way we use words to communicate the essence of an experience, the lens can create images that can communicate ideas and feelings as well as information.
Light
How do we know anything about the world? We have in our minds ideas about the nature of things, and that these ideas are built out of the information provided to us by our five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. However, the only “sense” that travels through the lens and is preserved on the film is sight and that image is flat, often only black and white and static. The skill of the photographer is to be able to create an image using just light to communicate, suggest or evoke the other four sensory elements that creates a complete and emotionally compelling experience of the world on the part of the viewer.
Time
Each photograph is a record of light at a moment in time. This chapter examines the way in which the technical design of the camera has made time and motion part of the language of photography. Every exposure has a beginning, a middle and an end; some exposures are long enough to create a blur, suggesting movement; others appear to freeze a "decisive moment", which tells a story by capturing and holding past and future in a critical fraction of a second.
Composition
Modern photography was the outgrowth Italian Renaissance artists who utilized the camera obscura to construct their paintings and structured their compositions based on design principals rooted in the idea that mathematics applied to art creates beauty and harmony. This chapter looks at some of the design principles artists have used for centuries as part of the broad collective language of the visual arts and which, in turn, can be applied to photographic imagery.
Subject and Object
To make a photograph you need an object to photograph; you cannot make images of unicorns or angels. The ability to record detailed information about objects in the world with mathematical consistency is what makes photography “objective” and gave it the reputation in the 19th Century of being a “faithful witness”. At the same time, photographers have always had a subjective point of view. How these two elements are brought together in a single image to communicate the photographer's intent, ideas or feelings is the subject of this chapter.
Color
Both color photography and black and white photography record patterns of light created by the lens. However, color photography has a visual language that differs from the language of black and white in many significant ways and as a result communicates similar information, ideas and emotions very differently. This chapter examines the aspects of the language of photography unique to color imagery and the techniques that can be used to make effective color photographs.
The Print
The idea that photographic imagery is a repository of something important that needs to be said or communicated, and that the experiencing of that image will change the viewer in a meaningful and important way presupposes that the image will endure long enough to accomplish this. Printing a photograph, transforming the fleeting, ephemeral image created by the lens into an enduring object that can be shared, displayed and contemplated is one of the principal means of insuring this longevity. The aesthetic character of this experience is different from and as important as the creation of the original image and ideally should be established in the mind of the photographer at the time the image is initially made.
Tao and the photographic Image
-A personal and historical inquiry-
It goes without saying that the world, in its vastness and complexity, is experienced very differently by each person, each culture, each time, and each place. Every individual and every culture seeks to navigate that vast complexity as they perceive it, and as best as they can. To do so, they connect the dots of their world, of their experience and understanding of it, and try to create a path through it. Some Eastern traditions have connected the dots of their experience and understanding of the world in a way that has led to an integration of the spiritual and the worldly. In the West, we have connected the dots—and many dots that are the same as Eastern dots—very differently, and then in such a way that has created not a harmony, but a profound and enduring conflict between these two aspects.
This inquiry considers whether some of the dots of our own culture can be reconnected in such a way that might also lead to a similar experience and awareness as that of the Eastern integration, and specifically, whether a nineteenth century European innovation—photography—might present an opportunity to find such a congruity within present-day Western secular/materialist culture.
Seeing and Believing: the ideological roots of the photographic image
How photography became an affirmation that the personal, subjective, idiosyncratic vision depicted in photographic images represents objective and transcendent Truth.
Realism and the Photographic Image
The jubilant clasping of photography to the bosom of mainstream culture seems artificial in light of the depth to which photography and the language of the lens is interwoven into the fabric of that culture. We laugh at primitives who fear the camera will "steal their souls", yet tout an artist who "captures a truth", as the camera
The jubilant clasping of photography to the bosom of mainstream culture seems artificial in light of the depth to which photography and the language of the lens is interwoven into the fabric of that culture. We laugh at primitives who fear the camera will "steal their souls", yet tout an artist who "captures a truth", as the camera is a product of our technological weltanschauung and certifies our faith in the viability of that self-same system.
Photography and the Photographic Image
A century ago, the efforts of the Photo-Secessionists resulted in photography's acceptance as a serious form for artistic expression. Through most of the 20th Century, serious photography was defined by Photo-Secessionist aesthetics — prints produced without retouching or alteration, sharply focused, with full tonal range and ma
A century ago, the efforts of the Photo-Secessionists resulted in photography's acceptance as a serious form for artistic expression. Through most of the 20th Century, serious photography was defined by Photo-Secessionist aesthetics — prints produced without retouching or alteration, sharply focused, with full tonal range and made without the intervention of the artist's hand—i.e., “straight photography.” The stand of the Photo-Secessionists was crucial to preventing photography from becoming a debilitating mimicry of oil and brush techniques. Yet such a stand could not, because of the newness of the form, differentiate photography from the larger aesthetic traditions of western art
A Brief History of the Photographic Image
It is generally said that the history of photography begins in 1826 with the discovery by Henry Fox Talbot of the chemical procedure which allowed one to permanently fix the image created by the lens and look at it under normal illumination. However, the historical forces that gave shape to that discovery were at work for many hundre
It is generally said that the history of photography begins in 1826 with the discovery by Henry Fox Talbot of the chemical procedure which allowed one to permanently fix the image created by the lens and look at it under normal illumination. However, the historical forces that gave shape to that discovery were at work for many hundreds of years and are clearly apparent in the subsequent uses of the camera and the imagery that it has been used to produce.
The Value of Art
Since the turn of the twentieth century, increasing numbers of artworks of all times, traditions, and cultures have been eagerly commoditized and consumed by a voracious art market even though these works may have been conceived for vastly different purposes and express a variety of aesthetic visions having little or no contemporary curre
Since the turn of the twentieth century, increasing numbers of artworks of all times, traditions, and cultures have been eagerly commoditized and consumed by a voracious art market even though these works may have been conceived for vastly different purposes and express a variety of aesthetic visions having little or no contemporary currency—their original contexts and meanings sometimes unknown and unknowable. And despite an enormous increase in the total volume of sales at auction over the last decades, the prices of individual objects continue to soar in seeming contradiction to the laws of supply and demand. Though rarity or uniqueness is virtually always a prerequisite for the highest valuation, the art market seems able to generate an ever-increasing supply of rare objects without undermining or diminishing the value of earlier investments. This paradox cannot be explained by traditional notions of collecting or aesthetics alone as the answer lies outside of the structure of the modern art institution. Rather, it is rooted in broader economic necessities that, since the turn of the twentieth century, have dramatically distorted the valuation of almost all commodities including the market price of art.