Contemporary Photography Research Articles

HOPE IN CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY: THE PORTRAIT OF SELLERS OF GOODS AND SERVICES DURING A PANDEMIC

It has been more than 2 years since the covid-19 pandemic struck the world, affecting many aspects ranging from economics to education. As time went on, new habits began to be implemented in people's daily activities, or what is known as the New Normal, such as the obligation to wear masks and wash hands during activities. Departing from here, there is a feeling of longing that arises when communicating and interacting with the community. The mandatory use of masks during the New Normal era makes it difficult to guess the expressions or facial expressions of the other person. The media, which is rife with reports about the spread of covid-19, is also a factor that makes people wary of one another, which makes caring for others not like it used to be. In this case, the worker makes the seller of goods and services an object of work, which is the party that has been negatively affected by the covid-19 pandemic in the economic sector. Portrait photography is a representation of the similarity of human figures in a two-dimensional form. Portrait photography provides a personal indication of both the portrait owner and the portrait subject. Portrait photography is used as a media approach in the cultivation of works for sellers of goods and services in Bukittinggi. With the medium of portrait photography, it brings the artist closer and lets him know how life and problems are felt by sellers of goods and services in Bukittinggi, which are then presented in the form of contemporary photography works. Contemporary photography is part of art photography that is influenced by modernization and is not bound by conventional rules.

Practice-Based Lessons in Photographic Education: An Alternative to Photo Image Development

The utilisation of contemporary photography technology facilitates rapid knowledge acquisition and enhancement of several aspects. Nevertheless, the fundamental process of picture-making needs to be adequately emphasised, resulting in a negligent approach and a lack of comprehension among students regarding the significance of generating high-quality images. This practice-based lesson aims to elucidate to students the fundamental relevance of picking picture image designs as a precursor to producing impactful photography. The chosen topic for creating artistic works is around nature and is centred on the Malacca campus. The PCT256 - Contemporary Photography Practice course selection at Universiti Teknologi MARA was based on its alignment with the initial approach, which involves creating artwork through various photographic processes. The subsequent topic, assessment analysis, will use the scoring rubric to assess the student's comprehension of the material. The fabrication of 58 pieces involved a total of 29 students. This essay will address the production process's various difficulties, problems, and challenges. The research findings indicate that students have a more significant potential for comprehending the process when they engage in iterative attempts to produce optimal outcomes.

Postmodernism in Photography: Deconstruction and Reinterpretation of Visual Norms

This paper investigates the impact of postmodernism on contemporary photography, emphasizing its role in redefining visual norms and perceptions of reality. By analyzing the works of prominent postmodern photographers, the study focuses on three main themes: the deconstruction of the photographic subject, the application of intertextuality, and the creation of hyperreal environments. It suggests that postmodern photography, by questioning traditional concepts and methods, prompts a reassessment of visual authenticity. The deconstruction of the photographic subject challenges the notion of authenticity, intertextuality enriches interpretations by referencing other art forms, and hyperreality blurs the distinction between reality and simulation, influencing how media shapes our perceptions. These themes collectively show how postmodernism not only alters photography’s aesthetic and technical facets but also engages with broader cultural and philosophical questions of the digital era.

Revisiting a de-Humanized Shanghai: Speculative Realism in Zhou Ming’s Contemporary Object-Oriented Materialist Documentary Photography

This paper explores the cultural operations of Zhou Ming’s photography (b.1960), which was aimed at exploring the deeper changes that have gripped the unstoppable urban renewal of Shanghai. His photo-essay Shanghai: An Alternative View (2000–2005), showcases the absurd and incongruous organic and inorganic spaces devoted to new points of view about the ruins that lay behind an assortment of high inner-city density residential areas situated in the Zhabei, Huangpu, and Houkou districts. Zhou Ming’s drive to de-humanize his apparent humanist photography through everyday objects and other signage found during his walking practices, also reveals multiple surrealist metaphoric representations between the materiality of the city and a slanted exaggeration of reality. His documentary camera sets out an ontological shift vis-à-vis the incidence of the everyday ‘found objects’, in which the privilege of humans over objects disappears. The aim of this article is to demonstrate how the photographer’s speculative aesthetics raises the need to redefine Chinese contemporary photography with theories linked to object-oriented ontologies and in general, to new materialism. This can be interpreted as a historical-cultural consolidation of media continuum that also embraces pre-photographic practices that can liberate objects and subjects from ‘sensitive’ content in a post-socialist reality.

Anti-assimilationist landscape: Becoming illegible as queer resistance to state power

Through a study of two queer contemporary photographers working with landscape imagery, the author proposes a theory of anti-assimilationist landscape: a politicized rejection of the conventions of landscape imagery and the repressive systems of land ownership, gender and nation-building it sustains. Collier Schorr and David Benjamin Sherry make landscape images in places with histories of gendered settler-colonial and white supremacist violence. The essay argues that their works function as both an interpretation of those sites and a queer reclamation of them, enacting a political ecology of difference that can allow for a politics outside of the liberal humanist notion of nationhood and the fascist notion of ‘blood and soil’. Arguing for its applicability to landscape architecture theory and practice, the author contrasts this anti-assimilationist mode with the turn-of-the-millennium concept of ‘eco-revelation’, proposing instead a queer aesthetics of obscuring and the potential of ‘becoming illegible’ as an environmentalist practice.

Olga Smith, Contemporary Photography in France: Between Theory and Practice

Olga Smith, Contemporary Photography in France: Between Theory and Practice

Magical Realism Journey of Juan Rulfo’s Images:A Cross-Media Photographic Method for Juan Rulfo’s Photographs

The essay seeks to explore Juan Rulfo’s photographs from a perspective of magical realism, which is a traditional literary aesthetic style traditionally used in many Latin American novels rather than photos. Firstly, the essay analyses the possibilities of employing magical realism in Rulfo’s photographs from three perspectives. Secondly, it explores how magical realism is demonstrated in some Rulfo’s novels, El Llano en Llamas (1953) and Pedro Páramo (1955). Thirdly, the essay explores how to apply magical realism to analyses of Rulfo’s visual work. Meanwhile, this paper will also examine, through the magical realism in his photographs, how Rulfo demonstrates his concern for marginalised groups, his perspectives on issues of individual memory and collective memory, and his reflections on Mexican history. The essay aims to provide a new cross-media analytical method for contemporary photography analysis, while also prompting scholars and audiences to pay closer attention to the relevance of photography to other media. In this way the relationship between photography and history, memory, politics, culture and landscapes can be better understood.

Gazes, Power, and Gender: The Figure of the Femme Fatale Reconsidered

Abstract: The exhibition Femme Fatale: Blick-Macht-Gender ran from 9 December 2022 to 10 April 2023 at the Hamburg Kunsthalle, offering a rich collection of works from the Pre-Raphaelites to contemporary photographers. The exhibition promised a problematisation of the figure of the femme fatale , particularly in the light of the #Metoo movement. While this was clearly successful, other aspects of this complex artistic figure were left unexplored by the curation.

Muzieknoten en voetnoten

This article delves into the cross media project Veurvaajers (Ancestors, 2022), which weaves together family history, pop music, and contemporary photography, while at the same time linking microhistories in the Meuse-Rhine Region (1780-1980) to general historical developments in society. The article explores how dialogues between scholarly research and different forms of art can help us make sense of the past by raising new questions and reaching new audiences. The article dissects the conception and execution of Veurvaajers, shedding light on the project’s blueprint and implementation. Along the way, it highlights both opportunities and limitations of historical fiction as a literary genre, and explores how historical actors, objects, and trends can be ‘auditised’ in a convincing manner. Much attention is directed towards the Industrial Revolution in the city of Maastricht from the 1830s onwards, underscoring its pivotal role in the larger historical context.

The Role of Postcards in Disseminating the Nuevo Ideal Nacional of Marcos Pérez Jiménez

The dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez engaged a variety of cultural texts to push the sense of spectacle and tangible progress that was central to the Nuevo Ideal Nacional – a positivist infused set of ideas that placed a premium on economic development and social well-being. This article considers the role postcards played in constructing an idealized visual lexicon for perezjimenismo . Postcards of the period projected an image of modernity to Venezuelans and foreign visitors alike. They indicated what the government deemed important – public works, flagship architectural projects, and infrastructure. The lexicon of modernity established by postcards and other photographic texts came to be widely disseminated and understood – although such images clearly occluded other ‘realities’ within Caracas. Though the focus of the article is on period postcards, the article considers the way in which contemporary photographers have inverted traditional postcard tropes to produce images that present the modern Caracas as a dystopian space.

Contemporary Photography in France: Between Theory and Practice. By Olga Smith

<i>Contemporary Photography in France: Between Theory and Practice</i>. By Olga Smith

New visions, new ecologies: On materialities and atmospheres in contemporary photography

This article proposes to reconceptualize the Hungarian photographer, artist and educator László Moholy-Nagy’s (1895–1946) inter-war call for a ‘new vision’ in order to grasp how artists presently experiment with photography and adjacent new technologies to explore the environmental, ecological and elemental dimension of media themselves. For Moholy-Nagy, photography represented a new way of seeing and experiencing the increasingly industrialized and automated world and a means of expanding our sensory perception. Drawing on recent scholarship of elemental media theory, I adapt Moholy-Nagy’s interest in the materiality of photography and the atmospheric and medial dimensions of light itself to an environmentally attuned notion of ‘new visions’. Exemplified with discussion of recent works by Emilija Škarnulytė, Lesia Vasylchenko and Istvan Virag, I show how a number of contemporary artists likewise scrutinize photography’s (understood in an expanded way) material basis and atmospheric qualities to explore new forms of image-making, including CGI and synthetic aperture radar images, fitted to reflect the accelerated automation and ecological precarity that mark the early twenty-first century.

To Inhabit, To Build, To Die. A Visual Essay

This visual essay explores the boundaries between a woman and her house as they approach the culmination of over seven decades together, navigating through her impending death. From an exhaustive photographic record and the familiarity that comes from having lived in the place for several years, I aim to depict the adaptative process between both entities during this final period, markedly defined by the woman’s deterioration and illness. Accordingly, a selection of contemporary photographs of different rooms and objects within the house is juxtaposed with a narration detailing some of the most significant moments in the woman´s history and that of her house. The results show the reconfiguration of boundaries between the house and the woman, reflecting the decrease in physical and cognitive capacities intrinsic to ageing. Simultaneously, it unveils how the woman´s retreat from the home (or vice versa) introduces a cadre of new human and non-human agents, negotiating new accommodations.

Contemporary Photography in France: Between Theory and Practice

May 25 2023 Contemporary Photography in France: Between Theory and Practice Contemporary Photography in France: Between Theory and Practice. by Olga Smith. Leuven University Press: Leuven, Belgium, 2022. 230 pp. illus. Paper. ISBN: 978-9-46-270344-5. Jan Baetens Jan Baetens Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Jan Baetens Online ISSN: 1530-9282 Print ISSN: 0024-094X © ISAST2023ISAST Leonardo 445–446. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02420 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Jan Baetens; Contemporary Photography in France: Between Theory and Practice. Leonardo 2023; doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02420 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsLeonardo Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © ISAST2023ISAST Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reimagining Affection in a Changing Shanghai

The article examines the dynamics of space surrounding Shanghai’s rampant urban change as experienced by the Chinese artistic duo known as Birdhead. Underpinned by the conceptual framework of the “affective turn”, this study reflects upon and addresses how the photographer’s chaotic photo-essay of Shanghai’s new state housing (Xincun, New Village, 2008) can function as a nexus of place-making. With a claim to impetuous emotion in his works, Birdhead’s contemporary photography pervades a plane of subjects, objects, and affections, in which the city is imagined and experienced as space-body performativity. Understanding Birdhead’s everyday urban practices as performative, we claim that the visual performance of these photographs not just materially shapes the bodies, but also acts as a rhizomatic catalyst for both things-in-themselves and webs of social affection inside and outside Shanghai. As a contribution, this article’s theoretical application to Birdhead’s everyday networks of unruly and frenzied emotional tactics challenges the official formulation of realism. More importantly, their contemporary photography apprehends and territorializes elements of anarchy, at the very same time deterritorializing the omnipresent affective strategies of a propagandistic post-socialist apparatus that pressures the positive over “other” emotional representations of Shanghai.

The Photographer’s Visual Grammar: Visual Rightness and Aesthetics of Artistic Photographs

Abstract We are living in a world where photography is everywhere, and almost everyone is a photographer (in the sense of producing photographs with some aesthetic aspiration). Yet, despite the democratic nature of the medium, which suggests that anyone can make great photographs, there are large differences in the aesthetic quality of photographs. Scientifically, we do not yet grasp very well what differentiates aesthetic from non-aesthetic photographs, and how this results in a different viewer experience. In this study, we explored the visual rightness of 21 high-quality artistic photographs, compared with their ecologically valid less-than-optimal variants (one to four alternatives). The high-quality photographs were selected from an online contemporary photography competition which is judged by experts (http://www.life-framer.com). The alternatives were variants provided by the photographers themselves. Participants () preferred the original photograph significantly more than chance level for the majority of the sets (13 out of 21), and significantly less than chance level for a minority of sets (three out of 21). This is in line with the visual rightness theory of picture perception, maintaining that artists are experts in creating visually right images, and that this is salient to nonexpert viewers. Yet, the preference for the original differed greatly between sets (range: 9.63–79.68%) and the original photograph was also the most preferred one in ‘only’ 12 out of 21 sets. Qualitative content analysis showed that preferences were influenced by many levels of photographic information (color, contrast, sharpness, composition, emotional expression, etc.), which were often working together. The most aesthetically powerful photographs reveal a skillful combination of medium, form, and subject matter levels, to produce an optimal visual message. Results have implications for empirical aesthetics, the photography practice, and for our understanding of photography literacy, a key topic in a world where there are many more photographs than humans that can appreciate them.

Martin Parr and the Legacy of British Colonial Photography

British contemporary photographer Martin Parr’s collection 7 Colonial Still Lifes (2005) delivers banal and benign images of remnants of British colonisation in Sri Lanka. While Parr’s early collection The Last Resort (1986) was harshly critiqued for its judgmental lens on the working-class British, some identified a contemporary ‘othering’ in Parr’s imagery. This line of reasoning was not explored to its fullest extent. Forming a postcolonial reading, I argue that what Parr’s critics have missed (or dismissed) is the historical legacy of British colonial photography. The images from The Last Resort bear a striking resemblance to the nineteenth-century British colonial photographer John Thomson’s collection Street Life in London (1877). Thomson is the first street photographer to reverse the colonial lens back on to his own people with similar results. However, in his still life photographs Parr trains his probing critical lens on empire itself, with much more successful results.

Analysis of the Artistic Concept of Contemporary Photography

Contemporary photography art is the range of visual thinking and face the objective life and works to convey the creative ideas and the range of performance, embodies the stage and order of photography, but also thinking of art development, transmission of ideas and trend of thinking constantly under observation. This article from the contemporary photography art concept, briefly analyzes the main ways of creation of contemporary photography, discusses the status of contemporary photography in the concept of art in the future, and on the basis of the concept of photography this paper provided some suggestions.

Historic Homes of Bastrop, Texas by Robbie Moore Sanders

Reviewed by: Historic Homes of Bastrop, Texas by Robbie Moore Sanders Kenneth Hafertepe Historic Homes of Bastrop, Texas. By Robbie Moore Sanders, with Sandra Chipley. Photographs by Marker Winslett. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2022. Pp. 240. Notes, index.) The rich architectural heritage of Bastrop, one of the oldest towns in Texas, has long been acknowledged. In the 1930s, the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) made measured drawings, took photographs and collected historic data about several of the earliest houses. Moreover, Texas Historical Commission historical markers are abundant. In spite of [End Page 608] this early recognition, there has never been a book dedicated to the buildings of Bastrop. This book seeks to rectify this, covering these early houses but also the charming houses large and small of the Victorian era, colonial revival houses, and bungalows and foursquares of the early twentieth century. This is a very attractive volume. The contemporary photographs are uniformly good, well framed and well lit, allowing the rich variety of Bastrop houses to be showcased. Modern photography is supplemented by a selection of historic photos, both of houses and the people who lived in them, a few photos of related structures, and a few floor plans from HABS. The text, however, is not as ambitious as recent studies of such Texas towns as Waxahachie, Glen Rose, and Waco. The book lacks an introduction and simply begins with a discussion of the first house. An introduction is critical here to orient the reader, if briefly, to the general history of Bastrop and to give some sense of the evolution of the town's houses. This is all the more crucial given that the book is organized by street, which is helpful for anyone attempting a windshield survey of the town, but results in a patchwork quilt of eras and styles. Essentially this book is a composite of existing knowledge rather than an attempt at a new interpretation. The county tax assessor records are occasionally used to good advantage, as are early local newspapers, but most of the house entries are based on notes for historic homes tours, recent newspaper articles, or historical markers. Indeed, sometimes historical markers are quoted in their entirety. (Historical markers may be cast in bronze but they are not writ in stone.) Moreover, the entries are so focused on the individual properties that there is no attempt to show how they fit in with the rest of Bastrop houses, much less other Texan or American examples. The reliance on secondary sources leads to the repetition of a great deal of speculation. In the preface the authors acknowledge that many stories included are "unverifiable" but that they are part of the traditions associated with a house. However, no attempt is made to separate family stories which are verifiable from those that are not. Perhaps the most important primary sources in a book like this are the houses themselves. They must be interrogated to see how they evolved over time and who did what and when. The authors use architectural terminology that is sometimes vague or not in common usage, such as "national style," "farmhouse style" or "pinwheel" floorplan. At times it seems that the term "dogtrot" is used to describe an enclosed central passage rather than a roofed-over open space between rooms. The book also exhibits an antiquarian tendency to date a house by its earliest rooms, even if a few early rooms are later overshadowed by a substantial two-story Victorian addition. The point here is not that early rooms [End Page 609] should not be recognized, but that dating should be nuanced enough to acknowledge later additions that fundamentally change a house. Still, this is a handsome volume, and one may hope that it will stimulate more original research into the architectural heritage of Bastrop. [End Page 610] Kenneth Hafertepe Baylor University Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

Co‐temporality and Sovremennost': Late Imperial and Early Soviet Photographs

Co‐temporality and <i>Sovremennost'</i>: Late Imperial and Early Soviet Photographs