Tuesday, September 24, 2013


Otto Steinert – “A Pedestrian's Foot”

From reading “The Photographer’s Eye”, John Szarkowski, I chose the photograph “A pedestrian walking” , 1951. Steinert was the founding member of Fotoform, it made photographic experiments and sought to draw attention to the creative possibilities of photography which had been extinguished by Nazi cultural policy. They had a strong emphasis on abstract form derived from patterns found in nature and from darkroom manipulation.

The framing and composition of this photograph turns the everyday objects, tree, footpath, road and a person, into abstract shapes. The very constructed view adds to this isolation of static forms on the left of the composition. The incomplete view of the tree and the road, the hard circle of the iron grate and the heavy concrete footpath emphasis the static nature of the left hand-side of the image. The introduction of a pedestrian walking into the frame. I feel the pedestrian is more disappearing into his environment than moving through it. The highly polished shoe is left stationary on the ground rooting the image to the right hand side. For this reason I feel the pedestrian is struggling to fit into this urban context.
William Spratt-Murphy

Space-Framed 2013/14 - Weeks 2+3

This week our discussion has evolved into two groups:
Portrait + Space and the Collective Portrait - Cities and Crowds.

Some of the photographers you will be looking at over the next week are August Sander, Alec Soth, Walker Evans, Candida Hofer, Thomas Ruff, Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Lisa Larsen, Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt, Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander and Mona Breede.

Here is the film by Helen Levitt that came up in discussion yesterday. (link )


In the Street (1948) by Lost_Shangri_La_Horizon


Reading for week 3:
Geoff Dyer: The Ongoing Moment (on reserve in the library), first essay.
Susan Sontag: The Image World from On Photography
Peter Schjeldahl: Thomas Struth
Peter Schjeldahl: Reality Clicks from the New Yorker


Assignments:
Each student needs to upload their work to date on the blog as follows:
Week 1: 1 photograph and 50-100 words
Week 2: 3 Photographs and 150-200 words.
When posting, include labels (can be added in column on rhs of posts, and searchable in column on rhs of blog) , links, relevant reading etc so that the blog can be used as a collective resource during the semester