Thursday, 8 March 2012

Social Networking and Sharing






Is it a good or bad thing?

Since social networking, the way we have shared and view our photographic images has changed dramatically.  It has shifted the focus from a print to a visual image which then may never be printed – just stored electronically and possibly forgotten about.
Reasons why we moved and focused more on sharing images via social networking may be because;
It’s cheaper.
It’s easier.
It’s more convenient/ so accessible.

However, because of this, people have become narcissistic and far more interested in themselves than ever before. As sharing on websites such as Flickr, Facebook and blogs is free and accessible to pretty much everybody. We can upload mounds and mounds of images due to the convenience of digital cameras these days.
Also, people have become almost obsessed with taking images of themselves.  Which is down to social networking. Using social networking, people can change the way people even portray themselves.

Take Jennifer Ringley for example:


Jennifer Ringley, of the JenniCam experiment.

JenniCAM - Last Week at Jenni's Place. 2012. JenniCAM - Last Week at Jenni's Place. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.arttech.ab.ca/pbrown/jenni/jenni.html. [Accessed 05 March 2012]


For seven years, Jennifer took images of herself on a webcam. At the time, webcams were new and this experiment was a first of its kind. It attracted a large audience – mainly strangers.  The images were just of herself, in day to day life. Mundane images really, but as people we have always been interested in other people’s lives – it’s almost like escapism from peoples own lives.

Which is a scary concept really. Putting images up of yourself available to anyone makes you a target and exposed to possibly stalkers. You can never know how safe you’re being online. – all because of internet personas being built up of images and online diaries. 

Another negative of online sharing is the privacy side of it. Many people are wary of uploading their photos or videos to a social networking site like Facebook is because they are concerned about retaining the copyright to their work. It is so easy to save and copy and image and pass it off as your own work.

Apart from the fact sharing images over social networking sites on the Internet is cheap, easy and accessible, I struggle to find any actual positives about it when thinking about all the negatives.

I personally prefer the old fashioned method in which families would print out images and store them in an album. Photographs used to be something that were special and enjoyable to share within friends and families. Now, it feels like the ‘specialness’ of it has gone as we take it for granted these days.

Tuesday, 6 March 2012

Composites as a visual aid for social commentary



In May 2010 ITN NEWS posted a video onto their youtube homepage telling the story of a toddler from Sumatra who had been addicted to nicotine since the age of 2. 
  

The video garnered much attention in the media for highlighting the perceived faults of the parent’s who introduced the child to smoking.
Inspired by this video was Belgian photographer Frieke Janssen who went on to create a series of portraits of children composed in different era’s for whom it would not have been averse to smoking



Frieke Janssen - Smoking Kids
 Personal Project 

from a young age. Seemingly taking inspiration from the 19th century daguerreotypes, Jannsens portrait stike an uncomfortable cord for smoking and non-smoking adults alike as the act itself is added to by the fact the children are wearing make-up typical of adults from different societies.
At first gland one might think Frieke Janssen has in fact glamorized the aesthetics of smoking, however the use of  lighting and facial expression suggests the darker side of it.

Visually I think another photographer who uses the idea of the social comment of society is Loretta Lux whose composite images portray the seemingly genetically enhanced subject matter in a mythical utopia on first glance. A closer inspection leads the viewer to question the thin line of genetics and the idea of creating a ‘designer’ baby be it for aesthetic or medical purposes. 
Loretta Lux- Rose in the Garden 2001
Loretta Lux - Sasha and Ruby 2005




Smoking Toddler: http://www.youtube.com/user/itnnews/search?query=baby+smoking


Frieke Janssen - http://frieke.com/#!/projects/
Loretta Lux - Works III and Works V http://www.lorettalux.de/
 
 




MESSAGE TO YOU... (e-resources)

  In what way do we use social network?
  To communicate with our friends, to share information about our life, to keep in contact...
We seem to know just the good side of those networks, we don't even think about other ways, but what about countries without free speech, countries where there is war and government hides everything, where the news are role by power of the government. In Iran protesters are using Facebook and Twitter to ensure that news of their demonstrations and brutal repression reaches the outside world.
  Protesters have struggled to be heard on media channels, so they turned to social networks, posting images and tweets about the situation that they are in. Those protesters are struggling with free speech issue, with tight internal media restrictions, but the power of freedom is so strong that they find the way of reaching the networks, they access them via proxy servers, this allows them to stay anonymous. On those images we can see that protesters are both male and female, groups of all ages, what is not clear is what is really going on and how much trust we can put in to those images.

British Journal of Photography, Message to you, 01/07/2009, p.11
  I looked on You tube as the writer Julian Lass suggested and find a film "Basijis are shooting at civilians" and from this short recording it is very hard to say what is really going on. Some of the men are blurred, running away from the shootings, on other recording we see a man shooting one way, in seconds maybe hundreds of men are running towards him. Those are films of news reports and as we think they can't lie, but it paints a very bleak picture, who is shooting and who is running away.
  In all that we have to think about the power of online networking, that so many of us ignore. 
Born in Moldova, activist and journalist Natalia Morar started a tweet about a demonstration, she expected at most a couple of hundred friends and colleagues, but with power of Twitter 15,000 turned up to the square, mostly young people with access to the internet.


British Journal of Photography, Message to you, 01/07/2009, p.12


British Journal of Photography, Message to you, Julian Lass, 01/07/2009

Copies, codes and patterns...

Wendy McMurdo uses the concept of 'The Composite' to create something that isn't real, a moment that is created or non traditional, along side a traditional staged like image. She uses digital manipulation to place children in a moment of play with their double. This could reference the idea of imaginary friends and myth. A sense of play, with an element of fear. She called this work 'DOPPELGÄNGER' which translates as 'double'. As society is presented with this idea of creating the designer baby and manipulating the codes in our genes, Wendy presents us with a series of photos which are similarly manipulated, she clones the children and places them next to each other, interacting, almost as if they represent different genetic codes and make up. Her repetition of this pattern throughout this project allows a pattern to form through the way the cloned children copy and interact with themselves.

                                                                (above) McMurdo 'Helen, Sheffield 1996', 1997     
I struggled to find images from Wendy McMurdo in books in the library, so I decided to use her website to look at her projects. I was very excited by some of the work she has created as it is quiet similar to some of the ideas I had in my previous projects. I love the way she presents the state of mind that children fall into when transfixed in to the virtual reality world. The notion of reality and false reality, combined together in a composite to create something quite provoking. http://www.wendymcmurdo.com/



In the series 'The computer Class' Wendy McMurdo removes the items of technology that these children are playing with, giving the images a surreal intensity. By removing the components, for example the computer,  we are drawn towards a pattern of behaviour and a state of mind that these objects induce. She isolates the children from the world and their surroundings, captured and lost in a trance of concentration. Creating an image which is more about codes and patterns, which are a result of the components in the composites.
                                                       (above) McMurdo 'Computer Class, Edinburgh II', 1997 
                                                      http://www.wendymcmurdo.com/



Her work references the growth of digital imagery and software,  as it becomes more assessable to the mass, making is easier to create imaginary images like the images above. It also presents us with growth into adulthood and the unknown, showing children mesmerised by something that we cannot see yet, the unknown.

Truth and Fiction - Web


Truth and fiction- web
Rachel Dickinson

First I started looking on the web for truthful and fake pictures and the amount that I came across was astonishing to me and I did not know where to start, there where recent pictures old pictures and a mixture of old integrated in with new, that where obviously fake. But seeing all the images on the web, I did not know whether to believe they were fake or real, the Internet is and easy source for fake and incorrect information to get out.

After looking at the fake photograph “camera found in world trade centre” 





This photograph was not edited or thought of very well and has a whole range of things incorrect about the day. weather, plane type, view, position 

I started looking at fake photographs around the whole subject of 9/11 and military photographs and I found videos photographs documents, this is one subject in which once one fake photographs gets out made by someone within a day it will go viral, 



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgq1yoiiDRc&feature=related

This video of a plane hitting the trade centre at the beginning must be real but as you get it enhanced you can obviously tell that it is fake, 

After watching many videos and looking at a fair few photographs i have found that looking at my related topic on the Internet is harder because they can look real at first but pictures go viral in minuets and fake ones are all over so like the conspiracies behind 9/11 it is hard to know what is fact and what is fiction.
Truth and Credibility, fact and fiction bookstock

The notion of objectivity of the photograph as a document and its ability to tell the truth and the ease with which photographs can use artistic tools to manipulate images far beyond accepted standards has been under pressure since the inception of inexpensive digital methods of recording information in the early 1990s in photojournalism it started in earnest with the digital composite of Olympic ice skaters Tanya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, showing the rivals practicing together on the cover of New York Newsday in 1994.



This digital composite of Olympic ice skaters Tanya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan appeared on the cover of New York Newsday. The picture showed the rivals practicing together, shortly after an attack on Kerrigan by an associate of Harding’s husband. The picture caption reads: “Tonya Harding, left, and Nancy Kerrigan, appear to skate together in this New York Newsday composite illustration. Tomorrow, they’ll really take to the ice together.”


Does the fake photo-shoppery or the orchestration of an event by a photojournalist affect the integrity of camera-based imagery elsewhere? Can news images ever really reflect objective reality? Is there such a thing as "reasonably real news"? Do people still presume photographs to be evidentiary? Are the photographs we see on the front page of the New York Times transparent vehicles of the subjects portrayed? Is viewing a photograph the next best thing to being there?
Reuters admits altering Beirut photo
Reuters withdraws photograph of Beirut after Air Force attack after US blogs, photographers point out 'blatant evidence of manipulation.' Reuters' head of PR says in response, 'Reuters has suspended photographer until investigations are completed into changes made to photograph.' Photographer who sent altered image is same Reuters photographer behind many of images from Qana, which have also been subject of suspicions for being staged
A Reuters photograph of smoke rising from buildings in Beirut has been withdrawn after coming under attack by American web logs. The blogs accused Reuters of distorting the photograph to include more smoke and damage. The photograph showed two very heavy plumes of black smoke billowing from buildings in Beirut after an Air Force attack on the Lebanese capital. Reuters has since withdrawn the photograph from its website, along a message admitting that the image was distorted, and an apology to editors.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3286966,00.html
Yaakov Lappin




Careless digital alterations by Adnan Hajj using Adobe Photoshop software embellishing Israeli air-strike damage in Beirut on August 5th 2006 was caught by Mike Thorson, a Wisconsin-based artist who alerted the publisher of a popular conservative media blog watchdog, "Little Green Footballs", and a fire-storm of controversy broke out. Charles Johnson's public outing of Hajj's embellished photographs on his blog led to the photojournalist's firing and the removal of his 920 photographs from the Reuter's archive. Is it incidents like this that are destroying the credibility for news organizations and photography as a vehicle for truth Or Is everybody pushing their own brand of reality?

I found you can’t believe what you see and that the era of photographs being used as a form of document of truth are a thing of the past.
The interesting point for me that people are so used to seeing the horror of war that the photographers feel a need to make it look worse than the photographs show as if its not enough
I think if I lived in the city where the bombs were dropped and you found out that photographers were doing this it would make you feel awful.
Although I have always known about you can manipulate photographs I wasn’t aware about the extent of the use in photojournalism airbrushing for fashion is one thing but using as a tool for giving war photos more of an impact to sell to the press I think is disgusting.

Copies, Codes and Patterns.

Loretta Lux.

Loretta Lux began photographing in 1999. Her portraits are mainly of children, often dressed in vintage clothes and sometimes Lux's childhood things. The main feature of the images are the digitally adjusted subjects.

"Elongated limbs, oversized heads, and eyes spaced just a little farther apart than average contribute to the strange mystique found in their cool gazes and isolated locations."

-www.mocp.org.

She also merges the subjects with their surroundings. They are either painted by Lux or taken from her photographs of landscapes and interiors.

http://www.lorettalux.de/




Aziz and Cucher. 

Aziz and Cucher focused on the representation of the body in relation to new technology. This type of exhibition showed a new age of digital manipulation.

This kind of digital manipulation allowed people to create surreal images. For example, "The Fabulous Beast." Which is a digital composite of all the dictators at the time. It was also used for political reasons or in the news like the photo of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on Time magazine.

Google images.



Monday, 5 March 2012

Social Networking & Sharing...

The Neglected Photo Path
The classic traditions of amateur photography, the family photo albums, shown down the generations. The craft of albums and storage of images from camera to developers to home, all these traditional methods have been revolutionized over the history of photography and at a high rate over the last 20 years. With the introduction of digital photography images are more easily accessible, easily stored in an electronic environment, storing thousands of photos with out the need for a great quantity of space to hold albums etc. Social networking sites holding vast amounts of images, some very personal and do break the conventional rules of sharing, however these sites hold thousands of images that only ever exist in the realms that are the social networking sites, sites storing and sharing sites such as Flickr images are never printed  they remain as digital code so do they become photographs? If they are never physical, does an image have to be physical to be a photograph or a piece of photography? the issue and era of these new photo paths does raise quite a lot of questions the traditionalists will raise an eyebrow at. However photography since day one has always been about progression from one era to the next, photographers have always looked to further the medium. So these new paths of photo sharing can be for the better where photography is concerned. However I feel the notion of sharing images has changed dramatically and for the better where they can be printed and shot much easier allowing everyone with even the most little of knowledge to indulge them selves in photography. But with this new sense of sharing and shooting images, the use of images has changed greatly, the reason why we shoot images has be altered vastly this coming along with the introduction of social networking, creating virtual presences and representations of yourself, taking images to show yourself naturally and for who you are would be seen as the route to go down, but with this form of social gathering and communication, there is the possibility to alter  appearance, show less or more depending on what your happy with, but the case is people forget what is appropriate and who can see these virtual images used to represent your self, as some people wouldn't stick a photo of them on a billboard for everyone to see, but online its the same principal if not more people can possibly see your image. These images being personal as in they are about your self and who you wish to portray, but also on other websites, amateur and professionals work is displayed on the same websites which has never happened before well not as regularly as it is now done on the web. This creates issues such as its harder to get credit, to get noticed etc with imagery being all over the web so easily accessible, also issues with copyright  images easily taken and used without the owners consent etc does prove to be a big problem with the internet holding so many images where does the line cross before you are invading someones privacy on the social network front, all when does accessing an image or using an become an invasion of copyright...
The british journal of photography covering a growing issue that concerns the vast social network that is Facebook, and the issue that is the use of images, because more and more people are using professional images as profile pictures with the rapid movement in image quality peoples 8mp cameras are not cutting it enough so people look to professional images etc but not always with the consent of the photographers they have used to get these said images. As with booking a shoot you have the shoot you get the selection of images but the consent is sometimes lost in translation a need for image license information is needed so that this issue of copyright infringement is not as common.
"People aren't knowingly breaking the law, they just need to be made aware," says Hewlett. "Copyright belongs to the photographer. This is unless the photographer has been contracted to take the images with the client owning the copyright. According to British law, copyright is granted at the point of creation. It belongs to the photographer unless it is taken by an employee in the course of their work, here it belongs automatically to employer."- BJP Facebook users "unknowingly" breaking copyright law- Oliver laurent, 10/01/2011
As with this new age of digital imagery sharing, mixed with the necessity of the social network the boundaries between copyright and what is deemed necessary are being crossed day in day out, making photographers jobs harder to keep up with whats being used and not used, within this new age photography may becoming easier for the masses but with that more difficult for professionals in ways.
This not just being and issue for the consumers dis-using professional photography, there are many cases of professional agencies with access to professional miss using images on the web, mis sharing them for own financial gain, there have been many accusations of companies infringing on sharing copyright,
http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2101339/photo-agency-wins-landmark-copyright-victory


Businesses begin to receive bills for miss use of imagery copyright infringements http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2075750/businesses-warned-infringing-photographers-copyright,  when the issue of this new age has become so clouded an difficult to get it right, issue of mis use and mis haps are becoming too common, from small businesses to the Daily Mail have been accused of lifting Flickr images> http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2043264/daily-mail-accused-lifting-flickr-image, however this issue of sharing- social networking, use of images online are all intwined together with the miss use of images, infringement of copyright becoming more and more of an issue as photography goes more digital and more viral in many ways, with the introduction of smart phones, tablets, wifi hotspots etc, images and the changing of images can be done more and more easily making it too easy for copyright infringement, possibly there is not enough info about what you can and cant do with an image of the web, do you know?

However the online storage of images, easily accessed by the public does ask the question why post it online if you don't want anyone to take the images and miss use them why post them somewhere they can be miss used. However that does not give the right for anyone to miss use an image, there are many levels to this argument but I feel the photo path has we know it has far from been neglected it has completely been altered and changed to suit the times, as photography progresses there are always going to be pros and cons, but there is progression and thats the main thing, however the progression may take another turn in the near future but the storage and sharing of images wether on social networking sites or image related sites there is going to be more and more of a collision of views on whats right and whats wrong with viewing and sharing but a new photographic path has evolved and looks to grow and get stronger as time goes on... 

Digital Composite – E-Resources

Just because a photograph looks real, do you actually know the truth behind it?


The article that I have looked at is all about how people view and see the work differently but respectably once it has been edited and manipulated and changed of the truth. Andreas Gursky’s work ‘Stockholder Meetingshows exactly this, he was exhibiting his art work at the Museum of Modern Art in spring 2001; there was a mixture of feelings and views towards his work which left the viewers puzzled and a little confused at why the work was the way it was. Even thought the work was up and been displayed, the general word around the gallery was that the image that was up was ‘weird’.

His work was seen as a ‘montage with flat footed minimalist pretence’ his work with the digital and technological world, became to some extent, art, but an uninteresting result. Traditional techniques and ways were seen as magic and gave somewhat an interesting and appealing piece of art work. Michael Fried explained that ‘stockholder meeting’ was dismissed from his 2008 book on contemporary photography as “one of the few outright failures in Gurskys retrospective exhibition.”
The work was withdrawn and when a Google image search is done there aren’t any results or records of his work. The work was seen as stepping outside of photography into photomontage and breaking the boundaries of it, but it is a different and alternative way of viewing and thinking about an image.

The photograph came straight from the photo lab to the museum in 2001; it landed within this historical blind spot, where it raised suspicion of the digital aspect of photography, where high quality printing was still new to the general public. The edited parts of the work can be seen mainly around the heads of the people in the image and shows the work of Photoshop. Obvious manipulation to the image had happened and this could be seen, so this then made the viewers question whether the other artwork had been ‘Photo-shopped’ as well. Some of the images had been highly composited but others hadn’t. The viewers of the artwork left the museum feeling uncertain about the amount and use of the technology that had been used (implications of the work).
Personally I think they had the right to question the work and wonder why it had to be edited and changed so much. In this case the viewers did know the truth behind this piece of artwork as it could be seen clearly because of the level of technique used to manipulate it. But in other cases, photographs cannot always be as truthful as they may make out, simply because of how high the digital technology is and the level of which people can now change and manipulate an image. It is becoming a challenge for people to work out that an image isn’t the truth but on the other hand every time we see a photograph we are questioning whether it has been manipulated and edited of the truth.
Certain Artists and photographers stay away from the digital technology and changing images and stick to more traditional ways of exhibiting and getting a natural look of an image. Now that we have all this new technology and ways to change how an image once looked and completed twist it of the truth, photographers are wanting to go back to analogue and the original/traditional  way of photographing.
Digital composites and manipulated images have changed the way the world views and judges’ images and this will not change, no matter how many photographers start using analogue and traditional techniques again. Film photography acts as a reassurance that not all photography is digitally enhance, even though film has always been editable, it has changed the way we view life. “This reassurance is highly attractive, but almost certainly false.
Reference: -
Afterimage; July/August 2010, Vol. 38 Issue 1, p5-8, 4p
Feature Article
Accessed: - 01.03.2012

Edward Leffingwell wrote a comment in the Art of America about the whole point of the work was so you kept visiting the gallery on several occasions so that the “viewers stopped to figure out this work”. Some people saw his work as not a realistic view and exhibit because of the amount of technology that had helped him create the cut and paste piece of work.

Copies, Codes, Patterns - E-resources

Can you still tell which one is the real world?

We are now living in a virtual world, in a world of technology, in an “unreal” world. We can create fake identities on the web or be who ever we want to be. We can create what character we want or we can communicate with each other even though one person is here and one on the other side of the earth. We have that power; we have the power to know everything and everything its just one click away.
Copies, codes and patterns are all over the place. Everywhere you look there is a pattern created, from the nature to the ones made by people. We are influenced by all the things around us and other people’s work. When I moved here, in England I realized there is a pattern when it comes to the houses and buildings, and I had my first project “Environment” about that. They all look the same, it depends on the area they are in but they all look the same. You struggle in finding your house at first because of that, but you need to find that one detail that makes it unique.

Thomas Ruff is a German photographer who lives and works in Düsseldorf. All of his portraits are in a pattern, shown with emotionless expressions, sometimes face-on, sometimes in profile, and in front of a plain background.



Thomas Ruff (born 1958)
Blue Eyes M.V./B.E; Blue Eyes M.B./B.E.; Blue Eyes L.C./B.E.; Blue Eyes C.F./B.E.
1991
C-type prints
Museum nos. E.96 to 99-2009
Given from the private collection of Michael and Fiona King, London, in loving memory of Rosina and John Palmer. Images Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York

Photo and description from : http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/node/5017

Ruff is part of a leading group of contemporary German photographers trained at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. The group is known for a disciplined approach that explores - and questions - the objectivity of photography. The consistent and dispassionate style in this series of portraits resembles that of a mugshot or passport photograph. But Ruff replaced the natural eyes of his sitters with the same set of bright blue irises, thereby undermining the photographs’ truthfulness as records.

We try to discover different shapes in nature like known human faces or interpret them on window stains, hear random voices in sounds generated by electronic devices; we try to find a certain pattern in everything we do.

Sunday, 4 March 2012

The Digital Composite (books)

Pedro Meyer ‘Truths & Fictions’

Pedro Meyer’s book is full of digitally altered images, photos that have been created out of other photos using post – production software. The main theme that runs throughout the book is contemporary United States and native culture of Oaxaca. Mexico.
Some images are supported with relevant quotes by other photographers, artists and film makers. At the end of the book there is an interview with Meyer and photographers own comments and explanations about how he created some of his images.



Live Broadcast, San Juan Mixtepec, Oaxaca, 1990/93. Pedro Meyer


This week I looked at Mexican photographer Pedro Meyer’s work. His collection of work in book ‘Truths and Fictions: a journey from documentary to digital photography ‘ at first was quite confusing experience as every image kept me guessing if it’s ‘real’, perspective trick or product of digital special effects.
I also realized how much we trust pictures because they’re pictures. That is crazy because it takes away our responsibility to investigate the truth for ourselves to approach the images with care and with caution. Meyer’s images maintain sense of narrative and surrealistic ways. With his collection he creates relationship between space and time which is a creative way of strategy for producing a documentary image.


Mexican Serenade, Yuma, Arizona, 1985/92. Pedro Meyer.


Meyer’s ‘Truth & Fictions’ series are commonly called digitally – altered images but which Meyer refers to as found and made images. He does not change his images to mislead but to point out things we might otherwise not see.
Meyer describes his images as being documentary truthful and ‘real’. That sounds absurd and impossible as digital composites are used to create the wrong impression, to shock the public and mislead the public and we come across that every day by different media such as press, campaigns and News. However Meyer thinks that with his digital composites he will ‘open’ the viewers’ eyes and make everyone look more critically towards all flow of information
.


References:

Meyer,P (1995) Truth & Fiction: a journey from documentary to digital photography, Aperture Foundation, New York.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG6Bu8gpoYg (accessed online 05\03\12)

Image from : http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=pedro+meyer+live+broadcast&um=1&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&biw=1680&bih=896&tbm=isch&tbnid=mHhImfKwh7Wk5M:&imgrefurl=http://qaysi.livejournal.com/&docid=Un4aNy4lObJe3M&imgurl=http://pics.livejournal.com/qaysi/pic/00005dba/s320x240&w=320&h=225&ei=jQVWT_HDCfSA0AXTnITzCQ&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=612&vpy=163&dur=369&hovh=180&hovw=256&tx=139&ty=122&sig=117773917198373748374&page=1&tbnh=152&tbnw=199&start=0&ndsp=30&ved=1t:429,r:2,s:0