ITAP photography 4

ITAP photography 4

1) Why did Garry Winogrand take photographs?

To see what the world look like photographed. He looked to capture the essence of life, the vibrancy of people. He had a wicked sense of irony and whit that he displayed through his photographs, as well as being deliberately provocative, it was said that he liked to make photographs that would upset the most liberal educated to the most politically conservative of people.

He was divorced with two young children and regularly took them to the zoo, photographing as he went. In one image he captures a “couple”, the man leaning into the attractive woman, with his arm causally but purposely behind her looking intently into her eyes, she is looking back at him, but her body language is very defensive, with her arms and legs crossed.  Behind them is a wolf, which appears to be stalking the pair of them. It’s a lovely irony, the hunter being hunted, the wolf contextualize the scene, from which the viewer can extrapolate his or her own meaning.  

2) Why did citizens evolve from blurs to solid flesh?

When the early photographers took images of towns or city’s, the citizens weren’t captured on the image due to the long exposure of the film and the movement of the people. Only people who stood still were captured. As cameras developed, blurs of people started to appear around static objects, and as they advanced further, with quicker exposures, peopled became solid.

3) What was/is the “much misunderstood theory”?

That will be “the decisive moment”. Through the Genius of Photography series, the theory has been accredited to Cartier-Bresson, who published a book of that title. It is a fact that all moments are decisive one way or another and that the cameras are capable of capturing the smallest of moments, no matter how worthy or unworthy they are. The suspension of time, that the camera facilitates, offers an insight into a life unseen, or, can expose a narrative that would have been lost.

4) Who was the godfather of street photography?

In the program Garry Winogrand is referred to as godfather of street photography.

5) Who was Paul Martin and what did he do?

He was an English photographer of French birth, borne in 1864. He is referred to in the program for the groundbreaking images he captured of the Victorians relaxing at the seaside. He obtained the unguarded images by hiding the camera in a paper bag.  

6) Who said “when I was growing up photographers were either nerds or pornographers”?

Ed Ruscha, who’s typologies and recordings of complete streets, put him on my nerdomiter.

7) Why did William Eggleston photograph in colour?

Not wishing to be flippant, but, because he wanted to. He seems to be a man that is not swayed by convention, at the time he published William Eggleston’s Guide, he defied the convention for black and white as well as for more traditional subject matter. He saw that there was a vocabulary that was being ignored and that was colour, he identified the psychological effect that colour could have, lifting advertising techniques into modern art.