Daniel Burns DIAA: 2013

Friday, 20 December 2013

Monday, 16 December 2013

At first it seems this idea of a man standing in a lift for 10 hours a day filming people coming in and out going about their daily life seems crazy, boring even. It would certainly be a hard sell to any producer but it is wonderfully dark,comic, depressing and yet fascinating. Every person that comes in has their own personality and interesting way of dealing with the man behind the camera. At the start people wonder why they're being filmed by a strange man in a lift but they gradually get more comfortable with his presence and even get his name. Some are funny, some are tragic. It shows how the majority of peoples lives are completely generic and are circles of repetition. Its an eye-opener and leaves you with a dark realization that the world is a grim dark place but infinitely intriguing.

John Bergers - ways of seeing

In "Ways of Seeing" John Berger analyzes nude depictions of woman in the European artistic tradition. The first depiction of a woman discussed by Berger is that of Eve from the story of the Garden of Eden. Berger holds that the consciousness or nakedness in the story of Adam and Eve was the result of different ways in which man and woman looked at each other following the eating of the fruit from the tree of knowledge, and the subsequent subordination of the woman to man's rule. Renaissance art stresses to moment of initial shame in which Adam and Eve cover themselves with fig leaves, but Berger notes how their shame is from a third observer, not from each other. Eve's embarrassment is retained in late secular art with the woman's awareness for the fact that she in being gazed at. And as Berger puts it: she is not naked for herself; she is naked as the viewer sees her. Berger also notes the hypocrisy of using the mirror to represent women's vanity – first we paint a naked woman for our own pleasure of watching her, and then we place a mirror in her hand and criticize her for enjoying her own figure. In the representations of Greek Mythology Paris the young man has to decide which of the gods is the prettier, and thus their appearance becomes a contest (the ancestor of the beauty pageant). Winning the contest means surrendering to the viewer's gaze. Berger notes that other cultures do not hold the same attitude towards female nudity. In other words, ways of seeing are for Berger in fact ways of subjecting, and these differential ways of seeing/subjecting which distinguish a man's stance in the world for that of women's have a long history in western culture and are, at least partly, the cause of gender differences which persist even in the feminist era, because this is something much deeper than just formal equal rights.

The Genius of Photography, 'We are Family' Q&A

1. Diane Arbus's photography was of the vulnerable mostly, one of her famous pictures is of a boy who is holding a toy grenade and his expression is something that wasn't originally intended but it was a face he made because Diane was taking forever to do the shot and he was getting antsy.

2. I think photographers do prey on the vulnerable people as it helps create a realer image then something that is staged.

3. Larry Clark's Tulsa project was about a group of young people and there lives in Tulsa Oklahoma. There lives were not so pretty, with imagery of their personal lives and the lives of people of the time, much of which consisted of drugs, alcohol, violence, and casual and gay sex.

4. The title of Nan Goldin’s most renowned work was the “The Ballad of Sexual deficiency”. A visual diary following the effort of intimacy and relationships between friends and lovers.

5. Arkias photographs are about

His philosophy was that if you don't shoot photography you don't remember he said if he didn't take picture then he wouldn't remember it.

6. Richard Billinghams work is about his family life mostly his father who was an alcoholic.