Photography ( ) is the process, activity and
art of creating still or moving
pictures by recording
radiation on a sensitive medium, such as a
photographic film, or an
electronic sensor.
Light
patterns reflected or emitted from objects activate a sensitive
chemical or electronic sensor during a timed
exposure, usually through a
photographic lens in a device known as a
camera that also stores the resulting
information chemically or electronically. Photography has many uses
for business, science, art and pleasure.
Lens and mounting of a large-format
camera.
A portable folding reflector
positioned to "bounce" sunlight onto a model
The word "photograph" was coined in 1839 by
Sir John Herschel and is based on the
Greek φῶς (
phos)
"light" and
γραφή (
graphê) "representation by
means of lines" or "drawing", together meaning "drawing with
light". Traditionally, the products of photography have been called
negative and
photographs, commonly shortened
to
photos.
Function
The
camera or
camera obscura is the image-forming device,
and
photographic film or a
silicon electronic
image sensor is the sensing medium. The
respective recording medium can be the film itself, or a digital
electronic or magnetic memory.
Photographers control the camera and lens to "expose" the light
recording material (such as film) to the required amount of light
to form a "
latent image" (on film) or
"raw file" (in digital cameras) which, after appropriate
processing, is converted to a usable image. Digital cameras use an
electronic
image sensor based on
light-sensitive electronics such as
charge-coupled device (CCD) or
complementary
metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology. The resulting
digital image is stored electronically, but can be reproduced on
paper or film.
The
movie camera is a type of
photographic camera which takes a rapid sequence of photographs on
strips of film. In contrast to a still camera, which captures a
single snapshot at a time, the movie camera takes a series of
images, each called a "frame". This is accomplished through an
intermittent mechanism. The frames are later played back in a movie
projector at a specific speed, called the "frame rate" (number of
frames per second). While viewing, a person's eyes and brain merge
the separate pictures together to create the illusion of
motion.
In all but certain specialized cameras, the process of obtaining a
usable exposure must involve the use, manually or automatically, of
a few controls to ensure the photograph is clear, sharp and well
illuminated. The controls usually include but are not limited to
the following:
| Control |
Description |
| Focus |
The adjustment to place the sharpest focus where it is desired
on the subject. |
| Aperture |
Adjustment of the lens
opening, measured as f-number, which
controls the amount of light passing through the lens. Aperture
also has an effect on depth of field
and diffraction – the higher the
f-number, the smaller the opening, the less light, the greater the
depth of field, and the more the diffraction blur. The focal length
divided by the f-number gives the effective aperture diameter. |
| Shutter speed |
Adjustment of the speed (often expressed either as fractions of
seconds or as an angle, with mechanical shutters) of the shutter to
control the amount of time during which the imaging medium is
exposed to light for each exposure. Shutter speed may be used to
control the amount of light striking the image plane; 'faster'
shutter speeds (that is, those of shorter duration) decrease both
the amount of light and the amount of image blurring from motion of
the subject and/or camera. |
| White balance |
On digital cameras, electronic compensation for the color temperature associated with a given
set of lighting conditions, ensuring that white light is registered
as such on the imaging chip and therefore that the colors in the
frame will appear natural. On mechanical, film-based cameras, this
function is served by the operator's choice of film stock or with color correction filters. In
addition to using white balance to register natural coloration of
the image, photographers may employ white balance to aesthetic end,
for example white balancing to a blue object in order to obtain a
warm color temperature. |
| Metering |
Measurement of exposure so that highlights and shadows are
exposed according to the photographer's wishes. Many modern cameras
meter and set exposure automatically. Before automatic exposure,
correct exposure was accomplished with the use of a separate
light metering device or by the
photographer's knowledge and experience of gauging correct
settings. To translate the amount of light into a usable aperture
and shutter speed, the meter needs to adjust for the sensitivity of
the film or sensor to light. This is done by setting the "film
speed" or ISO sensitivity into the meter. |
| ISO speed |
Traditionally used to "tell the camera" the film speed of the selected film on film cameras,
ISO speeds are employed on modern digital cameras as an indication
of the system's gain from light to
numerical output and to control the automatic exposure system. A
correct combination of ISO speed, aperture, and shutter speed leads
to an image that is neither too dark nor too light. |
| Autofocus point |
On some cameras, the selection of a point in the imaging frame
upon which the auto-focus system will attempt to focus. Many
Single-lens reflex cameras
(SLR) feature multiple auto-focus points in the viewfinder. |
Many other elements of the imaging device itself may have a
pronounced effect on the quality and/or aesthetic effect of a given
photograph; among them are:
- Focal length and
type of lens (telephoto or "long" lens, macro, wide
angle, fisheye, or zoom)
- Filters
placed between the subject and the light recording material, either
in front of or behind the lens
- Inherent sensitivity of the medium to light
intensity and color/wavelengths.
- The nature of the light recording material,
for example its resolution as measured in pixels or grains of
silver halide.
Exposure and rendering
Camera controls are inter-related. The total amount of light
reaching the film plane (the "exposure") changes with the duration
of exposure, aperture of the lens, and on the effective focal
length of the lens (which in variable focal length lenses, can
force a change in aperture as the lens is zoomed). Changing any of
these controls can alter the exposure. Many cameras may be set to
adjust most or all of these controls automatically. This automatic
functionality is useful for occasional photographers in many
situations.
The duration of an exposure is referred to as shutter speed, often
even in cameras that don't have a physical shutter, and is
typically measured in fractions of a second. Aperture is expressed
by an f-number or f-stop (derived from focal ratio), which is
proportional to the ratio of the focal length to the diameter of
the aperture. If the f-number is decreased by a factor of \sqrt 2,
the aperture diameter is increased by the same factor, and its area
is increased by a factor of 2. The f-stops that might be found on a
typical lens include 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22, 32, where going up
"one stop" (using lower f-stop numbers) doubles the amount of light
reaching the film, and
stopping down
one stop halves the amount of light.
Exposures can be achieved through various combinations of shutter
speed and aperture. For example, f/8 at 8 ms (1/125th of a second)
and f/5.6 at 4 ms (1/250th of a second) yield the same amount of
light. The chosen combination has an impact on the final result.
The aperture and focal length of the lens determine the
depth of field, which refers to the range of
distances from the lens that will be in focus. A longer lens or a
wider aperture will result in "shallow" depth of field (i.e. only a
small plane of the image will be in sharp focus). This is often
useful for isolating subjects from backgrounds as in individual
portraits or macro photography. Conversely, a shorter lens, or a
smaller aperture, will result in more of the image being in focus.
This is generally more desirable when photographing landscapes or
groups of people. With very small apertures, such as
pinholes, a wide range of distance can be
brought into focus, but sharpness is severely degraded by
diffraction with such small
apertures. Generally, the highest degree of "sharpness" is achieved
at an aperture near the middle of a lens's range (for example, f/8
for a lens with available apertures of f/2.8 to f/16). However, as
lens technology improves, lenses are becoming capable of making
increasingly sharp images at wider apertures.
Image capture is only part of the image forming process. Regardless
of material, some process must be employed to render the latent
image captured by the camera into a viewable image. With slide
film, the developed film is just mounted for
projection. Print film requires the
developed film negative to be printed onto
photographic paper or
transparency. Digital images may
be uploaded to an image server (e.g., a
photo-sharing web site), viewed on a
television, or transferred to a
computer or
digital
photo frame.
Prior to the rendering of a viewable image, modifications can be
made using several controls. Many of these controls are similar to
controls during image capture, while some are exclusive to the
rendering process. Most printing controls have equivalent digital
concepts, but some create different effects. For example,
dodging and burning controls are
different between digital and film processes. Other printing
modifications include:
- Chemicals and process used during film development
- Duration of print exposure – equivalent to shutter speed
- Printing aperture – equivalent to aperture, but has no effect on depth of field
- Contrast – changing the visual
properties of objects in an image to make them distinguishable from
other objects and the background
- Dodging – reduces exposure
of certain print areas, resulting in lighter areas
- Burning in – increases
exposure of certain areas, resulting in darker areas
- Paper texture – glossy, matte, etc
- Paper type – resin-coated (RC) or fiber-based (FB)
- Paper size
- Toners – used to add warm or cold tones to black and white
prints
Uses
Photography gained the interest of many scientists and artists from
its inception. Scientists have used photography to record and study
movements, such as
Eadweard
Muybridge's study of human and animal locomotion in 1887.
Artists are equally interested by these aspects but also try to
explore avenues other than the photo-mechanical representation of
reality, such as the
pictorialist
movement. Military, police, and security forces use photography for
surveillance, recognition and data storage.Photography is used by
amateurs to preserve memories of favorite times, to capture special
moments, to tell stories, to send messages, and as a source of
entertainment.
History
Photography is the result of combining several technical
discoveries. Long before the first photographs were made, Chinese
philosopher
Mo Ti described a
pinhole camera in the 5th century B.C.E,
Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (965–1040)
studied the
camera obscura and
pinhole camera,
Albertus Magnus
(1193–1280) discovered
silver
nitrate, and Georges Fabricius (1516–1571) discovered
silver chloride. Daniel Barbaro described a
diaphragm in 1568. Wilhelm Homberg described how light darkened
some chemicals (photochemical effect) in 1694. The fiction book
Giphantie, published in 1760, by French
author
Tiphaigne de la Roche,
described what can be interpreted as photography.
Photography as a usable process goes back to the 1820s with the
development of chemical photography.
The first permanent
photograph was an image produced in 1822
by the French
inventor
Nicéphore Niépce, but it
was destroyed by a later attempt to duplicate it. Niépce was
successful again in 1825. However, because his photographs took so
long to
expose (8 hours), he
sought to find a new process. Working in conjunction with
Louis Daguerre, they experimented with silver
compounds based on a
Johann
Heinrich Schultz discovery in 1724 that a silver and chalk
mixture darkens when exposed to light. Niépce died in 1833, but
Daguerre continued the work, eventually culminating with the
development of the
daguerreotype in
1837. Daguerre took the first ever photo of a person in 1839 when,
while taking a daguerreotype of a Paris street, a pedestrian
stopped for a shoe shine, long enough to be captured by the long
exposure (several minutes). Eventually, France agreed to pay
Daguerre a pension for his formula, in exchange for his promise to
announce his discovery to the world as the gift of France, which he
did in 1839.
Meanwhile,
Hercules Florence had
already created a very similar process in 1832, naming it
Photographie, and
William
Fox Talbot had earlier discovered another means to fix a silver
process image but had kept it secret. After reading about
Daguerre's invention, Talbot refined his process so that portraits
were made readily available to the masses. By 1840, Talbot had
invented the
calotype process, which
creates
negative images.
John Herschel made many contributions
to the new methods. He invented the
cyanotype process, now familiar as the
"blueprint". He was the first to use the terms "photography",
"negative" and "positive". He discovered sodium thiosulphate
solution to be a solvent of silver halides in 1819, and informed
Talbot and Daguerre of his discovery in 1839 that it could be used
to "fix" pictures and make them permanent. He made the first glass
negative in late 1839.
In March 1851,
Frederick Scott
Archer published his findings in "The Chemist" on the wet plate
collodion process. This became the most
widely used process between 1852 and the late 1880s when the dry
plate was introduced. There are three subsets to the Collodion
process; the
Ambrotype (positive image on
glass), the
Ferrotype or Tintype (positive
image on metal) and the negative which was printed on
Albumen or Salt paper.
Many advances in photographic glass plates and printing were made
in through the nineteenth century. In 1884,
George Eastman developed the technology of
film to replace
photographic plates, leading to the
technology used by film cameras today.
In 1908
Gabriel Lippmann won the
Nobel Laureate in Physics for his method of reproducing colors
photographically based on the phenomenon of
interference, also known as the
Lippmann plate.
Processes
Black-and-white
All photography was originally monochrome, most of these
photographs were
black-and-white. Even after color film
was readily available, black-and-white photography continued to
dominate for decades, due to its lower cost and its "classic"
photographic look. It is important to note that some monochromatic
pictures are not always pure blacks and whites, but also contain
other hues depending on the process. The cyanotype process produces
an image of blue and white for example. The albumen process, first
used more than 150 years ago, produces brown tones.
Many photographers continue to produce some monochrome images. Some
full color digital images are processed using a variety of
techniques to create black and whites, and some manufacturers
produce digital cameras that exclusively shoot monochrome.
Color
Color photography was explored
beginning in the mid 1800s. Early experiments in color could not
fix the photograph and prevent the color from fading. The first
permanent color photo was taken in 1861 by the physicist
James Clerk Maxwell.
One of the early methods of taking color photos was to use three
cameras. Each camera would have a color
filter in front of the lens. This
technique provides the
photographer
with the three basic channels required to recreate a color image in
a
darkroom or processing plant. Russian
photographer
Sergei
Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii developed another technique, with
three color plates taken in quick succession.
Practical application of the technique was held back by the very
limited color response of early film; however, in the early 1900s,
following the work of photo-chemists such as
H. W.
Vogel, emulsions with adequate
sensitivity to green and red light at last became available.
The first commercially succesful color process, the
Autochrome, invented by the French
Lumière brothers,
reached the market in 1907. It was based on a 'screen-plate' filter
made of dyed grains of
potato starch,
and was one of many additive color screen products available
between the 1890s and the 1950s. A later example of the additive
screen process was the German
Agfacolor
introduced in 1932. In 1935, American
Kodak
introduced the first modern ('integrated tri-pack') color film
which was developed by two musicians Leopold Mannes and Leopold
Godowsky ("Man" and "God") working with the Kodak Research Labs. It
was
Kodachrome, based on multiple layered
silver gelatin emulsions that were each sensitized to one of the
three additive colors--red, green, and blue. The cyan, magenta, and
yellow dyes were created in those layers by adding color couplers
during processing. This was followed in 1936 by Agfa's
Agfacolor Neu. Unlike the Kodachrome tri-pack
process, the color couplers in Agfacolor Neu were incorporated into
the emulsion layers during manufacture, which greatly simplified
the film processing. Most modern color films, except Kodachrome,
use such incorporated-coupler techniques, though since the 1970s
nearly all have used a technique developed by Kodak to accomplish
this, rather than the original Agfa method.
Instant color film was introduced by
Polaroid in 1963.
Color photography may form images as a positive transparency,
intended for use in a
slide
projector, or as color negatives intended for use in creating
positive color enlargements on specially coated paper. The latter
is now the most common form of film (non-digital) color photography
owing to the introduction of automated photoprinting
equipment.
Full-spectrum, ultraviolet and infrared
Ultraviolet and
infrared films have been available for
many decades and employed in a variety of photographic avenues
since the 1960s. New technological trends in digital photography
have opened a new direction in
full spectrum photography, where
careful filtering choices across the ultraviolet, visible and
infrared lead to new artistic visions.
Modified digital cameras can detect some ultraviolet, all of the
visible and much of the near infrared spectrum, as most digital
imaging sensors are sensitive from about 350 nm to
1000 nm. An off-the-shelf digital camera contains an infrared
hot mirror filter that blocks most of the
infrared and a bit of the ultraviolet that would otherwise be
detected by the sensor, narrowing the accepted range from about
400 nm to 700 nm. Replacing a hot mirror or infrared
blocking filter with an infrared pass or a wide spectrally
transmitting filter allows the camera to detect the wider spectrum
light at greater sensitivity. Without the hot-mirror, the red,
green and blue (or cyan, yellow and magenta) colored micro-filters
placed over the sensor elements pass varying amounts of ultraviolet
(blue window) and infrared (primarily red, and somewhat lesser the
green and blue micro-filters).
Uses of full spectrum photography are for
fine art photography,
geology,
forensics & law
enforcement, and even some claimed use in
ghost hunting.
Digital photography
Traditional photography burdened
photographers working at remote locations
without easy access to processing facilities, and competition from
television pressured photographers to deliver images to newspapers
with greater speed. Photo journalists at remote locations often
carried miniature photo labs and a means of transmitting images
through telephone lines. In 1981, Sony unveiled the first consumer
camera to use a
charge-coupled
device for imaging, eliminating the need for film: the
Sony Mavica. While the Mavica saved images to
disk, the images were displayed on television, and the camera was
not fully digital. In 1990, Kodak unveiled the
DCS 100, the first commercially available digital
camera. Although its high cost precluded uses other than
photojournalism and professional
photography, commercial
digital
photography was born.
Digital imaging uses an electronic
image
sensor to record the image as a set of electronic data rather
than as chemical changes on film. The primary difference between
digital and chemical photography is that chemical photography
resists manipulation because it involves
film and
photographic paper, while digital imaging
is a highly manipulative medium. This difference allows for a
degree of image post-processing that is comparatively difficult in
film-based photography and permits different communicative
potentials and applications.
Digital
point-and-shoot
cameras have become widespread consumer products, outselling
film cameras, and including new features such as
video and
audio
recording.
Kodak announced in January 2004 that it would
no longer sell reloadable 35 mm cameras in western Europe, Canada
and the
United
States
after the end of that year. Kodak was at
that time a minor player in the reloadable film cameras market. In
January 2006,
Nikon followed suit and
announced that they will stop the production of all but two models
of their film cameras: the low-end
Nikon
FM10, and the high-end
Nikon F6. On May
25, 2006,
Canon announced they will stop
developing new film SLR cameras. Though most new camera designs are
now digital, a new 6x6cm/6x7cm
medium format film camera was
introduced in 2008 in a cooperation between
Fuji and
Voigtländer.
According to a survey made by Kodak in 2007, 75 percent of
professional photographers say they will continue to use film, even
though some embrace digital.
According to the U.S. survey results, more than two-thirds (68
percent) of professional photographers prefer the results of film
to those of digital for certain applications including:
- film’s superiority in capturing more information on medium and
large format films (48 percent);
- creating a traditional photographic look (48 percent);
- capturing shadow and highlighting details (45 percent);
- the wide exposure latitude of film (42 percent); and
- archival storage (38 percent)
Digital imaging has raised many ethical concerns because of the
ease of manipulating digital photographs in post processing. Many
photojournalists have declared they will not crop their pictures,
or are forbidden from combining elements of multiple photos to make
"illustrations," passing them as real photographs. Today's
technology has made picture editing relatively simple for even the
novice photographer. However, recent changes of in-camera
processing allows digital fingerprinting of RAW photos to verify
against tampering of digital photos for forensics use.
Camera phones, combined with sites
like
Flickr, have led to a new kind of social
photography.
Modes of production
Amateurism
An amateur photographer is one who practices photography as a
hobby and not for profit. The quality of some
amateur work is comparable or superior to that of many
professionals and may be highly specialised or
eclectic in its choice of subjects. Amateur
photography is often pre-eminent in photographic subjects which
have little prospect of commercial use or reward.
Commerce
Commercial photography is probably best defined as any photography
for which the photographer is paid for
images
rather than
works of art. In this light
money could be paid for the subject of the photograph or the
photograph itself. Wholesale, retail, and professional uses of
photography would fall under this definition. The commercial
photographic world could include:
- Advertising photography: photographs made to illustrate and
usually sell a service or product. These images, such as packshots, are generally done with an advertising agency, design firm or with an in-house corporate design
team.
- Fashion and glamour photography: This type of photography
usually incorporates models. Fashion
photography emphasizes the clothes or product, glamour
emphasizes the model. Glamour photography is popular in advertising
and in men's magazines. Models in glamour photography may be nude, but
this is not always the case.
- Crime Scene Photography: This type of photography consists of
photographing scenes of crime such as robberies and murders. A
black and white camera or an infrared camera may be used to capture
specific details.
- Still life photography
usually depicts inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace
objects which may be either natural or man-made.
- Food photography can be used
for editorial, packaging or advertising use. Food photography is
similar to still life photography, but requires some special
skills.
- Editorial photography: photographs made to illustrate a story
or idea within the context of a magazine. These are usually
assigned by the magazine.
- Photojournalism: this can be
considered a subset of editorial photography. Photographs made in
this context are accepted as a documentation of a news story.
- Portrait and wedding photography: photographs made
and sold directly to the end user of the images.
- Landscape
photography: photographs of different locations.
- Wildlife
photography that demonstrates life of the animals.
- Photo sharing: publishing or
transfer of a user's digital photos online.
- Paparazzi
The market for photographic services demonstrates the
aphorism "
A picture is worth a
thousand words", which has an interesting basis in the
history of photography. Magazines
and newspapers, companies putting up Web sites, advertising
agencies and other groups pay for photography.
Many people take photographs for self-fulfillment or for commercial
purposes. Organizations with a budget and a need for photography
have several options: they can employ a photographer directly,
organize a public competition, or obtain rights to
stock photographs. Photo stock can be
procured through traditional stock giants, such as
Getty Images or
Corbis;
smaller
microstock agencies,
such as
Fotolia; or web marketplaces, such
as Cutcaster.
Art
During the twentieth century, both
fine art photography and
documentary photography became
accepted by the
English-speaking
art world and the
gallery system.
In the United States, a handful of photographers, including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, John Szarkowski, F. Holland
Day, and
Edward Weston, spent
their lives advocating for photography as a fine art.At first, fine
art photographers tried to imitate painting styles. This movement
is called Pictorialism, often using soft focus for a dreamy,
'romantic' look. In reaction to that, Weston,
Ansel Adams, and others formed the
Group f/64 to advocate 'straight photography',
the photograph as a (sharply focused) thing in itself and not an
imitation of something else.
The
aesthetics of photography is a matter
that continues to be discussed regularly, especially in artistic
circles. Many artists argued that photography was the mechanical
reproduction of an image. If photography is authentically art, then
photography in the context of art would need redefinition, such as
determining what component of a photograph makes it
beautiful to the viewer. The controversy began with
the earliest images "written with light";
Nicéphore Niépce,
Louis Daguerre, and others among the very
earliest photographers were met with acclaim, but some questioned
if their work met the definitions and purposes of art.
Clive Bell in his classic essay
Art states that only "significant form" can distinguish
art from what is not art.
On February 14 2006 Sotheby’s London sold the 2001 photograph
"
99 Cent II Diptychon" for an
unprecedented $3,346,456 to an anonymous bidder making it the most
expensive of all time.
- Photography that turns a concept or idea into a photograph.
Even though what is depicted in the photographs are real objects,
the subject is strictly abstract.
Science and forensics
Wootton bridge collapse in 1861
The camera has a long and distinguished history as a means of
recording phenomena from the first use by Daguerre and Fox-Talbot,
such as astronomical events (
eclipses for
example), small creatures and plants when the camera was attached
to the eyepiece of microscopes (in
photomicroscopy) and for
macro photography of larger specimens.
The camera
also proved useful in recording crime
scenes and the scenes of accidents, such as the Wootton bridge
collapse
in 1861 and the Staplehurst rail crash
of 1865. One of the first systematic applications
occurred at the scene of the Tay Rail Bridge
disaster of 1879. The court, just a few days
after the accident, ordered
James Valentine of Dundee to
record the scene using both long distance shots and close-ups of
the debris. The set of over 50 accident photographs was used in the
subsequent court of inquiry so that witnesses could identify pieces
of the wreckage, and the technique is now commonplace both at
accident scenes and subsequent cases in courts of law. The set of
over 50 Tay bridge photographs are of very high quality, being made
on a large plate camera with a small aperture and using fine grain
emulsion film on a glass plate. When the surviving positive prints
are scanned at high resolution, they can be enlarged to show
details of the failed components such as broken
cast iron lugs and the tie bars which failed to
hold the towers in place.
The set of original photographs is held at
Dundee
City Library. The photographs show that, in
the words of the
Public Inquiry the
bridge was "badly designed, badly built and badly maintained". The
methods used in analysing old photographs are collectively known as
forensic photography.
Between 1846 and 1852
Charles
Brooke invented a technology for the
automatic
registration of instruments by photography. These instruments
included
barometers,
thermometers,
psychrometers, and
magnetometers, which recorded their readings by
means of an
automated photographic process.
Photography has become ubiquitous in recording events and data in
science and engineering, and at
crime
scenes or accident scenes. The method has been much extended by
using other wavelengths, such as
infrared photography and
ultraviolet photography, as well as
spectroscopy. Those methods were first
used in the Victorian era and developed much further since that
time.
Other image forming techniques
Besides the camera, other methods of forming images with light are
available. For instance, a
photocopy or
xerography machine forms permanent images
but uses the transfer of static
electrical charges rather than photographic
film, hence the term
electrophotography.
Photograms are images produced by the shadows of
objects cast on the photographic paper, without the use of a
camera. Objects can also be placed directly on the glass of an
image scanner to produce digital
pictures.
Social and cultural implications
There are many ongoing questions about different aspects of
photography. In her writing "On Photography" (1977), Susan Sontag
discusses concerns about the objectivity of photography. This is a
highly debated subject within the photographic community. It has
been concluded that photography is a subjective discipline "to
photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means
putting one’s self into a certain relation to the world that feels
like knowledge, and therefore like power." Photographers decide
what to take a photo of, what elements to exclude and what angle to
frame the photo. Along with the context that a photograph is
received in, photography is definitely a subjective form.
Modern photography has raised a number of concerns on its impact on
society. In
Alfred Hitchcock's
Rear Window (1954), the camera
is presented as a promoter of voyeuristic inhibitions. 'Although
the camera is an observation station, the act of photographing is
more than passive observing'. Michal Powell's
Peeping Tom
(1960) portrays the camera as both sexual and sadistically violent
technology that literally kills in this picture and at the same
time captures images of the pain and anguish evident on the faces
of the female victims.
"The camera doesn't rape or even possess, though it may
presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest
reach of metaphor, assassinate - all activities that, unlike the
sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with
some detachment."
Photography is one of the new media forms that changes perception
and changes the structure of society. Further unease has been
caused around cameras in regards to desensitization. Fears that
disturbing or explicit images are widely accessible to children and
society at large have been raised. Particularly, photos of war and
pornography are causing a stir. Sontag is concerned that "to
photograph is to turn people into objects that can be symbolically
possessed." Desensitization discussion goes hand in hand with
debates about censored images. Sontag writes of her concern that
the ability to censor pictures means the photographer has the
ability to construct reality.
One of the practices through which photography constitutes society
is
tourism. Tourism and photography combine
to create a "tourist gaze"in which local inhabitants are positioned
and defined by the camera lens. However, it has also been argued
that there exists a "reverse gaze" through which indigenous
photographees can position the tourist photographer as a shallow
consumer of images.
Law
Photography is both restricted and protected by the law in many
jurisdictions. Protection of photographs is typically achieved
through the granting of
copyright or moral
rights to the photographer. In the UK a recent law
(Counter-Terrorism Act 2008) increases the power of the police to
prevent persons, even press photographers, from taking pictures in
public places.
See also
- Forms
- Photographers and photographs
- Equipment (cameras, etc.)
- History
- Techniques
- General concepts
- Technical principles
References
- Online Etymology Dictionary
- Joseph and Barbara Anderson, "The Myth of Persistence of Vision
Revisited," Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 45, No. 1
(Spring 1993): 3–12.
http://www.uca.edu/org/ccsmi/ccsmi/classicwork/Myth%20Revisited.htm
- Spectral curves of RGB and Hot Mirror
filters.
- “Canon to Stop Making Single-Lens Camera”
Associated Press, 25 May 2006. Retrieved 2 September 2006.
- www.voigtlaender.de
- The new Voigtlaender Vitolux S70 and Bessa III
667
- www.photographypress.co.uk
- Bissell, K.L., Photography and Objectivity (2000) findarticles.com (accessed 24/10/2008).
- Sontag, S., On Photography, Penguin, London (1977), pp
3–24.
- Levinson, P., The Soft Edge: a Natural History and Future of
the Information Revolution, Routledge, London and New York (1997),
pp 37–48.
- British Journal of Photography article
Further reading
- Freeman Patterson, Photography and The Art of Seeing,
1989, Key Porter Books, ISBN 1-55013-099-4.
- The Oxford Companion to the Photograph, ed. by Robin
Lenman, Oxford University Press 2005
- Image Clarity: High Resolution Photography by John B.
Williams, Focal Press 1990, ISBN 0-240-80033-8.
- Franz-Xaver Schlegel, Das Leben der toten Dinge - Studien
zur modernen Sachfotografie in den USA 1914-1935, 2 Bände,
Stuttgart/Germany: Art in Life 1999, ISBN 3-00-004407-8.
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