Doing a Photo Critique

An interesting and brief article on photo critique

and another

one more

and finally a rather more detailed and informative guide.

However here are the ten most annoying critiques!

Los Angeles County Sheriff stopping a photographer in the subway

Photographer: Robert Capa

Omaha Beach 1944 by Robert Capa who famously said, "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough".

Study Skills Workshop

Introduction to Photographic Studies

• Variety of different styles of portrait
• Not just portrait format
• Portrait/Landscape/Square
• Depth is more important than breadth - Essay

Exhibiting: Presentation, Meaning & Reception of Photographs

Photographer: Lee Miller

Document written about Lee Miller's Buchenwald photograph.

Photography & Ethics

• Self-reflective
• Own ethical code (which might change)
• Boris Mikhailov - Ukraine series (1998) Pays venerable people to pose in certain ways, decline of body and mind
• Germaine Greer quote on Diane Arbus
• Arnold Newman - Alfred Krupp (1963), subjective and how Newman wanted Krupp portrayed
• As a developing practitioner I need to decide what to do
• Is there a universal code or are they subjective
• Can i look in the mirror?
• What might the consequences be?
• No such thing as a simple checklist, honesty in gradation of photography
• Bert Stern - Marilyn Cross (1962), some images were crossed through with lipstick by Monroe but used after her death
• Paparazzi - hounding Ami Winehouse
• Mike Urban - Crowd Picture, handed to police
• Russell Sorgi - Buffalo suicide (1942)
• James Nachtwey - 9/11
• What you are prepared to photograph might be different from what you are prepared to print

Photography & Conflict

• Conflict is a broader term than war (Berger - agony)
• Handout - John Berger
• Image by Don McCullin - Black & White - Black Blood
• Not truthful because its B&W
• "I only use the camera like I use a toothbrush, it does the job" (Cited in Wells L, 2003:289)
• When was technology available to record agony?
• Susan Sontag - Regarding the pain of others
• Photography shows what war does - mutilation and ruin
• American/Mexican War, newspapers - "show me don't tell me"
• Early conflict photography was "staged" because camera speed too slow
• Daguerreotype - "General Wool & Staff" was long exposure
• We don't see active warfare, we see staging or we see the aftermath
• Roger Fenton: "The Valley of the Shadow of Death" (1855)
• Photographers often have famous artists in their heads when they stage images
• Fenton's work reported back an oppositional image (imotive) and not the "official" image
• Canonball offers a terrible suggestion but does not show the war itself
• James Robertson was far more explicit (1856)
• Alexander Gardner, strewn dead bodies (1863) - horror and reality, political point, making a point that previous photography was putting a veil over the truth
• William Rider: Passchendaele (1917) first major conflict where newspapers could reproduce images easily at relatively good quality. 
• No longer Kings Shilling, no longer elitist
• Images start to be censored by government
• Press works with government (self-censorship)
• Press do not want censorship so they show what they can
• Could not show dead soldiers in Britain
• Public didn't really see the soldiers experience of war
• Technology still not great
• Battles were in trenches so photography very difficult
• Night photography almost impossible
• Ernst Friedrich "War Against War" (1928) Compilation of images by other photographers
• Sontag - shock therapy, drawn from German archives
• The face of war, facial injuries. Book banned ten years later
• "The Fallen" by unknown photographer/soldier
• We start to see that those taking part in the war are taking the photographs
• Robert Capa: D-Day Landing (1944) Taking images of the battle itself
• Henri Cartier-Bresson - POW - Leica
• Eugene Smith - WWII
• Lee Miller: Buchenwald (1945) Conflict shown through subtle images and not metaphor
• Lee Miller gives official version
• Sontag - non polished images are welcomed - "I've got to show them"
• Larry Burrows: Vietnam (1966) No heroes, complex and contradictory
• Burrows lost Capa's photos in lab
• Images are now placed on the internet, leaked images, we all feel complicit
• Don McCullin now takes landscapes - Antithesis
• Inherrent contradiction
• What is the photographers aim? Strike concern in the viewer
• Aim was to politicise us into action
• Berger - photography of war doesn't affect human behavoir
• Tyler Hicks - triptych made front page of New York Times
• Sontag - What are we not seeing if we are seeing this?