Thesis Statements

"William Eggleston's Guide" makes an interesting connection to culture and society through pictures instead of actual words.

"In Plato's Cave" shows you new views on what photography means to other people and photography in a deeper way.

Robert Adams

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Adams_(photographer) :
Robert Adams (born May 8, 1937) is an American photographer who came to prominence as part of the photographic movement known as New Topographics. He was aJohn Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in photography in 1973 and 1980, and he received the MacArthur Foundation's MacArthur Fellowship in 1994. In 2009, he received the Hasselblad Award for his achievements in photography. He is represented by the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco and the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York.
For about five years, beginning in 1974, Adams embarked on an experiment: he made a series of photographs at night—the opposite of the high-altitude daylight used in most of his previous photographs. The project brought an element of risk he had not experienced before. Passing motorists sometimes veered toward him on rural roadsides, and in urban centers police repeatedly questioned him about his activities.

In Plato's Cave summary

While reading "In Plato's Cave", I did struggle to get through it at first.  But one main thing that stuck out to me was on p.8, "Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing - which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and tool of power."  I always thought that photography was just an art. I did not realize that to some people it can be something more meaningful.

Another part that caught me was on p.16 "Like the dead relatives and friends preserved in the family album, whose presence in photographs of neighborhoods now torn down, rural places disfigured and made barren, supply our pocket relation to the past." When I read this part, it made me think about how much has changed over the years. Photographs are like still memories that can be looked back on and remember the good times even if the present isn't what you expected it was going to be.

Homework Due Monday 1/31/11

Homework Due Friday 1/28/11

This is a picture of the stair case leading up to my dorm room.  Eggleston began his book with a picture of a door, as if to welcome you into the book and as a starting point.  I chose the stairs because it is a starting point to get to my room.

Homework Due Wed. 1/26/11

"I have, however, visited other places described by works of art, and have observed that the poem or picture is likely to seem a faithful document if we get to know it first and the unedited reality afterwards - whereas a new work of art that describes something we had known well is likely to seem unfamiliar and arbitrary as our own photos." - P.5

“Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.”  P. 6

“The American photographer Robert Adams has written about this process of prowling, and its purpose: "Over and over again the photographer walks a few steps and peers, rather comically, into the camera; to the exasperation of family and friends, he inventories what seems an endless number of angles; he explains, if asked, that he is trying for effective composition, but hesitates to define it. What he means is that a photographer wants form, an unarguably right relationship of shapes, a visual stability in which all components are equally important. The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is peace.””  P. 7

“The new graphic economy that characterizes the best photography of the early years of the century could be described in terms of the conventional concept of Composition, but it is perhaps more useful to think of it as the result of a new system of indication, based on the expressive possibilities of the detail.”  P. 8