Ding ding - round 2

A new academic year calls for a new blog, a fresh start and a blank canvas.

Redirect your gaze towards this sparkly new collection of thoughts and images.

New Blog Here!

Research - Aesthetics, from http://www.iep.utm.edu/aestheti/

Aesthetics

Aesthetics may be defined narrowly as the theory of beauty, or more broadly as that together with the philosophy of art. The traditional interest in beauty itself broadened, in the eighteenth century, to include the sublime, and since 1950 or so the number of pure aesthetic concepts discussed in the literature has expanded even more. Traditionally, the philosophy of art concentrated on its definition, but recently this has not been the focus, with careful analyses of aspects of art largely replacing it. Philosophical aesthetics is here considered to center on these latter-day developments. Thus, after a survey of ideas about beauty and related concepts, questions about the value of aesthetic experience and the variety of aesthetic attitudes will be addressed, before turning to matters which separate art from pure aesthetics, notably the presence of intention. That will lead to a survey of some of the main definitions of art which have been proposed, together with an account of the recent “de-definition” period. The concepts of expression, representation, and the nature of art objects will then be covered.

1. Introduction

The full field of what might be called “aesthetics” is a very large one. There is even now a four-volume encyclopedia devoted to the full range of possible topics. The core issues in Philosophical Aesthetics, however, are nowadays fairly settled (see the book edited by Dickie, Sclafani, and Roblin, and the monograph by Sheppard, among many others).
Aesthetics in this central sense has been said to start in the early eighteenth century, with the series of articles on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” which the journalist Joseph Addison wrote in the early issues of the magazine The Spectator in 1712. Before this time, thoughts by notable figures made some forays into this ground, for instance in the formulation of general theories of proportion and harmony, detailed most specifically in architecture and music. But the full development of extended, philosophical reflection on Aesthetics did not begin to emerge until the widening of leisure activities in the eighteenth century.
By far the most thoroughgoing and influential of the early theorists was Immanuel Kant, towards the end of the eighteenth century. Therefore it is important, first of all, to have some sense of how Kant approached the subject. Criticisms of his ideas, and alternatives to them, will be presented later in this entry, but through him we can meet some of the key concepts in the subject by way of introduction.
Kant is sometimes thought of as a formalist in art theory; that is to say, someone who thinks the content of a work of art is not of aesthetic interest. But this is only part of the story. Certainly he was a formalist about the pure enjoyment of nature, but for Kant most of the arts were impure, because they involved a “concept.” Even the enjoyment of parts of nature was impure, namely when a concept was involved— as when we admire the perfection of an animal body or a human torso. But our enjoyment of, for instance, the arbitrary abstract patterns in some foliage, or a color field (as with wild poppies, or a sunset) was, according to Kant, absent of such concepts; in such cases, the cognitive powers were in free play. By design, art may sometimes obtain the appearance of this freedom: it was then “Fine Art”—but for Kant not all art had this quality.
In all, Kant’s theory of pure beauty had four aspects: its freedom from concepts, its objectivity, the disinterest of the spectator, and its obligatoriness. By “concept,” Kant meant “end,” or “purpose,” that is, what the cognitive powers of human understanding and imagination judge applies to an object, such as with “it is a pebble,” to take an instance. But when no definite concept is involved, as with the scattered pebbles on a beach, the cognitive powers are held to be in free play; and it is when this play is harmonious that there is the experience of pure beauty. There is also objectivity and universality in the judgment then, according to Kant, since the cognitive powers are common to all who can judge that the individual objects are pebbles. These powers function alike whether they come to such a definite judgment or are left suspended in free play, as when appreciating the pattern along the shoreline. This was not the basis on which the apprehension of pure beauty was obligatory, however. According to Kant, that derived from the selflessness of such an apprehension, what was called in the eighteenth century its “disinterest.” This arises because pure beauty does not gratify us sensuously; nor does it induce any desire to possess the object. It “pleases,” certainly, but in a distinctive intellectual way. Pure beauty, in other words, simply holds our mind’s attention: we have no further concern than contemplating the object itself. Perceiving the object in such cases is an end in itself; it is not a means to a further end, and is enjoyed for its own sake alone.
It is because Morality requires we rise above ourselves that such an exercise in selfless attention becomes obligatory. Judgments of pure beauty, being selfless, initiate one into the moral point of view. “Beauty is a symbol of Morality,” and “The enjoyment of nature is the mark of a good soul” are key sayings of Kant. The shared enjoyment of a sunset or a beach shows there is harmony between us all, and the world.
Among these ideas, the notion of “disinterest” has had much the widest currency. Indeed, Kant took it from eighteenth century theorists before him, such as the moral philosopher, Lord Shaftesbury, and it has attracted much attention since: recently by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, for instance. Clearly, in this context “disinterested” does not mean “uninterested,” and paradoxically it is closest to what we now call our “interests,” that is, such things as hobbies, travel, and sport, as we shall see below. But in earlier centuries, one’s “interest” was what was to one’s advantage, that is, it was “self-interest,” and so it was the negation of that which closely related aesthetics to ethics.

2. Aesthetic Concepts

The eighteenth century was a surprisingly peaceful time, but this turned out to be the lull before the storm, since out of its orderly classicism there developed a wild romanticism in art and literature, and even revolution in politics. The aesthetic concept which came to be more appreciated in this period was associated with this, namely sublimity, which Edmund Burke theorized about in his “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.” The sublime was connected more with pain than pure pleasure, according to Burke, since threats to self-preservation were involved, as on the high seas, and lonely moors, with the devilish humans and dramatic passions that artists and writers were about to portray. But in these circumstances, of course, it is still “delightful horror,” as Burke appreciated, since one is insulated by the fictionality of the work in question from any real danger.
“Sublime” and “beautiful” are only two amongst the many terms which may be used to describe our aesthetic experiences. Clearly there are “ridiculous” and “ugly,” for a start, as well. But the more discriminating will have no difficulty also finding something maybe “fine,” or “lovely” rather than “awful” or “hideous,” and “exquisite” or “superb” rather than “gross” or “foul.” Frank Sibley wrote a notable series of articles, starting in 1959, defending a view of aesthetic concepts as a whole. He said that they were not rule- or condition-governed, but required a heightened form of perception, which one might call taste, sensitivity, or judgment. His full analysis, however, contained another aspect, since he was not only concerned with the sorts of concepts mentioned above, but also with a set of others which had a rather different character. For one can describe works of art, often enough, in terms which relate primarily to the emotional and mental life of human beings. One can call them “joyful,” “melancholy,” “serene,” “witty,” “vulgar,” and “humble,” for instance. These are evidently not purely aesthetic terms, because of their further uses, but they are still very relevant to many aesthetic experiences.
Sibley’s claim about these concepts was that there were no sufficient conditions for their application. For many concepts—sometimes called “closed” concepts, as a result—both necessary and sufficient conditions for their application can be given. To be a bachelor, for instance, it is necessary to be male and unmarried, though of marriageable age, and together these three conditions are sufficient. For other concepts, however, the so-called “open” ones, no such definitions can be given— although for aesthetic concepts Sibley pointed out there were still some necessary conditions, since certain facts can rule out the application of, for example, “garish,” “gaudy,” or “flamboyant.”
The question therefore arises: how do we make aesthetic judgments if not by checking sufficient conditions? Sibley’s account was that, when the concepts were not purely perceptual they were mostly metaphoric. Thus, we call artworks “dynamic,” or “sad,” as before, by comparison with the behaviors of humans with those qualities. Other theorists, such as Rudolph Arnheim and Roger Scruton, have held similar views. Scruton, in fact, discriminated eight types of aesthetic concept, and we shall look at some of the others below.

3. Aesthetic Value

We have noted Kant’s views about the objectivity and universality of judgments of pure beauty, and there are several ways that these notions have been further defended. There is a famous curve, for instance, obtained by the nineteenth century psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, which shows how human arousal is quite generally related to complexity of stimulus. We are bored by the simple, become sated, even over-anxious, by the increasingly complex, while in between there is a region of greatest pleasure. The dimension of complexity is only one objective measure of worth which has been proposed in this way. Thus it is now known, for instance, that judgments of facial beauty in humans are a matter of averageness and symmetry. Traditionally, unity was taken to be central, notably by Aristotle in connection with Drama, and when added to complexity it formed a general account of aesthetic value. Thus Francis Hutcheson, in the eighteenth century, asserted that “Uniformity in variety always makes an object beautiful.” Monroe Beardsley, more recently, has introduced a third criterion—intensity—to produce his three “General Canons” of objective worth. He also detailed some “Special Canons.”
Beardsley called the objective criteria within styles of Art “Special Canons.” These were not a matter of something being good of its kind and so involving perfection of a concept in the sense of Kant. They involved defeasible “good-making” and “bad-making” features, more in the manner Hume explained in his major essay in this area, “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757). To say a work of art had a positive quality like humor, for instance, was to praise it to some degree, but this could be offset by other qualities which made the work not good as a whole. Beardsley defended all of his canons in a much more detailed way than his eighteenth century predecessor however: through a lengthy, fine-grained, historical analysis of what critics have actually appealed to in the evaluation of artworks. Also, he explicitly made the disclaimer that his canons were the only criteria of value, by separating these “objective reasons” from what he called “affective” and “genetic” reasons. These two other sorts of reasons were to do with audience response, and the originating artist and his times, respectively, and either “The Affective Fallacy” or “The Intentional Fallacy,” he maintained, was involved if these were considered. The discrimination enabled Beardsley to focus on the artwork and its representational relations, if any, to objects in the public world.
Against Beardsley, over many years, Joseph Margolis maintained a “Robust Relativism.” Thus he wanted to say that “aptness,” “partiality,” and “non-cognitivism” characterize art appreciation, rather than “truth,” “universality,” and “knowledge.” He defended this with respect to aesthetic concepts, critical judgments of value, and literary interpretations in particular, saying, more generally, that works of art were “culturally emergent entities” not directly accessible, because of this, to any faculty resembling sense perception. The main debate over aesthetic value, indeed, concerns social and political matters, and the seemingly inevitable partiality of different points of view. The central question concerns whether there is a privileged class, namely those with aesthetic interests, or whether their set of interests has no distinguished place, since, from a sociological perspective, that taste is just one amongst all other tastes in the democratic economy. The sociologist Arnold Hauser preferred a non-relativistic point of view, and was prepared to give a ranking of tastes. High art beat popular art, Hauser said, because of two things: the significance of its content, and the more creative nature of its forms. Roger Taylor, by contrast, set out very fully the “leveller’s” point of view, declaring that “Aida” and “The Sound of Music” have equal value for their respective audiences. He defended this with a thorough philosophical analysis, rejecting the idea that there is such a thing as truth corresponding to an external reality, with the people capable of accessing that truth having some special value. Instead, according to Taylor, there are just different conceptual schemes, in which truth is measured merely by coherence internal to the scheme itself. Janet Wolff looked at this debate more disinterestedly, in particular studying the details of the opposition between Kant and Bourdieu.

4. Aesthetic Attitudes

Jerome Stolnitz, in the middle of the last century, was a Kantian, and promoted the need for a disinterested, objective attitude to art objects. It is debatable, as we saw before, whether this represents Kant’s total view of art, but the disinterested treatment of art objects which Stolnitz recommended was very commonly pursued in his period.
Edward Bullough, writing in 1912, would have called “disinterested attention” a “distanced” attitude, but he used this latter term to generate a much fuller and more detailed appreciation of the whole spectrum of attitudes which might be taken to artworks. The spectrum stretched from people who “over-distance” to people who “under-distance.” People who over-distance are, for instance, critics who merely look at the technicalities and craftwork of a production, missing any emotional involvement with what it is about. Bullough contrasted this attitude with what he called “under-distancing,” where one might get too gripped by the content. The country yokel who jumps upon the stage to save the heroine, and the jealous husband who sees himself as Othello smothering his wife, are missing the fact that the play is an illusion, a fiction, just make-believe. Bullough thought there was, instead, an ideal mid-point between his two extremes, thereby solving his “antinomy of distance” by deciding there should be the least possible distance without its disappearance.
George Dickie later argued against both “disinterest” and “distance” in a famous 1964 paper, “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude.” He argued that we should be able to enjoy all objects of awareness, whether “pure aesthetic” or moral. In fact, he thought the term “aesthetic” could be used in all cases, rejecting the idea that there was some authorized way of using the word just to apply to surface or formal features— the artwork as a thing in itself. As a result, Dickie concluded that the aesthetic attitude, when properly understood, reduced to just close attention to whatever holds one’s mind in an artwork, against the tradition which believed it had a certain psychological quality, or else involved attention just to certain objects.
Art is not the only object to draw interest of this pleasurable kind: hobbies and travel are further examples, and sport yet another, as was mentioned briefly above. In particular, the broadening of the aesthetic tradition in recent years has led theorists to give more attention to sport. David Best, for instance, writing on sport and its likeness to art, highlighted how close sport is to the purely aesthetic. But he wanted to limit sport to this, and insisted it had no relevance to ethics. Best saw art forms as distinguished expressly by their having the capacity to comment on life situations, and hence bring in moral considerations. No sport had this further capacity, he thought, although the enjoyment of many sports may undoubtedly be aesthetic. But many art forms—perhaps more clearly called “craft-forms” as a result— also do not comment on life situations overmuch, for example, décor, abstract painting, and non-narrative ballet. And there are many sports which are pre-eminently seen in moral, “character-building” terms, for example, mountaineering, and the various combat sports (like boxing and wrestling). Perhaps the resolution comes through noting the division Best himself provides within sport-forms, between, on the one hand, “task” or “non-purposive” sports like gymnastics, diving, and synchronized swimming, which are the ones he claims are aesthetic, and on the other hand the “achievement,” or “purposive’ sports, like those combat sports above. Task sports have less “art” in them, since they are not as creative as the purposive ones.

5. Intentions

The traditional form of art criticism was biographical and sociological, taking into account the conceptions of the artist and the history of the traditions within which the artist worked. But in the twentieth century a different, more scientific and ahistorical form of literary criticism grew up in the United States and Britain: The New Criticism. Like the Russian Formalists and French Structuralists in the same period, the New Critics regarded what could be gleaned from the work of art alone as relevant to its assessment, but their specific position received a much-discussed philosophical defense by William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in 1946. Beardsley saw the position as an extension of “The Aesthetic Point of View”; Wimsatt was a practical critic personally engaged in the new line of approach. In their essay “The Intentional Fallacy,” Wimsatt and Beardsley claimed “the design or intention of the artist is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.” It was not always available, since it was often difficult to obtain, but, in any case, it was not appropriately available, according to them, unless there was evidence for it internal to the finished work of art. Wimsatt and Beardsley allowed such forms of evidence for a writer’s intentions, but would allow nothing external to the given text.
This debate over intention in the literary arts has raged with full force into more recent times. A contemporary of Wimsatt and Beardsley, E.D. Hirsch, has continued to maintain his “intentionalist” point of view. Against him, Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels have taken up an ahistorical position. Frank Cioffi, one of the original writers who wrote a forceful reply to Wimsatt and Beardsley, aligned himself with neither camp, believing different cases were “best read” sometimes just as, sometimes other than as, the artist knowingly intended them. One reason he rejected intention, at times, was because he believed the artist might be unconscious of the full significance of the artwork.
A similar debate arises in other art forms besides Literature, for instance Architecture, Theater, and Music, although it has caused less professional comment in these arts, occurring more at the practical level in terms of argument between “purists” and “modernizers.” Purists want to maintain a historical orientation to these art forms, while modernizers want to make things more available for contemporary use. The debate also has a more practical aspect in connection with the visual arts. For it arises in the question of what devalues fakes and forgeries, and by contrast puts a special value on originality. There have been several notable frauds perpetrated by forgers of artworks and their associates. The question is: if the surface appearance is much the same, what especial value is there in the first object? Nelson Goodman was inclined to think that one can always locate a sufficient difference by looking closely at the visual appearance. But even if one cannot, there remain the different histories of the original and the copy, and also the different intentions behind them.
The relevance of such intentions in visual art has entered very prominently into philosophical discussion. Arthur Danto, in his 1964 discussion of “The Artworld,” was concerned with the question of how the atmosphere of theory can alter how we see artworks. This situation has arisen in fact with respect to two notable paintings which look the same, as Timothy Binkley has explained, namely Leonardo’s original “Mona Lisa” and Duchamp’s joke about it, called “L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved.” The two works look ostensibly the same, but Duchamp, one needs to know, had also produced a third work, “L.H.O.O.Q.,” which was a reproduction of the “Mona Lisa,” with some graffiti on it: a goatee and moustache. He was alluding in that work to the possibility that the sitter for the “Mona Lisa” might have been a young male, given the stories about Leonardo’s homosexuality. With the graffiti removed the otherwise visually similar works are still different, since Duchamp’s title, and the history of its production, alters what we think about his piece.

6. Definitions of Art

Up to the “de-definition” period, definitions of art fell broadly into three types, relating to representation, expression, and form. The dominance of representation as a central concept in art lasted from before Plato’s time to around the end of the eighteenth century. Of course, representational art is still to be found to this day, but it is no longer pre-eminent in the way it once was. Plato first formulated the idea by saying that art is mimesis, and, for instance, Bateaux in the eighteenth century followed him, when saying: “Poetry exists only by imitation. It is the same thing with painting, dance and music; nothing is real in their works, everything is imagined, painted, copied, artificial. It is what makes their essential character as opposed to nature.”
In the same century and the following one, with the advent of Romanticism, the concept of expression became more prominent. Even around Plato’s time, his pupil Aristotle preferred an expression theory: art as catharsis of the emotions. And Burke, Hutcheson, and Hume also promoted the idea that what was crucial in art were audience responses: pleasure in Art was a matter of taste and sentiment. But the full flowering of the theory of Expression, in the twentieth century, has shown that this is only one side of the picture.
In the taxonomy of art terms Scruton provided, Response theories concentrate on affective qualities such as “moving,” “exciting,” “nauseous,” “tedious,” and so forth. But theories of art may be called “expression theories” even though they focus on the embodied, emotional, and mental qualities discussed before, like “joyful,” “melancholy,” “humble,” “vulgar,” and “intelligent.” As we shall see below, when recent studies of expression are covered in more detail, it has been writers like John Hospers and O.K. Bouwsma who have preferred such theories. But there are other types of theory which might, even more appropriately, be called “expression theories.” What an artist is personally expressing is the focus of self-expression theories of art, but more universal themes are often expressed by individuals, and art-historical theories see the artist as merely the channel for broader social concerns.
R. G. Collingwood in the 1930s took art to be a matter of self-expression: “By creating for ourselves an imaginary experience or activity, we express our emotions; and this is what we call art.” And the noteworthy feature of Marx’s theory of art, in the nineteenth century, and those of the many different Marxists who followed him into the twentieth century, was that they were expression theories in the “art-Historical” sense. The arts were taken, by people of this persuasion, to be part of the superstructure of society, whose forms were determined by the economic base, and so art came to be seen as expressing, or “reflecting” those material conditions. Social theories of art, however, need not be based on materialism. One of the major social theorists of the late nineteenth century was the novelist Leo Tolstoy, who had a more spiritual point of view. He said: “Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them.”
Coming into the twentieth century, the main focus shifted towards abstraction and the appreciation of form. The aesthetic, and the arts and crafts movements, in the latter part of the nineteenth century drew people towards the appropriate qualities. The central concepts in aesthetics are here the pure aesthetic ones mentioned before, like “graceful,” “elegant,” “exquisite,” “glorious,” and “nice.” But formalist qualities, such as organization, unity, and harmony, as well as variety and complexity, are closely related, as are technical judgments like “well-made,” “skilful,” and “professionally written.” The latter might be separated out as the focus of Craft theories of art, as in the idea of art as “Techne” in ancient Greece, but Formalist theories commonly focus on all of these qualities, and “aesthetes” generally find them all of central concern. Eduard Hanslick was a major late nineteenth century musical formalist; the Russian Formalists in the early years of the revolution, and the French Structuralists later, promoted the same interest in Literature. Clive Bell and Roger Fry, members of the influential Bloomsbury Group in the first decades of the twentieth century, were the most noted early promoters of this aspect of Visual art.
Bell’s famous “Aesthetic Hypothesis” was: “What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? Only one answer seems possible— significant form. In each, lines and colors combined in a particular way; certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colors, these aesthetically moving forms, I call ‘Significant Form’; and ‘Significant Form’ is the one quality common to all works of visual art.” Clement Greenberg, in the years of the Abstract Expressionists, from the 1940s to the 1970s, also defended a version of this Formalism.
Abstraction was a major drive in early twentieth century art, but the later decades largely abandoned the idea of any tight definition of art. The “de-definition” of art was formulated in academic philosophy by Morris Weitz, who derived his views from some work of Wittgenstein on the notion of games. Wittgenstein claimed that there is nothing which all games have in common, and so the historical development of them has come about through an analogical process of generation, from paradigmatic examples merely by way of “family resemblances.”
There are, however, ways of providing a kind of definition of art which respects its open texture. The Institutional definition of art, formulated by George Dickie, is in this class: “a work of art is an artefact which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by the artworld.” This leaves the content of art open, since it is left up to museum directors, festival organizers, and so forth, to decide what is presented. Also, as we saw before, Dickie left the notion of “appreciation” open, since he allowed that all aspects of a work of art could be attended to aesthetically. But the notion of “artefact,” too, in this definition is not as restricted as it might seem, since anything brought into an art space as a candidate for appreciation becomes thereby “artefactualized,” according to Dickie— and so he allowed as art what are otherwise called (natural) “Found Objects,” and (previously manufactured) “Readymades.” Less emphasis on power brokers was found in Monroe Beardsley’s slightly earlier aesthetic definition of art: “an artwork is something produced with the intention of giving it the capacity to satisfy the aesthetic interest”— where “production” and “aesthetic” have their normal, restricted content. But this suggests that these two contemporary definitions, like the others, merely reflect the historical way that art developed in the associated period. Certainly traditional objective aesthetic standards, in the earlier twentieth century, have largely given way to free choices in all manner of things by the mandarins of the public art world more recently.

7. Expression

Response theories of art were particularly popular during the Logical Positivist period in philosophy, that is, around the 1920s and 1930s. Science was then contrasted sharply with Poetry, for instance, the former being supposedly concerned with our rational mind, the latter with our irrational emotions. Thus the noted English critic I. A. Richards tested responses to poems scientifically in an attempt to judge their value, and unsurprisingly found no uniformity. Out of this kind of study comes the common idea that “art is all subjective”: if one concentrates on whether people do or do not like a particular work of art then, naturally, there can easily seem to be no reason to it.
We are now more used to thinking that the emotions are rational, partly because we now distinguish the cause of an emotion from its target. If one looks at what emotions are caused by an artwork, not all of these need target the artwork itself, but instead what is merely associated with it. So what the subjective approach centrally overlooks are questions to do with attention, relevance, and understanding. With those as controlling features we get a basis for normalizing the expected audience’s emotions in connection with the artwork, and so move away from purely personal judgments such as “Well, it saddened me” to more universal assessments like “it was sad.”
And with the “it” more focused on the artwork we also start to see the significance of the objective emotional features it metaphorically possesses, which were what Embodiment theorists like Hospers settled on as central. Hospers, following Bouwsma, claimed that the sadness of some music, for instance, concerns not what is evoked in us, nor any feeling experienced by the composer, but simply its physiognomic similarity to humans when sad: “it will be slow not tripping; it will be low not tinkling. People who are sad move more slowly, and when they speak they speak softly and low.” This was also a point of view developed at length by the gestalt psychologist Rudolph Arnheim.
The discriminations do not stop there, however. Guy Sircello, against Hospers, pointed out first that there are two ways emotions may be embodied in artworks: because of their form (which is what Hospers chiefly had in mind), and because of their content. Thus, a picture may be sad not because of its mood or color, but because its subject matter or topic is pathetic or miserable. That point was only a prelude, however, to an even more radical criticism of Embodiment theories by Sircello. For emotion words can also be applied, he said, on account of the “artistic acts” performed by the artists in presenting their attitude to their subject. If we look upon an artwork from this perspective, we are seeing it as a “symptom” in Suzanne Langer’s terms; however, Langer believed one should see it as a “symbol” holding some meaning which can be communicated to others.
Communication theorists all combine the three elements above, namely the audience, the artwork, and the artist, but they come in a variety of stamps. Thus, while Clive Bell and Roger Fry were Formalists, they were also Communication Theorists. They supposed that an artwork transmitted “aesthetic emotion” from the artist to the audience on account of its “significant form.” Leo Tolstoi was also a communication theorist but of almost the opposite sort. What had to be transmitted, for Tolstoi, was expressly what was excluded by Bell and (to a lesser extent) Fry, namely the “emotions of life.” Tolstoi wanted art to serve a moral purpose: helping to bind communities together in their fellowship and common humanity under God. Bell and Fry saw no such social purpose in art, and related to this difference were their opposing views regarding the value of aesthetic properties and pleasure. These were anathema to Tolstoi, who, like Plato, thought they led to waste; but the “exalted” feelings coming from the appreciation of pure form were celebrated by Bell and Fry, since their “metaphysical hypothesis” claimed it put one in touch with “ultimate reality.” Bell said, “What is that which is left when we have stripped a thing of all sensations, of all its significance as a means? What but that which philosophers used to call ‘the thing in itself’ and now call ‘ultimate reality’.”
This debate between moralists and aesthetes continues to this day with, for instance, Noël Carroll supporting a “Moderate Moralism” while Anderson and Dean support “Moderate Autonomism.” Autonomism wants aesthetic value to be isolated from ethical value, whereas Moralism sees them as more intimately related.
Communication theorists generally compare art to a form of Language. Langer was less interested than the above theorists in legislating what may be communicated, and was instead concerned to discriminate different art languages, and the differences between art languages generally and verbal languages. She said, in brief, that art conveyed emotions of various kinds, while verbal language conveyed thoughts, which was a point made by Tolstoy too. But Langer spelled out the matter in far finer detail. Thus, she held that art languages were “presentational” forms of expression, while verbal languages were “discursive”— with Poetry, an art form using verbal language, combining both aspects, of course. Somewhat like Hospers and Bouwsma, Langer said that art forms presented feelings because they were “morphologically similar” to them: an artwork, she held, shared the same form as the feeling it symbolizes. This gave rise to the main differences between presentational and discursive modes of communication: verbal languages had a vocabulary, a syntax, determinate meanings, and the possibility of translation, but none of these were guaranteed for art languages, according to Langer. Art languages revealed “what it is like” to experience something— they created “virtual experiences.”
The detailed ways in which this arises with different art forms Langer explained in her 1953 book Feeling and Form. Scruton followed Langer in several ways, notably by remarking that the experience of each art form is sui generis, that is, “each of its own kind.” He also spelled out the characteristics of a symbol in even more detail. Discussions of questions specific to each art form have been pursued by many other writers; see, for instance, Dickie, Sclafani, and Roblin, and the recent book by Gordon Graham.

8. Representation

Like the concept of Expression, the concept of Representation has been very thoroughly examined since the professionalization of Philosophy in the twentieth century.
Isn’t representation just a matter of copying? If representation could be understood simply in terms of copying, that would require “the innocent eye,” that is, one which did not incorporate any interpretation. E. H. Gombrich was the first to point out that modes of representation are, by contrast, conventional, and therefore have a cultural, socio-historical base. Thus perspective, which one might view as merely mechanical, is only a recent way of representing space, and many photographs distort what we take to be reality— for instance, those from the ground of tall buildings, which seem to make them incline inwards at the top.
Goodman, too, recognized that depiction was conventional; he likened it to denotation, that is, the relation between a word and what it stands for. He also gave a more conclusive argument against copying being the basis of representation. For that would make resemblance a type of representation, whereas if a resembles b, then b resembles a— yet a dog does not represent its picture. In other words, Goodman is saying that resemblance implies a symmetric relationship, but representation does not. As a result, Goodman made the point that representation is not a craft but an art: we create pictures of things, achieving a view of those things by representing them as this or as that. As a result, while one sees the objects depicted, the artist’s thoughts about those objects may also be discerned, as with Sircello’s “artistic arts.” The plain idea that just objects are represented in a picture was behind Richard Wollheim’s account of representational art in the first edition of his book Art and Its Objects (1968). There, the paint in a picture was said to be “seen as” an object. But in the book’s second edition, Wollheim augmented this account to allow for what is also “seen in” the work, which includes such things as the thoughts of the artist.
There are philosophical questions of another kind, however, with respect to the representation of objects, because of the problematic nature of fictions. There are three broad categories of object which might be represented: individuals which exist, like Napoleon; types of thing which exist, like kangaroos; and things which do not exist, like Mr. Pickwick, and unicorns. Goodman’s account of representation easily allowed for the first two categories, since, if depictions are like names, the first two categories of painting compare, respectively, with the relations between the proper name “Napoleon” and the person Napoleon, and the common name “kangaroo” and the various kangaroos. Some philosophers would think that the third category was as easily accommodated, but Goodman, being an Empiricist (and so concerned with the extensional world), was only prepared to countenance existent objects. So for him pictures of fictions did not denote or represent anything; instead, they were just patterns of various sorts. Pictures of unicorns were just shapes, for Goodman, which meant that he saw the description “picture of a unicorn” as unarticulated into parts. What he preferred to call a “unicorn-picture” was merely a design with certain named shapes within it. One needs to allow there are “intensional” objects as well as extensional ones before one can construe “picture of a unicorn’ as parallel to “picture of a kangaroo.” By contrast with Goodman, Scruton is one philosopher more happy with this kind of construal. It is a construal generally more congenial to Idealists, and to Realists of various persuasions, than to Empiricists.
The contrast between Empiricists and other types of philosopher also bears on other central matters to do with fictions. Is a fictional story a lie about this world, or a truth about some other? Only if one believes there are other worlds, in some kind of way, will one be able to see much beyond untruths in stories. A Realist will settle for there being “fictional characters,” often enough, about which we know there are some determinate truths— wasn’t Mr. Pickwick fat? But one difficulty then is knowing things about Mr. Pickwick other than what Dickens tells us— was Mr. Pickwick fond of grapes, for instance? An Idealist will be more prepared to consider fictions as just creatures of our imaginations. This style of analysis has been particularly prominent recently, with Scruton essaying a general theory of the imagination in which statements like “Mr. Pickwick was fat” are entertained in an “unasserted” fashion. One problem with this style of analysis is explaining how we can have emotional relations with, and responses to, fictional entities. We noticed this kind of problem before, in Burke’s description “delightful horror”: how can audiences get pleasure from tragedies and horror stories when, if those same events were encountered in real life, they would surely be anything but pleasurable? On the other hand, unless we believe that fictions are real, how can we, for instance, be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina? Colin Radford, in 1975, wrote a celebrated paper on this matter which concluded that the “paradox of emotional response to fiction” was unsolvable: adult emotional responses to fictions were “brute facts,” but they were still incoherent and irrational, he said. Radford defended this conclusion in a series of further papers in what became an extensive debate. Kendall Walton, in his 1990 book Mimesis and Make-Believe, pursued at length an Idealist’s answer to Radford. At a play, for instance, Walton said the audience enters into a form of pretence with the actors, not believing, but making believe that the portrayed events and emotions are real.

9. Art Objects

What kind of thing is a work of art? Goodman, Wollheim, Wolterstorff, and Margolis have been notable contributors to the contemporary debate.
We must first distinguish the artwork from its notation or “recipe,” and from its various physical realizations. Examples would be: some music, its score, and its performances; a drama, its script, and its performances; an etching, its plate, and its prints; and a photograph, its negative, and its positives. The notations here are “digital” in the first two cases, and “analogue” in the second two, since they involve discrete elements like notes and words in the one case, and continuous elements like lines and color patches in the other. Realizations can also be divided into two broad types, as these same examples illustrate: there are those that arise in time (performance works) and those that arise in space (object works). Realizations are always physical entities. Sometimes there is only one realization, as with architect-designed houses, couturier-designed dresses, and many paintings, and Wollheim concluded that in these cases the artwork is entirely physical, consisting of that one, unique realization. However, a number a copies were commonly made of paintings in the middle ages, and it is theoretically possible to replicate even expensive clothing and houses.
Philosophical questions in this area arise mainly with respect to the ontological status of the idea which gets executed. Wollheim brought in Charles Peirce’s distinction between types and tokens, as an answer to this: the number of different tokens of letters (7), and different types of letter (5), in the string “ABACDEC,” indicates the difference. Realizations are tokens, but ideas are types, that is, categories of objects. There is a normative connection between them as Margolis and Nicholas Wolterstorff have explained, since the execution of ideas is an essentially social enterprise.
That also explains how the need for a notation arises: one which would link not only the idea with its execution, but also the various functionaries. Broadly, there are the creative persons who generate the ideas, which are transmitted by means of a recipe to manufacturers who generate the material objects and performances. “Types are created, particulars are made” it has been said, but the link is through the recipe. Schematically, two main figures are associated with the production of many artworks: the architect and the builder, the couturier and the dressmaker, the composer and the performer, the choreographer and the dancer, the script-writer and the actor, and so forth. But a much fuller list of operatives is usually involved, as is very evident with the production of films, and other similar large entertainments. Sometimes the director of a film is concerned to control all its aspects, when we get the notion of an “auteur” who can be said to be the author of the work, but normally, creativity and craft thread through the whole production process, since even those designated “originators” still work within certain traditions, and no recipe can limit entirely the end product.
The associated philosophical question concerns the nature of any creativity. There is not much mystery about the making of particulars from some recipe, but much more needs to be said about the process of originating some new idea. For creation is not just a matter of getting into an excited mental state— as in a “brainstorming” session, for instance. That is a central part of the “creative process theory,” a form of which is to be found in the work of Collingwood. It was in these terms that Collingwood distinguished the artist from the craftsperson, namely with reference to what the artist was capable of generating just in his or her mind. But the major difficulty with this kind of theory is that any novelty has to be judged externally in terms of the artist’s social place amongst other workers in the field, as Jack Glickman has shown. Certainly, if it is to be an original idea, the artist cannot know beforehand what the outcome of the creative process will be. But others might have had the same idea before, and if the outcome was known already, then the idea thought up was not original in the appropriate sense. Thus the artist will not be credited with ownership in such cases. Creation is not a process, but a public achievement: it is a matter of breaking the tape ahead of others in a certain race.

10. References and Further Reading

• Arnheim, R.1954, Art and Visual Perception. University of California Press, Berkeley.
  • A study of physiognomic properties from the viewpoint of gestalt psychology.
• Beardsley, M.C. 1958, Aesthetics, Harcourt Brace, New York.
  • The classic mid-twentieth century text, with a detailed, practical study of the principles of art criticism.
• Bell, C. 1914, Art, Chatto and Windus, London.
  • Manifesto for Formalism defending both his Aesthetic Hypothesis, and his Metaphysical Hypothesis.
• Best, D. 1976, Philosophy and Human Movement, Allen and Unwin, London.
  • Applies aesthetic principles to Sport, and assesses its differences from Art.
• Bourdieu, P. 1984, Distinction, trans. R.Nice, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
  • Studies contemporary French taste empirically, with special attention to the place of the “disinterested” class.
• Carroll, N 1990, The Philosophy of Horror; or, Paradoxes of the Heart, Routledge, London and New York.
  • Investigation into the form and aesthetics of horror film and fiction, including discussion of the paradox of emotional response to fiction and the paradox of “horror-pleasure”.
• Collingwood, R.G. 1958, The Principles of Art, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
  • Argues for important theses about Creativity, Art versus Craft, and Self-Expression.
• Cooper, D. E. (ed.) 1995, A Companion to Aesthetics, Blackwell, Oxford.
  • Short notes about many aspects of, and individuals in Art and aesthetic theory.
• Crawford, D.W. 1974, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.
  • Commentary on Kant’s third critique.
• Curtler, H. (ed.) 1983, What is Art? Haven, New York.
  • Collects a number of papers discussing Beardsley’s aesthetics.
• Danto, A. C. 1981, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.
  • Contains Danto’s developed views about the influence of art theory.
• Davies, S. 1991, Definitions of Art, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
  • Contains a thorough study of the respective worth of Beardsley’s, and Dickie’s recent definitions of art.
• Dickie, G. 1974, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
  • Dickie’s first book on his definition of Art.
• Dickie, G. 1984, The Art Circle, Haven, New York.
  • Dickie’s later thoughts about his definition of Art.
• Dickie, G. 1996, The Century of Taste, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
  • Contains a useful discussion of Hutcheson, Hume, and Kant, and some of their contemporaries.
• Dickie, G., Sclafani, R.R., and Roblin, R. (eds) 1989, Aesthetics a Critical Anthology, 2nd ed. St Martin’s Press, New York.
  • Collection of papers on historic and contemporary Aesthetics, including ones on the individual arts.
• Eagleton, T. 1990, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Blackwell, Oxford.
  • A study of Aesthetics from the eighteenth century onwards, from the point of view of a Marxist, with particular attention to German thinkers.
• Freeland, C. 2001, But Is it Art?, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
  • Discusses why innovation and controversy are valued in the arts, weaving together philosophy and art theory.
• Gaut, B. and Lopes, D.M. (eds) 2001, The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, Routledge, London and New York.
  • A series of short articles on most aspects of aesthetics, including discussions of the individual arts.
• Gombrich, E.H. 1960, Art and Illusion, Pantheon Books, London.
  • Historical survey of techniques of pictorial representation, with philosophical commentary.
• Goodman, N. 1968, Languages of Art, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis.
  • Discusses the nature of notations, and the possibility of fakes.
• Graham, G. 1997, Philosophy of the Arts; an Introduction to Aesthetics, Routledge, London.
  • Has separate chapters on Music, Painting and Film, Poetry and Literature, and Architecture.
• Hanfling, O. (ed.) 1992, Philosophical Aesthetics, Blackwell, Oxford.
  • Summary papers on the core issues in Aesthetics, prepared for the Open University.
• Hauser, A.1982, The Sociology of Art, Chicago University Press, Chicago.
  • Major historical study of Art’s place in society over the ages.
• Hjort, M. and Laver, S. (eds) 1997, Emotion and the Arts, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
  • Papers on various aspects of art and emotion.
• Hospers (ed) 1969, Introductory Readings in Aesthetics, Macmillan, New York.
  • Collection of major papers, including Stolnitz and Dickie on aesthetic attitudes, Hospers on Expression, and Bell, Fry, Langer and Beardsley about their various theories.
• Hospers, J. (ed.) 1971, Artistic Expression, Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York.
  • Large collection of historical readings on Expression.
• Kant, I. 1964, The Critique of Judgement, trans. J.C.Meredith, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
  • The original text of Kant’s third critique.
• Iseminger, G. (ed.) 1992, Intention and Interpretation, Temple University Press, Philadelphia.
  • Contains papers by Hirsch, and Knapp and Michaels, amongst others, updating the debate over Intention.
• Kelly, M. (ed.) 1998, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
  • Four volumes not just on Philosophical Aesthetics, but also on historical, sociological, and biographical aspects of Art and Aesthetics worldwide.
• Langer, S. 1953, Feeling and Form, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
  • Detailed study of the various art forms, and their different modes of expression.
• Langer, S. 1957, Problems in Art, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
• Langer, S. 1957, Philosophy in a New Key, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
  • Langer’s more theoretical writings.
• Levinson, J. (ed.) 1998, Aesthetics and Ethics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
  • Contains papers by Carroll, and Anderson and Dean, amongst others, updating the debate over aestheticism.
• Manns, J.W. 1998, Aesthetics, M.E.Sharpe, Armonk.
  • Recent monograph covering the main topics in the subject.
• Margolis, J. (ed.) 1987, Philosophy Looks at the Arts, 3rd ed., Temple University Press, Philadelphia.
  • Central papers in recent Aesthetics, including many of the core readings discussed in the text.
• Mothersill, M. 1984, Beauty Restored, Clarendon, Oxford.
  • Argues for a form of Aesthetic Realism, against Sibley, and with a discussion of Hume and Kant.
• Richards, I. A. 1970, Poetries and Sciences, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
  • Defends a subjectivist view of Art.
• Scruton, R.1974, Art and Imagination, Methuen, London.
  • A sophisticated and very detailed theory of most of the major concepts in Aesthetics.
• Sheppard, A. D. R. 1987, Aesthetics: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Art, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
  • An introductory monograph on the whole subject.
• Taylor, R. 1981, Beyond Art, Harvester, Brighton.
  • Defends the right of different classes to their own tastes.
• Tolstoi, L. 1960, What is Art? Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis.
  • Tolstoi’s theory of Art and Aesthetics.
• Walton, K.L. 1990, Mimesis as Make Believe, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.
  • A thorough view of many arts, motivated by the debate over emotional responses to fictions.
• Wolff, J. 1993, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, 2nd ed., University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
  • On the debate between objective aesthetic value, and sociological relativism.
• Wollheim, R. 1980, Art and its Objects, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
  • A philosophical study of the nature of art objects.
• Wolterstorff, N. 1980, Works and Worlds of Art, Clarendon, Oxford.
  • A very comprehensive study.

Author Information

Barry Hartley Slater
Email: mailto:slaterbh@cyllene.uwa.edu.au?subject=Your%20Aesthetics%20Article
University of Western Australia

Last updated: July 25, 2005 | Originally published: January/9/2003

Lighting Ratio's

http://people.ucsc.edu/~ilusztig/172/lectures/lightingratios.pdf

Whilst this article isn't ideal, it does help to serve as a reminder when considering lighting ratio's.

Adding contrast to an image can add to the overall mood, and differentiate your images from everybody else's - giving you a unique style.

This is the effect different lighting ratio's can have on the overall image - and on a persons individual features (this is great for defined faces, but maybe not so good for a fuller face)

Images taken by Elliot Boyd in a session instructed by Andrew Farrington

I do like the overall effect, and can clearly see the advantages of using varying ratio's to gain the required effect.
I'd like to try this with coloured gels and throw something else into the mix;

• maybe a colour over the camera lens and a neutralising gel directed on the face alone
• coloured gels just on the two lights which were side& behind

I think this may add a further interest to the shots?

35mm Film, composition and the golden rectangle - web research

Oskar Barnack and the 3:2 Aspect Ratio
The origins of the aspect ratio of 35mm film can be traced to Oskar Barnack, an employee of Leitz Camera in Germany. Barnack believed the 3:2 aspect ratio to be the ideal choice for his invention, the first 35mm camera ever, dubbed the "Ur-Leica". After WWI, Barnack convinced his boss, Ernest Leitz II, to begin production of similar cameras. In 1925, Leitz Camera released the first Leica and the rest is history. Why was Oskar Barnack so adamant about the seemingly arbitrary aspect ratio of 3:2? There are many other film formats with different aspect ratios to choose from, but there is something special about the 3:2 aspect ratio--it happens to have the closest proportions to the Golden Rectangle of any other major film format out there, with the sole exception of European widescreen. Perhaps Oskar Barnack had this in mind when he created the 3:2 aspect ratio.

What Is the Golden Rectangle?
The Golden Rectangle is defined as a rectangle that can be partioned into a square and a smaller rectangle which has the same aspect ratio of the original rectangle. In Figure 1, we see such a rectangle. In this example, the length of the smaller rectangle divided by its width is equal to the length of the larger rectangle divided by its width, i.e., a ÷ b = (a + b) ÷ a. The ratio of the larger side of each rectangle to the smaller side is known as the Golden Ratio. Mathematically, this works out to be about 1.6:1, or 3.2:2 compared to the 3:2 aspect ratio of 35mm film.

Figure 1: The Golden Rectangle.

The Golden Rectangle in Nature

The Golden Rectangle and Golden Ratio appear in some very interesting places. For example, in Fibonacci numbers, a sequence of numbers where each new number is the sum of the previous two numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 . . .), the ratio of consecutive numbers increasingly approaches the Golden Ratio. In Figure 2, we see a graphical relationship between Fibonacci numbers and the Golden Rectangle. The Fibonacci numbers are closely related to exponential growth, such as the reproduction of rabbits. They are also found in plants where many tend to have a Fibonacci number of petals or leaves.

Figure 2: Relationship between the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Rectangle

Another interesting place the Golden Rectangle appears is in spirals. Successive points dividing a golden rectangle into squares lie on a logarithmic spiral, also known as the "Spira Mirabilis". See Figure 3. Coincidentally, spirals such as these are found throughout nature, such as in the contours of Nautilus shells.

Figure 3: The Golden Rectangle and Spira Mirabilis

The Golden Rectangle in Art
The Golden Rectangle is believed to have been first constructed by Pythagorus in the 6th Century B.C. It is said to be one of the most visually pleasing of all geometric forms. Archeologists have found countless examples of it in the facades of ancient Greek architecture. In Figure 4, we see how the Parthenon in Athens was built to the dimensions of the Golden Rectangle.

Figure 4: The Parthenon

In Figure 5, we also see how Leonardo da Vinci applied the Golden Rectangle to the proportions of the human body. In this example, the height of the person was divided into two segments, the dividing point being the person's navel. Leonardo took the distance from the soles of the feet to the navel, then divided by the distance from the navel to the top of the head and found that it was equal to the Golden Mean, or as he would call it, the Divine Proportion.

Figure 5: Leonardo da Vinci's study of the human body

The Golden Rectangle also has its place in modern art such as in the paintings of Piet Mondrian. In Figure 6, we see one such painting.

Figure 6: Piet Mondrian, Composition in Red, Yellow, and Blue



The Golden Rectangle in Photography

And now we return, full circle, to how the Golden Rectangle relates to 35mm photography. We cannot speak further on this subject without mentioning Henri Cartier-Bresson, arguably the most imporant photographer of the 20th century. Before he ever became a photographer however, Cartier-Bresson studied painting under the Cubist painter, Andre Lhote. Beginning in 1928, he underwent the visual training which would eventually enable him to capture on film what he would later call, "Images a la Sauvette," better known as "The Decisive Moment". Indeed, before Lhote passed away, he commented on Bresson's photography, "Everything comes from your training as a painter".

So how does Bresson relate to the importance of the 3:2 aspect ratio? Interestingly, Cartier-Bresson never cropped any of his images. Every single photograph he displayed was a full 35mm frame just as it came from one of his Leicas. Cartier-Bresson would file out the negative carriers to specifically show that the print was an uncropped, full-frame enlargement composed entirely in the camera. He wrote. “In order to ‘give a meaning' to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what he frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, a discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry.” The geometry Cartier-Bresson speaks of is that of the 35mm frame. Notable war photographer, Don McCullin, said of Cartier-Bresson, "I think I speak for every photographer and especially Magnum photographers, when I say that Henri really introduced the concept of perfect composition into our thinking. He was the first to teach us to compose within the specific shape of the 35mm frame and to utilize the very nature of that camera and format."

But why such devotedness to the seemingly arbitrary 3:2 aspect ratio? In Figure 7, we see that the aspect ratio of 35mm film is in fact a very close approximation of the Golden Rectangle.

Figure 7: 35mm film and the Golden Rectangle

Although efforts to try and analyze Cartier-Bresson's genius would probably be pointless, by looking at several of Bresson's photographs, we can clearly see the close relationship between his compositions and the Golden Rectangle. This is most likely a carryover from his training as a painter, as his mentor Lhote suggested. The amazing thing is that, unlike a painter who can create his compositions at his leisure, Cartier-Bresson had to discover them in the unpredictable and relentless tempo of everyday life. We see, in Figure 8, how the line of children in one of Cartier-Bresson's photographs closely follows a logarithmic spiral.

Figure 8:

In Figure 9, we see how Cartier-Bresson used the proportions of the Golden Rectangle to form his composition.

Figure 9:

Interestingly, most people would probably say that the photo above follows the Rule of Thirds.

However, I would venture to say that the Rule of Thirds is merely a specific application or simplification of the Golden Rectangle. In Figure 10, we see an overlay of the Rule of Thirds over the Golden Rectangle. In this overlay, the four points located at the intersections of the lines dividing the image into thirds, considered the sweet spots of composition, fall approximately where the Golden Rectangle converges if allowed to repeat inside itself. Perhaps the Rule of Thirds actually has its origins in the Golden Rectangle.

Figure 10: Overlay of the Rule of Thirds over the Golden Rectangle

So, there you have it, a compelling argument against the idea that the 3:2 aspect ratio is simply an arbitrary standard some manufacturer decided on years ago for no valid reason. I leave you with my own attempt at applying the Golden Rectangle to photography.

History of Image - Portrait photographers

For this task I had to research 2 past photographers of a given genre - portrait photography.
I was pleased to receive this genre to research, as it is an area that I do not have much experience of, and as such probably have a lot to learn.

Initially I thought about my perception of portrait photography, and I recall old school photograph's where non of the students want to be there, and aren't enjoying the experience. No character or emotion is captured and whilst the clothes of the given era may be colourful, the images appear bland - maybe this is why I don't like portraits?
Time has moved on and disposable cash, some would say is more readily available, and with the rise in disposable income came a rise in the desire for family portraits to capture the 'spirit' of a family and the 'venture' style portraits that are now quite common - high key lighting, white backgrounds, white T-shirts and bare feet, whilst these might differ drastically from the family and school portraits of old, they all have the same feel - no matter who the family, like the poses are out of a handbook sent down from head office!
So why do I not like portrait photography? Probably because I haven't been exposed to as many images of different styles as I'd like, and the images I'd been bombarded with from this genre were bland and had no soul. So in my research I'm looking for photographers who capture something different, the essence of either themselves or the subject in a way I've never seen before.

I've used a lot of websites and books in this piece, the following are of note;
Master of photography
Photography as art
Criticising photograpghy
The ongoing moment
The theatre of face

Peter Hujar
Born in New Jersey in 1934, Peter Hujar moved to New York to work in the advertising and fashion industry. At this time New York was financially in poor standing but a place that was experiencing a surge in cultural changes through Gay Nightlife culture.
His black and white work was largely filled portraits of the 'alternative' people with whom his lifestyle would have brought him into contact with and feature nude gay men, drag queens and 'alternative' performers.

Hujar, who died in 1987 after an AIDS related complication, received little recognition during his lifetime, but was an important influence on other photographers and his work has featured in many exhibitions since his death.
His most recognised image is Candy Darling on her Deathbed.
The transsexual, who was a central figure in the downtown scene of New York, is pictured looking peace full, elegant and beautiful as she lies in a hospital bed awaiting her imminent death. Her face made up, her clothing is an elegant blouse as she continues to play her role as The Diva, defiantly refusing to look poorly, ever graceful, however close the end may be. Inescapable though is the morbid truth;  the black rose on the bed, the strip lighting of the hospital and the distant darkness.

The image is well composed and illustrates the many layers of emotion that must have been felt by both the photographer and the subject at that moment in time, as well as the ongoing struggle Candy must have had throughout life balancing normality with the diva and sexuality, and how the urge to perform remained until the end.


Roman Vishniac
Born in Moscow in 1897 to an unusually respected Jewish family, Roman was a diverse photographer and is well known for his contributions to photo microscopy, however, I am interested in his portraits of Slovakian and Polish Jews in their impoverished communities during the 1930's when Vishniac moved he and his family to Germany just as anti-Semitism was growing.

The image above, titled Sara, Warsaw, Poland captures the fragility of the little girl, who appears unkempt, under weight and alone. small in comparison to the things around her and well within the frame, the little girl appears dirty and impoverished, but retains a look of innocence - she is not buckling under the weight of her situation.
It is almost as though Vishniac knew the fate that the Nazi rule would bring to the Jewish community, and that they would not survive future events.
Vishniac was however commissioned by the Jewish Council who were working to assist Jews in eastern Europe, so is their purpose to make the subjects appear needy?

There is much more to portraiture than a rigid family pose or an over fashioned 'trendy' shoot, and I am now more interested at developing skills to use in portrait work.

Iconic image from the history of photography



In 1917, Frances Griffiths returned home with wet feet after playing by the stream with her cousin Elsie Wright. In trouble again after being told repeatedly not to play there, her excuse for being near the stream started an illusion that would last for over 70 years - she told her mother she went to see the fairies.

 

They borrowed a camera, and returned it to Elsie's father for him to develop, after the initial surprise, Mr. Wright dismissed the fairies as cardboard cutouts. He knew his daughter was a talented artist who enjoyed drawing fairy figures. Eventually Mr. Wright stopped loaning his camera to his daughter and niece after they took another photo with Elsie posed next to what appeared to be a gnome.

 

The whole matter might have stayed a private affair, but in 1919 the mothers attended a philosophy meeting that included in its teaching the possibility of nature spirits. After the meeting was over the women approached the speaker about the pictures. This brought the photographs to the

 

Through word of mouth the pictures came to the attention of Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes, who was also a member of the Spiritualist movement and believed that the living could communicate with the dead through psychics and seances. He was very open to the idea of fairies and welcomed the photos as evidence of a world beyond physical reality. Conan Doyle was unable to travel to interview the family, and instructed Mr Gardner to go in his place. 

After talking to the girls, Gardner reported to Conan Doyle that the girls were telling the truth. Conan Doyle then used the pictures in a story he was writing about fairies for The Strand magazine and suggested that more photographs be taken.

 

For many years the argument continued to speculate as to whether the girls had actually captured fairies on film.

 

Finally in 1981 and 1982 in an interview, Frances and Elsie admitted that the photographs had been faked.  Both ladies contended they had indeed seen real fairies near the stream.

 

Whether seen or not, the photographs have been used to communicate something not actually present at the time, and shoes that photo manipulation is not a new or digital invention.

The thought that the camera never lies has never truly been the case and photography still offers a medium by which to deceive or trick the viewer.

Dark room introduction - Pictograms

A pictogram, in it's literal sense is a picture which conveys a meaning through it's resemblance in an image. In terms of photography, they are very simple images where objects are placed directly on light sensitive paper and exposed and then developed.

The object which I had brought in for the day was not very transparent, and as light passes through the object to create varying tomes, I decided it would not be a good object to try my first pictogram with, and borrowed some feathers for session.

The dark room, has double doors, so that people can leave and enter without contaminating the paper or exposing film to light. It is also equipped with a red light, which is often referred to as a safe light, as well as sinks for developing.
It takes a few moments to get used to the red light, so I take time to adjust before starting work.

When in the dark room, health and safety should be adhered to as chemicals can be harmful to work with.

The dry side of the dark room should be kept bone dry at all times and towels are available to dry hands before moving into the dry side.

Equipment on the dry side included the enlarger. The negative is placed on the enlarger tray and the appropriate height and aperture are chosen. The feathers were then placed on the light sensitive paper and the exposure light turned on for the required period (which is a bit of trial and error dependant on the transparency of the items, in my case it was less than 10 seconds)

Enlarger

The paper is then taken to the wet side to be developed. Whilst film follows a different exposure process, for this pictogram the paper was placed in the developer for 1 minute, stop for 30 seconds and fixer for 2 minutes using a light rocking movement to ensure that the chemicals are agitated and evenly dispersed across the surface of the paper. Once developed it is then placed in a rinse on continually refreshing water for at least 20 minutes before placing on the rack to dry.
Tongues are used to place the paper in the trays of chemicals, and care should be taken to avoid any cross contamination.

Once developed, and assuming everyone else in the dark room has finished working with light sensitive materials, the white light can be switched on.

Here are the images I created.

I enjoyed the dark room work immensely, and really look forward to learning how to develop film in there, this will also enable me to shoot more in film and possibly experiment with medium/large format camera's.

Diagnostic Asessment - Bottles

For this assessment we have been asked to research 2 images of objects that have different purposes and discuss them. I thought it would be even more interesting to compare two different pictures of the same object.
I've chosen a very simple everyday object - The Bottle!

'Wolf' by Paul Bevitt

Used in an advert in 1994, 'Wolf' is part of an ongoing campaign for Smirnoff Vodka from the agency 'Lowe Howard Spink' The campaign focused on the products clarity (being a transparent liquid) and enabled the viewer 'to see through things'. The campaign included images that were interpreted as ironic and also political.
It depicts a frame full of sheep with a bottle of Smirnoff placed over the image allowing you to see through the product. On doing so the viewer discovers that one of the sheep has the head of a wolf, 'a wolf in sheep's clothing'.
This is part of a 'no copy' advertising campaign and the only wording seen in the entire image is 'Pure Fantasy' along with the branding.
I have been unable to find technical data on how the image was produced, however one can assume that much of the image was created in post production, with just the individual elements being photographed in isolation.
Paul Bevitt, from Yorkshire, originally studied graphic design but has been a photographer for over 30 years. His work has been commissioned by many advertising agencies and has been recognised with several awards including D&AD and The Creative Circle.

I choose this image, primarily for the way it captured the product campaign but I was also intrigued by an image that used so little in terms of colour, and could be considered bland, but was used in a stills campaign to grab the attention of the viewer. The lack of colour does however serve an effective purpose, by highlighting the recognisable brand logo and label.

Sources -
Book, No-copy Advertising by Lazar Dzamic
Website, LondonArt.co.uk

Untitled, Memphis, TN 1982 by William Eggleston



William Eggleston was born in Memphis Tennessee in 1939.
He has been credited by some as validating colour photography has a legitimate medium for photographic art. He is known for taking just one shot of one situation, seeing the composition, taking the shot and moving on, saying "I think most photographers have problems editing their work. Problem now solved!"
His work features common and mundane everyday objects, sometimes in isolation, or in their cluttered dirty environment, utilizing natural light.
The above image is part of of a collection of dye-transfer prints sold at auction in 2009, featuring a coke bottle and a sprung bed base.

The image appeals to me as it focuses on everyday items that most people would remain oblivious of, grey dirty items which add depth to our everyday existence and speak volumes about our environment and culture. I think that the composition and depth of field draw the viewer to the intended focal point. Even though this isn't the most colourful of Egglestons work, the natural light and shadow adds a warmth and vibrance.

Sources -
Website, Mastersofphotography
Website, Egglestonfoundation


When comparing the two images, they are both still as relevant today as they were when taken. The 'Wolf' is still conveying a very marketable brand image and a concept which the company still uses today, whilst Eggleston's image captures objects which are still found today cluttering up certain areas of any town or city.

When considering how I would capture a bottle in an image, I think about what message I would want to convey, and if in advertising, what the brief requirements would be.
When thinking about a bottle generally, I would like to convey how disposable it is, and how society as a whole doesn't value such an object. The image would be of a landfill filling half the frame, with the sky filling the rest of the frame. I would use the bottle as a focal point using a very shallow depth of field. I would maybe remove colour from the rest of the scene and saturate the bottle.
For an advertising shot I would play with light and lines trying to expose the surface of a bottle, maybe using a polariser to avoid unwanted reflections.

See sketches and cuttings in scrap book.