Pictorialism

Pictorialists took the medium of photography and reinvented it as an art form, placing beauty, tonality, and composition above creating an accurate visual record. Through their creations, the movement strove to elevate photography to the same level as painting and have it recognized as such by galleries and other artistic institutions. In the 1880s, photographers strived for photography to be art by trying to make pictures that resembled paintings e.g. manipulating images in the darkroom, scratching and marking their prints to imitate the texture of canvas, using soft focus, blurred and fuzzy imagery based on allegorical and spiritual subject matter, including religious scenes.

Influences on Pictorialism: Allegorical painting

Allegory is a figurative mode of representation conveying meaning other than the literal. Allegory communicates it’s message through symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.

Peter Henry Emerson 1856 -1936

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In 1889 Peter Henry Emerson expounded his theory of Naturalistic Photography which the Pictorialist used to promote photography as an art rather than science. Their handcrafted prints were in visual opposition to the sharp black and white contrast of the commercial print. Emerson soon became convinced that photography was a medium of artistic expression superior to all other black-and-white graphic media because it reproduces the light, tones, and textures of nature with unrivalled fidelity. He decreed that a photograph should be direct and simple and show real people in their own environment, not costumed models posed before fake backdrops or other such predetermined formulas.

Hugo Henneberg

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Hugo Henneberg was an amateur photographer originally trained in the sciences. Henneberg came to the medium from his study of physics, chemistry, astronomy, and mathematics. His knowledge of the technical aspects of photography served his aesthetic interests particularly well, as he created gum bichromate prints that involved multiple stages of development. The resulting prints possessed a rich, engaging texture that augmented a satisfying spatial sense, as in this landscape-Henneberg’s favourite genre.

Gum Bichromate

Gum bichromate is a 19th-century photographic printing process based on the light sensitivity of dichromats. It is capable of rendering painterly images from photographic negatives. Gum printing is traditionally a multi-layered printing process, but satisfactory results may be obtained from a single pass. Any colour can be used for gum printing, so natural-colour photographs are also possible by using this technique in layers.

Realism / Straight Photography

Realism photography grew up with claims of having a special relationship to reality, and its premise, that the camera’s ability to record objectively the actual world as it appears in front of the lens was unquestioned. This supposed veracity of the photographic image has been challenged by critics as the photographer’s subjectivity (how he or she sees the world and chooses to photograph it) and the implosion of digital technology challenges this notion opening up many new possibilities for both interpretation and manipulation. A belief in the trustworthiness of the photograph is also fostered by the news media who
rely on photographs to show the truth of what took place.

Straight Photography were photographers who believed in the intrinsic qualities of the photographic medium and its ability to provide accurate and descriptive records of the visual world. These photographers strove to make pictures that were ‘photographic’ rather than ‘painterly’, they did not want to treat photography as a kind of monochrome painting. They abhorred handwork and soft focus and championed crisp focus with a wide depth of field.

Alfred Stieglitz

In 1907 Stieglitz took this picture, The Steerage and thereby rejected Pictorialism’s aesthetics and became in favour of what Paul Strand called ‘absolute unqualified objectivity’ and ‘straight photographic means’. Stieglitz and Strand was also influenced by European Avant Garde art movements such as Cubism and Fauvism and some of their pictures emphasised underlying abstract geometric forms and structure of their subjects.

Modernism

Modernism led to progress in many spheres of life by changing the approach of mankind towards culture, modernism attempted to free humanity from its historical baggage through the use of philosophy and science.

Early modernity is characterised intellectually by a belief that science could save the world and that a foundation of universal truths could be established. The common trend was to seek answers to fundamental questions about the nature of art and human experience. Modernity imbue all aspects of society and are apparent in its cultural forms including fiction, architecture, painting, popular culture, photography.

By the beginning of the 20th century, with the diffusion of illustrated magazines and newspapers, photography was a mass communication medium. Photojournalism acquired authority and glamour, and document-like photographs were used in advertising as symbols of modernity.

Surrealism

Surrealism was founded in Paris in 1924, by the poet Andre Breton and continued Dadaism’ exploration of everything irrational and subversive in art. Surrealism was more explicitly preoccupied with spiritualism, Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism. It aimed to create art which was ‘automatic’, meaning that it had emerged directly from the unconscious without being shaped by reason, morality or aesthetic judgements. The Surrealist also explored dream imagery an they were an important art movement within Modernism involving anything from paintings, sculpture, poetry, performance, film and photography.

Rene Magritte (1898-1967)

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René Magritte was a Belgian-born artist who was known for his work with surrealism as well as his thought-provoking images. In the 1920s, he began to paint in the surrealist style and became known for his witty images and his use of simple graphics and everyday objects, giving new meanings to familiar things. With a popularity that increased over time, Magritte was able to pursue his art full-time and was celebrated in several international exhibitions. He experimented with numerous styles and forms during his life and was a primary influence on the pop art movement. Magritte’s handiwork is bold and illustrative, it’s playful and mysterious: you’re never left wondering what is pictured, but you are often left wondering why.

Post – Modernism

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Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism and was influenced by disenchantment brought on by the second world war. It refers to the state that lacks a central hierarchy and one that is complex, ambiguous and diverse. Grand narratives like freedom, societal progress, scientific progress were criticized by post modernists, who instead emphasized that difference should be celebrated, rather than forced unity. Post modernism represented a loss in faith in human reason, it provides a bleak prognosis of the human condition and offers no real solution.

Postmodernism also explores power and the way economic and social forces exert that power by shaping the identities of individuals and entire cultures. Unlike modernists, postmodernists place little or no faith in the unconscious as a source of creative and personal authenticity. They value art not for universality and timelessness but for being imperfect, low-brow, accessible, disposable, local and temporary. While it questions the nature and extent of our freedom and
challenges our acquiescence to authority, Postmodernism has been criticised for its pessimism: it often critiques but equally often fails to provide a positive vision or redefinition of what it attacks.

Jeff Wall

The most famous practitioner of “staged photography”, camera artist Jeff Wall is one of Canada’s greatest photographers of the 20th century. Challenging the notion of photography as a medium that records the “real”, Wall has been producing carefully staged photos since the end of the 1970s. Largely involving everyday scenes conveying an iconographic link to classical painting, they are often presented as large-format back-lit cibachrome photographs. His lens-based tableaux often feature a mixture of natural beauty, urban decay and industrial wasteland as their backdrop.

Examples of Pictorialism in photography:

Pictorialism was also the first signs of staged photography, where photographers got models to pose for the image in the way the photographer wanted. Julia Margret Cameron (above) is a prime example of this as she got members of her family to model for her.

Examples of Realism/Straight Photography:

Examples of Modernism in photography:

Examples of Post-Modernism in photography:

Straight Photography

The term, ‘Straight photography’ was first used in 1904 by critic Sadakichi Hartmann in the magazine, ‘Camera Work’ to describe a more ‘pure’ version of Pictorialism but the movement really began in the 1930s with the decline in popularity of Pictorialism and the rise of the west coast photographic movement. Straight Photography accentuated detail in photos by engaging with the camera’s own technical capability to produce images sharp in focus. Unlike Pictorialism the photos are generally not manipulated but are instead depict the image as the camera and photographer initially sees it. This movement pioneered photographic techniques taken for granted today such as depth of field, focus and use of shutter speed. The photographic society and group of friends f/64 was founded in 1932 as a response to the Pictorial movement and became known for their straight photography specifically surrounding the bay area.

 Ansel Adams was an American photographer and founder of iconic photography group F/64. Adams was renowned for his pure (straight) photography of the American west. Adhering to the conventions of straight photography, his images were sharp and focused. Initially he started his photographic career firmly working to the standards of pictorialism, using methods such as the bromoil process. Adams friend Paul Strand gave him a lot of insight into new methods of straight photography, showing him that using glossy paper over normal would help to intensify tonal values. Straight photography was very important to Group F/64. In their official manifesto it is stated that “Pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form.”

modernism-

Modernism in the arts refers to the rejection of the Victorian era’s traditions and the exploration of industrial-age, real-life issues, and combines a rejection of the past with experimentation, sometimes for political purposes. Stretching from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, Modernism reached its peak in the 1960s; Post-modernism describes the period that followed during the 1960s and 1970s. Post-modernism is a dismissal of the rigidity of Modernism in favor of an “anything goes” approach to subject matter, processes and material.

he shift to modernism can be partly credited to new freedoms enjoyed by artists in the late 1800s. Traditionally, a painter was commissioned by a patron to create a specific work. The late 19th century witnessed many artists capable of seizing more time to pursue subjects in their personal interest.

Modernism reached its peak with Abstract Expressionism, which began in the late 1940s in the United States. Moving away from commonplace subjects and techniques, Abstract Expressionism was known for oversized canvasses and paint splashes that could seem chaotic and arbitrary.

POST-MODERNISM

Post-modernism, as it appeared in the 1970s, is often linked with the philosophical movement Poststructuralism, in which philosophers such as Jacques Derrida proposed that structures within a culture were artificial and could be deconstructed in order to be analyzed.

Post-modern work in the 1970s was sometimes derided as “art for art’s sake,” but it gave rise to the acceptance of a host of new approaches. Among these new forms were Earth art, which creates work on natural landscapes; Performance art; Installation art, which considers an entire space rather than just one piece; Process art, which stressed the making of the work as more important than the outcome; and Video art, as well as movements based around feminist and minority art.

Post-modern art has since become less defined by the form the art takes and more determined by the artist creating the work. American artist Jenny Holzer, who came to prominence in the 1970s with her conceptual art made from language, embodies this model.

modernism and postmodernism were both movements that emerged from an analysis of events within the modern period from the perspective of the values of the Enlightenment.

Pictorialism is an approach to photography that emphasizes beauty of subject matter, tonality, and composition rather than the documentation of reality. This occurred from the 1880s and onwards when photographers strived for photography to be art by trying to make pictures that resemble paintings. Pictorialism has several key features which consist of using substances such as Vaseline on the camera lens to create a blur effect. Additionally another key characteristic is that photographers used to scratch the negatives to manipulate their photographs. Common themes within the style are the use of soft focus, colour tinting, and visible manipulation such as composite images or the addition of brushstrokes. The pictorialism movement led to great innovation in the field of photography with a number of the photographers associated with it responsible for developing new techniques to further their artistic vision. This therefore created the foundations for later advances in colour photography and other technical processes.

Above is a photograph taken by Henry Peach Robinson which represented pictorialism in several ways. This composite print, combining five different negatives, focuses on an intimate scene of a very sick young woman, surrounded by three family members. Robinson pioneered the composite image, which became a foundation of Pictorialism. To his contemporary audience the photograph was controversial, as many felt that photography was too literal a medium to portray such an intimate and painful scene.

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Straight photography / Realism emphasizes and engages with the camera’s own technical capability to produce images sharp in focus and rich in detail. The term generally refers to photographs that are not manipulated, either in the taking of the image or by darkroom or digital processes. Paul Strand and Alfred Stieglitz pioneered Straight photography in New York around the 1910s which is still continuing within the current decade. Realism / straight photography continues to define contemporary photographs, while also being the foundation for many relevant others areas of photography. These consist of documentary, street photography, photojournalism and even later progressed to abstract photography. Straight photography is a process and time-based approach. It represents immediacy, the passing of time as in history, or the freezing of time as in a snapshot. In a photograph, time is described by the movements of the subject. Each photographic style adapted the approach to emphasize its own treatment of form, sensory experience, or the changes in the social and cultural environment.

The photograph above was take by Paul Strand who was an American photographer and filmmaker. Although the photograph in which he has taken may come across as simple and minimalistic, it shows a clear close-up view of regular kitchen bowls that are used to study the effects of light and shadows. Paul Strand said that his “abstract” studies were a matter of clarifying “for me what I now refer to as the abstract method, which was first revealed in the paintings of Picasso, Braque, Léger and others… .”

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Modernism is when photographers created sharply focused images, with emphasis on formal qualities, exploiting, rather than obscuring the camera as an essentially mechanical and technological tool. Modern Photography encompassed trends in the medium from the early 1900s through to the 1960s. The move from early photography to Modern Photography is distinguished by a departure from the language and constraints of traditional art, such as painting, and this change in attitude was mirrored by changes in practice. The invention of photography was part of the process of modernization of the means of production that too place during the industrial revolution.

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Post-modernism is arose in the second half of the 20th century, and it encompasses a variety of themes. First and foremost, postmodernism builds on the themes and conceptual ideas that began during the modernist period. Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism and was highly influenced by the second world war. postmodernism refers to the state that lacks a central hierarchy and one that is complex, ambiguous and diverse. It also represented a loss in faith in human reason as well as provides a bleak prognosis of the human condition. Overall modernism and postmodernism were both movements that engaged from an analysis of events within the modern period from the perspective of the values of enlightenment.

Pictorialism

Time Period : 1880 – 1920

Key Characteristics/ Methods and Techniques : They wanted to create something that looked like it was hand made and resembled art. Pictorialism reacted against mechanization
and industrialisation. The manipulated images by scratching the negatives to give the images texture, used chemicals on the negatives and put Vaseline on the lenses.

Artists Associated :

Alfred Steglitz

Alphred Stieglitz (January 1, 1864 – July 13, 1946) was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his 50-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz was known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century, where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S. He was married to painter Georgia O’Keefe

Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron (née Pattle; 11 June 1815 – 26 January 1879) was a British photographer who is considered one of the most important portraitists of the 19th century. She is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorian men and for illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity, and literature. She also produced sensitive portraits of women and children.

Realism/ Straight Photography

Time Period : 1900 – 1940 mainly 1930

Key Characteristics/ Methods and Techniques : Straight/ realism photography was based on photographers belief in intrinsic qualities of the photographic medium and how it provided records of the world. The photographers strove tyo make photographic pictures instead of paintings and treated it as something away from drawing or painting. Realism was linked to the idea of photography growing up with a close relationship to reality and the ability of the camera to record a moment in time from the real world. The way a photo was taken shows the way the photographer looked at the world and why they chose to photograph it

Artists Associated :

Paul Strand

Paul Strand (October 16, 1890 – March 31, 1976) was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. In the 1930s, he helped found the Photo League. His diverse body of work, spanning six decades, covers numerous genres and subjects throughout the Americas, Europe, and Africa.

Walker Evans

Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans’s work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8×10-inch (200×250 mm) view camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are “literate, authoritative, transcendent”. He is also credited as one of the leading American documentary photographers of the 20th century.

Modernism

Time Period: Early 1900’s – late 1960’s

Key Characteristics/ Methods and Techniques: Early modernity is characterised intellectually by a belief that science could save the world and that, through reason, a foundation of universal truths could be established. The common trend was to seek answers to fundamental questions about the nature of art and human experience. Modernity imbue all aspects of society and are apparent in its cultural forms including fiction, architecture, painting, popular culture, photography. By the beginning of the 20th century, with the diffusion of illustrated magazines and newspapers, photography was a masscommunication medium. Photojournalism acquired authority and glamour, and document like photographs were used in advertising as symbols of modernity

Artists Associated:

Margaret Bourke-White (1904-71)

Margaret Bourke-White (June 14, 1904 – August 27, 1971), an American photographer and documentary photographer, became arguably best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet industry under the Soviets’ five-year plan, as the first American female war photojournalist, and for having one of her photographs (on the construction of Fort Peck Dam) on the cover of the first issue of Life magazine.

Ansel Adams

Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating “pure” photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph

Post Modernism

Time Period: second half of 20th century

Key Characteristics/ Methods and Techniques: Post Modernism was created by the criticism of the international style of modernist architecture. They criticized it for being too formal, austere and functional. Postmodern architects felt that international style had become a repressive orthodoxy. It had been adopted by the corporate world and exploited at the expense of its social vision. Postmodernist architecture uses more eclectic (various) materials and styles with greater playfulness. Parody of earlier styles is a dominant postmodern trait. Another is the refusal to develop comprehensive theories about art, architecture and social progress.

Artists Associated:

Jeff Wall

Jeffrey Wall (born September 29, 1946) is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit Cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Early in his career, he helped define the Vancouver School and he has published essays on the work of his colleagues and fellow Vancouverites Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, and Ian Wallace. His photographic tableaux often take Vancouver’s mixture of natural beauty, urban decay, and postmodern and industrial featurelessness as their backdrop.

Sam Taylor-Wood

Samantha Louise Taylor-Johnson( Taylor-Wood; 4 March 1967) is a British filmmaker and photographer. Her directorial feature film debut was 2009’s Nowhere Boy, a film based on the childhood experiences of the Beatles songwriter and singer John Lennon. She is one of a group of artists known as the Young British Artists.

Pictorialism

Pictorialism was a popular art/aesthetic movement beginning around 1869, developing from Henry Peach Robinson’s book Pictorial Effect in Photography: Being Hints on Composition and Chiaroscuro for Photographers. The book focused on ideas of chiaroscuro, the ancient Italian practise of using dramatic lighting to convey mood, similar to the literary device pathetic fallacy. Photographers following the movement would often use pictorial techniques to alter and distort the images they took creating the basis of what we now digitally use as photoshop.

• Bromoil process: This is a variant on the oil print process that allows a print to be enlarged. In this process a regular silver gelatin print is made, then bleached in a solution of potassium bichromate. This hardens the surface of the print and allows ink to stick to it. Both the lighter and darker areas of a bromoil print may be manipulated, providing a broader tonal range than an oil print.
• Carbon print: This is an extremely delicate print made by coating tissue paper with potassium bichromate, carbon black or another pigment and gelatin. Carbon prints can provide extraordinary detail and are among the most permanent of all photographic prints. Due to the stability of the paper both before and after processing, carbon printing tissue was one of the earliest commercially made photographic products.
• Cyanotype: One of the earliest photographic processes, cyanotypes experienced a brief renewal when pictorialists experimented with their deep blue color tones. The color came from coating paper with light-sensitive iron salts.
• Gum bichromate: One of the pictorialists’ favorites, these prints were made by applying gum arabic, potassium bichromate and one or more artist’s colored pigments to paper. This sensitized solution slowly hardens where light strikes it, and these areas remain pliable for several hours. The photographer had a great deal of control by varying the mixture of the solution, allowing a shorter or longer exposure and by brushing or rubbing the pigmented areas after exposure.
• Oil print process: Made by applying greasy inks to paper coated with a solution of gum bichromate and gelatin. When exposed through a negative, the gum-gelatin hardens where light strikes it while unexposed areas remain soft. Artist’s inks are then applied by brush, and the inks adhere only to the hardened areas. Through this process a photographer can manipulate the lighter areas of a gum print while the darker areas remain stable. An oil print cannot be enlarged since it has to be in direct contact with the negative.
• Platinum print: Platinum prints require a two-steps process. First, paper is sensitized with iron salts and exposed in contact with a negative until a faint image is formed. Then the paper is chemically developed in a process that replaces the iron salts with platinum. This produces an image with a very wide range of tones, each intensely realized.

The images were often of people but not natural and usual always staged. The movement connotes the era of the romantics but with a focus on people rather than nature.

Pictorialist Photographers

Wayne Albee, famous for his portraits of iconic prima ballerina Anna Pavlova was a key figure in the pictorial movement. Considering the blurry soft look of this portrait, it is likely Albee used a visual technique of either applying vasine to his camera lens or perhaps the oil print process explained above

Pierre Dubreuil was a key individual of the Pictorialism movement, embracing the technical effects that many classic artists and photographers criticised. His work was much forgotten about until the late 1970s when Californian collector Tom Jacobson discovered his work and set out to collect the photographers remaining work which was unfortunate mostly destroyed in bombings in Belgium during the second world war. Jacobson later produced widely successful exhibitions on Dubreuil, successfully re-introducing him to the photographic world and making him a celebrated and esteemed photographer. Le Figaro, praised Jacobson’s exhibition at the prestigious Musee National d’Art Moderne, acknowledging him for discovering “this treasure which was believed to have been lost.”^[5]

A form of photography has existed since almost the beginning of human existence. It has been theorised that as far back as 500BCE small holes in tents or animal skins created a photographic effect that inspired Palaeolithic cave paintings. Written records of a ‘pinhole camera’ first appeared in 4BCE in the Chinese text ‘Mozi’ edsciribing a ‘Treasure House’ inverted by a pinhole to collect light and produce an image. In 1502, in his book ‘Codex Anticulous’ Leonardo da Vinci gave the clearest and most concise description of a camera since it’s initial conception as an idea, writing “If the façade of a building, or a place, or a landscape is illuminated by the sun and a small hole is drilled in the wall of a room in a building facing this, which is not directly lighted by the sun, then all objects illuminated by the sun will send their images through this aperture and will appear, upside down, on the wall facing the hole. You will catch these pictures on a piece of white paper, which placed vertically in the room not far from that opening, and you will see all the above-mentioned objects on this paper in their natural shapes or colours, but they will appear smaller and upside down, on account of crossing of the rays at that aperture. If these pictures originate from a place which is illuminated by the sun, they will appear coloured on the paper exactly as they are. The paper should be very thin and must be viewed from the back.” It wasn’t until 1604 that the name Camera Obscura was used in conjunction with this invention, appearing in Johannes Kepler’s book Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena. The camera was initially used to study eclipses without exposing the eyes to the suns harsh and damaging rays but progressed to use as a drawing aid, producing incredibly accurate depiction which could easily achieve graphical perspective. Obviously all of these images were fleeting and were not fixed to material. It would take thousands of years from the conception of the cameras theory for the ability for photographers to fix the shadows.

Thomas Wedgwood is credited as being the ‘First Photographer’ being the first person known to have thought of creating permanent pictures by capturing camera images on material coated with a light-sensitive chemical. He was not successful in making permanent pictures but was able to produce shadowed photograms that was a scientific breakthrough and paved the way for his successors Daguerre and Talbert.

Photography as we know it was invented in 1939 by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre who created the daguerreotype, a method of fixing an image to a mirror like sliver plated copper. It was the first publicly available photographic process and was widely used in the 1840s/50s. As an academically trained painter Daguerre was particularly interested in creating a spectacle of entertainment which led to the dramatic creation of Daguerreotypes to create an experience rather than just a picture. dram The daguerreotype produced rich and lifelike photographs that were very beautiful however incredibly expensive to create and also were unable to be replicated due to the nature of the materials used. This caused a decline in popularity in the method and led photographers to explore other methods such as Talbert’s.

At the same time as Daguerre, Henry Fox Talbert, an MP, writer and botanist was developing his own method to ‘fix the shadows’. As an artist he was a terrible drawer so was very interested in the theory of photography to allow him to replicate surroundings accurately. His method was a salted paper technique in which paper was made wet with a solution of salt and then, after drying, was brushed on one side with silver nitrate. When exposed to light the paper would darken to produce an image and would then be stabilised by more strong salt. This method was the most effective way of producing photographs and quickly overshadowed Daguerre as the most popular photography process.

Introduced in 1900, the Eastman-Kodak brownie revolutionised photography. The camera sold for a dollar each and quickly brought photography into the home, making photography readily available for amateur photographers and families to document their lives. Initially manufactured for children, the brownie was a major success with all sorts of people, particularly soldiers who took the camera’s into the heart of battle in the first world war, composing historically significant images that are still emotive today. Kodaks marketing campaign “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest” was a great success which encouraged people to take more casual, relaxed photos which brought about happier expressions and smiles, more akin to photography today.

Book in hand: how does it feel? Smell, sniff the paper. It is a hardback book. It smells like a book

Paper and ink: use of different paper/ textures/ colour or B&W or both. There is a slip of loose paper with an image on it. The front is textured and feels like a linen cover

Format, size and orientation: portraiture/ landscape/ square/ A5, A4, A3 / number of pages. Portrait orientation a4 paper. 144 pages with 57 colour photographs

Binding, soft/hard cover. image wrap/dust jacket. perfect binding/saddle stitch/swiss binding/ Japanese stab-binding/ leperello Hard cover with a perfect binding

Cover: linen/ card. graphic/ printed image. embossed/ debossed. letterpress/ silkscreen/hot-stamping. Linen cover with a printed graphic of stitches/ barbed wire and an image of hair and an ear with an earing on the other side

Title: literal or poetic / relevant or intriguing. The title “out of the blue” may reference the idea of something unexpected happening, causing an imbalance to the normality of daily life.

Narrative: what is the story/ subject-matter. How is it told? When looking at the essay in the photo book it is told that it is about a missing person called Suzanne. The story is told by old fashioned photos, images of paper with writing on it, images of old fashioned photos of both her and her parents, images of family items and images of images cut out or covered up referencing that she is not here anymore.

Structure and architecture: how design/ repeating motifs/ or specific features develops a concept or construct a narrative. There is a repeating form of collages of photos partially or completely covered up to reference the disappearance.

Design and layout: image size on pages/ single page, double-spread/ images/ grid, fold- outs/ inserts. The size of images different from page to page as some take up the whole page, half he page or the whole page except a thin white border

Editing and sequencing: selection of images/ juxtaposition of photographs/ editing process. The images all have a retro look to them and the images are chosen to portray a certain message. They start off with an image of a note from the missing person

Images and text: are they linked? Introduction/ essay/ statement by artists or others.  Use of captions (if any.) At first you don’t know what is going on and see images of aerial views of a motorway and an image of a note the contents of which I have written below. Then, images of what appears to be a child’s bedroom and images that have the person cut out of. After reading a slip of paper with the essay on you realise it is about a missing girl. There are also a range of family photos of her covered up by other things to represent her disappearance.

Suzzanne Gloria Lyall

The photobook is about the disappearance of a 20 year old women and how the disappearance has effected the family. The photographer has taken images in different ways which are important in conveying messages. She cuts the missing girl out of old family photos and shows the parents of the girl unsure what they should do without her. The photographer has taken loads of old family photos of her and cut her out or covered her up, and placed all of the images on a big wall with strings attached like a detective case. She then photographed the board bit by bit telling the story of her disappearance.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/article/milestones-photography

The camera obscura was not invented in 1826, the earliest written account is from the 4th century (400BC) by a Chinese philosopher Mo-tzu. He wrote about how light from a illuminated object would pass through a pinhole into a dark room and create an upside down image of the object. The first use was in the 13th century when they used a camera obscura for safe observation of sun eclipse. An astrologer, alchemist and physician Arnaldus de Villa Nova used camera obscura as a projector for entertainment. Artists started using them in the 15th century. Artist and engineer Leonardo da Vinci talks about camera obscura in his book Codex Atlanticus, a twelve-volume bound set of his drawings and writings.