Identity politics

Identity politics is defined as a political approach wherein people of a particular race, nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation, social background, social class, or other identifying factors develop political agendas that are based upon these identities. While the term originated from the need to reshape movements that had until then prioritized the monotony of sameness over the value of difference.

For example, the “second wave” feminist movement fought for body autonomy, pushed for women’s equality and demanded that women be treated as human beings. However, similar to the first wave of feminism, centered around women’s suffrage and gaining the right to vote, white women became the default standard for all women. This then made it seem like the change desired was progress for white women and not all women.

Identity politics is deeply connected with the oppression of some groups in society and analyses that oppression. The term is used primarily to describe political movements in western societies, covering nationalist, multicultural, women’s rights, civil rights, and LGBT movements.

Identity politics has been a major driving force behind social progress and is seen as a step in the creation of more inclusive and fair nations.

However when it comes to identity politics, it can lead some political figures to overemphasise the importance of identity in the greater scheme of politics and in summary it can be used by politicians to get votes by exploiting identity politics.

Culture wars

A culture war is a cultural conflict between social groups and the struggle for dominance of their values, beliefs, and practices.

These movements can be viewed as being psoitively impactful as people are fighting for change and what they believe in however some disagree and critisize the idea that the concept is artificial, imposed, or asymmetric, rather than a result of authentic differences between cultures.

Bibliography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_politics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war

https://viriatovb.medium.com/identity-politics-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-d387f2eb876c

https://belonging.berkeley.edu/identity-politics-friend-or-foe

This shoot shows us experimenting with the multi-exposure setting on the camera:

I imported these images onto Lightroom and sorted through the best outcomes and rejected the ones I didn’t want to use:

Then, still on Lightroom, I did the initial editing.

Double/multiple exposures are an illusion created by layering images (or portions of images) over the top of each other to create artistic looks, like a ghost effect, mirror images. This can be achieved in the camera settings, or when editing on Adobe Photoshop by creating LAYERS and then using BLENDING OPTIONS and OPACITY CONTROL. This technique has been used to explore Surrealist Ideas and produce dream-like imagery/imagery that explores time and time lapse whilst being a technique in which you combine at least two images into one to create artistic looks, like a ghost effect, mirror images.

This effects can also be created by slowing down the shutter speed and some cameras also have a setting especially for creating multi-exposure images.

My attempts using photoshop:

My attempts using camera settings:

This is an example of a diamond cameo which is where multiple headshots are positioned in this diamond formation.

My attempt:

Using an example I found on the internet, I cut out and displayed my images on top of theirs to recreate the diamond cameo with my own images.

Using Lightroom I did the initial editing, altering the exposure and contrast and changing the levels of highlights, darks, whites and blacks to enhance the colours in the image and make it stand out more. Then moving onto photoshop I used the lasso tool to cut images and layer the images on top of each other to give the effect of double exposure by lowering the opacity of the layers to give the translucent effect.

shoot 1:

For shoot 1, in a group, we shot portraits in the studio swapping models and photographers over.

shoot 2:

Shoot 3:

shoot 4:

Then on Lightroom I began filtering out the better outcomes from the ones I don’t want to use and began the editing process.

Multi-exposure shoot:

This shoot shows us experimenting with the multi-exposure setting on the camera:

Rembrandt lighting

This technique is named after Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn who was a well known Dutch painter. It refers to a way of lighting a face so that an upside-down light triangle appears under the eyes of the subject.

It gets used often in hollywood portraits as it became widely used in promotional photographs of film stars showing them in a dramatic and eye-catching way.

how to set it up:

My attempts:

I used the set up with the light positioned to the right of the sitter allowing the light to hit one side of their faces and create the triangle that is the key element of Rembrandt lighting.

Butterfly lighting

This lighting technique is used primarily in a studio setting and gets its name from the butterfly-shaped shadow that forms under the nose due to the lights positionning.

The set up:

My attempts:

By positioning the light above the sitter it highlights their cheekbones and creates the butterfly shape under their nose.

Rim lighting

This technique displays the outline/silhouette of the model.

For the set up, the model is positioned in front of the light

Our attempt:

This was an attempt we made at using Rim lighting however as you can see it wasn’t the most successful. In future I think we need a bigger light source or to maybe position it higher to create a clearer silhouette.

A camera obscura is a dark room with a small hole or lens at one side through which an image from the other side of the hole is projected onto a wall or table opposite the hole however the image is projected upside down.

The camera obscura was used to study eclipses without damaging the eyes by looking directly into the sun. It was also used as a drawing aid, as it enabled the projected image to be traced therefore producing a highly accurate drawing, and was used as an easy way to achieve proper graphical perspective.

This method can be replicated with a pinhole camera. A pinhole camera is a camera without a lens and with a tiny aperture. effectively a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through the aperture and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box, which is known as the camera obscura effect.

Nicephore Niepce & Heliography

The first “permanent” photographic method. The name heliography came from the Greek terms meaning sun drawing. This method was invented by Nicéphore Niepce and originated from his attempt to produce an image that could be reproduced mechanically and profitably.

It was the process of Heliography that created the first and earliest known permanent photograph, taken from a nature scene. It was a simple but effective way to communicate and send images over long distances during the late 19th and early 20th century. Its main uses were for the military, survey and forest protection work.

Heliography was a ground-breaking process for its time. Here’s a rough outline of how the Heliography process took place:

1. The naturally occurring asphalt bitumen, is applied as a coating on glass or metal
2. This chemical then hardens in depending on the light exposure available
3. The plate is then washed with lavender oil.
4. After washing with oil, the only area remaining would be the hardened area where the image formed.

Louis Daguerre & Daguerreotype

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was a French artist and photographer, recognized for his invention of the eponymous daguerreotype process of photography.

The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process in the history of photography. Each daguerreotype is a unique image on a silvered copper plate

A daguerreotype is not flexible like the usual paper material of a photograph and is instead heavy. The daguerreotype is accurate, detailed and sharp. It has a mirror-like surface and is very fragile. The metal plate is extremely vulnerable, so most daguerreotypes are presented in a special housing to prevent damage.

The process to create this direct-positive process includes, creating a highly detailed image on a sheet of copper with a thin coat of silver without the use of a negative. The process requires great care. The silver-plated copper plate had first to be cleaned and polished until the surface looked like a mirror.

Henry Fox Talbot & Calotype

The Calotype was the first process of its kind that resulted in a negative paper image that was able to be reproduced into many positive images once exposed. 

In this technique, a sheet of paper coated with silver chloride gets exposed to light in a camera obscura; the areas hit by light became dark in tone, making a negative image. The most important aspect of the process lay in Talbot’s discovery of gallic acid that could be used to develop the image on the paper—i.e., accelerate the silver chloride’s chemical reaction to the light it had been exposed to. The developing process permitted much shorter exposure times in the camera, down from one hour to one minute.

The developed image was fixed with sodium hyposulfite. The “negative,” as Talbot called it, could yield any number of positive images by contact printing on another piece of sensitized paper. Talbot’s process was superior in this respect to the daguerreotype, which yielded a single positive image on metal that could not be duplicated.

Robert Cornelius & self-portraiture

Robert Cornelius, an amateur chemist, took a self-portrait 175 years ago in the back of his family’s silver-plating shop. On the back, Cornelius wrote: “The first light Picture ever taken. 1839.” It was one of the first Daguerreotypes to be produced in America, only a few months after Louis Daguerre announced his invention.

In February 2014 a daguerreotype self-portrait taken by the American photography pioneer Robert Cornelius of Philadelphia was considered the first American photographic portrait of a human ever produced, and since this was a self-portrait, it was also possibly the first “selfie .”

Julia Margeret Cameron & Pictorialism

Pictorialism, an approach to photography that emphasizes beauty of subject matter, tonality, and composition rather than the documentation of reality. Its an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the later 19th and early 20th centuries.

Julia Margaret Cameron was a British photographer who is known to be one of the most important portraitists of the 19th century. She is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorian people, illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity, and literature, and for sensitive portraits of men, women and children.

Cameron and her pictorialist contemporaries pursued painterly compositions, subjects, and qualities, hoping to elevate photography to a high art. A representation of a person or thing in a work of art.

Cameron herself indicated her desire to capture beauty. She wrote,

“I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied”

and

“My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real & Ideal & sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to poetry and beauty.”

Henry Mullins & Carte-de-Visit

Henry Mullins started working at 230 Regent Street in London in the 1840s and moved to Jersey in July 1848,

His speciality was cartes de visite and the photographic archive of La Société contains a massive collection of these. His subjects are many of the island’s affluent and influential people, including Dean Le Breton, the father of Lillie Langtry.

He was also popular with officers of the Royal Militia Island of Jersey, it was also very popular to have taken their portraits, as well as of their wives and children.

Cartes de visite consist of a print stuck to a card mount and the prints were mostly albumen and, later, emulsion based printing-out-paper. Other processes, including carbon and Woodburytype, were also used.

Cartes de visite reduced the cost of having a portrait taken and made it within reach of most people, as a result there was a dramatic increase in the number of studio photographers. They also started a collecting craze. Cartes were collected of people such as extended family, royalty and the famous.

Bibliography:

https://www.theislandwiki.org/index.php/Henry_Mullins

http://www.earlyphotography.co.uk/site/entry_I23-A.html

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/cameron-julia-margaret/

https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/julia-margaret-cameron-madonna-with-children-1864/

https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/julia-margaret-camerons-working-methods

https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2022/07/robert-cornelius-and-the-first-selfie/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cornelius

https://www.amphilsoc.org/exhibits/treasures/cornelius.htm

https://www.britannica.com/technology/calotype

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Daguerre

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Louis-Daguerre

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nicephore-Niepce

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura

To embed your understanding of the origins of photography and its beginnings you’ll need to produce a blog post which outlines the major developments and practices. Some will have been covered in the documentary above but you also need to research and discover further information.

Your blog post must contain information about the following and keep it in its chronological order:

• Camera Obscura & Pinhole photography
• Nicephore Niepce & Heliography
• Louis Daguerre & Daguerreotype
• Henry Fox Talbot & Calotype
• Robert Cornelius & self-portraiture
• Julia Margeret Cameron & Pictorialism
• Henry Mullins & Carte-de-Visit

Each must contain dates, text and images relevant to each bullet point above. In total aim for about 1,000-2000 words.

Try and reference some of the sources that you have used either by incorporating direct quotes, paraphrasing or summarising of an idea, theory or concept, or historical fact.