(Unfinished)
- Read two texts above (John Szarkowski’s introduction and review by Jed Pearl) and select 3 quotes from each that is relevant to your essay.
- Select two images, one that represent a mirror and another that represents a window as examples to use in your essay.
- Use some of the key words that you listed above to describe what the mirrors and windows suggest.
Essay plan
Introduction (250 words): Reflect on the origin of photography and describe in your own words the difference between the two photographic processes, Daguerreotype and Calotype. Consider how they could be viewed as either a mirror or a window of the world according to John Szarkowski’s thesis. Choose one quote from Szarkowski’s text and comment if you agree or disagree.
Essay draft
Mirrors and Windows, an exhibition of American photography since 1960, is John Szarkowski’s attempt to categorise the work of photographers which largely seek to explore outside of themselves. Whether an image is a mirror or a window is dependent on the photographer’s own sensibility, and whether or not it is a reflection of self.
Photography was said to be invented in 1839, that was the year that Louis Daguerre, a Frenchman, and Henry Fox Talbot, an Englishman, played an important role in announcing rival processes that would ‘fix the shadows’, to adopt a physical form to these images. The beginnings of photography were ultimately about the struggle to see which method would thrive. With how money and industry was a huge focus within the early beginning of photography, and had huge impact on what photography looks like at the present date, the method which photographs could be reproduced at a quick and commercial rate triumphed.
One of these processes innovated by Louis Daguerre, daguerreotypes, are photos which have a different kind of connection which is more intimate, as the process features no separation between the material the image is being shot with and the finished result. This is because the same plate within camera is the same plate which is eventually displayed as the photograph. Despite this method’s unbelievable range of values and detail, presenting the brightest whites and the deepest blacks, these photographs, if not gilded, could easily be wiped off with the slightest touch. Although a downside of this method was that only one image could be made from daguerreotypes, which was not ideal for the market photography was creating, which focused on money and industry.
The other process innovated by Henry Fox Talbot, calotypes, are photos much more reproduceable, ‘Talbot recognised that human communication was through paper’. Ultimately, Talbot’s method of making photographs dominated the Daguerreotype as multiple copies of the same captured image could be created, instead of one which could be lost quite easily, which was not in the market for photography at the time, as businesses wanted photographs for commercial use instead of sentimental purpose.
Paragraph 1 (250 words): Choose an image that in your view is a mirror and analyse how it is a subjective expression and staged approach to image-making. Choose one quote from Szarkowski’s thesis and another from Jed Pearl’s review which either supports of opposes Szarkowski’s original point of view. Make sure you comment to advance argumentation in providing a critical perspective.
(key words) tableaux, subjective, romanticism, fiction, staged, personal, reflective, manipulated
Images that are mirrors in photography are a romantic expression and a personal reflection of the photographer’s sensibility, as they project themselves onto things and sights of this world. Cindy Sherman, a photographer who explores this intimate aspect of photography, explores a personal perception of self identity and behaviours within the world around her. The collection of photographs named ‘Untitled Film Stills’ which Cindy Sherman produced in the 1970s and 1980s seem to deliberately rely on caricatures of female subjects in movies, staging these photographs by taking on the role of the actress, instead of adopting a performative approach in the creation of her works. She stated, “Once I set up, the camera starts clicking, then I just start to move and watch how I move in the mirror. It’s not like I’m method acting or anything. I don’t feel that I am that person. I may be thinking about a certain story or situation, but I don’t become her. There’s this distance. The image in the mirror becomes her—the image the camera gets on the film. And the one thing I’ve always known is that the camera lies.” (C. Sherman, quoted in Ibid., p. 23).
Sherman delves deep into exploring an enhanced personal perspective of self identity and the world around her, aiming to address how she perceives the projective eye which invokes a violent penetrative gaze on women during the 1970s and 1980s for the viewer, rather than expressing her own identity. Her performative artistic production of what could be an untitled film still of a woman under the pressure to act for the male gaze in film and other types of media relates directly to the concept of a mirror photograph, reflecting Sherman’s own sensibility. The idea of Szarkowski’s mirrors and windows theory is a very binary stance on photography, and I believe Cindy Sherman’s photographs, whilst objectively being viewed as a mirror extend further than simply that, and are able to criticise a much deeper issue within the world of public media.
Paragraph 2 (250 words): Choose an image that in your view is a window and analyse how it is an objective expression rooted in the notion of realism. Choose one quote from Szarkowski’s thesis and another from Jed Pearl’s review and follow similar procedure as above ie. two opposing points of view and commentary to provide a critical perspective.
(key words) documentary, objective, realism, candid, public, straight, optical, views
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Images that are windows in photography act as a window for the viewer to see something primarily factual and external to the photographer’s own sensibility, where the exterior world is explored in all its presence and reality. Henri Cartier-Bresson, a photographer who coined the term ‘decisive moment’, explores a factual and documentary-based way of photographs, and capture a moment in time which is usually not staged.
Conclusion (250 words): Refer back to the essay question and write a conclusion where you summarise Szarkowski’s theory and Pearl’s review of his thesis. Describe differences and similarities between the two images above and their opposing concepts of objectivity and subjectivity, realism and romanticism, factual and fiction, public and private.
Bibliography:
Cindy Sherman Retrospective – Thames & Hudson p.33