This quiz will test your knowledge of the origin, history and technical aspects of photography. There are 19 questions with a multi choice of answers and an image which will also add context and help you answer the question correct. it is important that you look at the image before answering.

Link to Kahoot quiz:

Introduction to A-level Photography – Details – Kahoot!

TASK: Produce a blog post with the questions and your answers to the A-level Photography Quiz. Make sure you include images too for each question. Download document below and cun’t & paste into your own blog post.

Use this simplified list to check that you are on task. Every item on the list represents one piece of work = one blog post. It is your responsibility as an A-level student to make sure that you complete and publish appropriate blog posts each week.

Homework and due dates will be listed / issued as necessary…

STILL-LIFE

WEEK 1: 5 – 10 Sept
1. Quiz
2. Formalism: Image analysis
3. Summer Task

WEEK 2: 11 – 17 Sept
1. Still-life: history & theory
2. Still-life: introduction studio-lighting
3. Still-life: photoshoots own objects
4. Camera Skills (aperture, shutter speed, focus)

WEEK 3: 18 – 24 Sept
1. Still-life: photoshoots own objects
2. File Management
3: Adobe Lightroom
4: Still-life editing

WEEK 4: 25 Sept – 1 Oct
1. Formalism/ New Objectivity
2. Artist study: Walker Evans / Darren Regan-Harvey
3. Single Object photoshoot
4. Single Object editing

WEEK 5: 2 – 8 Oct
1. Final photo-shoots: still-life/ single objects
2. Editing: still-life / single objects

WEEK 6: 9 Oct – 15 Oct
1. Photo-montage: history & theory
2. Photo-montage: experimentation
3. Adobe Photoshop

Week 7: 16 Oct – 20 Oct
1. Final images: still Life / photomontage
2. File-handling
3. Review and refine blog posts
4. Virtual gallery and evaluation

Half Term

PORTRAITURE

Week 8: 30 Oct – 5 Nov
1. Environmental portraiture: mind-map > mood-board > definition
2. Artists references: Environmental portraiture
3. School-assignment: environmental portrait of a student
4. Homework assignment: plan and shoot 3 different environmental portraits: outdoor > indoor > 2 or more people
DEADLINE: Mon 6 Nov

Week 9: 6 – 12 Nov
1. Environmental portraiture: editing and experimenting
2. Environmental portraiture: final outcome and evaluation
3. Compare and contrast your best environmental portrait and its inspiration (artist reference)

Follow the 10 Step Process and create multiple blog posts for each unit to ensure you tackle all Assessment Objectives thoroughly :

1. Mood-board, definition and introduction (AO1)
2. Mind-map of ideas (AO1)
3. Artist References / Case Studies (must include image analysis) (AO1)
4. Photo-shoot Action Plan (AO3)
5. Multiple Photoshoots + contact sheets (AO3)
6. Image Selection, sub selection, review and refine ideas (AO2)
7. Image Editing/ manipulation / experimentation (AO2)
8. Presentation of final outcomes (AO4)
9. Compare and contrast your work to your artist reference(AO1)
10. Evaluation and Critique (AO1+AO4)

MY FAMILY: Explore your own private archives such as photo-albums, home movies, diaries, letters, birth-certificates, boxes, objects, mobile devices, online/ social media platforms and make a blog post with a selection of material that can be used for further development and experimentation using a variety of re-staging or montage techniques .

Archives can be a rich source for finding starting points on your creative journey. This will strengthen your research and lead towards discoveries about the past that will inform the way you interpret the present and anticipate the future. See more Public/ Private Archives

For example, you can focus on the life on one parent, grand-parent, family relative, or your own childhood and upbringing. Ask other family members (parents, grand-parents, aunties, uncles) if you can look through their photo-albums too etc.

TASKS STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE: 

1. Either scan or re-photograph archival material so that it is digitised and ready for use on the blog and further experimentation.
2. Plan at least one photo-shoot and make a set of images that respond to your archival research. This can be re-staging old photos or make a similar set of images, eg. portraits of family members and how they have changed over the years, or snapshots of social and family gatherings.
3. Choose one of your images which relates to the theme of family (e.g. archive, family album, or new image you have made) and destroy the same image in 5 different ways using both analogue and digital method techniques. Eg. Reprint old and new photos and combine using scissors/ tearing and glue/ tape. In Photoshop use a variety of creative tools to cut and paste fragments of images to create composites.
4. Produce appropriate blogposts with both family research, archival material and new photographic responses and experiments.

Extension: Choose a second image and destroy it in 5 new or other ways.

Jonny Briggs: In search of lost parts of my childhood I try to think outside the reality I was socialised into and create new ones with my parents and self. Through these I use photography to explore my relationship with deception, the constructed reality of the family, and question the boundaries between my parents and I, between child/adult, self/other, nature/culture, real/fake in attempt to revive my unconditioned self, beyond the family bubble. Although easily assumed to be photoshopped or faked, upon closer inspection the images are often realised to be more real than first expected. Involving staged installations, the cartoonesque and the performative, I look back to my younger self and attempt to re-capture childhood nature through my assuming adult eyes.

Thomas Sauvin and Kensuke Koike: ‘No More, No Less’
In 2015, French artist Thomas Sauvin acquired an album produced in the early 1980s by an unknown Shanghai University photography student. This volume was given a second life through the expert hands of Kensuke Koike, a Japanese artist based in Venice whose practice combines collage and found photography. The series, “No More, No Less”, born from the encounter between Koike and Sauvin, includes new silver prints made from the album’s original negatives. These prints were then submitted to Koike’s sharp imagination, who, with a simple blade and adhesive tape, deconstructs and reinvents the images. However, these purely manual interventions all respect one single formal rule: nothing is removed, nothing is added, “No More, No Less”. In such a context that blends freedom and constraint, Koike and Sauvin meticulously explore the possibilities of an image only made up of itself.

Veronica Gesicka Traces presents a selection of photomontages created by Weronika Gęsicka on the basis of American stock photographs from the 1950s and 1960s. Family scenes, holiday memories, everyday life – all of that suspended somewhere between truth and fiction. The images, modified by Gęsicka in various ways, are wrapped in a new context: our memories of the people and situations are transformed and blur gradually. Humorous as they may seem, Gęsicka’s works are a comment on such fundamental matters as identity, self-consciousness, relationships, imperfection.

John Stezaker: Is a British artist who is fascinated by the lure of images. Taking classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations, Stezaker makes collages to give old images a new meaning. By adjusting, inverting and slicing separate pictures together to create unique new works of art, Stezaker explores the subversive force of found images. Stezaker’s famous Mask series fuses the profiles of glamorous sitters with caves, hamlets, or waterfalls, making for images of eerie beauty.

His ‘Dark Star’ series turns publicity portraits into cut-out silhouettes, creating an ambiguous presence in the place of the absent celebrity. Stezaker’s way of giving old images a new context reaches its height in the found images of his Third Person Archive: the artist has removed delicate, haunting figures from the margins of obsolete travel illustrations. Presented as images on their own, they now take the centre stage of our attention

There are different ways artists and photographers have explored their own, or other families in their work as visual storytellers. Some explore family using a documentary approach to storytelling, others construct or stage images that may reflect on their childhood, memories, or significant events drawing inspiration from family archives/ photo albums and often incorporating vernacular images into the narrative and presenting the work as a photobook.

Rita Puig-Serra Costa (Where Mimosa Bloom)  vs Laia Abril (The Epilogue)> artists exploring personal issues > vernacular vs archival > inside vs outside

Carole Benitah (Photo Souvenirs) vs Diane Markosian (Inventing My Father) > family > identity > memory > absence > trauma

Ugne Henriko (Mother and Daughter) vs Irina Werning or Chino Otsuka > re-staging images > re-enacting memories

Read article in The Guardian

Homework Task: Develop and write an introductory blog post on the origins of photography. Use the information below to help you create the content for your blog post.
DEADLINE: Mon 23 Sept

Watch the documentary on ‘Fixing the Shadows’ from BBC Genius of Photography, Episode 1.

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.

Use Harvard System of Referencing…see Powerpoint: harvard system of referencing for further details on how to use it.

In addition, research at least one photographer from the list below in the Societe Jersiaise Photographic-Archive and choose one image that references some of the early photographic processes, such as daguerreotype, calotype, salt paper prints, wet plate collodion, albumen prints, autochrome and colour transparencies as part of the origins and evolution of photography and include it in your essay.

Henry Mullins
William Collie
Ernest Baudoux
Clarence P Ouless
Francis Foot
Charles Hugo
Edwin Dale

Photographic-Processes

Camera Obscura

Origins of Photography: Study this Threshold concept 2: Photography is the capturing of light; ​a camera is optional developed by PhotoPedagogy which includes a number of good examples of early photographic experiments and the camera obscura which preceded photography. It also touches on photography’s relationship with light and reality and delve into photographic theories, such as index and trace as a way of interpreting the meaning of photographs.

Photography did not spring forth from nowhere: in the expanding capitalist culture of the late 18th and 19th centuries, some people were on the look-out for cheap mechanical means for producing images […] photography emerged experimentally from the conjuncture of three factors: i) concerns with amateur drawing and/or techniques for reproducing printed matter, ii) light-sensitive materials; iii) the use of the camera obscura
— Steve Edwards, Photography – A Very Short Introduction

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, French (1765 – 1833)

Debates about the origins of photography have raged since the first half of the nineteenth century. The image above left is partly the reason. View from the Window at Le Gras is a heliographic image and arguably the oldest surviving photograph made with a camera. It was created by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827 at Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France. The picture on the right is an enhanced version of the original which shows a view across some rooftops. It is difficult to tell the time of day, the weather or the season. This is because the exposure time for the photograph was over eight hours.

Louis Daguerre, French (1787 – 1851)

What is a daguerreotype?

The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process (1839-1860) in the history of photography. Named after the inventor, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, each daguerreotype is a unique image on a silvered copper plate.

In contrast to photographic paper, a daguerreotype is not flexible and is rather heavy. The daguerreotype is accurate, detailed and sharp. It has a mirror-like surface and is very fragile. Since the metal plate is extremely vulnerable, most daguerreotypes are presented in a special housing. Different types of housings existed: an open model, a folding case, jewelry…presented in a wooden ornate box dressed in red velvet. LD a theatre set designer

The invention of photography, however, is not synonymous with the invention of the camera. Cameraless images were also an important part of the story. William Henry Fox Talbot patented his Photogenic Drawing process in the same year that Louis Daguerre announced the invention of his own photographic method which he named after himself. Anna Atkins‘ British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions of 1843 is the first use of photographic images to illustrate a book. This method of tracing the shapes of objects with light on photosensitive surfaces has, from the very early days, been part of the repertoire of the photographer.

Henry William Fox-Talbot, British (1800 – 1877)

Fox Talbot was an English member of parliament, scientist, inventor and a pioneer of photography.

Fox Talbot went on to develop the three primary elements of photography: developing, fixing, and printing. Although simply exposing photographic paper to the light produced an image, it required extremely long exposure times. By accident, he discovered that there was an image after a very short exposure. Although he could not see it, he found he could chemically develop it into a useful negative. The image on this negative was then fixed with a chemical solution. This removed the light-sensitive silver and enabled the picture to be viewed in bright light. With the negative image, Fox Talbot realised he could repeat the process of printing from the negative. Consequently, his process could make any number of positive prints, unlike the Daguerreotypes. He called this the ‘calotype’ and patented the process in 1841.

In the month of August 1835, William Henry Fox Talbot produced the first photographic negative to have survived to this day. The subject is a window. Despite the clear connection, it is an entirely different image compared to those of his colleagues Niépce and Daguerre. Those are photographs taken from a window, while this is the photograph of a window. From the issue of realism, we shift here into an extremely modern outlook which today would be likened to conceptual and metalinguistic discourse. While the window constitutes the most immediate metaphor to refer to photography, Talbot doesnʼt use it but more simply he photographs it. He thus takes a photograph of photography. The first to comment on this was the author himself, writing a brief note (probably added when it was displayed in 1839) on the card upon which it is mounted. The complete text reads:

Latticed Window (with the Camera Obscura)
August 1835 When first made, the squares of glass, about 200 in number could be counted, with help of a lens⁶

Robert Cornelius, American (1809-1893)

Julia Margaret Cameron, British (1815 – 1879)

She is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorian men and for illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity, and literature.

Much of her work has connections to pictorialism and even movements such as The Pre-Rapahelites, and often had a dream-like, constructed quality to the images.

Henry Mullins, British (1818-1880) Lived and worked in Jersey 1848-73

Between 1850-73 Henry Mullins made over 9000 carte de visite portraits of Jersey’s ruling elite and wealthy upper classes. The collection that exists of his work comes through his studio albums, in which he placed his clients in an ordered grid with reference to mid-nineteenth century social hierarchies.

In 2013 Michelle Sank spent 6 months in Jersey as the inaugural Archisle International Photographer-in-Residence. She took inspiration from Henry Mullins collection of images and produced a new set of portraits that reflects upon a culturally diverse and more inclusive demographic of islanders as Jersey. In the photo-zine ED.EM.03 – on the social matrix Mullins 19th century portraits are paired with Sank’s images from 2013. Viewed together they represent 165 years of the practice of photographic portraiture in Jersey. During that period the island has undergo major social and economic changes. Through these photographers’ works, we examine those changes and the power structures that remain in place within this insular society.