Genius of Photography: Pt 6

1. How many photographs are taken in a year?

80 billion photographs will be taken this year alone. Today photography is not only worth bidding for, it’s worth fighting for. It’s also worth faking for, the medium has never been more widely appreciated or more eagerly exploited and questions how much a photograph is worth these days.

2. What is Gregory Crewdson ‘modus operandi’?

It looks like a movie sounds like a movie and smells like a movie but it isn’t, all the activity portrayed in Gregory Crewdson work is to make a single photograph, Crewdson uses cinematic lighting to create one single perfect moment, and he is his own camera operator and director of photography. He has a strange disconnection to photography, he doesn’t like holding a camera and he doesn’t take the actual picture images Is what he is truly interested in and that the camera is just a necessary instrument. Over an eleven day shoot in a variety of locations, Crewdson team will make a series of multiple exposures which will be digitally combined to make 6 final images; he’ll produce an addition of 6 final prints of each image priced at approximately 60 thousand dollars.

3. Which prints command the highest price and what are they called?

Prints that command the highest price tags are usually the ones made the photographer themselves; closest to the times the actual picture was taken. Like fine wines these prints are known as vintage.

4. What is a fake photograph? Give an example and explain how and why it is fake.

The image of John Kerry and Jane Fonda at a anti-war rally is an example of a fake photograph, the photograph shows john Kerry and Jane Fonda standing together at a podium during a 1970’s anti- war rally was a hoax. As the original unaltered photo of Kerry taken In June 13 1970 documents the Vietnam war, veteran was sitting alone prior to giving a speech at an outdoor rally, and Fonda was photo shopped in at a later date tells about the troublesome combination of Photoshop and the internet than it does about the prospective  democratic candidate for president.

5. Who is Li Zhensheng and what is he famous for?

Li Zhensheng was red army news soldier, he was a photojournalist who in the 1960’s and early 70’s found himself covering the Cultural Revolution.

6. What is the photographers ‘holy of holies?

 In 1994 British photographer Martin Parr applied to join photojournalism agency Magnum, a prestigious agency, but Parr had to battle long and hard to bring his distinctive brand of photography into photojournalism’s holy of holies. Parr’s work was very different to Magnum, his photo’s have been said to be meaningless but Magnum has developed a reputation which has become known as the holy of holies of famous photographers such as Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier Bresson.

7. How does Ben Lewis see Jeff Walls photography?

Ben Lewis thinks that Jeff Wall didn’t invent photography but he took photography back to the 19^th century to painting where everything is creative everything is constructed for a meaning, He fed in a lot of contemporary theoretical concerns , concerns about gender, about how men and women look at each other concerns about racial stereotyping.

8. Which famous photograph was taken by Frank Mustard?

French photographer Camille Silvy created the seemingly realistic photograph called ‘The River France’; it offers master class in 19^th century photographic manipulation. Silvy arranged where the people should stand so the working class people were in the common land on the right of the picture with an artificial sky that he added. But the actual photograph was not taken by Silvy it was taken by Frank Mustard.