Lecture : rough guide to reality

This lecture was a guide to reality and the aspect behind reality. The reality aspect of this lecture was looking beyond documentary photography but looking at critical practice as the creative exploration of the world and its mediations.

The lecture went onto montage as realism and looking at photographers who create this but majority didn't and one photographer which really stood out was Berthold Brecht his photograph of Krupp factory was very complicated as the photo does not represent reality in the slightest and it doesn't mirror the reflection of realism which was very odd as you would think that a photograph would create this realism and real to life but there are so many things you can do to a photograph to create a different meaning which is interesting while looking through the module.

Further on the lecture a section came up about surrealist documentary and ethnographic surrealism. Surrealist documentary is 'In aspiring to open the imagination upon reality, Surrealism blurs the distinction between fact and fiction. 'In Surrealist documentaries the realistic effect is used to hook the viewer into the world represented by the film in order to disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions about that world.' ( http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Surrealist%20Documentary ) This can be portrayed within a photograph just as much as a documentary and there were many photographers who were capturing this open imagination upon reality, one person while in the lecture who captured my eye was the work of Man Ray and his approach on surrealist photography. A quote by Man Ray when he was doing his photography "Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask 'how', while others of a more curious nature will ask 'why'. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information." (http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/surrealism/Man-Ray.html) Man Ray had a lot of inspiration when it came to his work but the  inspirations through-out his life, one of the most notable being Marquis de Sade – a man imprisoned for writing about sexual exploits involving women. Man Ray was inspired by his obsession with women and also began to explore female eroticism, evident in many of his photographs. Man Ray tried to create a Surrealist vision of the female form, and utilized solarisation, cropping, over development (various photographic techniques) to create a surreal effect in his photographs, and this is where his idea started of creating these amazing surreal photographs

Looking at this lecture made me really get a view and an understanding of the way photographers work and that so many of them have different ways of portraying certain things and I find it really interesting to be researching more in to photographer which fits in well with the project which I am doing.