Photography dissertation examples

Real Photography

The increasingly mediatised culture we live in today has lead us to be dominated by and dependent upon the production and consumption of images. Notions of objectivity and empiricism in the photographic have long since disappeared, but we still locate our sense of ‘the real’ in images. This dissertation will use many theories and ideas that discuss the role of photography, postmodernism and ‘the real’ within today’s culture. It will start with a discussion of the reasoning for the initial shift back towards the real. This shift mainly stemmed from postmodernism and the media. Postmodernism dealt with the idea of never ending reference and the fear about postmodern culture was that this never ending reference meant that all grip on reality had disappeared. There was a wish to return to something more stable and basic: ‘the real’? Due to advances in technology and developments in photography, the new fast changing everyday image led to our relationships and emotions becoming mediatised. We re-live events and experiences through images, which leads to a loss of the real. We remember the image rather than the event. Photographers started to try and return to the purely descriptive photography from the times before the mass referencing of postmodernism. This dissertation will look at how some of these photographers attempted to represent the real and also at how a few decided to play around with the representation of the real. Ansel Adams, for example, believed in simply trying to create a true representation of the landscape he was photographing. He attempted to show scenery at its most natural and realistic, with no visual manipulation or artifice. Andreas Gursky on the other hand began with this view but soon started changing this representation with digital editing so that it was no longer a true representation. Some photographers began attempting to create purely descriptive photography but could not escape referencing earlier work. Justin Partyka’s work The East Anglians, for example cannot be described as anything else but descriptive photography. However, his reference to Robert Frank’s The Americans in his title, had led him to fall into the postmodernism trap. Can you provide an account without analysis when it comes to photography?

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