1. What is your argument?
2. What 'theory' are you applying?
3. What visual material are you analysing?
4. What is your question?
Initial ideas:
- Reproduction in photography
- How the context can alter the way in which a photograph is viewed/read
- The idea of 'Aura' and authenticity in photography
Theories:
- Walter Benjamin: 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction', mass communication.
- Malraux: 'Museum without walls', used as a key tool in metamorphosis, acts as a service provider.
- The idea that photography is 'disseminating the subject'.
- Baudrillard: 'Simulacrum', reproducing with no original.
- 'Screened out', the idea of seeing through a screen and how that can alter the way a piece is viewed.
Visual material:
Readings:
- Emma Barker: 'Contemporary cultures of display'
- Brian O'Doherty: 'Inside the white cube'
- Walter Benjamin: 'Art in the age of the mechanical reproduction' in Illuminations (1973)
- Baudrillard: 'Screened out' & 'Simulations', Semiotext (1983)
- Sturken & Cartwright: 'Practices of looking: an introduction to visual culture', Oxford University Press (2001)
Key Questions:
- Is the 'aura' lost when a photograph is reproduced?
- Do photographs (original) even have an 'aura' in the first place?
- Does the context in which a photograph is viewed alter the way it is viewed?
- Is this effected by seeing works/images through a screen?
