Abstract
In design, the question of whether people influence a product, or whether a product influences people may have no definitive answer, given the long relationship between people and things being made that enhance their lives. The development of new products and services typically result in new behaviours that eventually bring about new developments in design, creating a circular process. Photography, and in particular, photographic images, can be seen in a similar way. The desire to reflect reality with greater accuracy brought about early developments in the practice, such as those by Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins. However, the use of photography as an objective record did not last long, and manipulation of images arose just as quickly as the technology itself. These dual aspects of photography, both its capacity to record and preserve in great detail, as well as fool us with even simple methods, could say something about how images are received, and certainly how they go on to influence our understanding of the world. The paper looks at three artists, Hannah Höch, Robert Rauschenberg and David Hockney, whose work forefronts these problematic aspects of photography, as they both highlight its constructed nature and yet rely on it to convey their ideas about the medium and their respective subjects. Their work is reviewed in light of the idea that images do not represent us, they create us.
Presenters
Alisdair Lochlin MacRaeInstructor, School of Industrial Design, Carleton University, Ontario, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Photography, Art, Collage, Objectivity, Subjectivity
