Photography’s essential artifact – the picture that’s created by a camera and printed on paper or viewed on a screen – is usually said to represent “the real world” faithfully, and with great precision. But those images are only representations; they’re separate from that real world in several very fundamental ways. The way lenses see depth and space; the way cameras understand time and motion; the way two-dimensional prints and screens impose edges and corners on what the camera sees – all that is truly different than our everyday experience of a three-dimensional world that brims with noise and aroma and a multitude of sensations.
How does a photographer cope with the loss of an entire dimension? How does a photographer resolve the iron-clad restrictions that the frame places of his point-of-view? Students in “The Photographer’s Eye” will become aware of the challenges posed by cameras and lenses, and they’ll learn about the solutions that photographers have developed over 150 years of time and trial.
Through lectures and discussions, exercises and assignments, this class will explore the specifics of camera vision in such areas as motion, time, and focus, and we’ll look at hundreds of pictures in order to better understand the frame itself, and the compositional strategies used by other photographers to resolve the demands of those edges and corners.
