Understanding photography

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Reframing Photography: Theory and Practice

Rebekah Modrak with Bill Anthes

Theory, history and practice should be integrated and, when they are, a broader interpretation of photography is possible. Having the technical knowledge surrounding lighting, exposure, composition, etc. alone is not enough to read and comprehend photographs.   Additional knowledge and understanding concerning the theoretical motivation behind inspirational photographs taken throughout history is also required to understand them fully. These are the arguments put forward in this new book.

Theory and practice are linked as closely as possible.  For example, notions of theories of light and shadow exemplified in the environmental landscape photographs of O Winston Link are followed by technical explanations of light, shadow and of the tools or materials that can be employed to create and control them. 

In ‘Seeing, Perceiving, and Mediating Vision’ Rebekah Modrak explores sight and photography from the camera obscura, through optical curiosities such as Zoetropes and stereoscopes, to surveillance cameras and Google earth.  She considers how the human eye functions and how cameras view and record light.  A portable camera obscura is constructed; explanation are given of how lenses, stereoscopic cameras, pin-hole cameras and camera phones work, and different camera formats, instant cameras, and film and digital recording media are covered.  This chapter also looks at camera controls such as how aperture affects depth of field and how shutter speed links to aperture and blur or motion. 

Bill Anthes theorises the concepts of light and shadow and how artists have used these concepts to reinforce the sense of time, place and mood. He also explores early photographic attempts to capture light and to record it onto a material, such as Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s use of pewter plates coated with light sensitive varnish, or William Henry Fox Talbot’s successful attempt to reproduce previously captured images onto coated paper.  Anthes also explores shadow play and projected light beyond the usual confines of the movie theatre.

Rebekah Modrak theorises on copying and reproducing images in ‘Processing the Subject: The Photographic Copy’.  She refers to Walter Benjamin’s classic essay, written in 1936,  ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.  She also discusses a gallery in Naruto City, Japan that features life-sized photographic facsimiles of fine art masterpieces.  The postmodern concept of acknowledging and appropriating reproductions of past works of art is explored.  Modrak looks at the notion of capturing, copying and reproducing images from rubbings (recording a raised surface or texture by rubbing a crayon or graphite over a sheet of paper) through various methods of image transfer, before covering traditional photographic film and digital methods of capture and copying in more detail.  Processing film and developing photographic prints via enlargers are covered at length, as well as t capturing images via digital sensors.  Issues of sensor size and image quality, colour space, bit depth and dynamic range are briefly explained.  The chapter ends with an explanation of various digital manipulation programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom, file types and formats and the importance of colour management, monitor and printer calibration. 

In the last part of the book, Bill Anthes  discusses series and sequences of images by examining how images are rarely viewed in total isolation but are viewed alongside other images.  Pictures are presented, observed and understood in the context of other photographs, such as the gallery installation or the results from a Google image search.  Series and sequence photographs are also explored via the panorama made up of several joined images and the early time-lapse photography of Eadweard Muybridge.  Anthes also covers relationship between image and text, from the historic illustrated manuscript to the contemporary magazine, newspaper or textbook. He explores the power of the caption and of how accompanying text can be used to reinforce ideas of truthfulness in the image.  There is discussion of a wide range of photograph editing and presentation topics such as digital manipulation of an image, photomontage, photo collage and adding text to an image file.  The traditional methods of bookbinding, mounting and framing as well as current thinking on web-based photo sharing, web-based book designing and print-on-demand publishing are also mentioned. 

The authors’ aim is to address the gap that exists in current literature between photographic books relating to theory and practice.  They wanted to produce one book linking photographic practice, only available in textbooks, with photographic theory, previously confined to a separate collection of publications.  While each chapter of Reframing Photography still addresses these two issues in separate essays, links are explicitly made between the two sections. 

The publication does fulfil the authors’ aim better than any previous book.  The impressively wide range of photographic information presented in the book is also the one disadvantage. Topics in this publication are sometimes not explored in depth; they are touched on but not developed.  The subject matter swiftly changes; the construction of a photographic light box out of wood, Plexiglas and florescent light fittings is immediately followed by information on presenting images on the Internet.  In this publication colour management, the sole subject of several publications, is covered in just nine pages.  Nonetheless, as an introduction to almost every aspect of photographic theory and practice the book is valuable for students beginning their photographic studies. 

Reframing Photography: Theory and Practice  by Rebekah Modrak with Bill Anthes is  published by Routledge, 2010. 560 pp. 773 illus, £24.99.ISBN 978-0415779203