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7/28/2019 Silver is Better Than Gold: An exploration of what can make photography Art
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Silver is better than Gold:
-An exploration of what can make photography Art-
joshua brancheau
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This book and this image are both dedicated to Henri Cartier Bresson,May the artistic life forever be a quest to capture that decisive moment in our work and in our hearts.
Capturing the Moment, Fall 2000
Silver Gelatin Print, 20 x 16
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Mundus est fabula
-Ren Descartes
I n h i s 1968 e s s a y U n d e r s t a n d i n g a
Photograph, John Berger makes an intriguingly
simple claim. Photographs, he suggests,
bear witness to a human choice being
exercised in a given situation. A photograph is
a result of the photographers decision that i t
is worth recording that this particular event or
this particular object has been seen.1
The very precise terms that Berger uses here
strike me as propos. For Berger, the decision that
lies behind every photograph behind Joshua
Brancheaus photographs, for example is not that
some particular event or some particular object is
worth recording. Rather, the decision is that it is
worth recording that some particular event or some
particular object has been seen and has been seen in
this particular way. A few lines further on, Berger
offers the following gloss on what he takes to be the
message that every photograph is: I have decided
that seeing this is worth recording.2 I would prefer
to say although perhaps it amounts to much the
same thing I have decided that this seeing is worth
recording.I have decided that this seeing is worth
recording. Such is, I want to suggest, the utterance
that every photograph is. What matters about every
photograph, what makes it the specific photograph
that it is and not some other photograph is not
the event or the object that it seems to report or
record; rather, what matters, what makes it the
specific photograph that it is, is the specificity of the
seeing itself.
Two photographs, taken at one and the same
time and of one and the same event two images of
1 Understanding a Photograph in John Berger, Selected Essays, edited by Geoff Dyer(New York: Vintage International, 2001), 216.
2 Cf. ibid..
one and the same 1/125 of a second, of one and the
same 1/60 of a second will only ever differ in the
manner of their seeing. The difference between
them is a difference ofhow and not ofwhat. And it
is this difference in the manner of their seeing that
allows me but not you to say of the one but not
of the other that this is what I saw; it is this
difference in the manner of their seeing that allows
you but not me to say of the other but not of
the one that this is what you saw. What separates
one from the other, in other words, what separates
one photograph from the next, is the seeing itself,
the seeing that each photograph is. This and nothing
more. If the photograph were really a matter of its
object, how could we distinguish between one
photograph and the next?
In this sense, then, the photograph is never
ofits object. Rather, the photograph is only ever of
its seeing. True, the photograph does represent
something. Something is always there, in silver
gelatin or in ink. But what is there what, for want
of a better term, we might call the image or the
picture, the referent, i f you l ike , in o rder to
distinguish it from its reference what is there is
there only as the mark or the trace of a particularway of seeing. And it is precisely this that Joshua
Brancheaus photographs make us see.
Consider the Where the Wild Things Are
series. Here, a sequence of meticulously constructed
city scenes are thrown into comic relief by the digital
addition of wild animals bears, whales, a moose. In
every case, Brancheau makes no real attempt to hide
the fact that the images have been manipulated. The
animals are very precisely not seamlessly blended
with their new environment. Indeed, the viewer is
taken to have grasped the artificial nature of the
images, taken to know that the image has been
constructed and to be comfortable with knowing
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precisely what elements are present, to use
Barthes term, and which are not.3 In a rather
straightforward sense, therefore, the images reflect
technically what is happeningthematically.
Something rather different and rather
more interesting happens, though, when the series is
seen in the light of Capturing the Moment, the
work that introduces this volume and that,
presumably, therefore, explains it. Here, too, a city
scene is punctured by the presence of something
wild, in this instance a bird, caught very precisely in
the geometrical centre of the photograph. In terms
of content alone, therefore in terms ofobject, if you
like Capturing the Moment appears very much of
a piece with the later series of Wild Things. And
yet, unlike the later animals, the bird in the centre
of Capturing the Moment is intended as something
that is actually there. Unlike the later photographs,
in which Brancheau very clearly mediates between
the viewer of the photograph and the scene that was
actually there before him, Capturing the Moment
is immediately given. The moment here is captured
and not constructed.4
But is that really the case? Seeing the first
piece in the light of the series might cause us to
wonder. Seeing the first piece in the light of the
series might, in fact, lead us to think about the
extent to which Capturing the Moment does, in
fact, capture the moment. Nothing, after all, tells us
that this image, too, is not the result of digital
manipulation. If bears can be set down on a London
street, why not birds in a park in Krakow? Indeed,
Brancheau seems almost to encourage these sorts of
worries with closing line of this volume: The irony,
he writes, is that this whole thing, this book, was
crafted on a computer, no silver gelatin at all. Even
if we assume that this is not the case, that the bird
is, in fact, there, what entitles us to say that this
3 Roland Barthes, La chambre claire (Paris: Seuil, 1980) 364 The fact th at the setti ng for Capturing the Moment is more natural and less
artificial as it were the city scene in question is a park and not a main street seemsto reinforce this sense of immediacy.
image is any less constructed or any more captured
than the later ones?
What Brancheau seems to be inviting us to
ponder both here and with the striking images of
the Experience Auschwitz series is this: the
photograph does not record some particular event or
some particular object; rather, it records records
precisely by being the manner in which some
particular event or some particular object has been
seen. As such, the photograph is tautological,
although not in the sense that Barthes assumed.5
For Barthes, every photograph involves a certain
voici, a certain voil that it cannot escape: a pipe,
here, is always and intractably a pipe Its as if the
photograph always carries its reference along with
it.6 F o r B r a n c h e a u a n d t h i s i s w h a t h i s
photographs are about the photograph is
tautological insofar as it is the seeing that it records.
Simon Sparks
5 Cf. Barthes, La chambre claire 26 Ibid..
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Hello and Welcome!
Before you lies an exploration of what makes photography art. I have dubbed this little project, Silver is
better than Gold, because the power of silver nitrate salts to capture photo reality makes photography the
ultimate art form, and silver the ultimate metal. By exploring what I see in photography, I wish to pay
homage to this great metal and the relatively new tradition that has brought photography to the threshold
of today. A wide-angle lens can capture more than the eye can see, a narrow depth of field can force a
point of introspection. Photography has the ability to frame a personal perspective for the rest of the
world to see, and force us to look at things we might not see everyday.
The world we live in and experience in our waking lives is a giant living sculpture. The photo artist
utilizes the perspective of a lens in order to capture intimate parts of this world of experience. The
technological advances that have brought us photography have enabled the world to create exact
replications of the objects we experience in the world.
For centuries the goal of European art was to master realism, but with the advent of photography, we get
the advent of impressionism, cubism, and postmodernism. Art just has not been the same since the rise
of photography. Yet, people are still unwilling to accept photography as art. What is art? What could
possibly make photography art?? Lets look at some photographs
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Where the Wild Things Are
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going to soho, 2005
digital print, 6x9
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suburban marmot, 2005
digital print, 6x9
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Why does man not see things? He always gets in the way: he conceals things.-Friedrich Nietzsche
Error has made animals into
men; is truth in a position to
make men into animals again?
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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sightseeing london, 2005
digital print, 6x9
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a swim in the park, 2005
silver gelatin print, 10x8
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What distinguished man fromanimals was the human capacity
for symbolic thought, the
capacity which was inseparable
from the development of
language in which words werenot mere signals, but signifiers of
something other than themselves.
Yet the first symbols were
animals. What distinguished men
from animals was born of theirrelationship with them.
-John Berger
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save the whales, 2005
digital prints, 6x9
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We shall see but little way if we require to
understand what we see. How few things can a
man measure with the tape of his understanding!
How many greater things might he be seeing in
the meanwhile!
-Henry David Thoreau
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rook takes pawn, 2005digital print, 6x9
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stuck in traffic, 2005
digital print, 6x9
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In Where the Wild Things Are I wanted to question mans place in nature. Humans reside in
fabricated environments, providing shelter and comfort to those who can afford to pay for it. We can
be so caught up in the environment we have built for ourselves, that we lose sight of the creatures
and the environment that our constructions have displaced. Man arose out of nature and at some
point lost contact with it. We became so absorbed in our ability to use our minds to overcome nature
that we placed ourselves higher than it. Nature has continually tried to contact man, but the
predominant perspective of man fears nature and will do anything to stop it from invadinginto mans
space. Man is in conflict with nature. In this body of work I have tried to skew the lines between
mans environment and nature. What if we eliminated the natural world, and the surface of the earth
was one giant cityscape?? Would the only place to see wild animals be the zoo?? Would whales
cross Times Square?? In eliminating the landscape of nature, would we eliminate all of its creatures
too?? Where are the Wild Things??
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To speak truly, few adult
persons can see nature. Mostpersons do not see the sun.
At least they have a very
superficial seeing. The sun
illuminates only the eye of
the man, but shines into theeye and the heart of the child.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What could possibly make photography art? When asked what is art,Pablo Picasso responded what is not. If I were asked who is an artist, I would respond who is not.We all make art in out own unique ways. Imagination and creation are a few of the things that have
set man above the rest of the animals, and art is some sort of refined aesthetic creation. We are all
creative in our own unique ways. Art is about creation. Art making is a special way of connectingwith the mind in order to bring forward some of our thoughts, manifest dreams into realities. The
main argument against photography as an art is that photographs capture reality they do not create it.Anyone who has actively thought about taking a photograph knows that taking pictures is notnecessarily a passive capturing process. A photographer can play a very active role in the process of
capturing his or her view of reality. Ansel Adams considered his photographs to be surreal. Have
you ever seen a sky as dramatic as the sky in an Ansel Adams photograph? Adams could visualizethe sky exactly the way he wanted to capture it. Henri Cartier Bresson coined the phrase the
decisive moment. He captured images which held emotions and events in timeless space, which we
can all respond to. Paul Weston gave us a new way of seeing peppers. Through the activephotographers lens there are unlimited worlds to be explored. From constructed landscapes out of
torn bits of paper to the elaborate fabricated worlds of Shauna and Robert Parke Harrison, the cameraand its trusty piece of silver gelatin film act as an interpreter for the vision of any reality that can beseen. Art is a form of communication. We express ourselves, or we express our agenda. In this
volume I have included three forms of photographic art to speculate. The first kind being the sort
where multiple images are brought together into single frames in the montage techniques of JerryUlesmann. The second kind is documentary photography. Documentary photography is inherently
more about capturing what is there rather than manipulating it,. Yet through the use of a camera
documentary photographers can share their perspective and tell their stories. The third type is the
capturing of constructed environments and camera manipulations which can be created in the studioor wherever your art may draw you. I believe there is art in all three types of photography to varying
degrees. The photo-making process is about taking the world we see inside of our heads and sharing
it with the rest of the world. I believe all three types operate in this fashion.
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He does not create his object in reality as does the
painter, but he creates, before the camera begins to
function, the irrevocably ultimate aesthetic form.
He carries the notion of the shape of an object in
himself and he takes the object destined for that
form, giving it a certain position or moving it into
a certain situation of light, in a certain relation tospace.... The photographers artistic performance
is thus displayed in pre-photographic and in post-
photographic action; in the preparation for real
photographic action and in the reproduction of the
photograph. The painter recreates his object from
beginning to end ... through his activity, through
his painting. The photographer, it is true, changeshis object, too, by his photographic action ... he
gives the convincing shape, most clearly adequate
to his perception, before, and he fixes this shape in
a mechanistic way.... Whereas the painter remains
creative from first to last, the creative activity of
the photographer is confined and limited; whereas
the artistic action of the painter is not interrupted,
the artistic action of the photographer breaks off inthe moment in which the apparatus is to fix and
make visible its effect.
-Heinrich Schwarz
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Experience Auschwitz
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Lies, Fall 2000
silver gelatin print, 14x11
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Arbeit Macht Frei loosely translates into work makes you freeIn the wrought iron over the gate of Auschwitz,this promise for salvation hangs in iry dissonance with the reality of what its gates enfold
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Pain, Fall 2000
silver gelatin print, 8x10
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Confinement, Fall 2000
silver gelatin print, 10x8
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What an age experiences as evil is usually
an untimely reverberation echoing what was
previously experienced as goodthe
atavism of an older ideal.-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Silenced Struggles, Fall 2000
silver gelatin print, 8x10
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Too Many Lost Soles, Fall 2000
silver gelatin print, 10x8
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Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the
way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into
the dark rooms of our souls.
-Ingmar Bergman
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A Failed Cover-Up, Fall 2000
c-print, 15x11
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InExperience AuschwitzI wanted to share an intense experience. Spending a day on the
grounds of Auschwitz and Birkenau is one that will never be forgotten. I would like to
go back and make an entire book out of imagery from these sights. The feeling of
walking through this nightmare for so many people was indescribable. Spending a day
on the sight where hundreds of thousands of people were worked to death or killed leavesquite a knot in ones stomach
Hearing about something a hundred
times is not as good as seeing it once.
-Chinese Proverb
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Simone de Beauvoirwrote that in the process of making a work of art,
the lack of being returns to the positive.
Her reference to an art works lack of being is a reference to the
thought of the artwork within the artists head. Previous to its
completion, the artwork exists as a thought and lacks being. It is
only through the process of making works of art that artists are able
to make their thoughts into positive realities
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A Legacy of Dead White Men
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The Patriarch, Fall 2004
silver gelatin print, 24x30
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We have met the enemy and he is us.
-Pogo
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King of Diamonds, Fall 2004
digital print, 24x30
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Queen of Hearts, Fall 2004
digital print, 24x30
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Jack of Spades, Fall 2004
digital print, 24x30
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What is
the difference between artworks
and artifacts???
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Divide and Conquer, Fall 2004
silver gelatin print, 28x40
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A Legacy of Dead White Men is about being
trapped inside of a dominant culture. What doesthat mean? What do we carry over from our
crusty white ancestors?? The drive for money
and powerAn idea that we are right and should
impose our righteousness on others. The conflictbetween a heart that wants to help and a culture
that wants everything for itself is tough. This is
just a budding body of work that is most likely to
consume me for an extended period in my life.Through the imagery of this work I will be
exploring the stresses and struggles that I
encounter through my family which holds me up,
my psyche which holds me back, and the society
that I encounter every day. I try to use popular
and traditional symbols to communicate my ideas
and express the distinct cultural experience of
being a white male.
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To see far is one thing: going there is another.
-Brancusi
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Any Last Words?
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This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination,
is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by
the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or
circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to
others.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Immanuel Kant
defined art asa finality without an end.
Artists create objects,
which can be experienced by the world;
immortalized emotion, and personal experience,
which is forever experienced anew by
the observers whom encounter it.
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The irony is that this whole thing, this book, was crafted on a
computer, no silver gelatin at all, just a bunch of bits and bots!
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computer, no silver gelatin at all, just a bunch of bits and bots!
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