Art Thinking Critically About Photography the Photograph

Art

Thinking Critically about Photography

The photograph that I have chosen to think critically about for the purposes of this assignment is "Paris, Montparnasse," by Andreas Gursky. The photograph is rectangular. The primary object in the photograph is a large building or edifice, full of homes or of offices. It is unclear from the vantage point because the picture is taken as an extra wide shot. This object takes up most of the area in the photo. There is some unused or negative space in the top fifth of the photograph. That empty space is of the sky. Toward the bottom fifth of the photograph, there are trees, plants, and what could be a parking lot or another section of the roof of the building. Again, while there is detail and sharpness to the photograph, these sorts of contextual details are ambiguous or unknown. The side of the building that faces the photographer and the audience is littered with hundreds of windows. The windows are divided into a finite number of squares and rectangles, and these shapes are repeated. There is variation in the colors of shades or curtains covering the windows, as well as those windows that are crisp and white, as opposed to dark black. There are also gradations of reflections off of the windows from the sun or other sources of light from within the rooms of the building. It is clear that there is a whole world behind every window of every room, yet from the perspective from which the photo is taken, the windows and their colors seem to be a part of a greater, collective image, such as those posters or works of art where they are of a famous person, such as Bob Marley, and upon closer inspection, each pixel or color of the poster is actually another image of that same person. Such works have been called Mosaic Collages. This photograph hints that the windows in the building are a part of a greater mosaic collage of another image, which is almost perceived, on the tip of the tongue, or brain, so to speak.

Sontag has an entire body of literature expounding upon the affects and effects of photography. She refers to the power of photography to "fiddle" or play with the viewers' sense of the scale of the world as well as linking photography to collecting. (Sontag, On Photography, 1973) Gursky's work participates in this discourse. The photograph captures a collection of windows, a collection of rooms, and a collection of colors. While viewers may know consciously from the parking lot and trees, that this building is for people, as in it is "people sized," the scale of the photograph invites persistent questions of scale and perspective. How far away is the photographer from the object? What kind of lens contributes to producing this effect? How big are those trees? There are no people in the picture. There is no common referential object in the piece to help more firmly locate the viewer with regard to scale and perspective. In this way, the photography is some sort of optical illusion. The photograph retains a hypnotic quality because in order to get a grip on what we see, how big is the thing that we see, and the determination if the thing we see is only a smaller part of an even bigger thing, we must continue to stare at the photograph. Sontag might argue that with respect to this photograph, in collecting the world, the photo has collected the viewers.