Brief:

• Read the Introduction from David Bates, Photography: The Key Concepts (2009) Bloomsbury.
• Note down your thoughts in response to this reading.

This book will provide you with further reading throughout this course and you can freely dip into it. There will also be points in the course where you will be directed to particular chapters.

As the book suggests, Genres have very much been a part of film and I would say generally thought about by the majority in terms of film by many (me included). I have thought about them more in photography terms in the last couple of years but it is still a word I link to film theory first. I also think of them in relation to paintings and in particular Still Life and Landscape

The Introduction talks about the predefined “scene” modes in some cameras and this made me realise that I didn’t really know what kind settings these scene modes have. I could guess what some of them might include,  but had never really thought about it. I suspect that when I used a camera that had these scene modes I took it for granted that the camera knew more than I did! My current camera doesn’t have them as such, so maybe I don’t take the quintessential “landscapes” or “portraits” that my old cameras would suggest.  I am certainly going to go and have a look at my “point and shoot” to see what differences these modes create.

The idea that the category or genre applied to a photograph informs the expectation of the viewer is also something I had never consciously thought about, but there is no doubt that it does. I would expect photographs that come into the portrait genre to be more than a physical likeness of a person. I would expect passport photographs to be a physical likeness only. The passport office almost instruct you to create a photo with nothing else but. This got me wondering what I would see (make up in my head) if a was looking at several passport photos in a portrait gallery, without knowing they were passport photos. Would my expectations override the reality. Or is it impossible to hide some parts of the real person or their emotions in a photo?

I found this introduction raised lots of questions  and I always look forward to digging around into ideas that have been raised either through reading, looking at other photographers work or perhaps through film and generally sometimes just “looking” and listening” I did, however get a bit overwhelmed by the last couple of paragraphs and very much wanted it to end on a more simple note. Putting the words semiotics, psychoanalysis, sociology and philosophy all in one sentence is something guaranteed to make me, and I would imagine others, run for the hills!

After running for the hills and coming back again, I think this is going to be a very informative and useful book.