Alternative Photography Cmn 703 Final Paper

By /

Alternative Photography Cmn 703 Final Paper

Do not be confused or worried about the generic requirements of this project: This is your CAPSTONE paper, not your first homework assignment. You’ve written research papers before. For those of you who want generic requirements, here they are:

Your paper should be 8 pages of analysis. You may insert your images in your text–as you analyze them. (You could also collect your images in an appendix at the end of your paper. But you must use MLA or APA style to embed your images.)

You should give your paper a title and write your name on it. You should submit in the Canvas gradebook link–as a Word or PDF document. You should use 12-point, Times New Roman font. You should revise and edit–writing matters, of course. You should use either MLA or APA documentation style.

Of course you must cite the relevant authorities. Your analysis can be no better than the materials that you’ve read. You should use our shared readings when you can and when they are relevant. You should have found some great materials on your own, too. If you are writing about images of war or love or technology, then you should know some of the great analysis of such photographs that came before you. If you are writing about images of relationships, then you should know how to adapt some great analysis of images of places to improve your analysis of images of relationships.

If you are going to use our shared, required readings, make sure you use them well. Don’t dump in terms and concepts that you don’t understand. (This is not a “cut and paste,” “connect the dots,” or “paint by numbers” task: It is YOUR Capstone Project.)

You chose the images, connect them, make them talk to us. It must be YOUR analysis!

Our required readings offer the examples of and standards for what you might do as a final project:

  1. Berger analyzed the August Sander photograph of the men in suits; he used his analysis to recontextualize the photograph and, thus, achieve an “alternative photography”
  2. Sontag analyzed Diane Arbus’s oeuvre and offered general, brilliant insight into the nature of photography itself
  3. Barrett offered a simple method of considering the contexts and genres that frame photographs
  4. In “The Rhetoric of the Image,” Barthes teaches about the cultural codes and linguistic messages that “frame” a photograph
  5. Group mu showed us how plastic elements combine to form iconic elements from which the rhetoric of the image arises
  6. Maynard teaches how technology works in the human experience: he treats photography as an extension of our ability to detect and imagine.
  7. Elkins says that every photograph spawns an imagination of the body
  8. Kress and Van Leeuwen begin to lay out a “grammar” of the photograph
  9. In Camera Lucida, moves past the cultural codes of studium to the fact that something that was there but isn’t anymore, the “that-has-been” … He finds the noeme of photography in this phenomenon