On Friday, we went to a symposium over Photography. It served as an introduction to photography as a whole instead of an intro into the curriculum at Kansas City Art Institute. The lecturer, Tom Lewis, started us off with one of the first photographs: an almost empty Parisian street. It was eerie looking at the photo and seeing no one in the streets except for a man on the corner. Lewis went on with a small discussion over that point and how the process of taking the picture took so long that when the picture was finally taken all of the movement in the street disappeared making the street appear empty. I thought that was very interesting, knowing that now if I were to take a picture of a street with movement, I would get blurred movement like with the grey car turning in my picture from The Bauer to see Town Topic. To think that even the people waiting to cross the street would most likely be erased and only the seller near the trees and the other across the street would be there, just didn't feel real.

Later in history, we began to learn a bit about Etienne-Jules Marey and Edward Muybridge and how photography can take action, though not as a clear photo as Marey proved. Muybridge would take pictures of people doing an action from two different angles while Marey would attach movement trackers on his subjects, ei an elephant, and took multiple pictures at different points to reveal such actions.

As we wrapped up, I learned that photography is closest to our perception however, because of that, we are easily tricked into thinking that whatever is in the photo is obvious when we can't see past photographic space. Robert Cummings knew this and experimented with making a space originally was 3D 2D or vice versa. It also goes into how film isn't just a continuous action like we believe and instead it is continuous pictures moving fast enough that we do not notice. I knew that part from my film classes in high school and having to sketch frame by frame (mostly) of videos I wished to do. After that, we saw many pictures by different photographers and I wrote down a long list of photographers to keep in mind like the Starn Twins, Oliver Herring, Thomas Struth, and Christian Boltanski.

If film doesn't work out, maybe I'll go into photography since they are so closely related.