Grammar 4

Grammar 1-3 classes provide a foundation in visual literacy for photographers and a framework for understanding personal style. Grammar 4 begins with a consideration of the creative process and how to keep that process open and active. We then turn our attention to issues of beauty and its relevance and the necessity of originality in photography. Shooting assignments will be based on the ideas in Ralph Gibson’s Refractions. Additional readings come from Robert Adams’ Beauty in Photography.

Along the way, we’ll continue to discuss the perceptual process, as well as addressing the juxtaposition and sequence of images. In particular, we will look at the way in which a group of photographs or adjacent photographs can establish a perceptual and interpretive context, whether on a website, book, gallery wall, or as a form of presentation itself.

Class 1: Juxtaposition

• Pairings and Diptychs: Three Approaches

• Ralph Gibson: Overtones

• Continuity and Dis-junction

Class 2: The Poetry of Chance

• Photography’s Chance Connections

• Chance as the Vehicle for Discovery

• Expanding Possibilities

Class 3: Creative Process

• Alternating Between Open and Closed Modes

• Beautiful Pictures of Beautiful Subjects

Class 4: Defining Beauty

• Aspects of Influence: Learning by Looking

• Aesthetics: Can Beauty be Defined?

Class 5: Images of Nothing

• Morandi vs Meyerowitz

• Absence and Presence

Class 9: Sequence

Class 10: Review of Projects