PART 1: Vision

PART 1: VISION

THEORY 1: Seeing, Perceiving, and Mediating Vision
REBEKAH MODRAK

this essay looks at ... 
active and passive approaches to vision and recording, visual mechanisms (including sea creatures, humans, and cameras), Ann Hamilton's mouth cameras, David Hockney's and Joyce Neimanas's dynamic photographs, a brief history of photographic clarity and fuzz, Uta Barth's photographs of a peripheral subject, the Ganzfeld, Ralph Eugene Meatyard's attempts to see without focus, Oliver Sacks's study of a man who regained sense of sight, Gestalt theory, John Baldessari's and Garry Winogrand's broken rules of composition, defining space through linear perspective, architectural, framed, televised, and online windows as frames for a view, viewpoints from armored cars in Iraq, Tim Hawkinson's floating eye, influencing visual perception through landscape design, the fear of open space in environment and image, sequential perception in Asian land and representation, mediating vision, the camera obscura as observatory, Janet Cardiff's walks, Franz John's military bunkers, vision in flux as scientific and artistic experiment, nineteenth-century optical toys and Liza McConnell's contemporary viewer-operated contraptions, Victorian entertainment and Merry Alpern's sex club photographs, the New Vision's techniques that attempt to make strange the familiar, mountain-climbing, space travel, and other visual feats, Paul Ramirez Jonas's kite cameras, Google Earth, viewing attention and Internet strategies, and more ..

PRACTICE 1: Vision: Tools, Materials, and Processes
REBEKAH MODRAK

exploring human vision

learn ...
how the eye and brain work

the camera as viewer

learn to ...
construct a roomsize or portable camera obscura
use optical and lcd viewfinders
operate a viewing system
operate, care for, and focus a lens
digitally create out-of-focus areas
select focal length and its effects on depth of field and perspective
create a stereoscopic image

the camera as recorder

learn to ...
record with a small, medium, large, pinhole, instant, or cell phone camera
scan with a flat bed scanner or photo copier
operate features of a pinhole, 35mm SLR, digital point and shoot, and digital SLR camera body
straighten digital images in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Camera Raw
make scanograms
control aperture and shutter speed settings
create shallow depth of field in a digital image