Assignment Four Critical review

The critical review may be read by following this link and opening the resultant file in Adobe Acrobat Reader. The original version before modification after tutor comments is set out below and available (with comments) on this link. Feedback with details of how the original was amended is available on this link.

I drafted some thoughts on the topic and sent to Tutor with favourable feedback on topic and some comments on how to structure. I had not enunciated my thoughts in detail, as I was concerned at that point to ensure that what I wanted to present was suitable subject-matter, which is not of a 'classical' nature. Enough has been said on the history of landscape photography; it is a personal view that academic photography has to move on from reviewing to previewing, to making more of understanding how ordinary people use photographs and cameras, and the consequent impact on the traditional two dimensional static image. As long ago as 2012, Time included an article about Google Street View and the artists inspired by it (Moakley, 2012); this is surely only a precursor to a very different photographic landscape.

The subject of how photography responds to current trends  has interested me since I came across the ideas and concerns of Sherry Turkle and others whilst studying Understanding Visual Culture. Academic photography has little to say about social media, smart phones, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and similar developments, and how these new media affect our vision and understanding of the world around us. Yet they are commonplace and becoming the dominant force of our visual conception of the world; the static two dimensional image which is the prime subject-matter of academic photography is far from moribund, but competes for our attention with other spatial media. 

An essay of 2,000 words is too short to to go into much depth, so I chose to consider three examples of change: 

• how technology and mobility have affected our expectation of beauty and sublime; 
• the impact of GPS systems on our spatial awareness;
• new camera technologies.

These examples are used to show how our world view is altered, and suggests how photography may respond. It is perhaps too big a subject to be able to condensed into such a short narrative, but I enjoyed researching it and writing it. I took on board Tutor's comments about structuring, which helped to narrow the focus (much material I would have liked to have included simply had to be omitted) and keep materially to the set word limit. 

Reference:

Moakley (2012) Street View and Beyond: Google’s Influence on Photography. Available from http://time.com/55683/street-view-and-beyond-googles-influence-on-photography/. Accessed on 20 December 2016.