What is an artist’s relationship with society? Hannah Arendt‘s seminal work The Human Condition introduces the term vita activa (active life) in contrast to the vita contemplativa (contemplative life) as a means to integrate the universal life of the mind with the everyday sociopolitical sphere. The goal is to revise the division between the aesthetic-intellectual realm and the existential-political sphere, to allow the reader (and artist) greater agency in the world around them. Students in the third-year of Photography examine for […]

Categories: PHOTO 3

Much of western art is set in the environs of the church or the courtly life. The landscape, the prototypical outsider, had to fight for respectability as a genre of its own. Pieter Brueghel‘s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus takes small notice of the mythic Icarus, devoting much of the pictorial space in favor of a pastoral scene. Some would say that this is a Northern European painter’s rebuttal of Italian Renaissance history painting as the highest genre, others might argue […]

Categories: PHOTO 3

What relationship do we have to the things around us? A central problem in philosophy is the relationship between a “knowing subject” (an individual consciousness) and the perception of an objective world, specially as predicated by language. Ludwig Wittgenstein echoes this view when he says: “The main point is the theory of what can be expressed by propositions – i.e. by language (and, what comes to the same, what can be thought) – and what cannot be expressed by propositions, […]

Categories: PHOTO 3

A review of the various lines of experimentation on the subject of portraiture by third-year Photography students:

Categories: PHOTO 3