Here is that part of the image itself in some ways is without inherent meaning, some ways the photograph itself needs to be coded through captions, through the sort of articles next to it, through many other ideas like the readers own political persuasion. The image becomes largely meaningless until it becomes coded by the surrounding areas. In some ways, the image without a code needs a code, the context for understanding its meaning. So talks about the paradox of photography and particularly of press photography. The ways that constructed intentional meaning, the things that have opinions or political leanings, can seem natural and pregiven, thanks to the index of photography. Reminding what it means. Of course, you know, thinking back to our photograph right here. We know that there was a corpse hanging from a tree. Light reflects that body on to photographic film and we know that it was there. That idea of truth value, that factual quality of photography. In some ways makes the constructed meaning seem natural and pregiven. So hes really trying to think about this in terms of press photography. Here is the cuba photograph we referenced earlier, taken by the spy plane. Heres a different shot taken by a spy plane, but same idea. Cuban landscape with identifying missiles. What might roland bart say about the publication of this image in a newspaper . Lynn . It has the captions on it. It gives more meaning to the photograph and makes it seem scarier than it would be if you just saw it without the captions. The captions here tell us what to look for here. You know we see, the caption here identifies whats in here as well as the internal captions tells us what we are looking at. Anyone else . Yeah. Kind of adding to that, it gives context of like you said what were supposed to look for and the photo on the left kind of sort of tells what is going on. In the context of a whole newspaper article, you get more indepth of what we are supposed to look for and why this is a big deal and more background why people should be afraid of this photograph. Good. Going off of that, more so like what they want you to look for. The text lends this cultural and political ideas on the photograph that isnt there when you see it. So kind of like that propaganda and corruption, what they want you to get out of the photograph. Great. Thats right. Great points. The image perhaps saying nothing or says very little, it communicates little specifics to the reader. The captions whether internally here, the article over here, the political persuasion of the reader as well as the scientific looking quality of the photograph. It looks like a document. It looks like evidence. All these aspects lead us to sort of think about the photograph and its meaning. We read it as truth and as fact. Of course, it is a very ambiguous image. Im not arguing that there were missiles in cuba. To the untrained eye of the american public, this photograph actually tells you very little. If you are trained in interpreting aerial photographs, you could maybe see something. The vast majority of americans could not communicate these ideas of missiles and so on. I also want to talk a little bit too about how beyond roland bart, beyond his analysis of press photographs, images as are published in newspapers, the material print production of these photographs also leads them to be even more ambiguous. For two reasons. One we talked about. The half tone. Remember the half tone process we discussed . Many weeks ago, around the turn of the 20th century, how photographs can be converted to a screen of dots that could be mass printed by newspapers. Allowed for the mass publication of photographs in the press. Major watershed moment in photojournalism. The second thing i want to talk about which is new for us and we have not talked about this semester, the wire photo that allows photographs to be transmitted via radio wire. Im going to make this caption larger. It says, missile sight cuba. This is a copy made public by the u. S. Embassy in london and radioed to the u. S. They first got access to this image, its a long story i wont go why this is in london, but thats the first time this photograph emerged. They had to wire the photograph from london to new york to print it quickly and in the next days paper. They had a new process for this. Just a reminder before the wire photo was introduced and well talk about its history in a moment, that photographs had to be literally transported from the site of their production to the newspaper. Remember the photograph, the earthquake in San Francisco in 1906, and it took four to five days to get the film from San Francisco to new york. Theres a significant delay in showing these images from San Francisco on the east coast. The film had to be put on a train to go across the country. The wire photo changes all of this. It was invented in 1907. As you see in the cover of Scientific American magazine. Not really made practical for widespread use until the 1930s. Didnt come into common use until the 1940s. Really becomes entrenched in our national and International Press during the cold war in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Actually used all the way up into the 1980s. I will read you the caption. Right here for this picture, this says, a photograph of the german crown prince. You see it here. Electronically transmitted to a distance of nearly 1,100 miles. The small picture from which the enlargement was made is the actual result obtained with the new method. The cover demonstrates this wire photo process. You see the results right here. Were going to watch a short video. This is a shorter excerpt from a longer clip from a news reel available on youtube. Its from 1937. From spot news. It gives the sense of how the wire photo works. Have a look. Although it took years to perfect, the technique of sending pictures by wire is comparatively simple. Its not a matter of sending the whole picture at once. But of separating the picture into fine lines, sending those lines over a wire and assembling them at the other end. Lets suppose we have a picture or a pattern which we want to send to another location. The only way to send it is through a small tube. For our purpose, we will make this picture on closely wound string. Now if we start at one end of the picture, taking it line by line, or string by string, in proper order, we can run the string through the tube and assemble it at the other end, line by line, until we again have the original pattern. That is exactly what we do in wired photo transmission. We now take the picture apart electrically, and translate it into units that we can send over a wire. The units are lines all of the same width but of different tones of gray. The video is longer online. I can send you the link. We see how wire photos work. The machine uses a lens, a light to break the photo down into lines of varying tonal levels. Then those lines are transmitted over a phone line via electronic pulse. The idea of lines are the tonal value are converted to a pulse. Then that pulse can be reconverted back to ideas of tonal values on the other side in the newsroom and you have a photograph transferred over long distances and be able to be printed in the newspaper quickly. Another way to think about this is you go from an image into a code, that pulses on the telephone line, and back into image. To bring back our diagram to remind us the image source and the actual wire photo process right here, of course, but it is a good image and you can see whats in it, but it still becomes much more blurry than a crisp silver, for instance, that we saw in the dorothy lang exhibition. We have this ambiguity at the heart of the wire photo process. It becomes standard after world war ii and in use until the 1980s. No longer in use today with digital technology. But it was so important to how americans as well as International Audiences understood the cold war through photographs. Any questions of the wire photo process . Very generally speaking. All right. To sum up this idea, we have a very blurry wire photo, a blurry half tone equals very blurry press imagery. Its a simple thing to say. But its important to remind ourselves that these images that were taken as fact, as conveying truth in history, were some of the most ambiguous images printed in the newspaper. Those really time sensitive, crucial news photographs were oftentimes the most ambiguous. Leads this idea about cold war photography, the need for truth and fact is undercut by this ambiguity of photography. Again, the press context. We think about newspapers as conveying truth and fact keeps down this ambiguity of the press photograph. Let me take a quick detour here and take a look at one painting. Andy warhol leads to a better understanding of the wire photo. In 1962 he made this painting right here, quite large, eight or nine feet long, copying the front of the new york mirror, this plane crash, and whats interesting is warhol is copying a wire photo. Warhol, such happenstance, marks his knowledge he knows hes painting a wire photo. Look at the caption right here. He doesnt really care about the narratives aspect of the caption. Only this little part of the caption right here, deletes most of the caption, but gives us this, says, upi radio telephoto. You know, hes marking the fact that this is a wire photo. Radio telephoto was upis branding of the wire photo process. So based on what we talked about with wire photos and newspapers, what is one way to interpret what warhol was suggesting about the press photograph here . Like why paint it . Its constructed like purposely. Like capture a photograph is structured purposely. It has a more intentional quality than a photograph. Perhaps revealing that aspect of press photography. Going off of that, takes away some of the factual inherent denotation that we associate with photography. Good. By painting it, it takes away the factual denotation we associate with a press photograph. What else . Thats exactly spot on right. The way warhol is calling attention to the ambiguity in the press photograph by painting it by hand. Yes, we can see whats going on here, but still, he renders it more ambiguous using like a sponge to create the background here. Sort of very block like figures. He reveals the ambiguity. Hiding within press photography. In some ways, we just saw this image right here. You might say its a plane wing. Probably would identify it as a plane wing. Kind of return to roland barts ideas, the headlines, 129 die in jet, tells us what we should be looking at here. It encodes that photograph to tell us what it is were supposed to be seeing. In barts terms that headline encodes the image. We can talk more about warhol. I wont here. I want to suggest, he is interested in ambiguity of press photography. Its one of the reasons he perhaps makes this painting right here. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about the ways that even in art museums and perhaps the most important and most famous exhibition of photographs ever arguably sort of has the same mechanisms of trying to control and fix meanings in photograph. This opened at the museum of modern art in new york city in 1955. You see an installation shot here of the entrance to the exhibition. Whats interesting for our purposes is it was curated by edward stykan. Remember he was a pictorialist photographer, a flat iron photograph in 190, but he becomes curator of photography at moma in 1947. He left his roots behind and now is interested in a more democratic mass ideal of photography. Some interesting stats that help us get a sense of what its all about. As you see here, it started at moma in 1955 and toured to 69 countries. Its an exhibition of photography. You could have multiple copies of the exhibition. You can have two or three open simultaneously because its they are photographs. Make more copies. It toured to 69 countries. It included 503 photographs, snapped by 273 different photographers from 68 different countries. An attempt to provide some kind of global understanding of the world through the medium of photography. Over all of its iterations around the world, it had over 9 million visitors saw this exhibition. The book itself, which i will pass around a version of it in the class, you can see the catalog right here, it sold 4 million copies. Its still in print today. Go to amazon. You can buy a copy of the family man. Its very much it sells. Today i had you read some press releases that moma put out about this exhibition. I want to get your sense of what you thought about the press releases, whats important about the exhibition. How did those press releases describe the show . Yeah, will. The press release talks about it emphasizes how internationally this exhibition would be. I think they invited photographers from all around the world to submit their photos to be exhibited in the show. He focused on how the photos are from all around the world. Its like an International Exhibition rather than regional focus. Good. International exhibition, trying to get photographs from all over the world. Can i get someone to read this for us . You cant make it out on the screen. Please. The family of man is planned as an exhibition of photography portraying the universal elements and emotions and the oneness of human beings throughout the world. Its probably the most ambitious and challenging project photography has reached and one for the art of photography is uniquely qualified. Thank you. To build on what will said, we have photographs from around the world used to create an image of global unity. Its photography that can do this. The second quote can i get a volunteer to read that for us . We are concerned with photographs which express the universal through individual and the particular. That demonstrate the importance of the art of photography in explaining man to man across the world, dreams and aspirations mirroring the forces of love and truth and the coercive evil inherent in the world. Good. So there we kind of have a sense were talking about expressing the universal particular. He wants to find images that can suggest something about humans all together in one single image. Bring the images together to create some kind of global portrait of what it means to be a human. The family of humans, called the family man in the 1950s. Also the way photography itself is a universal medium. Anyone can understand a photograph. If you are someone who lives in australia, france, germany, china, you can understand a photograph. It communicates the same to everyone. Of course this isnt necessarily this isnt true. But he had this utopian idea that photography could do this. This is hard to see. This is sort of the layout of the exhibition. I want to call attention to some of the themes that he creates installations about. We have eating is one of the themes. All humans eat. All humans play. All humans drink. All humans have not all, but many humans have hard times and famine. A lot of people are religious. It tries to find these themes that can apply to wide swaths of the global population and photographs from around the world to prove that were all human. We all have dinner together. Thats one of the points of the exhibition. Also one scholar compared the exhibition to an oversized life magazine without the advertisements. Photo essays you see here. Photographs of families hanging together right here. Its an oversized photo essay. Interesting enough, they were from life archives. Went into life archives, found many photographs there. So we have this connection between the exhibition and life. Do you know why he named it . Back then, people talked about human kind as mankind. He saw this idea of the world as being one family. This is the family a global family. Were all the same. We all eat. We all drink. We all have families, according to this exhibition. Of course, we do all eat and drink and have families of some kind. Try to find the unity that links us as human beings. I want to say that we have no captions. We have some captions here and there. Each photograph is not captioned to tell us precisely what were looking at. He creates them blows these up large, sometimes crop images to cut out an essential element. He is controlling this project. He is the photo editor of the family of man. Whats interesting about having no captions is that the photographs go back to barts terms, encoded by the images around them. We will show you an example of this in a moment. I want to say that he had experience making these large these massive photographic exhibitions, in 1942, at moma he did the road to victory, a propaganda show talking about the american war effort. Pearl harbor bombed in december 1941, the exhibition designed to sort of encourage patriotism and to support the war effort. You can also see large sort of photographs being hung in sort of an interesting environment as a way to create some kind of propaganda feeling. He had sort of experience doing this. Because the exhibition, the installation shots are hard to read, the individual photographs, i have a spread in the catalog thats being passed around right here. Toward the end of the catalog we had seven portraits that were featured. What are we looking at here . What links these photographs . Yeah, will. They share a common theme which appears to be portraits of couples. Yes. Portraits of couples and ill give you a little capping here to tell you where they are from. This one is from holland, china canada, american india, usa, germany, sicily, italy. But we see again, sort of a largely western european and america. We do have china here. China suggests that around the world there are heterosexual couples. Here the quote, we too from a multitude from roman poet suggests these two couples can become some kind of multitude and they have significance and they are important. So good. Thats what were looking at. The more important question is how . Why would he do this . Whats the broader significance of this . What are the implications of this . What are some ways to think about what hes suggests about humanity here . About difference . About different global regions. What are some ways to look at this . Sort of humanizes different cultures for people. I feel like theres a Common Thread . Good. Humanizes these different cultures. Anyone else . Kind of equates them. In some way as well. Equates them. We have no idea who these people are. We dont know if these people were married or a couple. They could be brother and sister. They could be work mates. They could be colleagues. We dont know who they are. So in some ways by putting these photographs all together, he is generalizing vast differences in identity, nationality and suggesting all these people are the same. They are all couples. Again, we dont know who these people are, what they are doing, if they are even heterosexual partnership. Whats interesting about the family man overall is the way each photograph in the show is controlled by those around it. So, again, think back to roland barts idea the photograph is an image about a code. In family man, the other images around the photograph encode image to make us see it in a certain way. So he is really trying to control photographic meaning here and not allowing for the ambiguity of images. Question at this point about family man . And so again the culmination of i