Genius of Photography - Snap Judgements

1. How many photographs are taken in a year?

     About 80 billion photographs are taken in a year all around the world.

2. What is Gregory Crewdson's modus operandi?

     He works with a production crew, who do everything for him. He is only interested in the scene himself and the final photograph. He doesn't even like to hold a camera, the camera is just a necessary instrument for him.

3. Which prints command the highest price & what are they called?

     Prints that command the highest price are usually the ones that were made by the photographer him/herself closest to the time the picture was actually taken. They are known as vintage prints.

4. What is a Fake photograph? Give an example and explain how & why is it fake.

     If there is a blank in the history of the photograph, then it's fake. Lewis Hine's photograph the Powerhouse Mechanic. The same print was sold to many different people saying that it's original. To find out they developed a dating criteria which was borrowed from the FBI. There were certain kinds of chemicals called OBAs which were put into photographic paper but only from 1955. Hine died in 1940 and those prints did contain OBAs.

5. Who is Li Zhensheng and what is he famous for?

     He was a red army news soldier, a photojournalist who in the 60s and early 70s found himself covering the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

6. What is the photographer's "holy of hollies"?

     Photojournalism's super agency, Magnum which was founded as a cooperative in 1947 by photographers like Cartier-Bresson or Robert Capa.

7. How does Ben Lewis see Jeff Wall's photography?

     He thinks that Wall didn't reinvent photography, he took it back to the 19th century, to painting where everything is creative; the people, the light, everything is constructed for a meaning.

8. Which famous photograph was taken by "Frank Mustard"?

     Camille Silvy's River Scene France. He arranged where the people should stand, he added the artificial sky, he added leaves to the trees but Francois Moutard, known as Frank Mustard took the actual photograph.