Photography Quiz

Photography Quiz Answers

1. Sir John Hershel first used the term photography in 1839 when photography first became public.

2. The term ‘camera obscura’ means dark room in Latin.

3. The earliest writings about the camera obscura were written by Leonardo da Vinci, which was used to understand perspectives.

4. Who produced the first photograph in 1827? A French man by the name of Nicephore Niepce.

5. Daguerre’s invention in 1937 was called the Daguerreotype, which was a chemical process that tried to change the exposure time of an image.

6. In 1884 George Eastman introduced a flexible film that would allow multiple images onto light sensitized paper. Four years after he introduced this flexible film, he then introduced the box camera.

7. Eadweard Maybridge is famous for recording what? Animal Locomotion was the study that made Maybridge famous, his study of the movement between humans and animals, which were horses galloping. 

8. What did Thomas Eakins invent? Eakins invented a type of camera with a rotatating disc that could record many exposures of a person moving in one single photo.

9. ‘Migrant Mother’ is the title of a famous photograph by Dorothea Lange, which captured the despair of migrant farm workers in California during the 1930s Great Depression.

10.  What was the first major world disaster to be recorded on a photograph?
     The first major world disaster to be recorded was the Empire State building
    in the 1930s focusing on the builders, but also he explosion of the German airship, The Hindenburg.

Monash Gallery of Art

Thursday 16th September 2010 we visited the MGA to see the Ponch Hawkes Photography as well as some other artists.

Ponch Hawkes was a photographer who used actors and performers for her night time photography. 

It was interesting the way she used car lights to give that particular look in her work. Her pictures usually were of random travels and featured weird things in some such as a man holding a mug, a man skipping, etc. But these peieces featured a main colour as well such as the man skipping had a blueish green top and the photo had some bottle shop glowy bits in it that were the same colour for the bottles. The man holding the mug (red) also had another red part in the picture.

Robyn Stacey had the artwork with butterflies and insects pinned down to her work, which you don't notice at first glance until you look up close. The picture looks like a fisheye lens has been used even though it is like a collage in a circular shape to give it that dimension.

We then looked at John Grollings who had the tribal pictures that had no horizons or gave no indication of where you were, he got viewers to be 'zoomed in' to the picture and be focussed on what was happening. He did alot of work from Papua New Guinea. 

Rod McNicol was a Melbourne photographer who was going blind and was having emphasema. 

He photographed graveyard stones but chose to do them in Sepia rather than black and white or colour. They were cropped rather then the whole stone, and there were different age groups of the photos he captured. Another photographer – Anne Ferran took photos of what seems to be grass, it was the grass at a woman's prison in Tasmania where pregnant women would go. the position of the artwork in the gallery needed more light so that Anne's message of looking at yourself through her photos would be shown better.

The piece however in the gallery that i enjoyed the most was the illustration of Ex de Medici. There was a hidden message of beauty in things ugly. Ex was in the Canberra Barracks for the army in Timor. 

She illustratated guns, birds, skulls and tattoo like things. The piece was done with markers and inks. 

It was fascinating to see some things smudged and done wrong such as a orange flower and some other little things, that the artwork wasn't perfect at a second glance.

European Masters, the Stadel Gallery, Germany

Thursday 2nd September 2010 we visited the NGV International on St Kilda Rd to see the European Masters art collection. I expected it to be mostly german artwork, but there was artwork from different artists around Europe such as Switzerland and particularly France (Degas, Cezanne, Monet, etc).

Rosemary was our guide, she began a short speech about the Frankfurt museum. Where the ideas and styles were easy to swap around and showed us a map of Germany then and now and that Mainehattan/Bankfurt is in the heart of Europe.
She explained about Johann Tischbein Frerick Stabel, who was the main artist for the museum in Germany that is called the Stabel Gallery.

We learnt about the real history of Art, the different periods of time from (in no particular order) of:
Early 19th century German Art, Impressionism, Classicalism, Romanticism, Symbolism to Modernity of Surrealism and Expressionism. There was a slideshow representing each area of the movements, with paintings from that era.

Some of the notes i jotted down as Rosemary explained some pieces include:


* Jacques Louis David: The Oath of Horatii has a bit of symmetry work in the piece.
* ROMANTICISM: (1820s) the pictures are all mainly landscapes of the natural world, the contrasts and sceneries are captivating.
* Monet: Painted with light, tones and colours. The Luncheon 1868 – is an ordinary subject matter for the panel of judges – Les Jury de Peintur– so when he didn't get chosen, he chose to join the Impressionists.
* Caspar David Friedrich: Rising Mountain of Fog – There was a scenery that included 3 mountains which looked like it represented the Holy Trinity. There was a real spiritual feeling about this painting.
* Eugene Delacroix painted against the 'rules' of french painting.
* Auguste Rodin portrayed human emotions – statue of Eve 1881.
* Arnold Bocklin (Swiss) – symbolism of myths and fairytales.
* Franz Marc was interesting for Cubism, he painted religious and nobility artworks. a popular piece in the museum was the Dog lying in the snow, c. 1911.
* Cezanne was the "Father of Modern art" 

It was good learning about the history of art itself before we entered into the gallery and looked at the pieces, it was a bit hard to grasp all the areas of history properly within that hour talk Rosemary gave us but it was a good insight into why the judges chose particular pieces, all with different subject matters and reasons.