Composition and Manipulation Written Response

     The presentation on composition and manipulation was helpful to explore. I already had a general understanding of the rule of thirds through my own experience with photography, but the golden proportion was new to me. I especially liked looking at Henri Cartier-Bresson's uses of the golden proportion, how the images all have one focal point initially, like the man on the bike or the kid in the front of the line, but also everything going on in the space outside that focal point draws you back towards it , such as the railing of the stairs or all the other kids lined up behind the one in the front. Looking at the other images like Ansel Adams' and discussing what we thought was truthful about it was interesting as well. The practice of seeing an image and trying to discern what elements of it are truthful is very important because we live in a culture where the doctoring and manipulation of images is fairly common and almost all photography is edited in some way, even if it's just changing the color saturation of the image. Sometimes this manipulation can be a very subtle change but still carry a huge effect on the connotation of that image, as we saw with the Mussolini on Horseback photo and how the removal of one person is the difference between him being a competent heroic figure and just some guy who doesn't even know how to ride a horse. This leads well into the Haiti controversy because it shows that the manipulation of a photo doesn't have to be done post taking the photograph. The photographers planted things on the dead girls body and changed some of the connotations of the image. The photo of the photographers while they were shooting shows us a different side of the same story but tells us a lot more about the truths in regards to both images. The final few images by Andreas Gursky and Jerry Uelsmann are good examples of the extent image manipulation can be pushed, creating large worlds of retail clutter or strange optical illusions that we otherwise wouldn't be able to photograph. Overall I found the slides really informative and I'm excited to try and apply some of these concepts to my own work.