Task 2 Visual Analysis Skills (Study of Criticism and Analysing Skills) (Process of task)

I've gathered some information about critical thinking to help me do this assignment better.

What is Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking is a way of deciding whether a claim is always true, sometimes true, partly true, or false. Critical thinking is an important component of most professions. It is a part of formal education and is increasingly significant as students progress through university to graduate education, although there is debate among educators about its precise meaning and scope.

(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

"Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action" (Scriven, 1996).

"Most formal definitions characterize critical thinking as the intentional application of rational, higher order thinking skills, such as analysis, synthesis, problem recognition and problem solving, inference, and evaluation" (Angelo, 1995, p. 6).

"Critical thinking is thinking that assesses itself" (Center for Critical Thinking, 1996b)                                     

"Critical thinking is the ability to think about one's thinking in such a way as 1. To recognize its strengths and weaknesses and, as a result, 2. To recast the thinking in improved form" (Center for Critical Thinking, 1996c). Perhaps the simplest definition is offered by Beyer (1995): "Critical thinking... means making reasoned judgments" (p. 8). Basically, Beyer sees critical thinking as using criteria to judge the quality of something, from cooking to a conclusion of a research paper. In essence, critical thinking is a disciplined manner of thought that a person uses to assess the validity of something (statements, news stories, arguments, research, etc.)

(See Original Information at: http://academic.udayton.edu/legaled/ctskills/ctskills01.htm#characteristics)

Critical Thinking Skills

1. Analyzing
Separating or breaking a whole into parts to discover their nature, functional and relationships.
"I studied it piece by piece"
"I sorted things out"

2. Applying Standards
Judging according to established personal, professional, or social rules or criteria.
"I judged it according to..."  

3. Discriminating
Recognizing differences and similarities among things or situations and distinguishing carefully as to category or rank.
"I rank ordered the various..."
"I grouped things together"

4. Information Seeking
Searching for evidence, facts, or knowledge by identifying relevant sources and gathering objective, subjective, historical, and current data from those sources
"I knew I needed to lookup/study..."
"I kept searching for data."

5. Logical Reasoning
Drawing inferences or conclusions that are supported in or justified by evidence
"I deduced from the information that..."
"My rationale for the conclusion was..."

6. Predicting
Envisioning a plan and its consequences
"I envisioned the outcome would be..."
"I was prepared for..."

7. Transforming Knowledge
Changing or converting the condition, nature, form, or function of concepts among contexts
"I improved on the basics by..."
"I wondered if that would fit the situation of ..."
Courtesy of B. K. Scheffer and M.G. Rubenfeld, "A Consensus Statement on Critical Thinking in Nursing," Journal of Nursing Education, 39, 352-9 (2000).
Courtesy of B. K. Scheffer and M.G. Rubenfeld, "Critical Thinking: What Is It and How Do We Teach It?," Current Issues in Nursing, J.M. Grace, Rubl, H.K. (2001).

http://www.umich.edu/~elements/probsolv/strategy/ctskills.htm

The 4-Step Guide to Critical Thinking Skills

Step 1: Knowledge

Identification and recall of information is key here. Answer the basic questions (Who, What, Why, Where, etc.)

Step 2: Comprehension
Organize your thoughts, select the facts, choose the ideas. Be able to interpret and paraphrase what you’re reading and learning.

Step 3: Application
Be able to use facts, rules, and apply principles. You should be able to find out information, solve problems, and give an example. This shows a higher level of understanding.

Step 4: Analysis
This is where the true learning really shines. Separate the whole topic or story into components / parts and pick each of these apart. Examine and then infer. Keep going! Do this for everything you’re hoping to learn about. You may just surprise yourself!

(Resource from Edudemic, www.edudemic.com)

(See original post at http://www.edudemic.com/the-4-step-guide-to-critical-thinking-skills/)

Criticizing Photographs

An Introduction to Understanding Images

Third Edition

by Terry Barrett

Here are some papers I've got from my lecturer, it's a few copied pages of this book <Criticizing Photographs> by Terry Barrett. I have scanned and read the papers, and underlined the most important information that I need to know, so here I will post the underlined content.

Describing Photographs

Defining Description:

To describe a photograph or an exhibition is to notice things about it and to tell another out loud or in print, what ones notices. Describing is a data-gathering process, a listing of facts. Descriptions are answers to the questions:"What is here? What am I looking at? What do I know with certainty about this image?" 

Descriptive information includes statements about the photograph's subject matter, medium, and form, and then more generally, about the photograph's casual environment, including information about the photographer who made it, the times during which it was made, and the social milieu from which it emerged.

Whether we judge first and then revise a judgement based on description, or describe and interpret first and then judge, is the matter of choice. Accurate description is an essential part of holding defensible critical positions.

In print, they don't necessarily describe first, next interpret, ans then judge. They might first describe to themselves privately before they write, but in print, they might start with a judgement, or an interpretive thesis, or a question, or a quotation, or any number of literary devices, in orders to get and hold their readers' attentions. They would probably be dreadfully boring if they first described then interpreted and then judged. 

Describing Subject Matter:

Descriptive statements about subject matter identify and typify persons, objects, places, or events in a photograph. When describing subject matter, critics name what they see and characterize it. 

The photographer gives us images; the critic gives us words for the images.

Most of the objects are recognizable, but some are abstracted in the composition so that they are "surfaces and textures" and not recognizable on the basis of what is shown. 

The subject matter of some photographs is seemingly simple but actually very elusive. 

Describing Form:

Form refers to how the subject matter is presented. 

Form is the shape of content.

Descriptive statements about a photograph's form concern how it is composed, arranged, and constructed visually. 

Describing Medium

The term "medium" refers to what an art object is made of.

Descriptive statements about a picture's medium usually identify it as a photograph, an oil painting or an etching. 

They may also include informations about the kind and size of film that was used, the size of the print, whether it is black and white or in colour, characteristics of the camera that was used, and other technical information about how the picture was made, including how the photographer photographs.

Describing Style

Style indicates a resemblance among diverse art objects from an artists, movement, time period, or geographic location and is recognised by a characteristic handling of subject matter and formal elements. Neo-expresionism is a commonly recognised, recent style of painting, and pictorialism, "directorial" photography, and the "snapshot aesthetic" are styles of photography.

Neo-expressionism 

Pictorialism is the name given to an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the later 19th and early 20th centuries. There is no standard definition of the term, but in general it refers to a style in which the photographer has somehow manipulated what would otherwise be a straightforward photograph as a means of "creating" an image rather than simply recording it. Typically, a pictorial photograph appears to lack a sharp focus (some more so than others), is printed in one or more colors other than black-and-white (ranging from warm brown to deep blue) and may have visible brush strokes or other manipulation of the surface. For the pictorialist, a photograph, like a painting, drawing or engraving, was a way of projecting an emotional intent into the viewer's realm of imagination.

Pictorialism as a movement thrived from about 1885 to 1915, although it was still being promoted by some as late as the 1940s. It began in response to claims that a photograph was nothing more than a simple record of reality, and transformed into an international movement to advance the status of all photography as a true art form. For more than three decades painters, photographers and art critics debated opposing artistic philosophies, ultimately culminating in the acquisition of photographs by several major art museums.

Pictorialism gradually declined in popularity after 1920, although it did not fade out of popularity until the end of World War II. During this period the new style of photographic Modernism came into vogue, and the public's interest shifted to more sharply-focused images. Several important 20th-century photographers began their careers in a pictorialist style but transitioned into sharply-focused photography by the 1930s.

(Wikipedia)

Snapshot Aesthetic

The term snapshot aesthetic refers to a trend within fine art photography in the USA from around 1963. The style typically features apparently banal everyday subject matter and off-centered framing.

This tendency was promoted by John Szarkowski, who was head of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art from 1962 to 1991, and it became especially fashionable from the late 1970s until the mid-1980s

From the early nineties the style became the predominant mode in fashion photography, especially within youth fashion magazines such as The Face - photography from this era is often associated with the so-called 'heroin chic' look (a look often seen as having been influenced particularly by Nan Goldin)

The term arose from the fascination of artists with the 'classic' black & white vernacular snapshot, the characteristics of which were: 1) they were made with a hand-held camera on which the viewfinder could not easily 'see' the edges of the frame, unlike modern cheap digital cameras with electronic viewfinder, and so the subject had to be centred; and 2) they were made by ordinary people recording the ceremonies of their lives and the places that they lived and visited.

(Wikipedia)

https://vimeo.com/12210379

(A video tells you what is "snapshot aesthetic")

Directorial Photography

Directorial Photography refers to a form where pictures are well thought-out, planned, setup, staged, prepared, etc. Manipulated, if you like, but not necessarily with post-processing editing tools like Photoshop – although it can be a part of it. Many times the pictures mislead and fool you: you’re not seeing what you think you are seeing.

So, in summary, it is fairly easy to understand what is meant by Directorial Photography. All pictures that are planned, though-out, setup, created, manipulated, staged, directed, etc. fall into this category. The work of Erwin Olaf, for instance, is a very good and obvious illustration of what Directorial Photography is all about.

(http://www.reiniervanhouten.com/?p=1391)

To consider a photographer's style is to attend what subjects he or she chooses to photograph, how the medium of photography is used, and how the picture is formally arranged. Attending to style can be much more interpretive than descriptive.

Comparing and Contrasting

A common method of critically analysing a photographer's work is to compare and contrast it to other work by the same photographer, to other photographer's works, or to works by other artists. To compare and contrast is to see what the work in question has in common with and how the work differs from another body of work.

Description and Interpretation

It is probably as impossible to describe without interpreting as it is to interpret without describing. A critic can begin to mentally list descriptive elements in a photograph, but at the same time he or she has to constantly see those elements in terms of the whole photograph if those elements are to make any sense. But the whole makes sense only in terms of its parts. The relationship between describing and interpreting is circular, moving from whole to part and from part to whole. 

Though a critic might want to mentally list as many descriptive elements as possible, in writing criticism he or she has to limit all that can be said about a photograph to what is relevant to providing an understanding and appreciation of the picture. Critics determine relevancy by their interpretation of what the photograph expresses. In a finished piece of criticism, it would be tedious to read descriptive item after descriptive item, or fact after fact, without having some understanding on which to hang the facts. That understanding is based on how the critic interprets and evaluates the picture, or how one evaluates it. At the same time, however, it would be a mistake to interpret without having considered fully what there is in the picture, and interpretations that do not account for all the descriptive elements in a work are flawed interpretations. Similarly, it would be irresponsible to judge without the benefit of a thorough accounting of what we are judging.

Principles for Interpreting Photographs

- Terry Barrant

All images require interpretation.

This contours the belief that art speaks for itself. An art is different from the ordinary objects because it is about something. Because it is about something, an artwork requires interpretation to function as an artwork. 

Art has important cognitive value, art as well as science but differently from science, offers us the view of the world that provide powerful insights, valuable information, and new knowledge. However, images provide insights, information and knowledge only if we interpret them.

Photographs carry more credibility than other kinds of images and especially requires interpretation. 

To interprete an image is to respond to it in language. 

To interprete a work of art is to make sense of it. To interpret is to see something as "representing something, or expressing something, or being about something, or being a response to something, or belonging in a certain tradition, or exhibiting a certain formal features, and so forth.

To interpret a photograph is to ask and answer questions such as these:

-What is this object or event that I see, hear or otherwise sense? 

-What is it about? 

-What does it represent or express?

-What does or did mean to its maker?

-What is it a part of?

-What are its references?

-What is it responding to?

-Why did it come to be?

-How was it made?

-Within what tradition does it belong?

-What purpose might it have served its maker or patron?

-What pleasure did it provide those responsible for it? 

-Did it solve, lessen or contribute to problems?

-What needs does it relive?

-What does it mean to others?

-Does it affect my life?

To interprete is to respond in thoughts, feelings, and actions to what we see and experience, and to make sense of our responses by putting them into or words. When we look at an image, we may think thoughts or notice feelings, move closer to the work or back from it, squint or frown, laugh, sigh, or cry, blurt out something to someone or to no one. Our initial responses to a work of art are usually inchoate, incipient, beginning rumblings of undistinguished emotions and vague thoughts. When we make the effort and are able to successfully transform these initial thoughts and feelings into articulated thoughts and identified feelings in language, we have interpretations. 

Photographs should be seen as opinions 

Feelings are guides to interpretations 

Emotion without cognition is blind, cognition without emotion is vacuous.

Photographs are made from light reflecting off of people, places, and objects in the world.

The photograph is caused by what it shows that which has been.

Photographs are factual and fictional; factual and metaphorical 

Photography is a subtractive medium and painting is additive.

The painters begin with a blank canvas; the photographer's viewfinder is never empty. Photographers generally remove clutter from the viewfinder until they have the distilled image that they want; painters  generally build layer upon layer of media to achieve the image they want. Neither way of working is better than other, but they are significantly different ways of working and thinking with media. 

The subject matter of a photograph is always cut from a larger context

Photographs are instantaneous

Subject matter + medium + form + context = content

Subject matter is the people, places and things depicted in a work of art. Subject matter is different from subject. Robert Mapplethorpe, for example, sometimes used the subject matter of flowers in his photographs but the subject of those photographs is not flowers but can be interpreted to be sensuality.

Medium is the materials and processed of which artworks are made. Considerations of the characteristics of media and how the image maker has used them is important to understanding the work being interpreted.

Form refers to how an image has been put together by its maker (or altered by its editor) form is a combination of how subject matter, materials, and elements of art are put together according to some organisational principle. Form is synonymous of composition.

Context refers to 1, the casual environment of the image, or the time, place, and circumstances in which it was made. 2, its presentational environment, or how and where it is seen by viewers. 

Content is the meaning of an image; what the work is about, what the work expresses or communicates. To state a content of a work of art is to interpret the work. Sometimes content is misused to mean only "social content", but all imagery has some kind of content, including the abstract and non-representational imagery. 

Language accompanying a photograph can over-determine the photograph's meaning.

The critical activities of describing, interpreting, judging, and theorising about photographs are interrelated and interdependent. 

Images attract multiple interpretations, and it is not the goal of interpretation to arrive at single, grand, unified, composite interpretations.

There is a range of interpretations any image will allow

An image can not mean nothing that we might want it to mean. Many of the most interesting forms of modern criticism ask not what the work has in mind but what it forgets, not what it says but what it takes for granted.

Meanings of images are not limited to what their makers meant them to mean

A good interpretation tells more about the image than it tells about the interpreter

The object of interpretations are images, not image makers