The Adventure of Photography

Rating:
Summary: Wasted Opportunity
Review: I ordered this DVD for my University Library. I will not show this DVD to my students until I can turn off the sound & replace it with my own voice. A 1-star is because there is no option for 0 or negative stars in the rating scale. I have never written a review for Amazon.ca but I am inspired by the wasted opportunity to write this. I purchased this DVD in hopes that it might offer the opportunity to provide a compact teaching aid of an overview of photography history. Indeed it does provide a compact history of photograpy --- completely ignorant of the important thinking around photography & representation since 1980. My despair is that these ignorant, but canny, authors have managed to soporificly subvert the enlivening re-evaluation of photography as the most significant & controversial invention of the 19th Century & enduringly significant in the 21st C. These authors are canny enough to include images by those photographers conventionally considered important to photo history in the 1990s, but overlaid with a 1970s heroic modernist perspective in the voiceover.
I've only viewed the First Part (there are many more) and it is striking that this DVD is predominantly French speakers, not Québecois, in translation. Yikes! Barthes wrote Camera Lucida sometime in the early 80s. The one Anglophone speaks of technology in a surprisingly complex way -- compared to the voice over & the other talking heads.
This is sad. So many good images of importance NOW, interpreted from uncomprehending authority.
Oh, funding powers that be, please give me the money to make 2 DVDs on the histories of photography & I will make something interesting and usuable & current.
If you buy this (that Brassai cover is seductive - hence, the canny) you will be disappointed.
Cyndra MacDowall, School of Visual Arts University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada.

Rating:
Summary: A complete course about history and areas of photography
Review: This is a superb dvd to those that are interested in Photography in general. If you are a beginner or a pro, the material shown here will make you blown. This DVD covers every area of photophy, and contains almoust thousand of pictures of the greatest camera artist,

Rating:
Summary: Monotonous and Theoretically Unarticulated
Review: Upon initially ordering this DVD, I was excited at the prospect of having a useful pedagogical resource in a single volume with which to instruct my introductory photography students. But after viewing its installments, my subsequent disappointment has led me to consider writing the company for a refund.

The series' audio presentation and accompanying visual inserts between the actual photographs is camp 80's-and not in any contemporary neo-kitsch appropriative manner either, rather surprising for a recent release. Granted, The Adventure of Photography provides a thorough display of many diverse photographic images from its 19th century origins to more recent expressions, although much is left untheorized and simply accepted, devoid of a necessary, critical self-reflexivity. For example, the treatment of the nude only confirms-or performatively illustrates-what photographic theorists and feminist cultural critics have argued since the 70's: that photographic practitioners are often complicit in the objectification of women and the male-dominant gaze found within western culture at large. Lauding the likes of Helmut Newton and presenting non-critical discussion of various other objectifying sorts renders this segment substandard.

Although other topic areas provide useful information, one has to put up with the *same* music clips in each chapter--along with the Star Wars-like textual display, which gets tiresome and irritating. In summary, The Adventure of Photography engages in nothing more than mere description, and as a result, gets my grade of D for disappointing.