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Product Reviews:
Wasted Opportunity, November 2, 2004
Reviewer: Cyndra MacDowall
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 Qu becois, 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.
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Monotonous and Theoretically Unarticulated, May 22, 2004
Reviewer: Fred Flintstone
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.
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A complete course about history and areas of photography, May 9, 2003
Reviewer: Dario D
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,
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Back to The Adventure of Photography (1998)
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