In week 03 we looked into a century of change which began with the industrial revolution. We looked at photography throughout the period.

We looked at Mathew Brady who was one of the earliest photographers in American history. Best known for his scenes of the Civil War, he studied under inventor Samuel Morse, who pioneered the daguerreotype technique in America.

We also looked at the work of Paul Seawright who is a photographer who has drawn heavily on his Northern Irish background to produce searching photographic investigations of aspects of its fraught political terrain, as in his ‘Orange Order’ and ‘Police Force’ series from the early 1990s. In his recent work, Seawright has moved away from an overtly Irish context, focusing on what he has termed a ‘generic malevolent landscape’ represented by the uninhabited spaces at the edge of cities and forests throughout Europe. These images take the viewer from bright, bleached vacant lots to corners of almost complete darkness, lit only by the dim, ambient light of street lamps, where the city merges with the forest.

We moved on to moving pictures and looked at cave paintings and how they create moving images.

We also looked at other kinds of moving images such as

Thaumatrope which is an optical toy that was popular in the 19th century. A disk with a picture on each side is attached to two pieces of string. When the strings are twirled quickly between the fingers the two pictures appear to blend into one due to the persistence of vision.

Zoetrope which is one of several pre-film animation devices that produce the illusion of motion by displaying a sequence of drawings or photographs showing progressive phases of that motion.

Mutoscope which is an early motion picture device, invented by W. K. L. Dickson and Herman Casler and later patented by Herman Casler on November 21, 1894. Like Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope, it did not project on a screen and provided viewing to only one person at a time.

Phenakistosc which was the first widespread animation device that created a fluent illusion of motion. Dubbed Fantascope and Stroboscopische Scheiben by its inventors, it has been known under many other names until the French product name Phénakisticope became common.