I went home this weekend which worked out really well for this blog. Because we were talking so much this week about memory photography, I thought it would be a good idea to take pictures of things from around my house. The house that I live in currently is the home that I’ve had since I was a little kid - it’s really the house in which I’ve grown up. SO, the images that I photographed are the things (I’m not sure if I’m going to articulate this correctly) which were necessary to the construction of my memories of my house. However, I didn’t want to photograph things to which I had a strong nostalgic connection. What I wanted to do this weeks was to see if I could fabricate that through a photograph.
Two of my photographs are black and white this week. I’ve been getting more and more comfortable working with black and white photography over the weeks, because it’s a less complicated way to present images to an audience. When you’re taking pictures as a photographer, I find that color can sometimes muddle your intent. Additionally, black and white images are more forgiving. Anyway, the black and white photographs add to that feeling aura of memory I was trying to capture. The absence of color in these images, for me, suggests that lapse of time - the black and white is like the tangible evidence of the passing of time, and the realization of time is how we understand memory.

Spring Break Photos

There were two things that I really wanted to do while I was on Spring Break (that were related to this photography course). The first thing I wanted to do was to take pictures of the abandoned power plants and refineries that would have been featured in the documentary film project I proposed, but I unfortunately never got the time to do that. However, I did accomplish my second goal: I got to take pictures of actual people!

It was really liberating for me to take pictures while I was on break. I didn’t really have a theme or purpose in mind while I was photographing my subjects, because we didn’t have class that week so I didn’t feel pressured to relate my photographs to any discussion. That being said, I feel like everyone of the pictures from break that I actually like is connected to one of the topics or photographs brought up in class. Maybe it was just an unconscious influence.

Working with the "models" was not the struggle I was expecting it to be. A lot of people weren’t really interested in being photographed to begin with, but the people who agreed to work with me were willing to do whatever I asked. I really tried to give as little direction as possible, because I knew I wanted to go for something more natural and uncomplicated. I took a good amount of pictures over the break, but a lot of them just didn’t work, and I don’t think it was because of me or the subject - I think there was just something off in the composition. However, I feel like I did get some pretty decent shots.

The pictures this week would probably fit into the deadpan portrait classification discussed by Charlotte Cotton. Until I took this photograph, I never really understood the psychological complication of this genera of photography. Like, I couldn’t really tell why these portraits were a study of the human condition if the photograph was supposed to capture an apathetic expression. After taking this photograph, I understand what the audience is supposed to be looking for in the picture: the face isn’t important, it’s everything but the subject’s face that I should be analyzing. I want to look for the subject’s reaction to the act o being photographed. I want to see what they’re showing, what they’re hiding, and what they’re self-conscious about, all that subtle emotional stuff.

Something Old

I FORGOT TO TURN MY CLOCKS FORWARD!


In the Cotton chapter about documentaries we read for last week’s class, the author discussed a particular photographer who’s documentary projects I really responded to; Zarina Bhimji. I thought the method of photographing “empty” or kind of isolated areas, and then creating a narrative about a particular social theme was a pretty powerful way engage an audience about a particular issue. The more this class peels back the layers of photography as art, the more apparent and rich these narratives become for me. The photos that I took this week were my attempt at creating a narrative though an “empty” or reduced space.

I started with taking photographs in and around my apartment. I think it’s important to start this kind of process by taking pictures of images that are not traditionally viewed as artistic or beautiful. So, the stuff that I photographed were the gross-looking, ignored pieces of my house that most people (myself included) take for granted artistically. The narrative that I was trying to create with this trio of images is concerned with the way things age. Specifically, I wanted to try and confront the way people view or appraise things which are considered “old”, and manipulate that perception by photographing the subjects from a more aesthetically interesting angle.

This exercise ended up with, at least to me, some pretty artistic images (my favorite to date). I feel that I accomplished my goal in reinterpreting age through these subjects, and I don’t think you can tell what these objects are right away just by looking at the pictures. However, the problem with these images lies in the subjective nature of a narrative. With a medium as complicated and personal as photography, it’s super hard to predict how the audience will interpret the images you present. Just because I see a story about age in these photographs doesn’t necessarily mean you will see the same theme. I wonder if professional photographers struggle with this pernicious relationship they have with subjectivity. How does the artist know that their intended message is being received? If their intention is lost, has their perspective and integrity been compromised? Or can they take solace in the fact that a connection (although different then intended) was made with the work?

Photo realism

Probably the biggest problem with trying to work with documentary photography is finding a subject that’s intriguing and powerful enough to warrant multiple photographs. I think documentary photography is challenging because the subject also has to hold he interest of the Photographer and the audience. If you’re at an exhibition of a certain photographer who‘s just showing photographs, and you don’t really respond to one image, you can move onto the next photograph or the next or the next and hopefully find that connection you want with an image. However, with documentary photography, the content within the image is going to be very similar, and while it might change from image to image, you’re looking to tell a cohesive story, if that makes any sense. So, when you’re taking a series of these images, you’re looking for something that builds and evolves from the photo that comes before it. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it was tough to find a subject in less than a week that was accessible for me to try and make a documentary series out. It’s hard to find a subject in which people can find a story.

When I was reading the Cotton article this week, there was a lot of discussion about content and how the image is read, and what kind of narrative unfolds out of a picture. This was the week where the literary aspects of photography made sense while I was reading the text. Usually I have to wait until class, when pictures are discussed in a group, until the analytical part of my brain starts to process the image. I think that’s because when you’re presented with a documentary photograph, you know that something exists outside of the image. That is, when you look at un-documentary (?) image, the significance is the image as a whole, but with a documentary image, the significance lies in the fact that the reality isn’t exclusive to the photo - the person, or whatever is captured in the picture, is actual and not confined the way a traditional photography subject might be. I’m not sure I’m articulating this correctly, but I hope you get my point.
Anyway, the documentary images that I decided to post are of postcards that I was sent from a friend traveling abroad. I think they’re complicated image to analyze because what you’re looking at is a photograph within a photograph. I guess you could argue that an image like that might not be eligible for the “photograph” title. However, I think these images really work well as pictures that isolate. They basically say, “this is where you aren’t”, or “this isn’t the life you’ve have. You chose the mundane, while I chose the glamorous.”

People Pictures

Forgive me for my lateness. It’s been a ROUGH couple of days.

This week I’ve been trying to focus my photography on taking pictures of the human body, which is a topic we started covering in class. The photographers we’ve been discussing are Robert Mapplethorpe and Cindy Sherman. Although they’re vastly different in many, many ways, these two photographers have the same kind of general idea when presenting the human body. They want to glorify their subjects in their totality. That is, they want to show you a person, and make that person a piece of art (whatever that means considering the subjectivity of the term “art”). I think that in his pictures, Mapplethorpe is trying to manipulate the human body in order to create new ways in which we perceive people on a physical level. Sherman also works with the idea of perception, but her photographs tend to focus on the psychological or emotional complications which her images present. However, both of these artists are characterized (if that’s the right word) by their reliance on the audience’s interpretations and perspectives, and I don’t think every photograph needs that interaction (which is another argument for another time).

Anyway, when I was taking photographs for my blog this week, I wanted to do something different with the way I constructed the human body in the image. What I wanted to do with the above images was isolate different parts of the body. Once they were disconnected, I wanted to try and re-negotiate them as art, but almost in a way which imagine these parts as alien or unfamiliar. I guess, What I wanted was to take the human body, or parts of it, and try to incorporate it within the artistic image rather than making those parts the artistic image. BY accomplishing that kind of human body photograph, the photographer is challenging not only how we look at beauty and anatomy, but how we perceive humanity’s relationship with art. When you single out the person, you’re saying “this a human, and he is art”. When you isolate part of that person and immerse it within a picture, you’re saying, “this is art, and the human presence is relative”.

I don’t know If I was successful in doing that, because all I really have is a simple digital camera and really basic accommodations in which to work. But, I guess that’s not the point of this blog. I’m not trying to be a big deal photographer, I’m just trying to analyze the pictures I take, and that’s where there purpose is involved. However, it has been SUPER frustrating trying to talk about the pictures I end up with, when the images I’m trying to take seem like they’re so much more sophisticated. In, uh, my head they seem more sophisticated.

I think that the most important theme that we talked about in class this week was the idea that photography functions as an ethical form of art. It is my philosophy that photography is the process of capturing actuality; as photographers we, (or, in this case, I) try to present life as it is, or as it was at one time. What we are trying to “get” is reality as it happens. However, the topics we covered this week dealt with the malleability of photography and the manipulation of actuality. I think that the Highsmith story and Rear Window were trying to emphasize the complications of photographing subjects which aren’t prepared or don’t know that they’re being photographed.
What I wanted to do this week was try and photograph unsuspecting subjects. Most of my photographs were taken at a hospital near my home in New Brunswick (it was pretty convenient, because the bus would drop me off right across the street from the kid’s wing). I ended up taking pictures of the rooms, and the people who stood around outside waiting.
The first image I took was the one of what looks like a nurse in the front office of the children’s wing. I have to admit that I was really uncomfortable taking the first couple of pictures this week, as I was really afraid of confrontation. Luckily, no one really approached me. I would stand across the street and take pictures with my zoom, because I thought that might be more inconspicuous than going right up to the window. The second image is of a Valentine’s balloon in one of the Hospital’s windows. Each night I took pictures, I tried to look for people in windows to photograph, but I never really saw anyone anywhere outside of that main office in the first photograph. I really like the image of the balloon, because it suggests that human presence that I was trying to capture. The third image is of one of the statues outside of the hospital. I ended up posting that photo because it portrayed action, and because the image of humanity it imitates through the photograph was much more intriguing and questionable than the pictures of real people that I took (they were mostly just smoking and standing around quietly. Also, I was afraid someone would find out about this blog and come after me. Does fear count as ethics?)
What these pictures helped me to understand was the way anonymous subjects functioned in the realm of photographic art. Photographing strangers is a complicated facet of this art not because of permission, but because of perspective. That is, while pictures of strangers are indeed images reality, the narrative of the photo is marginalized. Strangers are an ethical gray area because we don’t know how this moment of their reality fits into the grand scheme of existence. Who are they? Where are they going? What do they want? All of these questions go unanswered, and the audience leaves the photo unsatisfied. I guess that leaves me wondering why we, as an audience, want to feel this kind of isolation. Is it even our choice?

Nameless Faceless Photos

In my last picture this week, I really wanted to work with a live subject. I was trying to accomplish the deadpan, natural look discussed in chapter three of The Photograph as Contemporary Art. However, constructing that kind of image is so incredibly difficult, especially considering that I was photographing my roommate.

It seemed impossible to catch that almost sterile, but natural, expression needed for a photograph like this when shooting a subject who is completely aware that someone is trying to take their picture. I don’t know how many times I found myself saying something like, “You don’t need to smile - no one that cares about you will see this image.” I really wanted the subject to make eye contact in the photograph, but as I continued to shoot, that result seemed like a more and more unlikely. The image I ended up positing is an extreme compromise: there’s no eye contact and the subject’s eyes are virtually closed. I think the end result is more “detached” rather than “natural” or “deadpan”.

This particular exercise, more so than any other I tried to execute, really began to emphasize the voyeuristic sensibilities which are inherent to photography. If I was to end up with a shoot that I would have been happy with, I would have needed my subject to take herself to a place where she was completely isolated: I was trying to get something really raw out of her. When the task got really difficult, I kept wondering why someone would be interested in “deadpan” photographs; is it about the desire to relate? Do these kinds of photos show us that all of humanity can be reduced to a single apparently apathetic state? If so, what does that need say about us as an audience? About us as a society of social beings?