Making Pictures 2

For my next photograph, I tried to construct an image on a larger scale. I worked with the empty bottles and trash on my living room table, because the space was big and everything was pretty much completely set-up for the shoot.

The final image that I’m posting is only one of 43. What I really wanted to consider was the intricacies which define the final photograph. I really wanted to experiment with camera angles and perspective and how those factors contribute to a picture. I really wanted to have something to capture attention in the foreground, but be out of center focus in the larger image, and I wanted the background structures to mimic each other in form, which I think I kinda did. Once the image was constructed physically, I began to play around with the perspective of the shoot. Perspective is such a tricky factor in the make up of a photograph, because emphasis is totally dependent on how you’re seeing the image while you’re taking it.

It took me awhile before settling on the appropriate angle from which to shoot. However, once you accomplish that perfect perspective, you’re establishing that necessary relationship with the image – the photographer grants himself authority through his use of perspective. As some one who never really practiced photography before, these factors are very important, but subtle, facets of this art that aren’t really considered. As someone who mostly only views photos, I used to tend to place importance on the relationship between the image and the audience. Although, without considering perspective and the relationship intertwined within it, your resulting image doesn’t get the substance it needs.

Making Pictures

I’ve been having a lot of problems with this blog, and a lot of problems with Photography. I’m having problems getting passed Photography’s relationship with deliberation.

I think it’s impossible to come into a project like this and not have a bunch of preconceived notions about this style of art, and what it means to produced that art. For me, it’s been this need to take pictures spontaneously – to capture an image in order to recreate this idea of actuality. Isn’t reality the very thing a photographic image is trying to achieve?

Just finding something that looks nice and taking its picture is not photography, and I’m finding that out. There is something deliberate in every photograph taken, the more I take pictures, the more I’m figuring that out. This is not an organic art that one lucks into – Subject is imperative, but it’s not everything. The truth of that fact is a litter frustrating, because aesthetically, what is a photograph but content in its most basic and consolidated form?

Vouge validated

These are two photos are from Baldovino Barani's recent shoot (entitled The Evangelist) for Prive Asia magazine. These two photographs, for me, epitomize two crucial things about photography as an art form. For one, the pictures are indeed aesthetically pleasing and artistically satisfying – they exhibit a deliberate perceptive and achieve a particular mood. That is, they’re pretty, and I like looking at them. However, I think these photographs do something more than try and sell a garment. Barani is using this medium to deliver a message about the intrusive and hyperbolic nature of fashion in relation to non-western cultures. Look at these photos! A thin, white woman in couture outfit is lady-posing while the Chinese (I know for a fact it was shot in Hong Kong) citizens look on with terror as they awkwardly avoid interaction.

This, I think, is the point that Cotton is trying to make in the first chapter of The Photograph as Contemporary Art – images, and more importantly photographs, are art (or a more legitimate form of art) because they say something about the society in which we live. Pictures, like film or books or paintings, can be a serious tool for social change and progress. Just because one image is presented deliberately doesn’t mean that that one image can’t mean a million different things to a billion different people. Photography is art because it challenges humanity’s perception of what it means to live in a world with other humans.