Blog Prompt #20 - Constructed Realities

The book Constructed Realities: The Art of Staged Photography, edited by Michael Kohler, describes the affect of viewers haven't a shorter attention span, “We therefore consume images fleetingly and randomly. It takes very special pictures to grasp and hold our attention. We need to be seduced by images that outdo reality through excessiveness—as in advertising and movies.”

A lot of people think all these "changes" that are occurring in the world today, like colloquial language including things like "lol", and people feeling the need to check facebook every couple of hours. True, these things are new and different, and people are changing, but why is that a bad thing? Things are always changing. Things have always changed and they always will. As easily as you could argue that we're all changing, you could argue we're still the same. I think it's in human nature to prefer talking to people in person, and although many people do spend a lot of their time on social network sites, usually those relationships started face to face or, as in the case with tweet-ups, where people who follow each other on twitter can meet in person. I think people's attention span is changing, but so what? The idea of art has always evolved and changed, and the fact that our attention spans are getting shorter could produce a challenge to creating artwork that artists really enjoy. But even as I say this, I do try to have patience with not only images, but just things in general. I prefer slower takes in movies, long shots in scenes, and slower reads in artwork. But in advertising, I do want something that will capture my attention fast because I don't have time to care. Generally, it's good design that captures my attention first, which means designers have a challenge in the advertising industry. But it's a fun challenge, and I don't think we should be upset about it.

Another excerpt from the same book explain the term "infotainment" and how contemporary people react to them,

“But the term ‘Infotainment’ also implies this: with the gradual fictionalization of even the news, the old categorical oppositions of ‘documenting’ and ‘staging’, appearance and reality gradually dissolve. They are being replaced by a variety of hybrid forms for which it will be impossible, in fact pointless, to attempt to distinguish between fact and fiction. Even the accusation that ‘Infotainment’ is guilty of continuous ‘lying’ is therefore unjustified, for it is neither ‘true’ nor ‘false’. Like advertising, movies and all other genres that adhere to the laws of fiction, it works at a level beyond these oppositions—the level of ‘hyper-reality’, where reality is ‘simulated’.”

I think sensible people understand that infotainment is not reality. Of course there are some people who can't tell the difference, such as little kids who think Dan Radcliffe can actually do magic. I do believe that people often wish the "reality" they see in magazines and commercials is an "ideal" reality from which a lot of people develop a desire for. But that is not a new thing. In photography there is that aspect of "Is it real or isn't it" because things can easily be manipulated. I think these images can create something that is magical and we might think it's real, but same with the French trapeze artist, Lola, from the 19th century, who could hold herself up with her teeth. Apparently she was held up by a frame or wires. It's the same concept. People were deceived. Even if the audience knew it couldn't happen, for the sake of entertainment, they extended their belief beyond things that made sense. In Photography people do the same thing. Even if we know magic isn't real, it's fun to see a magic trick, but the trick isn't as fun once we know how it works (sometimes, anyway).

Claude Cahun

The picture above is a self-portrait by the artist Claude Cahun. I assumed from the name and from the image that the artist was a male. Not so, Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob had many different pseudonyms throughout her early life, but settles on the name Claude Cahun. She is from France, perhaps in France, the name Claude is for both men and women?
Cahun did mostly self-portraits. Her style is very theatrical, often dressing up in a mask, having strange make-up and, when she had hair, strange hair (she shaved her head and kept it cropped short for the rest of her life).
Her lifetime partner, Marcel Moore (also a pseudonym), was also an artists, and I will guess that they often worked together. But this assumption comes from the fact that when I googled Marcel Moore, many of the same pictures of Cahun came up.
Together the two artists moved to the island Jersey, which evidently shocked the avant-garde community (haha) because they left the artistically rich environment of the city. They worked isolated for the rest of their lives, secretly creating flyers protesting the war and the Germans, throwing them in cars or dressing up as German, entering German events, and placing them on chairs and tables. The two were put in jail for these acts and sentenced to death. Thankfully the sentence was never completed, but Claude died from from illnesses due to imprisonment.

The contemporary photographer, Joel Peter Witkin, has a similar process, I think, to Cahun. Although his subject matter is very different. Early on in his career, he was a war photographer, but later he began to photograph things he would set up himself, many of which are obviously composites (for example, a centaur). His subject matter ranges from dismemberment to transvestites to dwarves. His choice of subject matter comes from an incident that happened outside his house when a car accident decapitated a little girl.

Assignment 3: Place

For my forest photographs, I approached them all similarly as far as composition. I liked when the shadows were coming toward the camera and the sun is in the shot. I liked that the sunlight hitting the leaves would leave a nice outline, or highlight, and create this really crisp look to the photographs. For my other landscape shot, when I was there i was thinking the same thing, putting the sun in the back, but this one shot I was looking to the right of the sun, so there wasn't much compositional thought behind it besides capturing the texture of the field, but balancing it out with a third of the top dedicated to the sky. For The photo where I'm holding the old photograph of the same room, I really wanted all the doors and pieces of the old and new photographs to match up, but it never worked out because the dimensions are the same, so to match them up, I would either have to back up a lot and have a whole person in the picture, which I thought would be distracting. But the room didn't allow me to back up anymore, so it was pretty much impossible. Therefore, I just put the print in the middle of the shot and you can still tell it's the same room, but much updated.
I think my landscapes show a subtle dramatic side of nature. Nature is not always peaceful. The image with the guy, the concept was pretty much: climb on that limb. Of my friends, he was the only one who would do it. I wanted it to look somewhat like a shoot of a celebrity, where the person is the main focus. Same with the one where I have pussywillow coming out of my head and sleeves, I wanted the figure to be the main focus. Originally I wanted the background to be a forest, (which is why I have many pictures of trees), but the pussywillow completely disappeared with that background, so I changed it to this neutral flat background instead. The image where I'm holding the old photograph, the concept was just to point out the past and present and how things have changed so much.
The photograph that required the most work was the composite of me with the pussywillow coming out of my head and sleeves. It was not actually too difficult, I simply masked out the braches, shaded where I thought required shading, and played with the colors a little so there was a unified color and white balance. The one where I'm holding the photograph, I happened to be home one weekend and took that picture because I thought worded great for the assignment. The other images, I traveled to those location specifically for those photos.

My goal for creating the composite image was to create a realistic figure made of plants. I'm not sure how successful it came across. I love the legs, but not the hands and head as much. I don't think it is believable. For the in-camera collage photograph, my goal was to get that "my, how time has flown" feeling of the old photo within the new photo and the updated living room. The other photographs I simply wanted to create stunning fall-inspired landscape photos.

My in-camera collage photo reminds me of a few photographers who hold up old pictures of building and take new pictures of the streets those buildings were on and composite them together to show how time has changed. It is a very similar idea that have done with my living room. Here is an example of a photographer who does this sort of thing: http://www.sweet-station.com/blog/?p=11341.

Memory Composite

I made a panorama of a field, the hard and arguably more fun way (when you have time time, of course), and photoshopped an image of myself into it. It is inspired by a memory I have of running through a field at night time. I wasn't alone. I was with about twenty other people, but I didn't feel they needed to be included in the image.

I think I really want to start making landscapes. Not just to have landscapes, but to put people into them for posters. The background is just as important as the subject in the foreground.

As the image is so wide, when I uploaded it, it reduced the size. Therefore, I thought it would be nice to provide a detail, below.

Digital Collage Exercises

I did these a while ago to practice different methods of collaging images together in photoshop. The image in front of the Hogwarts castle I changed my head, but (hopefully) it's hard to tell it was photoshopped, therefore I have provided the oringial (which is shown second).

I also recently changed the way I select the outline of a person. I've always used the lasso tools, but in my photography class I've learned about masking and selecting through the pen tool. Although I feel comfortable using the lasso tools, I do think masking is actually a better way, because the image is still there, you can bring back what you cut out. Here's my example of that:

And then I played around with making part of the image illlustrated, which I think it very well executed in this poster:

But a lot less effective in my own:

Blog Prompt #19

I think there are plenty of things that should not be photographed. I think privacy is incredibly important and often times people forget the privacy wishes of others. Paparazzi is an excellent example. I think the paparazzi can come up with an excellent reason to photograph celebrities, and these days it pretty much comes with the territory, so I will not say celebrities should not be photographed while walking their dog. But I do think that that celebrity has the right to not have his or her children photographed.
Of course there are also very vulgar things that I don't think should be photographed, such as rape and murder, and torture (except perhaps for investigatory purposes).

We can photograph a person in pain, or in love, and we can feel the emotion through the expression of the person in the photograph, but we can't actually photograph emotions, and how our body reacts to being angry (heart beating faster), being embarrassed (face getting warm), or lonliness (a seriously empty clenching in the chest). We could photograph the actual muscles, but the muscles wouldn't convey the emotion, and especially not in a still photograph.

There are plenty of things I do not want to photograph. I'm not particularly interested in photographing unborn babies, or pictures of distant galaxies. These photos are used for different purposes than what I want out of my photos. I'm more interested in the art aspect of photography rather than the scientific aspect. Although I'm sure if I am ever pregnant, a picture of an unborn baby will mean something a great deal more than it does to me now.

Troy Library storyboard

The library is closing in my town, and although there is something we can do about it, not many people are aware. I'm hoping my video might help people make educated voting decisions.

 

There are some changes I need to make (luckily this is only the storyboard. At the end of the video I still have the percentage 25%, that should be changed to 60%. Sorry