Project 3

I definitely had a lot of fun with this project. I have been doing a lot of scanning this term with this project, and my book project was also heavily scan based. I feel that scanning is a form of camera-less photography that is so interesting, and it's something that I want to keep exploring. I feel the way that the scanner records data is very interesting and in a way that I haven't seen before, and I can see myself becoming immersed in this "medium", very easily. I spent a long time composing these and just figuring out how the scanner works, but I ended up being very happy with my product and excited to keep scanning in my art.

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Chapters 8-10 Response

In the beginning of chapter 8, Ritchin mentioned that he once helped curate a Magnum show where there were over 400 images being shown that in shutter speed only took all but 4 seconds to create. As photographers, we create an outstanding amount of photographs all the time. Each photoshoot I do, whether is be for fine art, or for more commercial purposes, I almost always top over 400 photographs. To even think about that only equalling out to be a number of seconds in the larger spectrum is just amazing to hear because of all the work you put into them in post production. Also, in these photoshoots, I know for myself at least, I tend to delete a lot of photographs as I go. Ritchin mentioned this briefly and said that photographers see this deletion of photographs are erasing a permanent record, which made me want to stop deleting photographs because I'm not scared of the permanent record, I never had thought about it that way. One more point I found interesting in chapter 8 was the notion of the photograph being voiceless, which I agree with in the context he's talking about. He's saying that often enough photographs become voiceless in the journalistic context because the photographer often doesn't know the person and so that person's true nature doesn't come out, they're just subject to a "judging on a book on it's cover" look instead of making it so that person is depicting in their most true state. I feel that photographers should have some sort of established relationships with their clients in order to give them a voice through the photograph.

Chapter 9 was very helpful for me when I was doing my book project. My book project was based on making photographs into mixed media pieces, and this section of the book helped me see the variety of possibilities that the photograph can be subject to and morphed to create new meaning, but still have that strong moment basis that photography offers. The end of this chapter spoke a lot to me in that he was talking about how the digital environment is this alternate universe that has many tools and that with this synthetic universe, we can use it to our advantage, which is what I was looking to do in the final product of my book. By bringing together all of these different technologies, I feel I was taking a peek into the digital environment and using it as a tool.

In the last chapter, I found that I couldn't relate to it as much, but I appreciated his wrap up on the ideas of being careful with digital photography and the way we enter that world indefinitely. The idea of coexistance between the analog and the digital was also another idea I found compelling.

Overall, I found this book to be helpful in my reading of digital photography. It gave me a lot of things to think about, as well as a better understanding of the digital world of photography and how it's something we need to be careful with in terms of how we use it and absorb it in the larger spectrum of the photographic world. It's something that can be taken advantage of very easily and that with care, we can create something beautiful with it. I definitely think that some chapters were more helpful than others, and that the readings about journalistic photography weren't as helpful for me because I'm more fine art based rather than candid/journalistic base, but it was still an interesting perspective to see nonetheless.

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Chapter 7 Response

A segment that really stuck out to me in this reading was when Ritchin says, "In may in fact be time for professionals to pay more attention to how amateurs envision the world"(130). I feel like this is very important to the social photograph because too often, professional, journalistic photographers are looking through the lens with only one perspective and that is the view that all the other photographers are taking. Whenever I'm at a large event, I always see professional photographers always having the "best view possible", when really, that view isn't very realistic for the viewer of the work in it's final print. People can't always relate to the photographs that journalists take because that wasn't how they might have experienced the event themselves. In sports and political photography, the two most photographed events for photojournalists, that same, close up photograph is being taken, and I agree that it's about time for professionals to start taking more of an amateur view and to start letting go of these stereotypical shots. The photo pass won't buy you the best shot, but more like the one that everyone else wants to take. Perhaps a shot from in the crowd spectating the event from another viewer's point of view would be more interesting than the shots we see all the time.

In the set "Nuclear Nightmares" that Ritchin was highlighting on, a larger sense of pushing the boundary of the stereotypical journalistic photograph began to take a turn and make it so something moving could come from overstepping boundaries. Though this work was controversial, I feel it made a difference in showing people some realities they may not have known about. That series also made me think about how the integration of text is so incredibly important to think about in photography, and that it can completely change the viewer's reading of the work. If it weren't for the text in that series, the viewer could be left very confused and perhaps scared, but the text is more eye opening for the viewer in the way that it's used and made it so it couldn't be denied.

I also found the idea of digital photography as needing authenticity to be very interesting too. Because digital photography can be manipulated so easily, the worth and authenticity of is questioned so much more, but with project like "Nuclear Nightmares" or "Purple Hearts", the authenticity is hard to deny. People wouldn't photoshop moments like that, it's not questioned really. But if it were photoshopped, how would people judge that authenticity level? The digital moment in conjunction with authenticity is something that really captured me in this reading. The social photograph demands authenticity that's harder to deliver in this digital age.

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Scanning

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Ice #7 Part 1

400%



110% 6 times

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Reading Response #5: (Ritchin Ch.6)

I found this reading to be eye opening in the sense that I hadn't realized how imperative it is to pay attention to how we are using sound and text in our photographs. This reading really made it obvious to me how the meaning of the photograph changes so drastically with how it's presented in terms of form, sound, and text. By putting text on a photograph, in accordance to Ritchin, you are telling the author what to think or what to feel. By adding sound, you are creating a soundscape to a visual representation of the real. By displaying your photographs in a certain form, you are shifting the way the viewer reads them, and are creating a narrative. The order in which you display photographs is incredibly important in context to having your viewer understand what's going on, to understand your narrative.

I also found the idea of the smart photograph towards the end of the reading to be interesting, and how microsoft is making this to make it so photographs have a DNA to them. I find it to be making photographs one step closer to being that depiction of the real, which I find very compelling. In photography, at its core, the point is to be depicting what you are seeing in its rawest, most real, sense. In attaching this DNA type profile to the work, we would be getting closer to making photographs be absolutely real, and I find that absolutely amazing. The photographs would then share something super authentic with the viewer, and that would be DNA, it would make the connection between the viewer and the work to be more personal, they would both have an identity, per say.

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ICE #6

DRY MOUNT:



WET MOUNT:

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Reading Response #4: (Ritchin Ch.4)

I found the part about photographs to be referenced as "mirrors" and "windows" to be very interesting in the sense that I struggle between the two as a photographer. I feel, as a photographer, that my input matters to the photograph and that in some ways, the photographs should be about me as a photographer, as a mirror. In other ways, I feel my photographs should focus on the subject matter, or the "window". As artists in the frame, we have to think so often about both of these reflective surfaces and find a way to balance the two out in a way that works towards our concepts, and challenges the viewer's perspective at the same time. I feel this outlines a prime difference between tourists & artists in terms of photography, or the documentary vs. the art photograph. They both mean different things, but are they both still considered art?

I also found the notion of the mosaic to be very compelling as well, because it shows this interplay of the photograph as a technology, and being inserted into this alternate reality that goes where the artist decides its going to go. Through putting our photographs in this mosaic format & altering their appearance through the use of the rectangle, is it still going to be considered traditional? In having the mosaic become part of this dynamic media, as Ritchin describes, we are transfixing the meaning without even realizing it. It's comparable to how print photographs speak different languages than digitally shown photographs do. In putting a series of photographs in a mosaic and forcing them to be together-we are changing the meaning, we are making it become something else. This also relates to Ritchin's notion of how photographs are half truths, and putting photographs in mosaic form does indeed keep relating to the fact that mosaics can be considered half truths. Through combining more than one photograph in a rectangle, we are creating an alternate truth for the viewer to absorb- a half truth that may not exist otherwise.

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Reading Response #3: (Ritchin Ch.5)

This reading really enlightened me to the fact that politics really are a spectacle for journalistic photographers. Some of the most famous photographs have been political photographs, and they're ones that stick in people's minds, forever. Photographs of war are so publicized, and when people are looking for news, they're usually obsessed with the photographs of the news. Photographs are one of the only ones to document events in their visual formats and because our society is very attracted to tragedy, photographs become popular. When September 11th happened, photographs and videos were some of the first things to become publicized and I remember even sitting in my house and looking at my mom with the newspaper photographs on the kitchen table and watching the video of the towers falling over and over again. Political and war photographs are popular because of our culture and how the people in it are so attracted to paying attention to tragedy. In the Ritchin reading, he was talking about how they were on a deadline and used a photograph of white jazz players and that it didn't really matter what photograph they used because it wasn't big news. This is an example of how the little stories that are just happy and documentary aren't always the most popular to be photographed, or the ones that stick in people's minds, solely because of society wanting to see tragedy. We are so much more likely to pay attention to something when it's tragic, and photographs are the first things to often document tragedy, and Ritchin highlights this. The power of the photograph is translated to the public in tragic events, and many other great photographs of less tragic events are often misused, as Ritchin highlighted. The notion of photographs being misused is something that happens often in journalistic photography; the meaning of photographs are twisted in journalism. I found the bit about camouflaging the artificiality in context to him taking a photograph of politicians with a bunch of other photographers in the frame to be very interesting. The editor wants to manipulate a scene to change its meaning, and it's makes me think that the public shouldn't trust everything they see in journalistic photography; journalists are twisting the power of the photograph to portray some other meaning to better support their own arguments, which is unfortunate because photographs should speak truths, and show truths, to viewers. Journalistic photography is a virtual reality where the journalists are telling us how to think, how to view, essentially.

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ICE #5

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Reading Response #2 (Ritchin Ch.3)

The first thing I found very compelling about this reading was the idea of the tourist. In many instances, on vacation, or even just in your everyday surroundings, you will see a tourist taking photographs of just about everything that they see. As an artist, I know that I am very quick to judge that these tourists are not artists but are just using photography as a tool to quickly document an experience that can't be repeated in any other way besides maybe a home movie. This made me think about how our experiences change when a camera is around, people start acting differently. I know that in my home albums, the photographs always tell different stories than how the trip actually went, and so it points to the idea of the posed photograph, and how much truth that actually speaks to real experience.

This also relates into the end of the reading where it was said that "We are entering an era when no one will be able to say whether a picture is true or false"(Richin 67). So often nowadays photographs don't always tell the truth, but rather stretch the truth, lie, or are created not in the camera. It's so easy now with the technological age we are living in to create a photograph without actually taking it, and it makes me wonder where the art context of photography is going to come in play in the years to come. Because the industry is so ever changing and the technology is constantly growing, I would have to agree with Richin. Our generation is so used to photographs being edited and tampered with that it's a thing of the norm, and the phrase, "oh I'll just Photoshop it later", is becoming more and more prevalent among the public, and even the art world. Photographs are becoming so manipulated nowadays that it's going to be hard to trust any photograph that you see; because true documentary is just becoming a myth, in my opinion.

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ICE #4: Color Checker

Studio Light (No profile edit):



Studio Light (With natural light profile edit)




Natural Light (No profile edit):





Natural Light (With natural light profile edit):

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ICE #3-Black & White Conversions

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Project 1: Part 1

Naturalistic




Hyped



Low Key

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ICE #2: Color Ring Around

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Reading Response #1 (Ritchin Preface, Ch.1, Ch.2)

The thing that captivated me the most about this reading was the view Ritchin has on our relationships with the screens. How the world was first seen to be flat, then to be round, but now with the entering of the digital, flat once again. Our relationships with computer screens, digital camera screens, tv screens, etc, is toxic, completely toxic. This made me think a lot about how the photographs we take digitally can be so, so easily lost and aren't always a depiction of what's even real. With the digital, we are able to manipulate white balance, ISO, shutter speed, aperture, and many other things to create this 'perfect photograph', when sometimes, it just doesn't even depict the true subject at hand in a way that's accurate to the eye. In photography, there's often depth of field that comes from the camera lens that produced onto the photograph, and that's something we don't actually see with our eyes, it's a mechanical consequence. With that, so are long exposures, for example. With all the manipulation that digital photography can give us, one could question it's worth in context to what photographs are supposed to do in its most technical definition; to depict through film a copy of reality. With people so absorbed in manipulating the photograph and creating this relationship with the computer through Photoshop, the photograph is starting to have shifts in its meaning that are so much different than they were originally. The digital has made it so any amateur can make a great photograph, strictly through having skill in the digital field. The taking of an amazing photograph is starting to matter less in this day and age, but rather changing of a mediocre photograph to an amazing one is starting to matter more, and have more prestige. The way the medium is changing is incredible in good ways and bad ways, certainly, but Ritchin's take on how it's been changing is very interesting in reference to his views of the screen and our relationship with it in creating a generational shift.

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ICE #1: Past Work/Future Aspirations

(^my old work that best represents where my work is right now, who I am as an artist)


The Work of Alec Soth really inspires me because of the beautiful harmony he brings to his portraits through the atmospheric landscape, specifically in his body of work called Sleeping by the Mississippi. He pays a lot of attention to the environments his models are set into, and the photographs them in a way that is so authentic. He inspires me to think a lot about where to place models for portraits and I would like to do what he does; to photograph people in their natural environments. In context to the photograph I brought in that represents who I am as an artist right now; that body of work that photograph was included in had to do with how the relationships we have with others reflect who we are as people and our lives. And the other photograph I brought in had to do with how color relationships influence how people appear in the photograph, and which colors best match them as people, personality wise. I want to keep branching off of these ideas in this upcoming term. I have a lot of ideas that have to do with portraits and ways to portray people through the use of colors and the people that are close to them/influence or reflect them, as people, the most.

Example of Alec Soth's work:





Link to Alec Soth's work: http://alecsoth.com/photography/

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