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| Can you tell which is which? (dry on left, wet on right) |
Monday, March 16, 2015
Scanning Smackdown
Managed to miss getting this one on the blog earlier- whoops!
Final Book Project
Photography- a delicate play of light and time interacting
with a photosensitive surface; nothing more, nothing less. My work explores
this most fundamental aspect of the medium by utilizing darkroom tools and
ambrotypes to create imagined landscapes – a topography formed by air, light and
ice upon a piece of silvered glass. By omitting decipherable information, these
cryographic prints can act as spaces for viewers to ponder what a photograph
is, as well as provide scenes that can be read in many ways. My
photographs are a record of something, but what? Ultimately, I find that the original moment is irrelevant; it can be discarded in favor of this new and evolving interpretation, at the mercy of my hand and each viewers' subjectivity.
http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/invited/5446381/b09e45ca95d38a1be3ac189be65f06822ad10506
Diptych
Again, this was when the sickness struck me down, but here it is! I think being ill subliminally informed my subject.
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| Original Image |
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| New Image |
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| Diptych |
Researched Books
As I’d been sick when this was happening, I looked into
books I already owned to find some inspiration for The Book. I’ve got a
decently wide array of photo books, so I had selected several to act as models.
1.)
Sante, Luc. Evidence.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992. Print.
This book is a compilation of early crime scene photographs
from 1910-1920 that the author discovered had been rescued from a massive purge
of the NYPD’s archives in the ‘60s. Despite the rescue of the photographic plates,
many had been neglected and largely all of the corresponding
files/documentation was lost. Sante compiled the most compelling images and all
available information regarding them into this book, presenting the plates one
to a page, with a plate number to correspond to the back of the book.
The use of plate numbers appealed to me, as these were all
originally ambrotypes, so it relates materialistically to my project. Beyond
that, I could see myself using plate identification if I were to eventually
have an index of full-plate thumbnails. I felt that the minimalism to the page
was important to not detract from the subject matter, and I would likely use a
similar approach with little to no text on each page. The way the book is
broken up into components that allow the viewer increasing amounts of
contextual information is practical for my purposes, as well; it worked in his
favor to allow the reader to experience the horror of the photos before finding
out the details that remain about the crime.
2.) Busse, Dietmar, and Tom Breidenbach. Flower Album. New York:
PowerHouse, 2003. Print.
In the book,
Busse ‘tries on’ different imagined flowers, using his body as a canvas; he
also does simpler arrangements of decomposed and recomposed plant specimens.
Like the last book, Busse’s book uses highly minimal text on the photo pages,
which I think is highly effective in allowing the reader to become absorbed in
the images without getting distracted by unnecessary reading.
Also like the
last book, there is an image index with specific species information for the
plants used in each image, corresponding with page numbers and each piece’s
title. The images themselves on the page were what caught my eye, though- all
the images are full bleeds, allowing the image to sprawl across the page. I
felt, more so than with Sante’s book, that I could be totally immersed in the
pictures I was viewing. While with Sante’s found photographs the graphic nature
really needed a border to contain them (to keep them from getting too close to
us!) I think that my own work really
needs the entirety of the page.
3.)
Libbrecht, Kenneth George. The Little Book of Snowflakes.
Stillwater, MN: Voyageur, 2004. Print.
This tiny book
isn’t exactly an art book per se… more like one of those bargain books you’d
get at Barnes & Noble. That being said, though, it’s got an abundance of
different formats in the book that each work a little differently depending on
the corresponding text and/or images. If I want to end up covering details from
my plates, or provide a plate index, I think the grid format used on several of
the pages could work really well, providing enough information without allowing
anything to be too decipherable.
To get to the
root of why I chose this book, I kept closing and opening it until I realized
that I was smitten with the square format. I’m a sucker for symmetry. The plate
details could work really well as large panoramas (landscape 8x10, for example)
but I think that the 2:1 ratio should work well. This book appears to be the
same size as the smallest square option through the Lightroom interface for
Blurb.
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| Minimal text, large images |
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| Plate indices |
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| Interesting division of space without being distracting Full bleed makes image seem to fall off of the page, extending beyond what viewer can see |
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| Sneaky 2-image spread with full bleed They seem to merge into one another with careful editing and excellent placement |
One-Page Wonders
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Creature Comforts [Me] documenting a week of sickness and my cat |
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Suburban Sprawl because what is more expansive online than cat pictures |
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Dependence saving me from returning to an empty home is the damn cat yes, again because I'd be lost without him |
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Realities check the boxes next to symptoms occurring in the past week we will need your insurance information please step on the scale take a pill and a half in the evening no milk for an hour before or after this medication may cause suicidal thoughts or actions but everything will be fine |
Calling From Canada- Ken Lum Retrospective
Wow, the article started out with references to the Mirror Stage of the Oedipal Complex… after that, I kind of expected the author to focus on childhood trauma and I certainly wasn't disappointed. While only a brief part of Ken Lum's history, it would make sense that such events would go on to inform his interest in identity and culture that's so consistently present in his work. The work he does with signs is likely my favorite, though I do enjoy his work with mirrors. The 'personal logos' (as I believe he called them in his talk) have a quirky humor to them that make them very approachable. Though their meaning has shifted over the decades, viewers can still have an idea of political climates of the past to help inform their impressions of the work. There's an interesting conflict that happens in my mind when he 'casts' the East Asian man as "Steve"; while he does confront the discrimination of the time, he also strips away the person's identity to have them act the role they've been given. I think this is effective in creating conflicting feelings of amusement and discomfort; it certainly bothered me!
Aesthetically, his mirrors and inserted photographs are beautiful in a nostalgic kind of way, but I'm not certain if I would necessarily end up considering the same things if they were presented without his previous work with signage in the same show.
Aesthetically, his mirrors and inserted photographs are beautiful in a nostalgic kind of way, but I'm not certain if I would necessarily end up considering the same things if they were presented without his previous work with signage in the same show.
Abstracting Photography- Walead Beshty
I love Walead Beshty's work- I really do. His prose, perhaps, could do with a little simplification- it was an incredibly dense article in theory, history, and vocabulary.
In Beshty's essay, he constructs a 22-page journey that meanders along photographic history and theory, making pit stops at many crucial moments along the way. From Barthes to Baker, he painstakingly tracks the rises and falls of photography as an artistic medium, moving towards the contemporary fear of the "death" of photography.
"…the Barthesian theorization of the "this has been" contained in the photographic image, has become the "this has been" of "Photography" itself." (293)
What Barthes refers to with "this has been" is the idea that there is both an objective and subjective record of something that has concretely happened; Beshty takes this a step further in arguing that the state of photography is spiraling into disintegration as the referent and context become further and further apart.
By tracking the numerous idiosyncrasies of the medium, he is able to pinpoint multiple locations that photography falls apart, yet I would personally argue that these places are ripe to be mined of interesting work- isn't that what the Conceptual art movement set out to do with the murky referred/referent relationship that photography has? But he presses on, pointing out the conflicting nature of photography in its dimensionality (it's both an object and a compressed representation of another reality), its inherent documentative power (photojournalism, snap chat, etc), its utilization in shaping culture/politics (photojournalism, 'leaked' pictures, hacked data, etc), and its Cartesian functionality for categorizing things (Anna Atkins comes to mind).
Through all these sources, it becomes apparent that he is interested in the subjective/objective duality of the photograph, and the 'dead' quality that it takes on in relation to the moment it endeavors to represent. Though the majority of people understand that photos are mere facsimiles, we are often swayed by 'visual evidence' that they seem to provide, even though the awareness of manipulation and tampering is ubiquitous.
He basically comes to rest upon the suggestion that, by using new 'methodologies' to create photographs, artists can expand the meaning of photography while simultaneously questioning and critiquing the historical foundations of the medium. By abstracting photography, the viewer is helped to confront the inherent subjectivity of photographs; if the referent is absent, then what becomes of the photographic reference? His personal preference for exploring the 'in-between' spaces seems to parallel this murkiness that photographs often enter with the divergence of content/context.
CAVEAT: Trying to do a reasonable summary that properly articulates all of his theory is well outside of my capabilities, as I'm not entirely sure what he's implying all the time; the essay is very complex and he speaks metaphorically quite often, which complicates things.
In Beshty's essay, he constructs a 22-page journey that meanders along photographic history and theory, making pit stops at many crucial moments along the way. From Barthes to Baker, he painstakingly tracks the rises and falls of photography as an artistic medium, moving towards the contemporary fear of the "death" of photography.
"…the Barthesian theorization of the "this has been" contained in the photographic image, has become the "this has been" of "Photography" itself." (293)
What Barthes refers to with "this has been" is the idea that there is both an objective and subjective record of something that has concretely happened; Beshty takes this a step further in arguing that the state of photography is spiraling into disintegration as the referent and context become further and further apart.
By tracking the numerous idiosyncrasies of the medium, he is able to pinpoint multiple locations that photography falls apart, yet I would personally argue that these places are ripe to be mined of interesting work- isn't that what the Conceptual art movement set out to do with the murky referred/referent relationship that photography has? But he presses on, pointing out the conflicting nature of photography in its dimensionality (it's both an object and a compressed representation of another reality), its inherent documentative power (photojournalism, snap chat, etc), its utilization in shaping culture/politics (photojournalism, 'leaked' pictures, hacked data, etc), and its Cartesian functionality for categorizing things (Anna Atkins comes to mind).
Through all these sources, it becomes apparent that he is interested in the subjective/objective duality of the photograph, and the 'dead' quality that it takes on in relation to the moment it endeavors to represent. Though the majority of people understand that photos are mere facsimiles, we are often swayed by 'visual evidence' that they seem to provide, even though the awareness of manipulation and tampering is ubiquitous.
He basically comes to rest upon the suggestion that, by using new 'methodologies' to create photographs, artists can expand the meaning of photography while simultaneously questioning and critiquing the historical foundations of the medium. By abstracting photography, the viewer is helped to confront the inherent subjectivity of photographs; if the referent is absent, then what becomes of the photographic reference? His personal preference for exploring the 'in-between' spaces seems to parallel this murkiness that photographs often enter with the divergence of content/context.
CAVEAT: Trying to do a reasonable summary that properly articulates all of his theory is well outside of my capabilities, as I'm not entirely sure what he's implying all the time; the essay is very complex and he speaks metaphorically quite often, which complicates things.
Creating Artist's Books
…is harder than it looks!
As for my summary:
As for my summary:
Rebecca Senf’s blog post is a rather detailed walkthrough of
the myriad considerations an artist is face with when self-publishing a book;
in addition to mentioning some pitfalls, she provides photos of examples that
she reviewed during the jury selection of books to be presented in the 2014
exhibition of Self-Published Photo Books. The major points she brought up were:
typeface, editing (paring down, specifically), form (does the book match
content/intent?), text placement, trim size, pitfalls of templates, and why
getting help matters.
The various books she selected were extremely helpful in
seeing exactly what ‘works’ and why, though I would have liked to see examples
of what doesn’t work as well- I can understand from her perspective as a juror
that it would be inappropriate to show books submitted as such examples. That
said, though, the incredible variety shown still astounds me, even after the
guided tour of the artist books at the library.
I was very interested in her short section on typeface-
having struggled with fonts that don’t ‘work’ on projects, I zeroed in on her
suggestions. Taking photos of books that are inspirational has been something
I’ve done for a few years now, so the idea of snapping fonts that might be good
references make a lot of sense. I wish she’d have divulged her favorite fonts,
though!
On a related note, I often see fonts I like on websites, so
I did a lot of searching and found several great plugins that allow you to see
the font information on type you hover over with the cursor.
WhatFont (Chrome)
Font Finder (Firefox)
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