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Liz Wells, Ch. 7

As someone who is deeply suspicious of Eurocentric, male-centric humanism, I greatly enjoyed this chapter. I found the way the author presented and analyzed the history of how we have interacted with and conceived of digital photography and computer-generated images to be very thought-provoking and fresh. I likened the way the author says "the digital" was conceived of during the 80s and 90s, with contempt for its lack of "truthfulness" that is, to modernism and the literalist way of thinking about art objects. I likened the way the author conceived of digital photography, that it is one type of photography that can be used and interpreted in a number of different contexts within a broader set of photographies, as more postmodern and perhaps poststructuralist. Certainly, he is using poststructuralist tenets when he starts talking about how our anxiety about the "untruthful" digital image is perhaps more an instance of our being anxious about the loss of the scopic, man-centered humanist way of viewing the world. That section was definitely what I found most interesting about the chapter. I also agreed with this conception of "false innocence"--that we've always known photographs are highly composed and can exist no other way but that we've sort of lied to ourselves about that in order to help satisfy this incessant need to understand the big picture of our world by sorting out all the small parts. I wondered in the part on 319 where the author is talking about virtual spaces and Crary and Mitchell: did Cubism sort of do the same type of thing, and do digital photographs and virtual images really have a capacity to create novel perspectives when Cubism already did that?

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Work in Progress #4

Both of the images I chose to make fine prints from fit formally with some of the other images I've taken up to this point. I wanted to print images that feature written text, because I am now imagining that my final portfolio will include mostly images without text and only a few key images that will work to focus the set. My concept has broadened significantly since the beginning of the project. These images serve as markers for the heart of what I'm trying to get at: loss of agency and personhood. They help convey my message of language's role in certain instances of the loss of agency.

I hope that the small scale of the image on the large plane of the paper draws viewers into the photograph so that they notice the faint text etched onto the figure's body. I hope also that my treatment of the image will disturb viewers or arouse some sense of anxiety in them. The harsh flash, black bar in the first image, and very conspicuously cropped composition of the second image are intended to heighten that effect.

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Liz Wells, Ch. 6

The content of this chapter was, for the most part, not as engaging as the other chapters. I felt like the author just kept reiterating in different ways that photography wasn't conceptualized as art even when it was used within the art world until it was. One thing that I did appreciate about the chapter was how clearly it explained Walter Benjamin's ideas about photography/art, which I think I had been misinterpreting. Perhaps I didn't find much of the chapter incredibly interesting because it focused a lot on the tenets and development of modernism, and I've been so entrenched in the tenets of postmodernism lately, so all the discussion of Greenberg and the like felt especially conservative and archaic. Modern radicalness isn't radical at all anymore. The chapter became more interesting to me when it started discussing photography's development through the Pop Art and Conceptual Art phases. Up until the development of Conceptual Art, it seems, the photograph within the gallery setting functioned as a formal thing, an object whose proximity to "reality" was the main focus of the image's content. As illustrated by Keith Arnatt's use of photography in Self Burial, however, photography within the gallery then came to serve as an indexical sign of an event that happened, at the same time serving as the final product. The idea was captured/documented/made real by the physical photograph of a fleeting event. After that, as Douglas Crimp comments, photography really became finally realized as another media on the same plane as painting and sculpture. I also thought it was interesting to consider the relationship between art schools and the art institution and how that relationship affects subsequent art that is produced. I found the discussion of the heritage institution in relation to the discussion of identity and the multi-cultural that directly preceded it was really interesting. It reminded me of discussions of the archive as a curated entity with a specific point of view. How does the photograph change when placed within the context of the heritage institution? How the photograph contextualized in that way contribute to national identity?

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feedly #10

http://www.featureshoot.com/2014/03/malika-gaudin-delrieu-tk/?utm_source=feedly&utm_reader=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=malika-gaudin-delrieu-tk#!B3yhS I mean, it's pretty obvious that I'd choose this article to write about this week--"Portrait of a Happy Hermaphrodite Prostitute." The article's about a total outlier, somebody who shouldn't exist, an elderly hermaphrodite who identifies as a woman, genuinely enjoys sex work, and is even an activist for sex workers. Someone who has everything going against her yet is somehow invigorated by what most people would consider afflictions or at least misfortunes. I think the article presents Claudette as a sort of saint, which I don't necessarily agree with and would like to have been presented with a more human human; however, I think that the photographs give me that quality. They are shot in an unexpected style for me--I was expecting either more gritty or more dramatically-staged photographs.

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feedly #9

http://lenscratch.com/2014/03/ellen-kok-cadets/ This article is about Ellen Kok's book of photography called Cadets. Kok documented students in the JROTC program at a high school in a poor area of New Hampshire. The article describes the project and some of the things the photographer learned from her time with the students. Kok comes from a journalistic background, and the documentary style of the project and the photographs reflects that. The choice to include the before/after type portraits of the kids was an interesting one--though these photos are very different (black background, figures look directly at photographer) from the snapshot type of the rest of the photos (at least those sampled in the article), they still work within the group. All of the photos, in fact, are formally related not only in subject, but also in lighting. The photos, whether indoors or outdoors, are characterized by very even, white lighting. This type of lighting, which relates to the fluorescent lights under which public school students and government workers spend a great deal of their lives, works well with the photographer's journalistic content. I think that the photographer expected to find something menacing and insidious in the military indoctrination program that JROTC programs seem to be when she set out to do this project; however, I think Kok did a good job of creating photos that remain somewhat neutral and that do not overtly try to give the viewers the message that these types of programs prey on/exploit kids in rough circumstances.

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feedly #8

I read a review of Roe Etheridge's "Sacrifice Your Body" Show -here-. Expecting a work/series of works more overtly/less subtly related to the title, I was both intrigued and a little disappointed--the work is interesting but doesn't really relate to my current work as I thought the title suggested. After reading this review of "Sacrifice Your Body," which also exists in book form, I searched for more images from the series in order to get a better sense of what the work looks like and what I think the artist might be up in with the work. The photographs, as the author of the review notices, do feel very much a part of contemporary fashion photography and youth culture. The campy or kitschy feel of the photographs is invoked by the very specific aesthetic choices the artist is working within: bright colors, highly stylized compositions, retro subjects, purposefully "bad" editing, and extremely flat lighting are all working together to make the photographs feel very editorial and very much a part of this specific time and set of popular trends in youth culture. If the reviewer hadn't pointed out that Etheridge often does work for fashion magazines, I think I still might have gotten that or that he was referencing that style in this work. These aesthetic choices correspond to his content, which deals with suburban life and banality--what could be more suburban and banal than an old fashion magazine, an empty signifier of "something more" to a teen trapped between the fluorescent bulbs and tacky carpeting of the family dentist's office? Personally, I am kind of tired of the aesthetic invoked by Etheridge. These types of photographs felt very cool and new and weird and interesting a few years ago, but I don't know how well they work in 2014, when thousands upon thousands of the same types of photographs have been reblogged over and over again by tumblr photobloggers for years. What may have been unexpected in 2009 has come to be the expected. This aspect may work for Etheridge's content quite nicely.

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Liz Wells, Ch. 4

The chapter deals with the body and how photographic representations of the body change and control how we conceptualize it and how we think of ourselves and others. The author brings up a lot of interesting things to consider in dealing with photographs of the body. I thought that the discussion of photographs as means of social control through the construction of archives was very thought-provoking: I hadn't really given a lot of thought to the use of photography by institutions that govern us or the potential impact that the way archives are constructed could have on bodies. This idea intersects with the work I'm doing right now, in many respects. I think that the decision to not include a discussion of photographs of the disabled or of children is lamentable, because I think that how those types of images are read is very telling about how we take information from photographs of the body and how that affects social attitudes.

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Work in Progress #2

I chose the first image as my strongest, because I think it relates best to my concept. The text, an abbreviated version of the proverbial saying "little girls should be seen and not heard," works really well in the image I have paired with it. I tried to think of other cliches about "girls" that I could overlay other close up images of women's faces, but I couldn't think of any that really worked. I had these four other images that relate formally, and I chose to unite them by using the same text across them, though a different text than in the first image. How the viewer interprets my remix of the insult "you fight like a girl" changes depending on the image that it overlays.

Cliches are the lingual equivalents of social stereotypes, which is why I think they serve my concept well. As in the first set of five images I came up with, in this set I have paired gendered verbal cues with perhaps contradictory images in order to emphasize the violent/destructive nature of the language that enforces, constructs, and deconstructs conceptions of the gendered/sexed body.

In my process this time, I felt my initial concept stretching out. I am not as focused on forcing my viewer into seeing the specific concept I am trying to convey, but rather I am focusing on creating images that deal with several, interrelated issues.

I want to take more of these half-shaded portraits, because I think they are working well--I wanted to find a way to obscure the figures' faces, because I am not conceiving of this series as being concerned with the individual figures. In fact, I even hesitate to refer to these images as portraits.

I am having trouble creating a set of images that are unified in light quality, however. I'm really into the drama created by the lighting and expression in the last image, but I also like the blueish light in the images of the male figure and the way it connects those images to my first set of images.

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Liz Wells, Ch. 3

This chapter dealt with the personal photograph, spending a lot of time talking about social history and the impact it has made on personal photography over time. The personal photograph as discussed in this chapter repeatedly called to my mind the selfie. On page 123, the author talks about the unreliability of personal pictures in terms of historical analysis. I thought about the hundreds of pictures I have taken of myself that just sit on my hard drive: who did I take these pictures for? If I only made them for me, why? Why do I feel compelled to amass images of myself? Why do we post photos we've taken of ourselves on online platforms? Is it vanity? Are we responding/buying into the celebrity culture that makes such heavy use of images? Is there something existential going on in our obsessive self-reference through photographic image? Touching on the previous chapter, I thought it was interesting the distinction the author, on page 142 and again on 147, points out between photographs of and for the poorer classes--the poorer classes (talking about 19th/early 20th centuries, here) wanted to obscure their living conditions where outsiders wanted to heighten them. I see this as relating to selfies to a certain degree and to our desire to construct specific photographic representations of ourselves.

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FINAL PROJECT, FIRST IMAGES

This group of images is quite different from what I had originally thought this project would look like, though it keeps to the initial idea in a couple of key ways. My initial idea was to overlay images of the body (I was envisioning the body/bodies of a woman/women) with text that addressed and drew critical attention to the power dynamics created, enforced, and deconstructed by, specifically, the terms "girl," "woman," and "female." The images I have come up with at this point are related to my original idea and get at the same concept in a different way. With the image/text amalgams I have created here, I am attempting to draw attention to a few different issues: power dynamics between rapists and their victims, power dynamics between photographers and their models, and the magnitude of violence that slurs can hold./// The juxtaposition of the images of a young boy in positions of vulnerability and the text that is meant to represent things that he, as an adult, will or might say in acts of violence/rape is meant to jar viewers and call attention to the violence in our society that entirely too often enables/promotes the transformation of children into power-hungry rapists and domestic abusers. I hope that the viewer gets the sense that the quotes are things that the figure will eventually say to someone else and not things that will or have been said to him. With that interpretation the images do not have as great of an impact./// The first two images (and perhaps the third) are working best, I think, because of the stark backgrounds. I don't like the completely dark background of the final image; that image feels too much like a PSA poster, which isn't necessarily what I'm going for. I think the obscurity of the face is effective, in that it allows the viewers to project people from their lives onto the body of the figure and to imagine people they love in the victim's and the abuser's position. Also, I'm not sure about creating a set of twenty or so images of this very nature: it seems like the theme could get tired. I am thinking of perhaps creating subgroups within my final portfolio of text/image amalgams that each address my stated theme in a different way.

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feedly #5

Kesh Angels by Hassan Hajjaj When I saw this post on my feedly, I had to write about, because the artist's work had popped up on my tumblr dashboard earlier this week, and it's really interesting stuff. Kesh Angels is a series of portraits of women from Marrakech, Morocco who are part of a biker subculture there. Obviously, the way Hajjaj turns over Western stereotypes of Arab women is very interesting, as is the highly graphic nature of his work. What I find most interesting about this work, however, is that the artist often has his sitters wear clothing of his own creation and frames their portraits with consumer packaging. These women and the culture they are from do not seem exoticized in their portraits, as they easily could amidst all the bold colors and designs that envelop them. I think the portraits escape exoticism because of the aspects of consumerism and Westernization so central to and apparent in them--though we, as people fully immersed in American culture, may look at these portraits and try to see in them some mysterious "Other," as we have been conditioned to, the subjects' control over the motorized bikes they pose with and their often defiant or determined gazes/postures make it impossible for us to do so.

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feedly #4

MASQUERADE EXHIBITION AT THE NEW ORLEANS PHOTO ALLIANCE I chose this post because I saw it as relating to this week's Wells chapter. The set of photos depicts all different types of people wearing all different types of masks or mask-like objects. I see these photographs, though they are clearly documentary, as existing on the fresher side of documentary, the side on which the subject asserts some degree of agency either in their engagement with the photographer or in their obscurity behind their mask. I think the effect of a mass collection of photographs from many different photographers, cameras, and situations but dealing with the same topic is quite interesting--deducing a meaning from the work as a whole becomes much more complex than when dealing with a series by one artist. This set of photos has no sole context, which is the same effect as old documentary photographs often have.

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Liz Wells, Ch. 2

The main theme that the author of the chapter seems to return to again and again is this idea of the constructed rather than depicted, objective "reality" that photography is generally thought to represent. Unlike the last chapter, this chapter, "Surveyors and Surveyed" was not nearly as concerned with tracing the different theoretical approaches that have been used to analyze photographs, but instead dealt with understanding and evaluating a specific type of photography, documentary, which "provide[s] an account of events that have their own existence outside the frame of the photograph or the confines of the studio walls" (p. 115). What I found most engaging about this chapter was its addressing of the inherent power dynamic in documentary photography that uses living people as its subject--analyzing documentary photographers' roles as a constructors of "realities" is important because they play a huge part in how we understand our history and our present. I really liked the discussion of the role of documentary during the Victorian era and the role photography played and continues to play in constructing and perpetuating ideas about race in a global environment characterized by imperialism and diaspora from a supposedly scientific standpoint. The parallel drawn between colonialist photographs of "primitive" peoples of Africa and bourgeois-taken images of the poor and working classes was very interesting and something I had never really thought about. In the section in which the author discusses the role of documentary photography and war, I wondered, "How does the voyeuristic quality of documentary photography change when the subject is triumphing/joyous rather than suffering? Does the image then become one of propaganda?"

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feedly #3

Life Once Removed is a series by Suzanne Heintz in which the photographer comments on the pressures she feels as a "spinster" to get married and have children. Life Once Removed, in which Heintz poses with mannequins to create simulated family portraits, takes a critical look at the social pressures placed on women at this point in history to be fulfilled and to "have it all." Heintz sees her work as criticizing broader social frameworks that make us all feel like we have to live up to certain ideals. This series is interesting to me because it critiques social norms in a funny yet biting way. Heintz's formula is very effective. The juxtaposition of her bright, insistent smile with the deadpan faces of the mannequins along with the often visually rich settings propels her message forward, really sticking it to the people she often feels pressure from to get married: her photographs say, "Here, look! This is what you wanted for me. Are you happy now that I'm acting out what you thought I should have/want? Are you more comfortable now that this supposed hole in my life has been filled?"

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Liz Wells, Ch. 1

"Thinking About Photography: Debates, Historically and Now" This chapter covered a broad range of topics related to how photography has been conceptualized and approached theoretically. The author overviewed the major historical developments in culture and critical theory (for example, modernism, post-modernism) and how those developments altered how we think about photography. The implications of the ideas of major theorists such as Foucoult, Benjamin, Barthes, Baudrillard were also outlined and discussed in relation to photography. The chapter resonated with me at several points, raising many questions and leading me to think of photography, art, and the development of history in new ways. In the section of the chapter titled "Critical Reflections on Realism," the author again mentions photography's use as an empirical recording device: the author writes, "If reality is somehow there, present, external, and available for objective recording, then the extent to which the photograph offers accurate reference, and the significance of the desire to take photographs or to look at images of particular places or events, become pertinent" (27). This statement made me question the existence of an external reality; we assume that photographs record external realities because we presume that reality is an external entity. However, postmodernism posits that there is not necessarily an external/universal truth/reality. Has the early conception of photography as a recording device that avoids human subjectivity made us more susceptible to the idea that reality is an external occurrence? Has our current understanding of photography as hugely alterable/subjective undone any of that if it ever in fact occurred?

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feedly #2

"Portraits of Americans Who Have Converted to Islam" is an article on featureshoot.com about Claire Beckett's series, The Converts. The short description of the work mentions a few of the questions the work brings up, questions relating to American identity within a global context. Specifically, American identity is examined in relation to Muslim identity, identities that have been popularly constructed as diametrically opposed. The portraits are displayed with the names of the people in them, drawing attention to the individuals' pasts/roots in mainstream, pseudo-Christian American society. The photographs are dramatically lit with both natural and artificial light sources, an effect that recalls traditional Catholic imagery; the portraits seem almost like modern-day images of saints, each sitter adopting traditional portrait poses. There is also a sculpture-like quality to the figures, the dramatic lighting creating rich shadows in the folds of the figures' drapery. Rather than being presented as traitors to U.S. nostalgia, the figures represent earnest commitment to their religion. Though we are meant to understand the figures as Americans who have converted to a foreign, perhaps "un-American" religion/culture/value system, the (mostly) ambiguous settings do not suggest that these peoples' environments "naturally" clash with or undermine their choices to convert to Islam.

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feedly #1

"Seth Hancock: 10 Minutes with a Stranger" This article, posted on lenscratch, is about a series in which the artist traveled across the country and photographed strangers and their handwriting. His goal was to get to know as many people as possible and to open up a verbal dialogue between people, as he sees virtual communication as less authentic/communicative than actual speaking/writing. I have been fascinated with handwriting for a long time because it is so personal: the way someone writes--size, spacing, compactness, looseness, angularly/organicly--is so expressive and personal. Just like Seth Hancock, my interest in handwriting relates to my interest in the individual. To connect with someone for a few moments or hours on a completely honest and open level is a really incredible thing. I think Hancock achieved what he set out to do--or at least, his photographs suggest or convey the honesty/candidness he wanted to find. People are incredibly interesting, and the artist seems to have captured the individuality and subtleties of these strangers well. What is particularly interesting is the relationship between the constructed image presented in the photographs, which seem at times cartoonish, and the very human writings that accompany the photographs.