Midterm Artist Response... Bill Viola

Bill Viola is an artist that uses various medium including water-filled tanks that nude models float in, and slabs of black granite as reflective surfaces, and video projectors to display his work. The picture above is from his piece called "Stations". This installation measured 20 feet by 50 feet x 40 feet. It had 5 black granite slabs, 5 projection screens, and a dark room.

This is pretty progressive work for the time he did this (1994). Further works all involved fire or water as the main focal point, and stood from everything from life to death.

His work is worth looking into, in my opinion, so take a look!

Video Response to Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson & John Baldessari

This video was very informative, showing off Jeff Wall's recreations and mimicry, as well as Gregory Crewdson's impressive & expensive "photography", as well as John Baldessari's work.

For me, I chose to respond to Jeff Wall's work, mainly because of something he said in the video. He said that he took no liberties with his imagery and that it was 'true'. And yet, he never shot something at the moment it existed. He re-creates it later as he remembers it, then takes liberties with it to remove someone from it because he thought that even though originally there were 4 people, he felt it looked better with 3.

So at no point was he "true" to the original as he saw it. He saw it, recreated it in his head as he chose to make it, THEN shot the picture with other people to re-enact what he chose.

So, if the original idea behind photography being that what you see is the truth, then looking at his work would mean that what you see is all completely a lie.

My question to the class is, do you feel that Jeff Wall took liberties and was untrue to the original? He seemed to contradict himself several times in the video!

Robert Frank : Hmm.....

One of the things in the video on Robert Frank that I found interesting, was the short clip where he was asked if he wanted to go site-seeing while he was in Paris. His response was to say "That's not my style".

So, lets talk about his style.

His photography was, to put it kindly, not exactly the best when it came to quality of print / lighting. A good portion of them seem to be a bit fuzzy, possibly out of focus, and in a lot of cases, the exact subject of the image isn't quickly discernible. The subject was often to the side and oddly lit and almost seemingly an accident.

And yet the work that he did for "The Americans" is renowned as some of his best work.
Makes you wonder WHY doesn't it?

Is Photography Dead ? ( By Stephen Nesbit)

Between this class and my digital imaging class, I've been reading a lot about how photography is controversially "dead", or "not dead".

In "Is Photography Dead", Peter Plagens essentially points out that the "original" craft of photography is dead. The intent of photography once being to show a truth. Where photography now can be tweaked, touched up, enhanced, or taken digitally with a number of filters so that it no longer looks natural. Sure, if as Plagens believes, Photography was ONLY there to capture "truth" as the eye sees it, then I suppose THAT aspect of Photography is not exactly the same.

All cameras now have built in filters and color selection modes and presets that allow the user to take pictures that aren't exactly "true" as the eye sees it. But does that make it not true? It's how the picture is taken at the time the shutter release is pressed.

The photo that I shared above is a slightly tweaked picture. It is a process called HDRI. That is, High Dynamic Range Imaging. You essentially photograph the picture underexposed, correctly exposed, and overexposed, then use a program like Photomatix, or Photoshop CS3 to meld those various images into one beautiful image. It allows you to get the FULL range of contrast AND detail without blowing it out, or losing data in the shadows. You essentially get the best of all points in an image, which leaves you with a picture SO real that it's unreal. So while nothing in it has been CHANGED, it's not exactly the truth either, because you are blending three or more separate images in order to obtain one.

When Plagens talks about photography being "dead", he's not exactly correct. As the phographer Lisette Model said, "Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest". Sure, anyone can snap a picture on a camera, but it takes a keen eye and a creative spirit to capture an image that inspires someone, or at the very least, captures an image so beautiful that when people look at it they are moved emotionally.

So in my opinion, Photography is NOT dead. It's just evolved to a point where everyone can be involved and share *their* visions, and it allows the photographer to paint with light, creating masterpieces of nature and technology alike.

A few more examples of this to share.

How to create a slideshow with Picasa Web Albums.... a simple (?) set of instructions!

By the way, if you are going to use Picasa Web Albums like Alexis and I both did, you will want to do a couple things. Once you have chosen your images, open up Picasa Web Albums, and click on UPLOAD near the top-center of the page.

A window pops up, and you can click CREATE A NEW ALBUM. Give the album a title, a date, and a description if you want. Also at the bottom of the window is the option to have the images public or private, make sure that is set to PUBLIC. The next screen lets you browse your computer and select up to 5 images. Once you have selected your first 5, click UPLOAD. Then choose 5 more! Repeat as needed.

After you have all of them uploaded, click on the MY PHOTOS tab in the top left corner of the page. You will now see your album listed! Click it to open it up. Click on the first picture to open it up. Once you have it open, you can click below the picture to give it a caption. This is where you can identify "Define Artistic Equipment", etc. So that the viewer knows what they are looking at. Type in your caption, and click SAVE CAPTION. Then click the RIGHT ARROW key above the picture to go to the next picture in the album, again, create a caption, save it, and repeat.

Once all images are captioned and ready to rock, you can click on MY PHOTOS, re-open the album, and at the far right side of the screen, click next to the chain-link icon that says "LINK TO THIS ALBUM", and right below that appears "EMBED SLIDESHOW", click that.

A new window pops up with more settings for the slide show. Due to the size and structure of the blog we are posting in, don't use anything larger than 400px for the size of the slide show. Anything larger and it "breaks" when you view it in the blog.

So, now that you have the size set to "Large 400px", click on "SHOW CAPTIONS", then copy the text that appears in the EMBED SLIDE SHOW window at the bottom. Simply double click the text in that section and it should all highlight, then copy it, switch over to the blog site, and make a NEW POST, and paste the text into the page.

You can click PREVIEW at the top to make sure it works before hitting SUBMIT.

That should do it!

Hope that helps, I heard someone asking about the full procedure the other day, so I thought I would share!

American Photography : My Thoughts....

Over the past 3 classes as we have watched these videos, one image in particular stood out for me. It was a very heartbreaking picture, and very thought provoking.


Phan Thi Kim Phúc, photo taken by AP photographer Nick Út

This image, more than the rest, stuck in my mind. For one, it showed some of the atrocities that the Americans back home either didn't like to admit took place, or didn't know about at all. It also showed how uninvolved the soldiers were. If you look at the soldier on the far right, he appears to be getting ready to have a smoke.

What kind of person would you have to be to just continue going about your regular business, have a smoke, when a naked child runs past you screaming after having been burned with napalm??

There are moments in time like this that are revealed to us, that without photography, we would never get to see or understand.