Erika Ford AD267: October 2017

Monday, October 30, 2017

Weekly Inspiration (Oct. 29- Nov. 4)

My weekly inspiration is the Indecisive Moment show. I really enjoyed attending the panel talk with the artists and getting to see all of the works.

Thursday, October 26, 2017

Indecisive Moment Response

One of the most interesting aspects of the Indecisive Moments artist panel talk was the idea of photographs as objects themselves. Up until now, I had always thought of photographs as windows to a different reality, not as a reality in itself. When I look at photography, I always want to know more about what was being photographed and how it was done and never just take it as it is. When I saw some of the photographs in the gallery, specifically those of Anastasia Samoylova, the first thing I thought was wishing I could’ve seen the real set up in person. I never thought about the photograph itself being the “real thing.” In the panel talk, it was interesting to hear about how her setups just end up falling apart at the end and then she’s done with it. She also talked about how she has had people that want her to create displays to show instead of just photographs. Part of me would really like to see the display in person, but the other part now realizes that we should sometimes just take photographs as objects themselves, not just a window to what the artists wants to show. Another artist that this subject came up with was Jill Greenburg. For her photographs, she takes multiple pictures of a drying painting with many different types of light. She then further manipulates them digitally. She spoke about how people often want to know what she does with her paintings when she’s done, and how surprised they were to find out that she throws them away. This just highlights how difficult it is for us as people to just accept photographs for what they are, not what they are showing. I’m glad I attended this panel talk because it really brought up some ideas about photography that I had never thought of.

Presentation Response

I really enjoyed hearing about all the different photographers in the past two classes. In particular, I found Anna’s presentation about Cameron Wittig especially interesting and well put together. It’s neat that she was actually able to get in contact with him and ask questions over email. His approach to the project when he couldn’t show the musician’s face was both creative and successful. I loved seeing all of the different things he did with the idea from pixelating his face, to covering it with dice, and creating collages with it. The end result was a really fun way to do portraiture. Even without being able to see his entire face, you can still learn a lot about the musician just by how his portraits are collaged and put together. I also really agree with the comment from one of his friends that said that his work always had more than one thing to look at. In all of the portraits, I look at both the face, and what he is doing to cover it up. In his landscapes, he never just takes simple photos of landscapes. There is always another aspect that he adds in to make it more visually interesting. In many of his landscape photographs, he does double exposures to add to them. One of my favorites of his landscapes is the one with the mountains and the moon, because of the way the light is working. Overall it was one of my favorite presentations.