01/04/2010
This video was a one-shot (ie, no moving the camera) project. It was required to (1)be two minutes long and (2) finish in a position that represented a famous painting.
Our group chose Son of Man (“Son of Man”?) by Magritte and set it to the song “Hallucinations” by Bobby McFerrin. The video was shot by the Reflecting Pool in downtown DC with the help of a film major (thanks John!). We really like how it turned out…
21/03/2010
For this entry, we were asked to view the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange, find and read a scholarly article analyzing the film, and then write a three-paragraph response to that article.
The article that I chose to read was Vivian C. Sobchack’s 1981 analysis, “Décor as Theme: A Clockwork Orange” ; its citation can be found at the end of this blog post. I specifically selected this piece because I felt that it, out of the handful of articles found, best explored themes related to the purpose of this Visual Literacy class . The article seeks to explain the importance of Kubrick’s choices for the film’s décor, especially its use in conveying ideas about art in relationship to violence. Sobchack argues that, rather than positing art and violence as opposing, antithetical concepts, Kubrick has attempted to demonstrate that they are rather much the same thing– that “Art and Violence spring from the same source; they are both expressions of the individual, egotistic, vital, and non-institutionalized man” (1981: 98).
Sobchack’s point is novel, and valuable in attempts to understand any “deeper meanings” within A Clockwork Orange. Much of her supporting evidence is solid and thoughtful: she points out the subtle physical connection between ‘good’ art and ‘ultra-violent’ behavior in the film (they are constantly in the same frame), discusses the ways in which the camera as “third-person narration” (1981: 100) enhances a theme that was necessarily secondary in the novel’s limited first-person recounting, and mentions the stark contrast between different environments within the film–a contrast mostly delineated by the presence or absence of unique, creative art.
(More after the jump…including a NSFW photo of art from the film–hence the cut).
27/02/2010
This blog post is to showcase the final business card design that I chose.
Theme: “Soar”
own photo. all rights reserveeed
21/02/2010
For this extra-credit post, we were asked to attend 1-2 hours of this past Saturday’s photo judging competition and to write a couple of paragraphs about the experience we had there. (For this week’s assigned blog post, please scroll down.)
I arrived at the photo judging competition at 10 AM on Saturday (about half an hour into the judging) and stayed until about 11:15 AM, when technical issues with the online-judging format called proceedings off for an undetermined amount of time. Although a lot of the conversation and discussion that I overheard had more to do with ironing out the technical kinks of the process, some of the judges’ comments were still enlightening. One of the most interesting experiences, for me, was trying to understand why the judges made the decisions they did. Often, I would find a photograph to be quite entertaining or novel, but they would dismiss the photograph without comment; at other times, it was easy to see why they chose the selections they did.
The last fifteen minutes of my time at the competition were spent judging the Documentary–News Value category. Each entry in this category (there were only a handful) consisted of a set of 10-12 photographs that revolved around a theme. The first entry, about a Ghanian village that must cope without electricity, was immediately dismissed for lacking technical merit. Then there was a prolonged discussion about first and second place, with the judges split between “Wasting Away: The Struggle of a D.C. Aids Nonprofit” (original photo story here) by documentary photographer Jahi Chikwendiu and “Recession Road” (original multimedia blog here) by Washington Post photographer Michael Williamson.
Some of the points discussed:
In the end, “Wasting Away” took top honors and “Recession Road” placed second; an outcome that made perfect sense after hearing the judges’ debate. However, the strengths (listed above) of the entries need not only be applied to documentary photography. I intend to keep them in mind when shooting my own photographs, in order to continually improve their quality.
21/02/2010
For this blog post, we were asked to upload several hand-drawn sketches of potential business card designs, for use in class on Monday.
Design #1: “Soar”
Description: This card shows a plane-style kite against a vivid blue sky; the back contains all the contact information.
Source photo:
(own photo)
Potential issues with this design: I’m not sure how to fill up the white space on the back of the card. I might make the information on that side horizontal rather than vertical.
Design #2: “Fly High”
Description: The image on the front is a kite against a vivid blue sky, with information on the back (much like Design #1, but with a different kite).
Source photo:
(own photo)
Potential issues with this design: see above. Also, the design of this kite (it’s a panda bear) is less clear.
Design #3: Bookworm
Description: The image on the front is a stack of paperback books, with personal information where each of the books’ spine titles, etc. were.
Source photo:
(own photo)
Potential issues with this design: It might be difficult to edit out all the original title information/graphics from the photo. Also, I’m not sure what I’d do with the rest of the space, or with the back side.
21/02/2010
For this post, we were asked to read the New York Times opinion blog article “Photography as a Weapon by Errol Morris, found here, and respond to it.
Showing the Photoshopped areas (from The Daily Lede blog, http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/in-an-iranian-image-a-missile-too-many/)
In his opinion piece “Photography as a Weapon,” published 11 August 2008, Errol Morris discusses the faked Iranian missile photo in the larger context of visual images’ power to deceive. Morris argues that photographs are inherently open to various forms of fraud, from sophisticated digital manipulation and “Photoshopping” to the simple addition of an incorrect caption, because visual images have such an enormous significance to the human mind. For example, he and his guest, Hany Farid, mention a psychological study dealing with misinformation; the study showed that people who are given false information, then informed of its falseness, remember only the original information — not the accompanying caveat. This is true in photos as in words. Morris wants us to remember that photographs are powerful because they can both “copy” and “alter” reality.
Another photograph supporting this article is one that I remember from the 2006 Israeli-Lebanon war:
from Little Green Footballs (http://littlegreenfootballs.com)
This photograph was taken by Adnan Hajj, who had been working as a photojournalist for Reuters News Service for about ten years when this photograph was taken in 2006. At the time (July-August of 2006), Israel and Lebanon were engaged in a brief, intense war. This photograph purports to be of Lebanon’s capital city, Beirut, after being attacked by Israeli bombs. However, the smoke in the image, as well as some of the buildings, were photoshopped to make the fire and the damage look more intense than was actually the case.
When the image was first sent out (August 5, 2006) by the Reuters news service, it was clear to many people almost instantly that the photograph had been digitally manipulated. Members of the public — bloggers (such as Little Green Footballs, above) and forum posters, for a couple of examples – noticed the discrepancies and began to spread the word; within a day, the news service ordered a photo kill and began to investigate the allegations. Ultimately, they chose to let Hajj go and removed many of his pictures as well. I believe this was the right thing to do: there are many ways to manipulate an image, and some (color enhancement, cropping) are more forgivable than others. Deliberately inflating the context of a photograph, as here, however — especially in a delicate situation such as wartime — is deceitful and dangerous, and should not go unchecked.
21/02/2010
This post is in response to the Feb. 7th prompt that asked us to choose one of a selection of Pulitzer-Prize-winning photographs and to discuss the image’s composition and context.
The photograph that I selected is Carol Guzy’s “Refugees from Kosovo,” below:
Carol Guzy, 1999 (from Pulitzer Prize Photo Exhibit handout)
This image makes use of several very effective photographic techniques to present an effective and striking glimpse of its subject. First, the photographer has carefully cropped the photograph to ensure that the image’s focus is clearly on the child, rather than on the people surrounding it: the head and body of the left-hand person (the one in the grey shirt) have been removed. Second, the photographer uses colour to great effect: unlike the other subjects in the photograph’s foreground, who are dressed in grey, the child’s outfit is a vivid shade of teal — another way to ensure that the eye is drawn first to the child, the photograph’s subject and also paralleling the rich blues of the sky and mountains in the background. Finally, the photographer employs leading lines to draw the viewers’ eyes to the central focal point:
Some of the leading lines enhanced on "Refugees from Kosovo" (Guzy , 1999, photo taken from Pulitzer Prize Photo handout, editing own)
The photographer has also made use of the “rule of thirds”: the idea that a photograph should be divided into nine equal segments by a grid of lines, two horizontal and two vertical, and that all of the photograph’s action should take place along those lines:
Rule-of-thirds grid imposed over "Refugees from Kosovo" (Guzy, 1999, from Pulitzer Prize Photo handout, editing own.)
Here we see that although the photographer opted for a somewhat more centered composition than in many shots, she still incorporated the rule of thirds into her shot: the child’s head is positioned directly at the lower right-hand intersection, while its mother or aunt (on the right) is on the same horizontal line and the hands of its other family members (on the left) are caught on the left-hand vertical line.
This image was taken May 3, 1999 in Kukes, Albania, where ethnic Albanians were flocking to a refugee camp, desperate to get away from the interethnic violence in their home province of Kosovo. Kosovo, a province in the former Yugoslavia, was at the time in the middle of a war between the ethnic Albanian and ethnic Serbian people with much violence on both sides. On this day at the refugee camp, Carol Guzy says, a large number of new arrivals had come to the camp from Prizren, but could not enter until enough tents had been prepared for them. Family members waited anxiously at the wire fence marking the camp’s border, trying to find relatives on the other side of the fence and passing (as in this photograph) greetings — and small children — back and forth. Guzy felt that this photograph captured “the innocence and the horror” of Kosovo at the time. (all referenced information in the above paragraph from this blurb.)
31/01/2010
This blog post is in response to our second assignment for the Visual Literacy class, in which we are asked to analyze various aspects of two print advertisements: one considered a ‘successful’ ad and one considered ‘unsuccessful.’
The first advertisement that I selected is this August 2009 advertisement created by the Salt Lake City advertising company Richter7 for the website strongermarriage.org, which offers resources — classes, tips, counseling — to couples who want to improve their marriages:
from Ads of the World website (http://adsoftheworld.com)
I consider this advertisement successful because it is simple, containing little irrelevant or extraneous information; visually striking, with lots of nearly-empty space and dramatic text; and highly creative, playing with the tangible nature of the original advertisement to create a hands-on message that requires significant thought and potentially interactivity between the page on which the text is printed and the reader of the ad, who is asked to “cut on dotted line” and “rotate 180 degrees” to discover the secret to “build[ing] a lasting relationship”.
One of this ad’s most appealing features is the strength of its visual elements. Although some commenters consider the faded, marble-like pattern of the background dowdy and old-fashioned looking, it also lends to the concept being discussed (a good marriage) a certain sense of stability, reminding the reader of long-lasting monuments and sturdy, yet grand buildings such as those in downtown D.C. — I am most reminded of the material that comprises the Washington Monument, for example . As for the main text, “me” is in extremely large, thick font at the upper center of the page, designed to catch the reader’s eye. Meanwhile, the ‘instructions’ and secondary text, including the gist of the ad, are done in readably-sized type in a direct, unfussy fashion of communication. Overall, the advertisement is trying to sell 1) a concept — working on a strong marriage is good and requires both parties’ involvement and 2) a service — the website that will help you strengthen your marriage.
When examining this advertisement through the framework of the Seven Principles of Visual Literacy, the most applicable principle I found was the third:
3. Viewers take an active part in interpreting visual information.
As the picture to the left of these explanation shows, the ad quite literally interprets this principle: it requires that the viewer actively participate in its message, whether mentally (picturing the final product as a mental image) or physically (dredging up some scissors from the silverware drawer). In this way, the advertisement relies on more than just form, or “looks” — it seeks a more involved, more active audience as well as providing an amusing thirty seconds or so of consideration.
This ad does not contain a large amount of background knowledge from its viewer: perhaps the acceptance of marriage as 1) something worth saving and 2) something that can be ‘worked on’ in ways such as those found on the website, or the ability to think spatially.
The company that produced this advert (website information above) does not offer a huge range of work examples, but many of these examples do have an “old fashioned” sort of theme connecting them (‘vintage’ pattern, faded colours, etc.), such as this advertisment. However, a large portion of their work appears to be in the medium of filmed advertisements, which would differ significantly from this kind, especially as these ads’ “gimmick” relies on their tangible nature.
I would envision the target audience as married couples post-honeymoon+newlywed-bliss who wish to receive more information about maintaining or improving their marriage: the poster emphasizes stability, togetherness, and many other things that a younger person or couple might shy away from.
I consider this ad unsuccessful for its cluttered design, unclear message, and lack of focus. Overall, I feel that the many elements, despite managing to communicate their message, do so in an unorganized and confusing way. In other words, had I found this advertisement on the pages of a magazine, I certainly would not have devoted the time to analyzing and discovering the message within the image.
Although the visual elements of the piece are strong: the blue shades are a unifying theme, as is the symmetry in the design, there are far too many elements crammed into the design: too many fonts, too many words, too many images. It presents an image of organized chaos — but chaos all the same, and something of the message is lost in the attempt to create a visually stimulating design. The overall composition reminds me of a 1970s photo album, from the disco ball to the broken couch to the neon roadside signs. All these in combination convey the message that Greyhound bus trips are a ‘retro’, yet cool way to experience the USA: not uncool, like “a dent in the couch.”
The most suitable principle of visual literacy for this advertisement would be #6:
6. Visuals present information in interrelated, non-linear ways.
Although there certainly is a “line” down the center of this page, there is certainly no linear way of thinking that would connect a broken, decades-old couch to the Greyhound bus system. However, the words — and there are many — in the advertisement attempt to connect the seemingly random images into a cohesive train of thought. The attempt, however, is only half successful.
The ad relies on the preconceived notion that Greyhound buses are “Tried and True, Simple ,Safe, and Boring,” and in turn the knowledge that Greyhound has been around for several decades now.
Unlike many of the earlier Greyhound ads, this one appears to be much less focused on the information (except for the blurb “Faster routes. Less stops.”) about the buses and the amenities or services they offer and more on the “Greyhound experience” — much like the idea from our earlier readings, that the “brand name” is more important than the “product”. Here, the ‘experience’ of being hip, moving fast, etcetera, is being sold, much less so than an actual ride from point A to point B.
I envision the target audience to be teenagers or young adults; those who have grown up with an era of two-plus cars per household and a view of public transportation as “creaky” and old-fashioned, as the ad focuses most heavily on revamping the image of Greyhound from frowzy and stolid to young and sleek.
24/01/2010
One of the three pieces that really caught my attention during my visit to the Hirshhorn was the 1963 sculpture-cum-installation Instability by Julio Le Parc:
from personal photographs (materials: wood, monofilament, mirrored plastic and plexiglass)
Some of the things that drew me to this piece:
Instability put me in a reflective kind of mood; it led me to think in suprisingly complex ways about the way viewers and artwork interact. It also reminded me a lot of windchimes, which also require interaction — in their case, wind or breath — to fully display their nature, and of icicles, and of rain: all natural phenomena. The strongest image it provoked, however, was that of a hippy-style beaded curtain, which was interesting: usually curtains keep something separated or tucked away, disguising whatever lies beneath. Here, however, the curtain hides only a flat black screen. Anyway, overall, this piece really seemed to capture the sense of a precarious balance between several matched pairs of attributes (light/dark, solid/fragile, etc.), and the inability of such an arrangement to stay so ordered, especially as it is acted upon by the audience, its viewers.
Directions, the exhibit of John Gerrard’s virtual landscape panoramas, also led me to think quite deeply about the way viewers interact with art. For example: during the requisite fifteen-minute watch period, only one of the four people who entered the exhibit sat down, and that woman only remained for three or four minutes. In the Dust Storm piece, half the camera rotation encompasses only flat prairie and blue sky; there is only the slightest tinge of reddish dust in the air to suggest the titular dust storm. The other half reveals a farm, a string of telephone wires, more buildings, and, abruptly, an enormous dust storm, rising from the flat and near-featureless plain. However, when one does not allow a full conversation (if you will) to occur between oneself and this installation — for example, by entering during the ‘flat plain’ sequence and leaving before the ‘dust storm’ images — the entire impact of the piece is altered, if not altogether lost.
As for the piece itself, I found that I enjoyed it much more than I originally expected. The first two mini-screens amazed me with their meticulously detailed images and lucid colours: I really felt like I was looking at the new video game Watch an Oil Rig or Pig Farms: Rise of the Pig. The large installation, however, reminded me less of a video game and more of a genuine panorama in that the images looked much more realistic, though this is potentially attributable to the blurrier images, lack of up-close details, etc. (I was fascinated to read that the dust storm was actually superimposed upon the original image of a prairie farm.). The first few minutes, which for me involved the tail end of the dust storm followed by seemingly endless prairie, were somewhat hard to focus on, but once I became more involved in the piece, I began to notice details: the perspective acquired by the introduction of the ever-advancing telephone poles, the undulating grass, the aforementioned haze of red dust.
from John Gerrard's personal website (http://www.johngerrard.net)
Although I was instantly convinced that the exhibition “re-imagine landscape art” (as the introduction to the exhibit claims), I was less sure that it “offer[s] meditations on the impact of our habits of consumption.” However, I was struck by a phrase from earlier in the description:”their [the pieces'] heightened effects also underscore the bleak ramifications of depleting natural resources.” I began to think about traditional landscape art and realized that it traditionally contains very little, if any, non-natural content: it is all rolling hills, virgin forests, sandy beaches, and the like, in contrast with the images presented in the exhibition, which included superimposed onto the same beautiful landscape the ugly machines and structures required by modern human life. In combination with the impact of the “heightened effects” — the super-clear dust storm was truly awe-inspiring and a little bit alarming, for example — these images perhaps suggest that modern landscape art has no choice but to include such human elements in its work to truly represent a modern landscape. It is sad to think that one day there will be no open prairie, rocky mountain, or translucent ocean that is not marred by such machines, which fuel — you guessed it — our “habits of consumption.” Maybe it is this aspect of Gerrard’s work that offers the aforementioned meditations.
Finally, I visited the Next Floor film in the black box theater of the Hirshhorn’s basement. I was slightly worried about what the film entailed, especially after listening to the noise/catching a few glimpses from outside while waiting for the beginning to arrive. Despite its minor grotesque elements, however, I thought the film was actually quite a focused piece with some elements of dark humor and a clear message about overconsumption at the cost of all else. It reminded me most of several short stories I have read in mystery compilations, all of which associate the overeating and gluttonous attitudes of their characters with death, especially violent death — the same kind of macabre tone that this film incorporates.
After reading the description, I was somewhat more aware of the film’s background, but I felt that the message portrayed by the film was clear enough to grasp without the aid of the description: if societies and cultures that embrace overindulgence (whether in food or in consumption of a more general sense) continue to do so with no regard for those around them, nor for the ever-increasing pace of destruction they are perpetuating, the ‘joke is on them’, and they will eventually self-destruct, much like the diners’ own habits and failure to heed the warning signs (falling through the floor, anyone?) led to their eventual doom. One of the most fascinating elements, to me, was the young woman at the table who, for the first half of the film, was clearly not enamored of the situation, at one point refusing to eat any more food. Yet she never went so far as to actually leave the table, for whatever reason, and ultimately was seen to “give in” and join in the wanton consumption, albeit with a tear on her cheek — a clear indication that she felt forced into the role. Still, this feeling does not save her from plummeting into infinity forever. After the film, I felt mildly uneasy — the sight of such gluttony almost turned my stomach, and the message really struck home with me — and a little bit shamed and saddened by the knowledge of my own participation in acts of consumption and thoughtless ‘gluttony’ in my life. Am I like the young woman, willing myself to leave the circle, yet never managing to break free?
24/01/2010
FYI:
These first two blog posts are in response to the assignment handed out during the first week of class: to complete some readings on the experience of looking at art, and then to visit the Hirshorn Museum (http://hirshhorn.si.edu/), one of the Smithsonian art museums on the southern side of the National Mall.
I visited the Hirshorn on a cloudy Wednesday afternoon, so I was worried about the likelihood of seeing other visitors, but there was a steady trickle of various people entering and exciting throughout the afternoon. Most of these people seemed to be either college-age students/workers (with their flexible weekday schedules) or tourists (with no weekday schedule at all). The result was a general low hum of activity and conversation for much of the afternoon, although I did notice people lowering voices and whispering, perhaps demonstrating the attitude, discussed in John Berger’s excerpt that an art museum is a kind of sacred space, like a “church” or “library” (Berger 24); when a group or person did engage in ‘loud’ or even ‘normal’ levels of conversation it seemed almost intrusive, even to me. It was intriguing to note the different ways that people responded to the artwork. There seemed to be two general ‘types’ of viewer: the students and the browsers. Students — not necessarily of student age — walked slowly through the rooms, stopping to focus particular attention on one or two pieces in each room. They carefully read the didactics, and seemed to spend a good length of time staring intently into the paintings or sculptures, as if attempting to see through them to the ‘real meaning’.Browsers spent no more than the average ‘three seconds’ on each piece of art, if that. They tended to walk fairly quickly through each room in the exhibitions, drifted in and out of the Directions video within a minute or so, and only slowed down before particularly impactful or meaningful pieces: for example, many stopped to reflect on the enormous Wall Drawing #1113 created by Sol LeWitt, perhaps because of its enormous scale:
from the Hirshorn Museum website (http://hirshorn.si.edu)
Like the above piece, much of the Hirshorn’s pieces attempt to redefine, challenge, and otherwise shape our collective notion of what “art” is. For example, many people seemed comfortable with the “realist” images in the gallery (realism here meaning that the work has an identifiable object or concept that it illustrates), such as Edward Hopper’s First Row Orchestra:
from personal photos
However, many of the more abstract pieces in the exhibition, such as this work, Untitled, by Willem de Kooning, were often less-examined; the people who did pay particular attention to such pieces seemed vaguely confused, studying the didactic for a long time as if hoping to discern some meaning that lay behind the seemingly random splashes and brushstrokes.
from the Hirshorn Museum website (http://hirshorn.si.edu)
This mirrors my own experience with such art: a struggle with the idea that “art” should have an easily grasped “object” and, therefore, a “meaning”. Joseph Berger suggests that notions such as this, of what art is or isn’t, are a part of the cultural mystification of art: the way society, hoping to retain the historic power associated with the knowledge and ownership of “art” in the face of increasing democratization, perpetuates myths about what art “should” be based on a mythos of what art “was” in the past. These myths cloud the lens with which the modern viewer sees art, “mystifying” the concept of art and separating viewers from the ability to view art, in all its forms, truthfully.
