Book Critique

I was so impressed by the variety of books that were passed around today! Everyone was so creative with the different styles. It was definitely exciting to be able to look through them.

Amanda Markell- I love how you did an Accordion book but chose to bound the covers together. The pictures were very interesting and I felt like I was right there and could hear the music! I want to know where those pictures were taken. I like how simple your cover and your overall design was.

Sophia Lupi- I really like how tiny and pillow like your book is. I saw you sewing a couple of days ago and wondered what you were doing! It took me a little time to figure out how to open it up, but I really like how you didn't the covers. I'm not quite sure what exactly your topic was, but I like how small the pictures are because it made me have to get up closer to the book to see the pictures more clearly.

Amy Bergeron- I enjoyed how abstract your photos of glass are. I like how some of them I could figure out what was beyond the glass and some of them I couldn't at all. I really like how your pictures filled the whole page and how your design was very simplistic.

I really liked this project and I'm hoping to be able to make an accordion book at some point but with time constraints I figured the e-book would be the best solution for my own book this semester.

My Book!

My book came in earlier this week & I'm very happy with the way it came out. It's made up of pictures of my sister and me growing up with quotes about sisters & siblings on each page. I'm planning on giving it to my mother after the semester is done.

Beyond The Single Image

This project didn't come out exactly as I envisioned it,  but I think that I may rework it for my final project... maybe.

Artist Lecture : Michael Cardinali

I was excited to see that Michael Cardinali was going to have an artist lecture because I have him as a professor for the second time this year and I was interested to see what his work was really like. After already taken one of his classes, I knew that he had worked mostly in New York and a little bit in Boston after moving up this way to go to school at Mass Art. I wasn't quite sure, prior to the lecture, what he actually liked to photograph or what inspired him. I learned that he particularly enjoyed photographing things he saw on a pretty regular basis. He mentioned how many of scenes he has photographed in the past were from his running route or his route to work/school. I found it especially interested to learn that his process of choice (for most of his work) was a platinum palladium process. I knew that he enjoyed film photography more than digital photography, just from being in his classes, but it was very interesting to learn about how he went from shooting only in black and white, to expanding to color film and how it opened him up to a whole new world. I enjoyed how enthusiastic he was about how photography can sort of trick the viewer into thinking an image might be one thing, when it's actually another. He told a few childhood stories that explained his path into majoring into photography. I liked how with many images, he related back to some of his stories and his earlier images. Although, many of the photographs he chose to show during the presentation were landscape or nature photos, I think the ones he chose to show of the figure worked nicely. I like how the presentation showed his growth throughout college and I could definitely see changes and maturity as a photographer. Overall, I thought Cardinali's lecture was inspiring and definitely made me see my professor differently (and more positively) than I had prior to attending the lecture.

Criticizing Photographs: Chapter 8

In the final chapter of his book, Barrett finally talks about writing about photographs. He makes an important point: you need to be interested by a photograph in order to write about it. He suggests that while you're looking and studying a photograph, to write down some notes of things that come to mind when you first look at an image. This simple exercise will help to get your mind thinking artistically and help you remember what you originally thought of the image. He also mentions that it is important to try to look at the photograph from a point within the photograph. It's sort of like placing yourself inside the frame and looking at the scene in front of you, as if you were the photographer. I've never really done this exercise before, but I think it would be interesting to try it out. He also says how important it is to talk about photographs, like in the critique setting we have here in our photography department at UNH. I personally enjoy the critique setting we have here because it allows us to all build off one another, maybe seeing things we hadn't originally noticed. It also gives the artist a chance to listen to the other students' impressions of the work and maybe the viewers see things that the artist hadn't intended. This type of critique setting also helps for future projects, because as the viewers are discussing a particular work, it can trigger ideas in the artist's head about things to do differently next time, etc.

Criticizing Photographs: Chapter 7

This chapter is about theories and the importance of theories in photography. Barrett questions whether theories are necessary to photography. He points out that theories are made by all types of people associated with photography and art. When you look at a photograph, you begin to develop your own theory almost instantly. Barrett moves on to talk about the truth of photographs. Now personally, I would rather not alter my images via Photoshop or some other program. It seems like the point of photography, at least when it was first developed, is to record the truth of an event or scene. However, many war photographers would move things around in a scene to make it more interesting, therefore, altering an image in a way. Also, since the very beginning of photography as a medium, people have gone back and forth about whether it should be considered art. I think that all types of photography can be considered art, however, not all photographs show the truth. Photographs only show the viewer what the photographer wanted to show.

Barrett also goes on to talk about the morality of photographs. Is it moral to show someone dying of an incurable disease? Would anyone even want to look at that, let alone purchase it? He mentions a photojournalist, Rankin Waddell, who was just down the street from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and how Waddell decided not to photograph the destruction. Waddell said "I didn't want to mediate it in any way, to document it in any way, deal with it like that. I wanted to deal with it personally. I thought, 'My experience of this is not going to be through photography.'" (page 191) Other photographers might have jumped at the opportunity to photograph this event, but Waddell didn't.

It's important to remember that with all the new technology developing around us, things might not look as they seem. We are now taught to question whether a photograph has been manipulated or if it's a pure image. It's becoming more difficult to decipher what is true and what is false, however with all the new developments, the creative possibilities are endless.

Regarding the Pain of Others

Susan Sontag provokes us to think about what it's like to view violence and pain of all types through photographs. Do photographs about war, starving children, or dead bodies sensitize us to the violence going on around the world? Should we be changed by looking at such photographs? Sontag doesn't try to answer these questions, but instead aides us in creating our on conclusions. She gives a brief history of photo-journalism and war photography. She questions whether war photographs, those which depict gruesome scenes, are considered art. She considers the fact that some war photographers moved corpses to create a "better" photograph and whether these actions made the photos better or worse. Sontag explains that war photographs, no matter what type of experience you've had with war, are supposed to shock you. They're supposed to make you think about things outside your own life and your own hardships. Sontag points out that in every photograph that shows some form of pain, whether the photograph is of a wounded soldier or a starving child, that people were affect by the scene presented in that photograph. That wounded soldier had a family and that starving child had the potential for something greater than him or herself. However, some people might look at those types of photographs for hours, and still not understand the meaning behind them.

I've had numerous conversations in history classes about how desensitized the younger generations are becoming, simply because of everything on the television these days. Video games and movies are becoming increasingly violent, too many things on the news at night is negative and same goes for the newspapers. It's amazing how quickly the most violent or gruesome of photos race around the internet when they are first uploaded. It seems like people sometimes aren't as upset as they should be when certain subjects are photographed. This book made me think about how every person in the world is fighting their own battles. Some might not be a devastating as war or poverty, but everyone is united by the fact that we're all fighting a battle of some kind. As our next project is rapidly approaching, I'm still having some issues deciding what to focus on. I think it might be interesting to focus on something less gruesome than war or poverty, but rather something on a smaller and more individualized level. We shall see though.