Video for Art Project

I made a holster/belt for my art practices class. In addition to this after choosing the name and idea for a commercial, gave my photographs to my dear friend Benji and as a result, he made quite the rad video. Feel free to laugh at me cause I totally did. :) Have fun with it!

https://vimeo.com/63714004

Ideas for Photo Project

Abigail Reynolds

I find Abigail Reynold's work to be a great solution to modifying and enhancing a photograph. This image in particular, I am the most fond of. A few projects back, I incorporated paper folding by working with origami. Granted, I had to have more skilled origami makers complete the unicorn and chicken, but it did give me an appreciation for the kind of work that goes into paper folding and an appreciation for the aesthetic. This may be why the folding and shaping of the paper in this photo appeals so much to me. I regret that I have just seen her work because I would have attempted this technique on the last project. This does give me ideas for the final photo project. I think methods like this push photography into the next level and make them more of an art piece that can be appreciated on multiple levels. For people who argue whether or not photography is an art, they would have to rethink that logic when the art gets pushed even more through artistic modification.

Custom filters we created in class.

Rephotograph Diptychs.

Initially, I had driven to Galisteo and Santa Fe to do my rephotographs. My rephotograph of the plaza was not as interesting as the Galisteo and Northrop Hall photos I had taken, so I omitted the Galisteo church from my selection. When I went to the archives, they informed me that the Galisteo photos were in the Santa Fe archives and it would be expensive and time consuming in order to acquire them. This forced me to look for a new photo. As  result, I found the flagpole incident photo. This worked out better in the end because I felt like this photo was much more dynamic than my previous choices. The original photos are so powerful that I wanted to contrast that high energy with little to no energy. This is why I also chose to leave people out of my rephotographs. Hopefully, I accomplished my goal of creating two opposite moods to exaggerate the high energy of the old photograph to create a more powerful overall impact. The first photograph shows the construction of Northrop Hall and the building from the same angle as it stands today. The second photo was more challenging due to the addition of the front part of the building of Johnson Center, which covers the building in the original photo. I got as close I could to the vantage point and tried to match the location of the 1970 flagpole incident as best as I could.

Mark Klett & Byron Wolfe

The amount of detective work that goes into the reconstructing old photos of the Rio Grande Canyon is immense. It makes sense that Klett and Wolfe chose to collaborate on this project. Making sure the scale is close, the lightning is identical (timing), and that the angle is correct, are all crucial elements in creating a well done rephotograph. I liked how they took the old photographs and post cards and would insert sections of the new photographs within them. Will we be able to do this in our project? It seems like that would be more of a technical challenge and would captivate the viewer more because you get to compare the two photos as one distinct piece instead of two separate images.

Andre Kertesz

  Although I really enjoyed Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's and Man Ray's work, I found Andre Kertesz to have an overall greater appeal. I found all of his photos to be lovely on some level. He seems to capture humanity in a way that tells a story. He reminds me of what it means to be alive. What a beautiful experience life is and how intriguing people are. He is also very creative and I find magic and life in his photos. His photos are alive. They are memories and youth made immortal by the lens. People and places, frozen in time. In a time where there was momentum and high energy. I think of lives as flames that burn brightly, but burn out over time. In some ways his work is uplifting, but it is also heartbreaking because these moments and some of the people in these photos, have been lost with the passing of time and we are left with the ghosts of what they once were.