Our guest presenter this week was a photographer named Craig Hickman. It is a little difficult to write about his ideas and what he believes photography to be because we looked at photos of other artists during lecture. Towards the end of lecture though, he showed us a few of his photographs which were all doctored by photoshop. One student asked, “Why do you like photography and what do you think of it?” Craig replied, “I like the relationship it has to the world and even if you manipulate it, it’s believable.” I think that this is great because many photographs today are altered with photoshop but you can still always find something real about them because they were made from something real.
One artist that the guest speaker focused on was Nancy Rexroth. She used a cheap camera and captured some really amazing black and white photographs. The images she captured were very simple and serene.
I really loved this weeks reading and multimedia because I felt that it was very relevant to the world today. I was able to connect with it in a more relatable way. I must start off by saying I am obsessed with Alfredo Jaar’s work after this week. I thought that his pieces were so real and thought provoking that for the first time art made me feel vulnerable. I felt like the experiences he captured through those images were bigger than me.
When reading Jaar’s interview on the Rwanda project, Jaar talks about trying to create a balance between intellectual and emotional elements with his art. I think that he does this well with all of his pieces. One piece in particulars from The Gramsci Trilogy that communicated to me with these two elements was “Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom.” The way Jarr explains the idea behind this display was so powerful. He talks about keeping something alive only to destroy it and once its destroyed, replace it. I think this is something we do as a society a lot. We take simple things for granted and by not appreciating their beauty we destroy it.
The reading this week, “Photography as a Weapon” by Errol Morris was also very fascinating. The main focus of the article was how photographs can be very deceiving. This idea was shown with the missiles how originally there were only three but a fourth was photoshoped into the picture. An interesting quote by Errol Morris was “Captions do the heavy lifting as far as deception is concerned,” which I believe to be so true. You could have a picture of one thing and completely change what you are seeing by the caption attached to the photo. Errol explains this occurs because the side of our brain that processes our visual senses is in the back of the brain but our language center is on the side of the brain and therefore processed more strongly.
The connection that I made between this weeks presenter and the readings/multimedia was the idea of “fauxtography.” As we saw from Craig’s images, they were all manipulated to be believable and that is the same with the picture from the reading. The idea of altering a photograph ever so slightly to make things that are fake seem real is very deceiving.
Another connection that I made is that all the images, even though some were altered, came from something real. For example, with Craig’s images the background of the building and the lighting was real but the pictures that he photoshoped on weren’t. For the photo of the missiles, three of the missiles were real but one of them was altered.
I found this photo on the website listed below. I think that it shows the power of the caption and how no matter what the image is of, the power of language will overcome your visual. I also advise everyone to check out this website by Austin Kleon because the things he talks about go right along with what we are talking about in class this week.
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