Surreal: involves the bizarre, unlikely, and unexpected. Situations and images that feel detached from reality.
Salvador DalíThe Persistence of Memory, 1931Part of the surrealism art movement.
Kitsch: often described as tacky, garish, or in poor taste. Appeals to popular culture.
I am excited to start this project as it is yet again something I am unfamiliar with. However, I have no idea what I want to create. The artists that stood out to me the most from those discussed in class are David Hockney and Petra Cortright. In particular, I am drawn to their landscape paintings.
My books are all done! Today we learned how to use Japanese stab binding to bind the books. It seemed complex at first but once I got started it was simple. The hardest part was measuring.
I used the canon camera to take my photos. I had to manually change the brightness while taking some photos because the camera wouldn't do it. As a result my photos have a distinct grain. I think it gives them an older look, like photos from the early 2000's. I would not have achieved this effect with my phone camera so I'm glad I couldn't use it for this project.
I edited the photos very little. I only changed the lighting on some, and changed the sizes on all.
If I was to do this project again, I would have taken more photos so I could include more in my books. I am very happy with the ones I have though.
The Best Days, featuring my grandparents. I spent an afternoon with them and tried to capture their day with posed and candid photos. For this book I have a mix of colour and black and white photos. The colour photos have both my grandparents and the black and white have only one grandparent. I chose to do this because I liked the look of the photos both ways and I thought it was cute that the colour ones have the presences of all three of us, showing how I feel when we spend time together.
KC Adam's Resilience billboards spoke to me the most out of the examples on project 4's outline..It stood out because it calls out first impressions and negative stereotypes. The first photo is also similar to an ID photo in that the subject stares straight ahead, not smiling. The second photo is a more accurate depiction of the person, who they are as a person.
I also looked at Colberg's book on Photobooks. It helped me get a better sense of the layout of the pictures.
The Photobooks I chose to check out from the library are Glass House by James Wellington and Soviet Bus Stops by Christopher Herwig.
Glass House has only one subject, a house with walls of glass and it's surrounding landscape. Wellington has captures extremely vibrant colours in his photos. This makes a mundane subject matter interesting and fun to look at.
My second photo book has a similar premise. I spent a day with and photographed my grandparents. Each photo has at least one of them going about their daily lives. My photos are not nearly as vibrant as Wellington's, in fact, most are black and white. I liked having a book so full of colour to help guide my choice of using colour or black and white in my own work.
Soviet Bus Stops contains photos of bus stops from former Soviet Union countries including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, and Estonia. Interestingly, there are none from Russia.
A bus stop is such a common architectural feature in a city that they are typically overlooked. The ones that Herwig photographed are visually interesting, incorporating Middle Eastern styles and modern Western ones. Most look abandoned. I would be interested to know what they look like now.
This book relates more to my first photobook. My theme centres around my given vs. preferred name and how I relate to them. Herwig labelled all the bus stops he photographed as 'Soviet.' While not incorrect, each bus stop is distinct to the country it is from. Latvian or Estonian versus Soviet for example.
I also find the sizes of these Photobooks interesting. Glass House is long horizontally and short vertically. Soviet Bus Stops is longer horizontally but much smaller. Both are not the shape of a traditional book.
On Monday I started working on my first photobook. I created a number of images to use, but at the end of class Prof. Miller gave me a new idea. So, these photos will be for a third, hypothetical, photobook. I scanned my U of L ID, my drivers license, my U of Essex ID, and my passport. Using those photos I combined them in different ways.
This is the image I created during the Photoshop demo. It was my first time using this software, although I do have some experience in a free website called Pixlr. How many cats can you spot?
Here is a collection of the art I made for my other studio classes this semester! Landmarks Print With a Press Indigenous Art
