Free Shoot #9: Photographing the "Playground"

Thoughts on Animations

I have mixed feelings about this project. The final result was rather satisfying- watching everyone's animations was entertaining, thought-provoking and fun. The idea of linking still photographs together in order to bring, in my case, food and foil to life is an interesting concept that delights the eye and is incredibly mesmerizing. However, the process of creating these animations was rather frustrating and not the most enjoyable experience. The iMovie glitch was just annoying and I got tired of trying to "trick" the program into letting me do what I want. Photographing the images was also not a highlight of the project- I felt like the assignment became more about generating hundreds of images than about employing good photographic techniques and skills to create visually stimulating images. I guess one could argue that the unification of the hundreds of images is what ended up being visually stimulating. It seems with this assignment, photography was merely one of several tools we could work with and the project was more about the thought process of choosing and animating a subject as opposed to producing great photographs . I don't know- it's a process and approach I find intriguing and worthy of exploration.

And, oh yeah, my camera broke when it took a dive off the tripod during this assignment. That was not fun either and certainly shifts my mixed feeling towards the negative end of the spectrum...

Animations: Bringing Food and Foil to LIFE

Free Shoot #8

Photographic Lies

ALINE SMITHSON, take 2

I discovered Aline Smithson while at a Fourth of July party in my friend’s mother’s friend’s house. I was immediately drawn to a framed photograph on the hallway wall and, needless to say, learned it was the work of Aline Smithson. While I do not explicitly remember what the photograph was of (I think a boat in a lake…), I do remember being attracted to its strong use of light, composition and the sense of “purity” and simplicity it emitted. After divulging in more of her work, I was really impressed with her photographs and the approach she employs. I am particularly drawn to her ambition to explore everyday life with humor and integrity and capture the familiar, yet unexpected, through both black and white and color photography. She says, “The odd juxtapositions that we find in life are worth exploring, whether it is with humor, compassion, or by simply taking the time to see them” and I really admire this approach. Smithson wants herself and her viewer to “linger” within an image and is trying to evoke nostalgia and a “universal memory”. She successfully achieves this by purposively isolating her subjects in a certain manner (esp. in her children photographs) and limiting the amount of “action” within the frame. She often photographs a single person or a single object which, for me, forces me to ask more questions…why this one object? Why this one person? What’s the underlying significance of a half empty cereal bowl?


Her "Portrait of the Photographer’s Mother" series is relevant to the recent collaborative assignment in class and is thus worth mentioning. In this series (as well as Vintage Modern), Smithson is supplementing photography with hand oil painting in order to create color work. I personally find them very humorous and demonstrate her expansive creativity and artistic skills exceptionally well. Through her use of paint, she is able to individualize each photograph and make it evoke a distinct response. She is using a traditional painting off of which to base her work as well as traditional photographic techniques to create something very untraditional. I like it.

Reaction to Photographic Lies Assignment

This project was challenging but rewarding for a number of reasons. How to approach this assignment was the first major challenge for reasons that are rather apparent based on our class discussions; lying’s role in photography is extremely subjective and can be interpreted very arbitrarily. I chose to present a pretty straightforward and blatant lie by placing Bowdoin in locations other than Brunswick. The second major challenge this project presented me with was how to successfully convince people that Hubbard Hall was actually a part of the landscape of Italy, London, Copenhagen etc. Having no background of Photoshop whatsoever, the process of creating my photos was incredibly frustrating. At times I was made well aware of what a “language” Photoshop constitutes and me not speaking Photoshop fluently made the process of manipulating these images very time consuming and trying in the beginning.

Aesthetically and technically speaking, I am very pleased with the final results. I think the cityscape sunset images of London and Edinburgh were particularly successful due to the subtle incorporation of Hubbard Hall. In retrospect, I sort of wished I had used this approach for all my images because I think these were the ones that challenged my viewers the most. I spent a great deal of time questioning how to present my images and am happy with my decision to turn them into tangible “postcards”, which added another dimensionality of lying (even though they might not be that convincing). I would have liked to experiment more with the back of the card however, by perhaps including a written message. Unfortunately, a limited amount of time prevented me from exploring potential possibilities.

It was rather interesting to see how the rest of the class approached this assignment and I was particularly impressed with the varying degrees of interpretation. The wide assortment of topics speaks to just how subjective and interpretative photographic lies truly are.