mark's project #2 statement of intent
By the time I started taking pictures, I had practically forgotten the assignment. All I really remembered was outdoors. So outdoors I went, to the top of a parking structure where I took lots of pictures that I would end up not using. However, there was a reason to go up there, even if no art came from it, I had wanted to take pictures of lines (not remember that that was even an example theme!) and that's all I could think of. Buildings have lines, and buildings look interesting from above, right?. Most of the pictures were uninspiring but they got the tacky out of my system and on the way home I began shooting pictures at a park, then outside my house, and finally in it. After pondering the concept of lines the an hour to, on, and from the parking structure, I had become quite focused on the concept of lines and by the time I returned home, they began to pop out everywhere!
I have been surprised that, of the three pieces, two were largely staged. The photography that seemed good was slight visual lying, but why was it better than the organic images of the surrounding environs? I was a little disappointed that I could not capture real life in a sense, but maybe I was disatisfied only because I wanted to see things that I wasn't really seeing. The problem was that I didn't not notice the absence of what I thought existed until reviewing pictures on the computer screen. At least I didn't have to develop them individually to discover that.
In all three pictures, the lines act differently. In one, the obscured outdoor photo, the lines create the visual interest, whereas in the tacky stapler picture, they are the negative space. Finally, in the self-portrait, the lines interupt and bring back parts of my body and face.
In the end, I am rather happy with all three. I don't know if the stapler counts as tacky, but I have decided it will for now at least. The choice of black and white hopefully brought that out. The lines in each photo served different purposes and each photo had a wildly different level of detail, something I really like. In a sense, it's a lot like the game of set. The photos all have lines but they also work together because every other characteristic of each image differs from the other two rather drastically.