Art 328 SP 2016 Digital Photography: Project 3: Extending the image

Reading: Chapter 7

Prelim critique: 4/18

Final Critique: 4/27
Prints due: 4/27*
Large-format print files due: 4/25

* If you will be printing individual letter size, tabloid or Super B size prints, please do your own printing. If you will need oversized, large-format prints (say of grids or panoramas), please speak to instructor well in advance about setting up your files correctly and arranging for large-formal printing.

Background

Cartier Bresson...example of "The Decisive Moment"

As photographers, the frame is perhaps our most important tool. With the camera, we "frame" our subjects, including what we feel is important for the picture, and excluding what isn't. Essentially, we are editing from the visual world with our frame. A common goal in photography is to try and get it all in one frame—to create a singular image that conveys our full expression, sharp, clear, with a single point of view.

Further, we capture single points in time, often orphaned from the longer story. They float, untethered without revealing what came before or after, or for that matter, what else was going on at that time.

There's value in all this—but it can also be limiting!

How can we extend the story of a photograph? What happened before our decisive moment? What happened after? What did the other person see? What about the fly on the wall? Sometimes we need multiple images, multiple frames to convey the breadth and richness of our visual story.

For this phase of the course, we will explore the following modes. For this project, explore one of the following below.

Narrative Sequence
Conceptual Series
Multiples (diptych/triptych)
Typology
Expressive formats

1. Narrative Sequence

How can photography be used to create a narrative sequence, to convey a story through time? Think about change and movement...what changes? What moves? What stays the same? How does this change tell a story?

Duane Michals (and here https://vimeo.com/40237404) used extended sequences of images to convey complex and (often amusing) narratives. Some of these visual story lines went in a straight lines, sometimes they made bizarre circles and spirals.

Grandpa Goes to Heaven, Duane Michals

Chance Meeting, Duane Michals

Countless photographers have borrowed his approach to make narratives of their own.

E.Sariozkan

elodie fougère

The Personal Telling of Story

Jennifer Shaw

New Orleans photographer Jennifer Shaw illustrates the trials her family faced during and in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The images are told through the use of toys and figurines.

http://jennifershaw.net/hurricane-story/

Metaphoric narrative

The photographer Masaru Goto created a compelling narrative documenting the difficult subject of his mother's sickness, decline and eventual death. He draws a comparison between the life-cycle of cherry trees passing through the four seasons from the blossom stage through the shedding of leaves as extended metaphor for the phases of a human life, from full glory to eventual decline. The result is sad, but poetic and contemplative.

Ideas to get started:

Create a character and story...depict this visually, telling the story through a sequence of images. Shoot in a way that links the images together in a coherent way.
Choose or stage a sequence of actions and consequences that are related...show us the before, during and after in a compelling way. Even better, throw in a twist or surprise.
Illustrate a recent (or current) news event using a fictional or illustrative approach. Instead of photographing the actual events, recreate the event in a compelling or believable way through a sequence of images
Take a photo every hour for a day...document what you are doing or seeing. Or what someone else is seeing or doing. What stays the same in every photo? What changes?
Same place different time...photograph the same place, the same way, but at a different time...vary by minute, hour, day, week...decide one method and keep it constant
Same person different time...photograph the same person, the same way, but at a different time...vary by minute, hour, day, week...decide one method and keep it constant.

2. Thematic Conceptual Series

Andrew Moore captures how time and economic forces, seemingly beyond our control, can change a city. He depicts decaying structures related to the auto industry in Detroit, to tell a sad story of a city that was once a vibrant and thriving place. Each photograph carries an echo of the past, and is operates very tightly around the central idea. While each image is strong, the work should be considered the whole series, rather than the individual photos.

Denis Darzacq creates images of individuals in ordinary settings that appear to defy gravity. The project gains strength through repetition and variation within this theme.

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HonzF8LbLE

3. Multiples (diptych, triptych, etc.)

On more of a documentary, story-telling mode, Lucia Ganieva, creates rich biographical portraits of people relating their persona to their vocation, past, workplace, etc. using diptychs and triptychs. Notice how the frames work together to build meaning.

Uta Barth is a photographer of place. Instead of creating visual descriptions of places, like a traditional landscape photographer would do, she is more interested in evoking or suggesting how we experience places. Often working with multiple frames, she changes the scale, plane of focus (in some she focuses on the "space between" foreground and background), in an attempt to more closely mimic the process of human perception, as well as the passage of time.

4. Typology

Jeffrey Milstein creates a typology of aircraft.

Bernd and Hilla Becher are particularly associated with this mode of art

Jeff Brouws

Artists like these are concerned with cataloging and "collecting" with their camera. For instance, Brouws isn't interested in singular train cars, but the almost endless variations between numerous cars. Working with a mode called typology, he creates grids that simultaneously show similarity and contrast.

Idis Khan quite literally quotes Bernd and Hilla Becher's work with industrial architecture, but layers the multiple variations of structures within a single frame instead of a grid.

There is a long history in photography of objectification based on race, gender, stereotypes and notions of the "other". African Americans have been notably objectified in this way. Photographer Myra Greene turns the tables on this history with her clever and effective series: "My White Friends".

5. Expressive formats

Essentially these are a form of what the book author terms joiners, or many-make-one, extended images that functions like fragmented panoramas both vertically and horizontally. David Hockney is well known for working this way. The following images, by Hockney, show some variations of this approach. How do they differ?

This last Hockney image begins to imply the passage of time—in particular, the time it takes to shift one's gaze, looking around a room, or having a conversation. Uta Barth, mentioned above, also references the time we take to experience and perceive reality, often working with diptychs that reveal a few minutes' difference in time.

Margaret Hiden is explores how family histories can be told through narratives that blend the past and present to form richer tapestry of telling. Here, images function much like memory... where our present is continually colored by the echos of the past.

Michael Taylor explores how light and time relate, creatine some very interesting abstracted imagery.

Project Description

For this project, create imagery in an extended format that engages a strong concept. Choose one:

Narrative Sequence

Conceptual Series

Multiples (diptych/triptych)

Typology

Expressive formats

The content and concept are as important as format. Think it through.

Output methods... what you will physically make and turn in

For series and sequence, a digital book can be a nice format. Digital books from blurb or Apple would represent your final prints. Letter size physical prints are also fine.

For grids and multiple images, generate large file that includes all the supporting images. If you are doing a grid, this would mean one file depicting the grid. For diptychs, this would mean building one file that contains two images.

How much to do? If you are doing diptychs or triptychs, turn in at least 5 separate ones. If you are doing a series, aim for 8-12 images. It depends on your project—discuss with instructor.

All of your individual photos that go into this project should be edited appropriately in photoshop. This includes the skills covered so far in class: WP/BP, global tone adjustments (brightness and contrast using curves and/or camera raw), color adjustments, local adjustments (dodge and burn, blending mode curves with masks), sharpening. All Raw conversions must be smart objects.