Title: Graffiti, Graves and Veterans in Photographic Terms

338 notes Photography 338 Proposal for Final by Victoria Vallis Title: Graffiti, Graves and Veterans in Photographic Terms Abstract: The countless opportunities for the artistic eye to apply photographic concepts of the keys to composition. Description of the Project: John Baeder has an obsessive passion for handmade street signs, and is a knowledgeable, deeply committed chronicler of that rapidly disappearing facet of American vernacular. Sign Language- Street Signs as Folk Art by John Baeder discusses street signs. As folk art that have played a unique role in our social and cultural history, in that their subjects are gentle , and lyrical. He is deeply in love with this focus and his personal responses add new meanings to these simple, and often touching, public declarations. Baeder offers revealing observations about folk art and real life and tells the reader much about letterforms, compositions and brushwork of his favorite signs. But, more importantly, Baeder sees everything as its own size in its proper environment. His photographs fit into their urban context like modest folk heroes. Half Life by Rosamond Wolf Purcell Most photos in the book are made by reflecting one subject with details from a painting or photo from another, some presented in color and others in black and white. The book consists of four sections. In Cabin Fever, the first one, we can see among the eleven (11) plates some half human, half animal creatures that don't make us look too long. In parts of the book -The Exquisite Corpse- showing distorted mirror reflections. Crossing Over, R.E.M., and other collages of images. Disavows by Francois Leperlier Eikoh Hosoe is a Japanese photographer and filmmaker began photographing in the 1950's. While photography of the period sought to document the real world, Hosoe used photographs to recreate memory, exploring not only his personal childhood memories but also the nation's collective memory of the trauma of wartime and of the atomic bombings. A classic example of courageous innovation in photography, and a must-have. experimental arts movement of post-World War II Japan. He is known for his psychologically charged images, often exploring subjects such as death, erotic obsession, and irrationality. We tend to forget or ignore the unfamiliar and the evident. The artists’ first solo exhibition of photographic works, Mike Mandel’s and Larry Sultan’s Evidence is a collection of found images taken from public and private American institutions, corporations, and agencies. In 1977, after sorting through the local picture archives at a California NASA office, the young artists, just out of their graduate studies, received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to continue the work in other such spaces. After sorting through a hundred archives that chronicled America’s frontier into the technologically advanced future, they carefully selected a dynamic batch of images to be sequenced loosely into a book and exhibition. By relating the familiar, often taken for granted, to an unfamiliar context, a yin and yang balance is created. Collage and conceptualism are a homegrown art movement. In the perception of continuity, gaps are often filled in. If a picture is plucked from its original context, and combined with artistic value or conceptualism, it takes on another form and fantasy meaning. Sometimes humorous, nonsensical and mysterious in nature, this image can be fragmented, paradoxical and subversive Conjoined photographs without apparent meaning become an unpretentious, and dreamlike landscape of provocative aura. The subtle transitions become a melancholic, bizarre phenomenon of hidden meanings and strangely forceful logic. Half Life reemerges as an allusion to ideas similar to a glance from the corner of the eyes. The forces of camouflage, dreams, memories and impressions are a true chameleon. The representation of an image of the same subject from varying distance, and angles, in a montage of experimental viewpoint, moves the viewer to visualize overlooked parallels and interpreted identities. Francis Leperlier describes cahun’s work in Disavows as “ not only reflects a crucial moment in the passage from symbolism to surrealism, but in many ways exceeds them both… it develops a radical, subversive, unclassifiable, infinitely open line of thought.” Immogen Cunningham was the most experimental, independently sophisticated photographer on the west coast during the mid1900’s. Far ahead of her time in use of strong shadows, contrasts of light, and transposing images, while using negative space, curves and movement. Her avant-garde aesthetic ideology and futuristic interest in detailed pattern, emphasizing clarity of form and abstraction created visual metaphors and purity of image. She also employed techniques of montage, double exposure, and transposing of tonal values to produce phenomenas of surrealism and strong, bold, exciting forms. Light 7 describes the overlapping of psychology, art, science and religion as the connection to the spiritual cosmos that occurs when a camera lifts an image out of context. A state of suspended intuition or spirit is perceived as light carries messages of shadow, reflection and mirror images to exceptional states of heightened perception. Divola exhibits the cryptic, haunting filmsets of the 1930’s and 40’s, which conjure up the mad scientist, fallen woman, and gangster,. These temporal out takes document an artificial unity of space and time. Featuring rich shadows and highly saturated blacks, this film noir of the 40’s radiates melancholy beauty of excluded moments and possibilities. Ann Hindry reviews the photographic works of Sophie Rustehueber as having “ a vague sense of a hidden content that keeps one’s perception in a state of suspense.” She describes the photographs as slices of reality without any embellishment or masquerade camouflaged in visual euphemism. These metaphorically based allusions are ambivalently placed between reality and fiction. Dorthea Lange in her book In focus, picks one in a crowd to stand out and represent the masses. Muralist use this same technique. She also employs the photographic techniques of thirds, strong contrasts, directorial point of view, diagonal perspective and playing with the light. Through this photographic journey I intend to portray levels becomes clearer. Methodology: Conclusion: production of this series will take much longer. Hours of photoshop preparations and printing time will conclude this project in time for finals. As few as 10, but as many as 20 photos will portray the examples of photographic concepts, memorializing the . Budget: Photos will be printed on 19 by 13 Epsom Luster . The budget includes price of paper and printing, research, time and equipment, a Cannon Eos digital camera,and tripod. Bibliography: An Afternoon in Astoria by Rudolph Burckhardt, Art Publishers, New York, 2002 Aperature, Masters of Photography by Eikoh Hosoe, Aperature Foundation, 1999 Continuity by John Divola, Imart Art Press & Ram Publications, 1997 Disavows by Claude Cahun, Mit Press, 2008 Evidence by Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, Art Publishers, New York, 2003 Half Life by Rosamond Wolf Purcell. Publisher David R Godine, Boston 1980 In Focus by Dorothea Lange, Getty Publications, 2002 Light7 by Minor White, MIT Press, 1968 Sign Language- Street Signs as Folk Art by John Baeder, Harry Nabrams Inc, Publishers, 1996 Sophie Rustelhueber by Ann Hindry, Hazan Press, 1998 The Modernist Years, by immogen Cunningham, Trevillle Co. Ltd., 1993