The
photographs that I took for this project were simply to document. I took photos
during our process, construction of the letters and then on site to show the
progress that our group had made, display how we got from the beginning to end.
But in the
Steve Edwards reading, I thought it was really interesting when the author
discussed how an artist who could copy down the details of world around them
perfectly with a pencil, today highly valued, was once considered a “rude
mechanic” and “mindless”. The academics saw it as a mere physical labor type
job, and valued positions where one had to think and create originally, so art
moved along with that thinking and became more abstract and idealized. I also
learned photography’s role in colonializing, how it helped the Europeans
separate themselves from their colonial counterparts. The reading overlapped
with our photojournalism unit in my Journalism 101 class, as we also discussed
the role of a social activist in photography and the photo “The Valley of the
Shadow of Death” by Roger Fenton. I thought the distinction between documentary
photography and artistic photography was interesting, because for my entire
life people have been postulating that all photography is art. I’m not sure if
it is really so black and white on either side. I think photographs taken
simply for documenting can be incredibly beautiful, and that photos taken for
beauty can equally come off as bland as a document. As long as they are not
staged, as the reading discusses. I think they can interchange. And in way, all
photography documents this time and place, the subject of the photo will always
show people in the future what that time looked like.
I
thought this reading was relevant and important for us to look at because of
all of the detail it gives about photography and its evolution in the world.
Today, we have cameras on every device. It seems that everyone is a
photographer and with apps like Instagram, people don’t even need to know how
to edit photos with Photoshop. Photography seems quite easy to us, but we don’t
often think about the meaning of what we are doing. From the reading we learn that
there is a lot of power in images, especially ones for documenting. Now, as
design students, we can be conscious of our decisions when taking photographs
for art or documenting.
From the “Photo Ops” reading, I got a
refresher on what they taught me in high school photography class. It was nice
to see some great examples of symmetry, asymmetry, repetition, framing, and
movement. And the other pages about continuous mode, exploration and close-ups
give ideas for inspiration for the next time I take photos. I thought this
reading was good because it reminded me of the basics of photography and gave
me a few ideas on what to try out the next time I’m taking photos.
