Regarding the Pain of Others- chapter 5&6

" Photographs tend to transform, whatever their subject; and as an image something may be beautiful- or terrifying, or unbearable, or quite bearable- as it is not in real life" (page 76)

        Sontag is trying to say that even a gruesome war photograph can be beautiful in its own way. She says, "There is beauty in ruins".  She mentions it is probably very hard for people to acknowledge the beauty in images of war. But sometimes you have to look past the devastating part and look through the image.
    Then she goes on to talk about how photographs objectify. She mentions that people or objects tend to look or feel "better" in a photograph. She says one of photography's function is to improve the normal appearance of things.


       Chapter six explains how everyone has an inner torment. For example, when people drive past a bad accident, every car all a sudden slows down, not because  they have to but they are interested in the pain of others. No matter how much people say they don;t want to see that kind of stuff, we do. We are naturally interested in the pain of others.

Goya- The Disasters of War

Goya- The disasters of War

Regarding the Pain of Others- chapter 3&4

           Chapter three talks about how war photographs awaken, shock and wound the viewer. The Disasters of War is an example that does this. These photographs are meant to make a statement.
           My favorite quote that really stood out to me was (page 46), "It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude." A photographer has a lot of control with what goes into the frame and what they chose to keep out. This tool can make images look different than they really are. Even before photoshop and technology, photographers could still manipulate their images. It has also been possible for photographs to misrepresent.
       "The camera is the eye of history" (page 52) - Brady has suppose to had said. I feel like this is an on going theme throughout her writing. She talks a lot about the history of war. She emphasizes how the photographs tell us what happened.

        These chapters also talk bout how many war photographs were actually set up. This was very surprising to me. I never would have thought any of those images of war were set up. I feel like they lose their value is they are set up. They are suppose to be a real moment and knowing that they are set up takes away from that.

The Valley of the Shadow of Death

      

Regarding the Pain of Others- chapter 1 & 2

The author of Regarding the Pain of Others , Susan Sontag,  brings up many important points about photography in the first couple chapters. She defiantly  shows how passionate she is about war images and photography. She never once says that she is passionate about war photography but it comes out in her writing. She writes in a very powerful way.  These chapters mainly explained how powerful photography is and many people forget how powerful it actually is. She talks about how war photographs show what is real, instead of ignoring what is going on in the world. These chapters also explain that photographs of war are used to shock people and scare people so they understand the insanity of war and how bad war actually is. Photographs are more powerful than we all know. A picture of dead soldiers really shows the realness of war and doesn't try to hide the blood or bad parts of war. If photographs try to make war look good than people won't understand what those soldiers are really going through.  These chapters explain how photography can be used for advertising to get people to feel a certain way about the image or product being sold.

A quote I really liked from chapter two (page 25) is, "Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination today, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real."  - Walter Lippmann

Walter Lippmann

This quote really made me think and showed me how powerful war photographs are. They are real and these images can not be ignored.

Some of James Mullen's work

I really enjoyed these two pieces of work that James showed in the artist lecture. I liked how the first image kind of shows what we have to do for our next project. You read from one side to the next. The pictures work together.  I also like the second image because the image reads from front to back or vice versus. You eyes move through the piece of work!

James Mullen

James Mullen

Lecture 1: James Mullen

          This was my first artist lecture I have ever been too. I really enjoyed it. I was kind of nervous at first that the presentation was going to drag on and be boring. But I was completely wrong. James Mullen, a previous undergraduate from UNH, understood how boring some presentations used to be in art history. He started his presentation off by saying that he was going to go through the information quickly and not stay on one slide for 20 minutes.  His presentation included many examples of his work, but also the people that influenced him. He got his BFA in 1985 and his MFA in 1991. He received many awards. He started off his career just by doing paintings. Painting is what he was most interested in at UNH. His drawing one teacher, Craig, was one of his biggest influences. He had a very structured class and taught James a lot. It was interesting to see him talk about a teacher that is still here at UNH. He also mentioned John Hatch as a big influence in his life. This is where he got the influence to work with landscapes. James Mullen did a lot of work with landscapes. He also started to play around with the idea of still- lifes and landscapes in the same painting. This was very interesting to see and it was my favorite out of all of his work. He did a very good job making the balance work between the two.  He also worked with sculptures his senior year. He also explained how he was very shy as an undergraduate so this forced him to do a lot of self-portraits. He was intimidated by asking other people to pose for him.
            After his first 25 years working in the studio and having all of the time in the world, his life changed drastically. He became a father. This was a very big change in his life. He no longer had time to spend hour after hour in the studio. He had to some how change the way he worked to fit in his studio time and also his loving children. This is when he started looking at digital photography and incorporating that into his work. At first he just took pictures every where he went and later he formed them into paintings. He mentioned he was not a good photographer before he had children but I think he started to have a passion for it. After working with digital photography, he started to become really interested in panoramas. John Hatch used to do a lot of panoramas so he influenced James. This kind of work reveals the image from one side to the other. He also mentioned that it revealed time.
         The last part of his presentation, he explained how technology was involved in is later work because of having children. He used an iphone application that automatically made a panorama. They were really interesting looking and it really surprised me.  He also worked a lot with photoshop. He mentioned that he was very interested in using technology because the difference in time. It will take about 2 months to make just one painting but can take 2 sec. to make a beautiful digital image.
         Overall I really enjoyed this artist lecture. I feel like I got a lot out of it. I'm very happy that my first lecture was a good one because I would love to go to many more!

You Got Eyes- Robert Frank imagines America- by Francine Prose

       When I first started to read this article, I was confused to how it related to what we were talking about in class. But as I started to read more and dig deeper into the reading, it became very clear to me. I feel like this reading helped me a lot with starting to think about our next project. 

       Robert Frank took on a very risky and large project. He wanted to look at America as a whole. He used his own perspective to create a sense of what Americans were like.  Many people thought he took some disturbing photographs along the way.  He used emotion to get his point across. He took images of people mourning at funerals, women alone, and many other hardships. He chose to take on a very difficult task. He captured many scenes that have never been seen before. He wanted people to look at his images like reading a poem. He wanted his images to be like that really well put together line in a poem that everyone wants to read more than once. I feel like his images defiantly had this characteristic. They were so intense that people wanted to know what they were all about.

Robert Frank

       The reason why this helped me with my project so much is because it showed me that it is always good to take risks. Robert Frank took a very big subject, America, and wanted to capture everything about it and the hardships that people go through. He wanted to see the country as an outsider. I would like to take on this project as an outsider. I want to look at a specific problem  our world is going through and really examine it through emotion. I want my images to have intense emotion to show the relationship between each image. I really would like to try  and reveal a person who is having trouble through a series of photographs. 

Persona- final images!

I'm happy with my final images. I know its not the best work I could have produced but this was my first time using photoshop. I really like the idea I was trying to show, which was reflecting another image of myself.