Week 5: Humanity and photoshop

The videos we watched in class about the photographer JR made a very deep impression on me. I thought that the way he could bring Jews and Palestinians together in a way that has never happened before was amazing. By placing images of people from one side of the wall onto the houses and walls of people from the other side he is showing them that each one is real. They have to look at each other's silly caricatures every day and see that they, too are people.

What really affected me the most about the trailer for JR's film, "Women Are Heroes" was the story of the crying woman recounting the tale of being raped by soldiers while her children had to watch and endure brutality at the same time. Horrible! I can not understand why humanity is not inherent in every human!  I sat and cried for a little while after seeing that. I realized just how much I, and pretty much everyone I have ever met, takes the freedom and luxury we have in our society for granted. I also realized that with the amount of freedom I have, I also have a lot of power. But I don't do anything with it. None of us do. We'd rather sit around and watch tv or get drunk or -- whatever -- just do nothing productive. We could be using our power to make a difference in the world so that other people can also experience freedom and peace. We could share the abundant resources we have with the rest of the world. I don't know how one would go about making that happen, but why are so many people suffering while I sit in my spacious home doing nothing?

I can't even get close to describing exactly what I mean by this. It's just like what Alfredo Jaar said when he was working on his Rwanda series of art projects. He tried so hard to convey the feeling he had from his experiences in Rwanda. He said, "It was my most difficult project. That’s why 'The Rwanda Project' lasted six years. I ended up doing twenty-one pieces in those six years. Each one was an exercise of representation. And how can I say this? They all failed".

"The Silence of Nduwayezu," detail1997

It is impossible for an artist to convey his or her true feelings. The viewer will always put his or her own personal feelings, ideas, thoughts into the interpretation. According to Jaar, "The work is always the creation of a new reality. So how do you build this new reality that, one way or the other, translates the lived experience?" That's a very good question.

I really like Alfredo Jaar. I think I loved reading his interviews even more than I liked viewing his art on Art21. I love the messages he is sending with his projects. He is coming from a place of compassion and wants the viewer to be able to see the reality of the situations he is representing. I am especially inspired by one thing that he said, "Most artworks today try to say thirty-seven things at the same time. I try exactly the contrary. When you reach that essential idea, it’s extraordinary."

Our guest presenter this week, Craig Hickman was a little too much for me to handle for such a long period.  I was on image over-load by the end of his presentation.  I felt like I couldn't look up at one more image shortly before he was finished.  I almost made it!  There were definitely a lot of really cool pictures, even though I don't know the first thing about photography.  I wasn't sure I was actually learning anything at first, but I think I did.  For example, he was talking about how changing the color, the brightness just a little bit can greatly enhance the image, making it more appealing.

How about some "artificial color"  in those beans?

For example, he showcased Martin Parr in whose photo book, "Food" there was a photograph of some baked beans.  It was bright and colorful, and Hickman mentioned that it was definitely photoshopped to make it so, because otherwise it wouldn't have been as interesting.  That's probably very elementary to someone who already knows about photography, but I am not that person.  I always forget to take pictures, so the idea of taking it even further and having to manipulate  the photos that I do take would just be asking way too much!

Other people, apparently, are way into photoshopping photos for fun, for profit, and for controversy.  

Take this controversial photoshopped classic, for instance.  There were 3 missiles released in Iran, someone thought it would be more exciting if there were actually 4 instead, so they made there be 4.  Where were they aimed?  Nobody knows that, but that's not the point to the people who care that Iran launched 4 exciting missiles.  I just don't care about war and politics and photoshop so much that it's hard to think of what to say about it.  Why is it so important that this happened, or didn't really happen?  That's not the point.  Are there any images left that we can trust as real?  I'm going to start thinking about that differently now that this has been exposed.  The article that I got this image from, on the New York Times Opinion Pages (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/photography-as-a-weapon/) is very interesting, and talks in depth about the history of photo manipulation, past and present.

I'm not sure how I went from talking about compassion and humanity to talking about baked beans and photoshop, but that's the realm of photography.  It is ubiquitous.  It is so vast that I have about 3 pages worth of interesting notes that did not make it into this blog post.  I definitely feel like I know at least a little bit about photography now, whereas last week, I would not have been able to say that.

Tony Mendoza's close-up flash photos of flowers are extremely beautiful!