Thursday, February 26, 2015

Fitzpatrick, Alex - P.A.F. Response #3, The Staged Document - ARTO250

            In this section of Photography After Frank I found many ideas and sources of inspiration for my project.  This section talks about the ways in which you can manipulate or collaborate with your surroundings and subjects to achieve an artistic goal or theme.  It talks about how our artistic choices affect our work as photographers.
            After reading this I have some good ideas about working with light and combining these ideas with the ones I liked from the Portrait section.  I think I want to do a series of portraits, possibly including my own, in a silhouetted or shadow style.  I want there to be some lighthearted elements in the shadow portraits that juxtapose the seriousness of the shadow and tell us something vague about the subject.  I got this idea after reading the second paragraph in the section talking about Duane Michal’s series entitled The Spirit Leaves The Body.
            I really enjoyed the discussion of different ways of representing or capturing time within photographs.  This is cool and tricky because the nature of photographs is to freeze a particular moment in time.  Working with these opposing themes can create some very cool breakthroughs and results.
            Lastly, we read about how Ryan McGinley has found a way to stage his documents but retain spontaneity at the same time.  He does things like invite a large group of friends to a beach house for a party and set up a trampoline.  Eventually and inevitably he gets some great shots of his friends jumping naked.  These pics still seem like he captured a genuine moment, which he did, but the moment was carefully thought out and set up ahead of time.  Genius.

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