Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Overdue Post, New Photographs!

It has been too long since my last post, so here's a bunch of new projects for you to look at! I haven't taken any photo electives at MIAD for a while, and so this semester I decided to take two of them! I have been really wrapped up with my thesis work lately, so the assignments for these classes are a welcome break. 

The first class I have is called Framed Narratives: Storytelling and Practice. The second assignment we had was to create photographs that tell a story using the tableaux format. Tableaux photography incorporates 'actors' and usually include costumes and props, and can involve theatrical settings and lighting. The stories we presented needed to be contained in single images. For my photographs I used lyrics from the band Streetlight Manifesto's album Everything Goes Numb, and I picked out visuals that I got from particular lines in the songs. Each photograph is titled from the song the lyrics are from.

"Everything Went Numb"

"Point/ Counterpoint" 

"Here's to Life"

I'm not entirely happy with the 'Here's to Life' image, and I hope to reshoot it a bit differently soon.

The other class that I have this semester is called Humor in Contemporary Practice, where we get to be - you guessed it- funny! Our first assignment was to explore the themes of irony, pun, paradox, parody, or the unexpected. I chose to create some visual puns:

Couch Potato

Sleeping Bag

I made five or six of these visual puns for the critique, but I'm hoping to make many more in my free time (what free time?).

Our second assignment addressed the themes of deadpan, futility, tragicomic, self-deprication, and the absurd. Out of the many examples that we looked at, what stood out to me were old Buster Keaton silent films from the 1920's. With that in mind, I tried to focus on the deadpan aesthetic and the idea of the tragicomic hero. Here are two images from my series Using Ladders Where They Aren't Necessary:




There you have it! This is some of what I've been up to outside of my thesis work so far this semester!

No comments:

Post a Comment