Externally set task
Initial idea of Messages
Different photographers and artists like Barbara Kruger, Martha Rosler and Lorna Simpson combine words and phrases with their photographs to convey messages. I plan to potentially send a message or something that people can look at and interpret in their own way through my images that I'm going to make for this project with different quotes that have a personal connection to me but also can potentially have meaning to other people. Every image or video has some sort of message behind it, trying to put the creators mind and thoughts across to the people watching or seeing the image, wether it is writing with an actual message or just a series of images with clear meaning or maybe something more enigmatic with secret symbolism behind it. Every picture taken has a meaning and sends a message, selfies for example can communicate someones beauty, or a group photo can communicate friendship but the meaning of the image can be completely changed if it was to have a message on it. Every images message or symbolism can be changed or made clearer with text.
Lee Friedlander - letters from the people
Letters From The People is a exhibition of some 200 photographs by American photographer Lee Friedlander, depicting signs, posters, graffiti, and other public messages , opening with the alphabet, the exhibition moves on to numerals, then to words and sentences. The variety of messages, commercial, religious, personal, political, sexual, and romantic all trying to send a different message. For example on the seawall overlooking the harbor of Hong Kong is written, “Everyday I calls a phone to her. Every night I dreams of her.” each message can be simple or elaborate, neat or messy or even polite or vulgar, however, every image has a message to send to the people looking at it as the pictures suggest the "inexhaustible range of what we have to say and of the ways in which we go about saying it."
From the images, I find the religious, personal, political, sexual, and romantic aspects of the various images very interesting as not only does it reach a wide range of people but it sends more than one message to people, its letters or messages from people that Friedlander made possible for other people to see. Messages from the people to the people.
Duane Michals - Photographs With text
Michals made a significant impact in the field of photography during the 1960s as it was an era heavily influenced by photojournalism, Michals manipulated the photographs to communicate narratives. The images for which he is known for, appropriate cinema’s frame by frame format. Michals has also incorporated text as a key factor in his works, his handwritten text adds another dimension to the images meaning and gives voice to Michals’s singular ideas, which are poetic, tragic, and humorous, often all at once. Michals is able to bring together thoughts, texts and images in such a way that they explain very basic feelings and things in life in a surprising and thoughtful way
The text under each image, in a way enriches the photograph itself, giving it more meaning, or, meaning that wasn't clear before. For example, on the first image example you would look at the image and see a happy couple, however once reading the text you get a completely different idea of what the photograph represents, its an idea of , yes love, however love that is lost and the anger towards that it is now gone.
Gillian Wearing - Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say
This series of images were taken with the collaboration of the public and their own thoughts, she photographed multiple different people holding their statement of what they were thinking at the moment, whatever it was. As indicated by the title of the work, Wearing has written that this collaboration ‘interrupts the logic of photo-documentary and snapshot photography by the subjects’ Most of the signs express intimate thoughts or personal convictions.
Masahisa fukase - ravens
I have already looked into Fukase's work in the past with one of his other projects "hibi" in which he took pictures of the floor and painted over them. However, with Ravens Fukase avoided the traditional notions of portraiture and documenting series of pictures, instead creating a narrative that merges his deeply personal and obsessive state of mind and the trauma of Japan after the war. It's his own personality that is sensed strongly in his work, in his increasing identification with the birds he pursues with his camera, the ravens. It is the ravens that compel Fukase, so much so that he wrote in his diary that he had "become a raven".
After doing research of multiple different photographers the reason I am interested in messages and wanted to choose it is because I want to be able to send a message to people of my own. Expressing my own thoughts, feelings and experiences that I have gone through and i want people to be able to take their own interpretation of my work and in some way be able to relate to these feelings of anhedonia and constant exasperation and I want to be able to elucidate these ideas to people. I want to be able to experiment with a subject that plenty of people can relate to and have experienced to some extent, some, more than others, for example depression, and how one event can affect someones life drastically and change them forever. To be able to achieve this I need to be able to think about how to present my images and digitally and physically manipulate them to get my own message across.