Watching: A Photography Exhibition

Watching: An Exhibition of Digital Photographs

Today marked an end to a sort of evolution of my Digital Processes’ class presentations of our digital photographs. We began this evolution with a stop on the World Wide Web, utilizing programs that are part of Web 2.0, such as Flickr and Blogger, to present the world with our images and ideas. These images that were simply floating around in hyperspace were then harnessed and produced into tactile objects; books. And finally, we edited down from these many images a pair that would accurately and effectively portray the artist’s concept in a gallery setting for our exhibition called Watching. Setting up a gallery was a new experience for me, and I found it to be enjoyable working with others in the class to figure out the best way to complete the layout of the show. Being a little OCD, I think I would all too much enjoy setting up a solo show of my own work (as long as it worked out exactly as intended)! Although dramatically Photoshopping images was not prevalent in our show, it is still very fascinating to think about how the ability to alter images in almost any way imaginable nowadays has almost removed the ability of photographs to act as a sort of “evidence” or indexicality for the images they capture. I am highly interested in utilizing this exact power of photographs to make political statements in my artwork, and because of photoshop this concept is now in jeopardy. How will I prove my images to be real? Will there someday become a “certified organic” category of photography? We will have to wait and see!

Technology to Tangibility

Putting together a magazine based on my Pet/Food set in Flickr was an interesting process in that it made me think very critically about the sequence of the photos, as well as the content. Originally, sequencing the set on Flickr felt much more like how Robert Frank described sequencing his photographs in the book The Americans; “More of a process of discovery than a discourse… the chapters… evolved intuitively.” While I retained a majority of the original sequencing from my Flickr set for my book, having the layout be two pictures juxtaposed side-by-side informed all of the changes that I made to the set. My goal was to make sure that the two images placed next to each other on each set of pages would evoke a powerful response from the viewer. In order to achieve this, I edited a couple photos that I felt were weaker or didn’t quite go with the sequence out of the set completely, and also added two new photos that I thought strengthened the set. I am excited to have my photographs become a tangible object that requires more physical involvement to observe than photos on the internet that can be easily ignored by the viewer.