Reading 137-162

The way light is directed has a large effect on the emotion that the image portrays. The reading discussed different directions of light, natural light versus artificial light, the color of light, and various tools used both in-studio and out. Front lighting creates few shadows, and it can become somewhat mugshot-esque. Side lighting highlights the contours of the face giving it great dimension. A more subtle variation on side lighting is to place the light at a low angle, and about 45 degrees from the side of subject. This makes the shadows more subtle. Natural light is often diffused more than artificial light because it filters through atmosphere and (sometimes) other objects, such as trees.  That is not to say that direct sunlight won’t give you bold shadows.

Reading 169-204

This reading discussed the theories behind copying, capturing and reproducing images. One thing that sparked my interest was the work of Sherrie Levine. She re-photographed images by Walker Evans from magazines and printed them as her own. I don’t really know how I feel about this. I can see how the process of duplicating an image is a form of art, especially when taken the source of the image is a magazine page, but I think that this her work may have been crossed the line. There really wasn’t much work done to make the images her own, and when you look at them, it is hard to tell the difference between the original and the duplicate.

Reading 339-364

The reading was about series and sequences, and how to display works. Displaying images in a slide format is very interesting to me. I think there is something to be said for the physical/mechanical process that it requires, unlike digital projections of images. I wonder if this relates the nostalgia of using film cameras. Recently, in many shows that I’ve seen, slide projectors have been used. Their noisy quality adds to the images and changes the emotional impact of the works being seen. The reading also mentioned flipbooks, in the section on motion. I like the idea of using a slide format to present work over a flipbook for a few reasons. Viewing art can be both personal and public; I like the idea of having my images seen on a large, public scale, but having the viewer’s interaction with it be personal. In addition, I like the way slides allow more room for image variation and that they also don’t (necessarily) have control over how quickly the images change.