This week in class, we read the works of Annette Kuhn, who writes about the intricacies of photography, and how a seemingly simple photo can reflect a much broader meaning, providing a small window into the "personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday, and historic" (pg. 9) atmosphere of the picture's time. I felt that the picture (seen above), which I made for my website's homepage, provides such a window. Even though it may not be an actual photograph of myself, it is a picture I had manipulated in a way so that it can carry the messages I wanted to make, while perhaps bringing up subconscious thoughts that I may not know exist in a "return of the repressed," as we talked about in class.
I wanted this picture to reflect the world as I see it: fast-paced, eclectic, and changing at a speed that is oftentimes faster than we can keep up with. A capitalist society in which so much energy is spent on competing for others' attention and money that it all blends together, becoming a swarm of images, words, and sounds that our minds can't seem to be able to absorb. And this escalates more and more as it becomes more difficult to make an impression on society.
Yet while this picture makes a broad statement about the way I feel about the society I live in, it also tells something about myself. As someone who has a passion for music and the arts, I feel it represents my personal struggle to keep the things I love in my life while somehow focusing on and keeping up with the "practical" world. To find a way that I can live a comfortable, successful life in this fast-paced world while having time for the things that I enjoy.
Yet this is only a surface examination, for the actual pictures I manipulated here may say much more about me that I myself do not even have an insight to. I had randomly chosen most of them without thinking, yet they must have jumped out at me and called me to attention for some reason. I find this to be a fascinating part of Kuhn's work: that a simple picture can portray so many more things than what we actually see.
1 comment:
Very interesting entry. I'm fascinated by the idea of simply choosing some images at "random" and seeing what happens. Often when we don't take the time to think through the work, the piece is that much more interesting for it. Sometimes it's crap. Hard to know which way it will go.
:)
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