Photo Resurrections & Myth of Narcissus Reflections

The myth of Echo and Narcissus has long been one of my favorites. When I was younger, we had a version of it in the Greek Myths book that I read obsessively on the floor of the living room. Something about it always spoke to me–whatever the reason may be. The dual tragedy of the story captivated me as a young person; Narcissus’s tragic wasting away and Echo’s tragic fading into the background.

Photo Resurrections is an interesting discussion on the nature of family photography as a form of maintaining and correcting memories and images of the people we can no longer see. Imagery inherently distorts reality, but further editing of imagery can turn a photograph from a representatin of something real into a representation of an imagined existence. This aligns with the reading of Narcissus and Echo because Echo’s purpose and path is to take the words Narcissus and others utter and to re-represent them as her own form of communciation.

Final Project Prospectus

Though this is not what I ended up doing for my final project due to technical difficulties, my original idea was videography, to use a chair in my house as a signifier of the passage of time. I enjoyed the “Man with a Movie Camera” assignment that I did for my midterm, and I found capturing people and experiences through video to be more rewarding and exciting than still photography in many ways. My idea for my final project was inspired by conversation with Lara, and my plan was to set up a camera outside my apartment, with visuals on a chair we call the Thinking Chair, and see how people use it/what the time spent in it looks like as time passes and seasons change. Unfortunately, teonly camera I currently have is a phone camera, which was not up for the task, so I have since turned to a different way of expressing changing climate and seasons through photography.

The Blue of Distance Reflection

This text is about distance, both physical and emotional. The titular blue refers to the ways in which physical distance in space causes minute atmospheric effects to build up and develop a blue haze in the distance. This has been portraryed through art historically in many different ways; the author talks specifically about the development of blue haze as a method of indicating distance in the 1500s.

Beyond the literal blueness of literal distance, the distance we make from our memories and experiences causes them to be hazy and unclear. They become no longer a solid path that we can follow in fact, but something more vague, like a path that disappears into the fog as it falls behind you.

But just as a skyline can return to sharpness as we walk back to the city, memories can return as we bring ourselves back along that path, via a smell or a phrase or even just concentrated effort.

The image this reading brought up in my mind was of a time when I was hiking in the Appalachian mountains and sat on a low mountaintop to eat a late breakfast. Though I’d been to that mountaintop before and always been astonished at the view, this time a fog lay heavily over the bald where I was sitting, and I was incapable of seeing anything beyond my immediate surroundings. I never lost my direction, but not only was my physical view obstructed, but my memories of the view became a little foggier and bluer for it.

Criticizing Photographs, Chapter 2: Describing Photographs

It makes sense to open a chapter about describing photographs with descriptions of photographs, which is exactly what the author does here. Barrett goes on to breakd down the photograph in to four parts: matter, form, medium, and style, which is how I will divide the questions I devised to guide my critique of photos in the future

Questions to ask myself as I view photos

Matter

What is the photo of? What can I see in the photo? What is missing that I might expect?

Form

How does the subject look? How is it defined? (by color? shape? contrast?) Is the subject distorted in some way? Does it look as I expect it to?

Medium

How has the artist chosen to capture the subject? What am I looking at? How was it made?

Style

What Artists does this remind me of? How does this make me feel? Does it remind me of another piece of art work? Is this intentional? What else do I know about the artist?

Metropolis

I loved watching this movie. I honestly wasn’t looking forward to it for some reason, I think because I was apprehensive about having to take so long to focus on one thing at the end of the semester, especially a silent movie, but once I slowed down. I really got into it. I loved the score– I’ve been listening to it around the house since watching it– and how beautifully constructed the images are. It being shot in 1927 i was surprised at how compelling the special effects to make the city settings were. I honestly don’t have much analysis except to say that it’s cool to see how in a silent film, it feels like an in between photos and film, if that makes any sense. The actors are very theatrical in the absence of speech, and without dialogue you really engage with the visual aspect of the film, the moving picture, in a different, more semantic way (at least I did). The filmmaker doesn’t rely on text to explain the images, they have to be intelligible themselves.

I also did a bit of reading about the film and I thought the history of the releases was really interesting. The author’s original version was deemed too long and symbolic for American audiences and it was cut drastically down, and then I’m assuming WWII contributed to the loss of the original cut, which was lost until 2008 when an original version was found again. It’s so interesting how you can just lose something like a film– I mean, of course, but also in the time of the internet things seem so persistent it’s a little fantastical seeming to lose and then find an idea or an experience like a film.

How to Critic Others: Blog Post #14

When criticizing photographs, or trying to develop better images for yourself, Barrett emphasizes that the viewer, or photographer, takes crucial steps. He first forces the reader to imagine the works, as to create a better mental picture of the type of narrative, he or she would need to create. Then describing the photo or mental picture comes next, where  Barrett outlines four main aspects of a photograph that a critic may describe as subject matter, form, medium, and style. The subject of an image is what objects are actually being photographed and the matter refers to the meaning or theme behind a photograph. Form is portrayed as how the individual subject, whether it is abstract or traditional, is presented, including elements such as how light is shone, the color in which the image should be maintained, the original texture of the image, and even the angle from which the picture is taken. This depends on how the photographer’s meaning for the image was represented.  Medium refers to what process the artist will use to portray that subject, which depends on both the matter and the form. And then lastly, style speaks to a similarity to an artist, or time period, although insignificant for photography beginners, it is important to reflect on to consider potential routes for improvement. Although these items seem intrinsically objective, Barrett points out the subjectivity in photography, and that few critics write unbiased descriptions. The goal however is to combine this description and analysis to produce unbiased feedback. It is interesting how much processing goes into developing a photograph, as well as criticizing one as well. 

The History of Photography-Abridged : Block Post #13

My thoughts on quite frankly and ironically, the Short History of Photography, described to the reader by Walter Benjamin, are not unexpected and as like every new invention, especially in the media world. Before writing was invented, the individuals at that time either criticized the medium because it makes the activity of memorisation easier, or praised the potential it could possibly have on society But more often than not, it yielded more benefits to humanity than anyone could have predicted. Similar events occurred at the transition from writing, to drawing/painting, and now in this time period that the writer is referring to, is taking place again. The only situational differences between the ideas are the benefits, and how rapidly these benefits manifested themselves. In the passage, Benjamin explains the rapid pace at which photography as a medium was built, as well as the subtleties a photo can reveal that a physical artist will ignore. It was quite interesting also reading about how photography shifted from portraits, which could be attributed to an obsession with themselves, towards more freeing concepts, an example of which is landscape, where people are more curious as to the nature around them. I wonder if the progress of photography would be as a medium if it was developed outside the second industrial revolution.

Unrelated Articles? : Blog Post #12

We have two, or you could say, unrelated bodies of work that are actually quite interesting.

Photo Resurrections, an article written by Nina Hein of NYU, portrays her sentiments towards how impactful photography could potentially be – starting us off with an example of individuals going blind by simply looking at an image – and how the medium of a portrait, could both be a reflection of past human behavior, as well as alterations of what individuals, outside of historical, perceive to be crucial.  Employing such direct and dramatic events in her own personal life, this passage was particularly intriguing in the execution of how it was written, and examples the narrator applies to drive home his feelings towards portraits. Despite reading about the tragic situations that happened to her family, as well as comical ones such as driving her car into a boat, these examples happen to mirage into the background of the article, only acting as a way for the author to explain the correctness of her ideas. I read it at first glance, and thought to myself “Did I read that correctly,” and had to reread the section because of how the author abruptly mentions such situations in her life – I imagine it was the same way for other readers. Outside of the events, her passage concepts of altering portraits resonate especially well with modern culture with the advent of social media, utilizing filters to essentially beautify an image, harder to tell which parts of the portrait are real and which ones are fake. I imagine that this article was written, in light of the situation of our culture as well, commenting on the disadvantages it brings; If we asked her today how she particularly felt about selfies on social media, I doubt she would please based on the article and her vehement reaction to the man adding earrings based on a factual assumption about the past. I wonder how she feels about photoshop?

The Myth of Narcisuss…well…I did not think that was how the story went. I thought initially that Narcissus was just a generally obsessive person at the beginning that died of old age, but to think that he didn’t originate as that at first but was cursed by the nymphs that he had rejected is unfortunately very sad. It’s also even worse to think that because of the curse the nymphs played on him, the legacy of his name had been tarnished to over obsessive admiration of one’s self – in my opinion should be known as a tragedy. Granted, he did reject the nymph Echo in a terrible way and I imagine he did so in similar ways to other nymphs, but the burden of fault doesn’t lay on him. My only question is as to why this myth is not labelled and portrayed as a tragedy in Greco-Roman culture. 

The Prospect of a Prospectus: Blog Post #11

The subject I will be working on is clouds, their distinct shapes and forms, and how they change in relation to movements in the sun, as well as over the course of the day. This won’t be an easy task considering the fact that my piece is heavily reliant on the weather, and since it’s approaching winter there tend to be less and less pure cloudy days, and more sunny but cold days. Therefore, I would need to plan and account for the number of days that are cloudy, and edit and look back on film on the days that are not ideal. As for the actual angle, since clouds are relatively distant from the observer, it makes it hard to successfully change the perspective on them. The only solutions to obtain a different picture would be to either wait for the clouds to shift places, which would take roughly 5-10 mins depending on how windy the day is, or to experiment with different objects being placed in front of them – trees, landscape, animals – to see the result. Midway through the project I also plan to take pictures of clouds during the night and see what the difference is. Since clouds are also relatively abstract objects, I also plan on making images with photoshop, fused with clouds. 

The Feeling of the Unexpected : Blog Post #10

Despite the dramatic addition of ethnicity into the mix, anyone can relate to an intense feeling of sudden realization. For some it may be a concept that was known throughout one’s life but not made abundantly clear until you had experienced it. For some others it may have been a concept that you had never learnt or didn’t believe to be true until the moment it was made true. In James Baldwin’s Notes to a Native Son, it was a stringent combination of these two situations, as the idea of racism to him was still very much an after thought until he became an adult, and had both experienced and witnessed to a horrifying degree. It had arisen as a shock to him, so much that he became a prominent African American activist, writer, and novelist in the early 20th century because of it. This passage was unique in the way that anyone could relate to his shock, despite the color of one’s own skin – despite the passage being a dedication to natives who feel oppressed by not only the past society, but today’s culture as well.  This definitely places an interesting perspective of racism from a child’s view, and how even though it doesn’t seem blatantly apparent to someone at first, it still exists.