Brain Fitness Debrief #8

During me time with T we finally got to sit down and go through the images that I have narrowed down. We went through the images one by one and he told me specific details about each one. WE still have several more images that we have to go through but we made some great progress. T still brought a whole bag of photos to our session and I struggles with telling him that there was not enough time to go through them all. I wish that we had more time to talk about the photos that I had finally narrowed down but I am confident that we will get through the rest during our next session. I have really enjoyed this whole process and I feel like I have made a new friend. I have already started to do the layout and organization of his photo book. Now I just need to get the blurbs done!

Reading Response: Blurb photobook design handout

I think that this article helped me to get a better idea of what I want to do for my photo books.
There are a lot more components to a photobook than I thought. This reading helped me to think about what I am going to be doing for the cover and the back, what format the images are going to be, will the format of the images be all the same or vary?, will the blurbs of the photos be short or long?, will I have a long blurb at the beginning of the book explaining what I did or not? etc. I think that I want my photo books to be neat and have the pages be uniform just because of my personal taste. I think I would have a couple important photos take up the entire page and then have the blurb be on the opposite page. I think that I want an overall theme to go with my books to make them flow better.

Brain Fitness Debrief #7

Today my partner T was not able to come to our session so I met with another member at Brain Fitness Club. We had some great conversations and he told me a lot about his life and his profession. He then proceeded to show me photos of his wife and a dear family friend and then he showed me some family photos. He was able to send me some of these photos so that I will be able to pass them on to his partner. It was nice to et to know another person at the brain fitness club and learn about his life and his stories.  I will be working with my partner T next session on putting labels onto the photos.

Assignment 3: Photos

Assignment 3: Borrowed Photos

I have always been interested in the concept of home. For many people, when you say the word home they immediately think of one place in particular. For me when I hear the word home I just think of all the houses that I have lived in while moving from place to place. This is why I chose to take google maps photos of all the houses or apartment buildings that my family has lived in or owned. This is the first picture of my “Home” series because it makes my overall theme of the series obvious right off the bat. For this picture I arranged the houses in order of when I lived in them. Each photo then has a amount of time that was spent in each place and it is right in the middle of the photo. By just taking a snapshot of each map and adding the text to the I feel as though I have transformed them to have meaning instead of just being google images of houses.

My second image of the sequence gets a little bit more conceptual about different types of homes. I combined an image of a slum with an image of a nice small home and connected them via their doors. I did not do this image to say one is better that the other I did it more to show the contrast of different types of homes. These images were cropped and adjusted in order for them to fit together better.
The third Image of the sequence gets even more conceptual because it shows a contrast between sleeping at home and sleeping homelessly. I connected these photos by connecting he torso of a person sleeping on the street to the torso of someone sleeping at home. These images have changed from being just pictures of people sleeping in their beds and on the street to a contrast photo showing the big problem with the growing homeless community. I think it is very important to think about the homeless population when talking about “home”. I always wonder how some people got to be living on the streets. Did they have a place called home? Have they made the streets their home? 

The Fourth and Final image of this sequence gets back to the broader idea of home. I took photos of different types of homes that fill one city block. This photo includes suburbs, slums, an RV park, a farm/ranch , a city, and a mansion with property. These photos separately have different meanings but when they come together they all represent different ways to fill one block with homes or a home. I made this image in black in white so that all the images would flow together better. I also didn’t want people looking at it to be distracted by the colors and not think about the concept.

Reading Response: Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida excerpt

This article was very interesting and kind of difficult to read and understand. I had to read it over a few times just to understand the main concept. I think it is interesting how we all immediately  start analyzing and interpreting photos when we see them whether we mean to or not. This article helped give words and categories to how I analyze photos that I see. The Studium is just the overall enthusiastic commitment to the photo. Then the "coded" aspects of the photo are more specific things like the details of the photos. This answers questions like Formal/informal? color/Black and white? etc. The Punctum then brings in the personal connection that comes with photos. It describes when a photos links to something of our past.

Brain Fitness Debrief #6

During my session with T at the brain fitness club, T brought in several new photo albums for me to look at. I urged him to hold off and take time to go through the photos that I have already taken so that I could get some more details but we decided to go through more photos instead. I took photo s of the descriptors that were on the backs of some of the photos so that I can work on the annotations of the photos later.  I have so many photos from T and now I just have to narrow them down and choose the top ones. I wish we could have gone through the photos that I had narrowed down but I have learned to go with the flow.

Reading Response: Collective/Cultural Memory & Appropriation

All of these videos and articles have the common themes of using others photographs and changing them in a way to portray meaning. While I was watching the videos on the contemporary Native Photos on the Native American's I had to think about how I define people as Native American. I feel like there is so much more to their culture that hasn't really been brought to light and I think that is what the show was about. My favorite piece that they talked about was the one where they did the cutout of the previously photographed men and this was done to "give them their power back".

Another Video that caught my eye was the one by Kevin J. Miyazaki.  The photos that he used helped him to understand his Japanese/ American history and they also helped bring people together who have had similar histories. He was not creating any new pictures for this project he just simple created a way for them to all come together in a cohesive manner.

Are they giving credit to the original photographers?
would the photographers like their changed pieces of work?