My chosen theme for this project is 'messages' and I chose this theme because I would like to take images with meaning because I believe that it would refine and revamp my website. I aim to produce high quality images and writing to excel my website. At the end of my project I will choose my best photographs and present them in a separate gallery to show off my work, and with my final images I will develop them with Photoshop. To this day people still discriminate and I would like to show people what the media doesn't show. The ugly truth of it all.
For my initial research I am I will start to be looking into photographers who take images with meaning. At the moment I have four photographers in mind. These are Gordon Parks, Sheila Pree Bright, Jana Curcio and Patience Zalanga. These four photographers take a lot of images on the discrimination issue. I chose to look at Gordan Parks because he was a photographer during the 1940s and he took a lot of images of racial discrimination, civil rights and poverty. He fantastically captures beautiful images with deeper meanings and a message behind them. Another photographer that I chose to look and research about is Sheila Pree Bright. She is famous for her plastic doll photography that show ethnic women digitally merged with Barbie dolls, she took images like this to show society's complex relationship with cultural beauty and standards and to show the fine line that is often drawn between reality and fabrication in American culture. Another photographer that I chose to look at is Jana Curcio, Jana is famous for her interconnected nature of skin color, she edits her photos like this to explore issues of interpersonal relationships and the complex struggle around one's identity. And one last photographer that I am going to look at is Patience Zalanga, I chose to look at and research this photographer because she takes pictures of the reality of riots especially the Black Lives Matter protest, which the media seems to fabricate. She also takes images of police brutality and any other social movement and uprising. The images she took really speaks to people and shows them the veracity of issues like this.
My initial thought on the theme 'messages' sounded quite bland to me but I realized that I can delve into the theme and turn it into something meaningful which will develop my work and get me the top grade which is what I am aiming for. I wanted to explore the subject discrimination because It's a challenge to take photographs on the issue and I wanted to signify my website to make it more purposeful and worthwhile. I also wanted to explore things that were more personal to me, my race and gender. I also wanted to take pictures of something that is often fabricated in the media. I wanted to show the reality and truth of all types of discrimination. I realize that this is a difficult subject to discuss but I feel like we should get past our discomfort and talk about issues like this, and the way I would like to do this is to take photographs of messages that are based on the topic. I will take images that has physical messages and have photographs that have a photograph that has a deeper message such as images taken of discrimination in action.
To show progression through my work, I will start to take photographs of the subject around my home to make my website more personal and distinctive. I will also take high quality photographs that show my own twist on the topic of discrimination. I don't want to take photographs that look like someone else's, I believe that it's better to take photographs that's unique and individualized to one's self, so I am going to explore my own ideas and not somebody else's . This will help to develop my website and to make it more professional. I will start of by taking photographs of the words 'injustice', 'discrimination', 'racism' etc. I think that this will really develop my website because it will show the start of my progression and then later on I will take photographs of images in the finest state. When I am not in school I will carry on my task and take photographs at home, I will take images of things that can be used to discriminate people with for example, Islamic culture, gender, and race/ethnic background. I think that this will give me a highly developed website because then people will be able to understand what people use to discriminate other people with.
For the equipment I will use a manual DSLR camera which is what I will take all of my photographs on, sometimes I will use a microscopic lens to get that in depth photography. I will most likely use this lens for when I'm taking photographs of words and skin color. I will do this because I would like to to take photographs with different depths of field, I believe that this will definitely get my the highest grade because it shows my capability to use a variety of different tools that I can use to get me a developed outcome. When I am at home I will use my phone camera which will also show my capability to use different tools. After I've finished taking photographs of these I will transport them into Photoshop and edit them which will evolve my image into something different and unique. I will use Photoshop to turn these photographs into edits such as double exposure. duo tone, or the dispersion effect which is something I'm confident and comfortable with. I will also go up and beyond with the Photoshop effect and use more complicated tool such as the glow effect, the surreal glass effect, and Photo manipulation. I am confident in to thinking that this will get me the highest grade because it will show my ability to try out different Photoshop techniques.
I have until the end to develop my third project. I aim to complete my statement of intent by the first week so I can have a lot of time to take photographs and to edit as many as I can, I also aim to complete my mood board and mind map in a lesson which will also hopefully give me time to complete my 4cs for four photographers, the time that I'll hopefully have will increase my chances for a better outcome and a developed research to get me that top grade. After I complete my 4cs I will move on to my shoot plan which should only take a lesson, this will give me enough time to take photographs the nest time I have a lesson. Taking and uploading the photographs should take two lessons which will get me a really advanced set of images. After that I will upload them into galleries and do my best and worst with detailed annotations, which will also take a lesson to do. Following that I will start to edit them in photoshop this might take a week or two depending on the type of edit I will do, I will hopefully produce 8-10 developed outcomes with step by step journey of how I got to that outcome, the end result will go into my final gallery. Depending on the time I have I will probably do another shoot plan and repeat the process I did with the other shoot plan, I will put my final outcomes from that shoot plan from photoshop into my final gallery. Then I will produce a final evaluation to talk about the project in it's entirety and also talk about my next steps into moving forward.
As my project progresses I will annotate everything to show the step by step process of my work, I will mostly annotate my best and worst and my photoshop, I will do this to get the highest grade and this will get me the highest grade because it will show my ability to talk about my work in a critical manner, this will hopefully show that I am serious about my third project and I will do anything to make it the best I can possibly do. I will seek advice from my peers and tutors about how to make my work better and I will also work on my weaknesses to get the best outcome. I will also watch tutorials for photoshop to also get a better understanding of the edit and to produce my work as highly as I can. Then I will write up a final evaluation on the project as a whole, to reflect on what went well and what didn't go well and what I will do differently next time to get the best outcome I can possibly give.
Research
Photography research for Gordon Parks
Context
Gordon Parks, one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century, was a humanitarian with a deep commitment to social justice. He left behind an exceptional body of work that documents American life and culture from the early 1940s into the 2000s, with a focus on race relations, poverty, civil rights, and urban life. Parks was also a distinguished composer, author, and filmmaker who interacted with many of the leading people of his era—from politicians and artists to athletes and other celebrities. Born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912, Parks was drawn to photography as a young man when he saw images of migrant workers taken by Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers in a magazine. After buying a camera at a pawnshop, he taught himself how to use it. Despite his lack of professional training, he won the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1942; this led to a position with the photography section of the FSA in Washington, D.C., and, later, the Office of War Information (OWI). Working for these agencies, which were then chronicling the nation’s social conditions, Parks quickly developed a personal style that would make him among the most celebrated photographers of his era. His extraordinary pictures allowed him to break the color line in professional photography while he created remarkably expressive images that consistently explored the social and economic impact of poverty, racism, and other forms of discrimination. In 1944, Parks left the OWI to work for the Standard Oil Company's photo documentary project. Around this time, he was also a freelance photographer for Glamour and Ebony, which expanded his photographic practice and further developed his distinct style. His 1948 photo essay on the life of a Harlem gang leader won him widespread acclaim and a position as the first African American staff photographer for Life. Parks would remain at the magazine for two decades, covering subjects ranging from racism and poverty to fashion and entertainment, and taking memorable pictures of such figures as Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael. His most famous images, for instance American Gothic (1942) and Emerging Man (1952), capture the essence of his activism and humanitarianism and have become iconic, defining their generation. They also helped rally support for the burgeoning civil rights movement, for which Parks himself was a tireless advocate as well as a documentarian. Parks was a modern-day Renaissance man, whose creative practice extended beyond photography to encompass fiction and nonfiction writing, musical composition, filmmaking, and painting. In 1969 he became the first African American to write and direct a major Hollywood studio feature film, The Learning Tree, based on his bestselling semiautobiographical novel. His next film, Shaft (1971), was a critical and box-office success, inspiring a number of sequels. Parks published many books, including memoirs, novels, poetry, and volumes on photographic technique. In 1989 he produced, directed, and composed the music for a ballet, Martin, dedicated to the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. Parks spent much of the last three decades of his life evolving his style, and he continued working until his death in 2006. He was recognized with more than fifty honorary doctorates, and among his numerous awards was the National Medal of Arts, which he received in 1988. Today, archives of his work reside at a number of institutions, including the Gordon Parks Foundation, Pleasantville, New York; the Gordon Parks Museum in Fort Scott, Kansas, and Wichita State University in Wichita; and the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian Institution, all in Washington, D.C.
In the image above, Gordon Parks purposefully sets the table as the foreground to show that the boy is in a classroom to covey the significance of the 'Doll Test' in Brown v. Board of education. Gordon also intentionally places the boy as the middle ground/background to allow the viewer to place their focus on the young boy to reveal the disturbing results of the study. This will allow the viewer to pay attention to the image and to understand the significance of this confound subject. Finally the photographer sets the dolls as the background/middle ground. The dolls represent the clash between black and white people, and how young children see the world in that time where there was conflict between the two races, it shows the boy pointing at the white baby, this conveys the influenced fact that there is 'white supremacy'. Parks intentionally positions his camera this way to show the importance of the subject and to make it as dramatic as possible which is also why he takes the picture almost as if looking up, this has impacted the photograph because it has allowed the photographer to capture everything but leaving out the hands that just comes into the picture as if the hands are just there almost representing something more. Parks cleverly constructs something simple into something more with just the position of his camera. The photographer sets this image in black and white because this can show that not everything is not a pretty picture filled with colors, there are some things that are serious for example situations like this. Parks uses a certain setting to turn the image into a specific black and white filter because he wanted to show the color of the skin of the boy and the dolls to show what the photograph means. Since this is a very basic image with no unique features, I doubt that Gordan Park edited this photo in photoshop but if he did he probably edited the black and white filter to make it clearer to see the skin tone of the boy and the dolls. Since the photograph is taken at an angle Parks wouldn't have used a tripod or else he wouldn't be able to capture the event in that specific spot. The photograph is set indoors but the surroundings look very natural, not just a solid color backdrop, I can see that this image was clearly taken in a classroom. The image is very light so the ISO would've been either been on auto or 800-1600 to get that light effect, since the event is taken place inside the WB would've also been on auto or tungsten. The image also isn't blurry so the f-stop would've been f5.6 -6 to get that clear shot that doesn't look distracting, I believe that Parks did this to stop the viewer from trailing off from the subject and to allow the viewer to get the story from the image. The angle the photographer took the image was at a low angle view but not so low that the viewer cannot see the entirety of the photograph, he did this to make the viewer look at the situation as how a child would've seen it which is what the photograph is about, he also wanted the viewer to recognize that children are innocent but have been pulled in into this horrifying matter.
Connections
I will take inspiration from Gordon Parks because of the photographs he takes and how he takes them. He strongly believes in the Civil Rights Movement and wanted to share the situation of it to as many people as he could, it's not only the pictures that he taken it's how he captured them that inspires me, he seems to have a different but important angle for every single experience that he take images of, for example the image above. He recognizes that there was a child in this picture and he also recognized what the image was about so he took the image from below to show the world how children view this complication which is so brilliant and clever. For most of his images he takes them in black and white which seems to be a recurring theme of mine, he does this to show the seriousness of the subject which is what I would like to do and hope to achieve someday, he additionally tells a story with every photograph that he takes which he does so excellently. I believe that every photograph should tell a story or else it's just a picture, this is something else that I will take inspiration from Gordon Parks and will hope that someday I will attain this. I additionally like how the photographer cropped the image, as I have said before, he cuts out the person who is holding the dolls and just gets their hands to show the significance of them which is fear, you can clearly see that the boy is looking at the person as he is picking the white doll, this shows that children get influenced of what is right and wrong. I would optimistically hope that someday I would produce an image with this amount of meaning and depth because it will help the viewer to continuously look at it and will hopefully see the true meaning of the image, it will also help me build on my chosen theme 'messages'.
Comment
I chose Gordon Parks because he understands the meaning of the story behind the camera which is something that I want to create to develop my theme of 'messages', he also explores social and economic impacts and presents them in an interesting and beautiful way. He's also taken pictures of one of the most famous Civil Rights Activists Malcolm X which to me is very inspiring, he takes beautiful images and he is extremely talented in what he does. He is one of my favourite photographers because when I look at his images I sit back and reflect on society and makes me want to help in any way I can shape or form.
Photography research for Sheila Pree Bright
Context
Sheila Pree Bright is an International acclaimed photographic artist known for her photography series #1960Now, Young Americans, Plastic Bodies, and Suburbia. She is described as a soft-spoken woman who images speak boldly and truthfully, which portrays a combine wide-range knowledge of contemporary culture. The images she presents and capture of culture and sometimes counter-culture challenges ideas about narratives that are controlled by Western thought and power structures. Bright’s work is in the book and exhibition Posing Beauty in African American Culture. Also, Bright’s photographs appeared in the 2014 feature-length documentary Through the Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People. She has been exhibited at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Smithsonian National Museum of African American Museum, Washington, DC; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; Turner Contemporary, Margate, Kent, England; The Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada and the Leica Gallery in New York. She is the recipient of several awards including Center Prize (2006). Her work is included in numerous private and public collections, to name a few; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC, Oppenheimer Collection: Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland, KS, National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Atlanta, GA, The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, The Museum of Contemporary Art, GA and The Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Pyramid Peak Foundation, Memphis, TN and the University of Georgia, Athen, GA. Bright’s recent series, #1960Now is featured in the New York. Bright connects leaders of the civil rights movement to the young activists working today. In chronicling street demonstrations in Atlanta and Baltimore, she summons the dramatic energy of Leonard Freed’s high-contrast documentary photography, while her minimalist portraits of activists recall the intensity of Richard Avedon’s work from the 1960s. Bright presented an interactive version of #1960Now at The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia in fall 2015, but she has also moved her photography beyond the gallery walls through wheat pasting campaigns and Instagram hashtags. At a moment when social justice, inequality, and representation are national concerns at the highest levels of politics and media, Bright’s photography provides a potent mediation on the ongoing work toward racial progress in America. To this day people still discriminate and I would like to show people what the media doesn't show. The ugly truth of it all. From, "https://aperture.org/editorial/vision-justice-sheila-pree-bright/" "https://www.bu.edu/arts/sheila-pree-bright/"
Composition
Sheila Pree Bright is very famous for her 'plastic bodies' photography set which is a message to show society's complex relationship between cultural beauty standards. In the photographs above she juxtaposes real women with barbie dolls to show the difference between societies standards and real life. This has made such a huge impact to women because they can see the impossibility of what society wants, it shows the raw beauty of ethnic women not plastic which is what Bright does so smartly. The images don't have a lot of compositional effects such as foreground/middle ground and background but I can see the that the dolls are taken in a studio shot with a black background. The angle that the dolls are taken in is just eye level but this simple feature allows the viewer to look at the doll and that's it, it makes the image less distracting and allows the viewer to just continuously look at the elements of the doll. The Photoshop techniques that Bright uses are very unusual and unique and not everyone uses this effect. She uses double exposure to merge women into the face of the dolls, this can allow the viewer to easily see the difference between the two and how abnormal it would be to look anything like the doll, this has a deeper meaning of society's high standards of female body and face which show's how impossible their high standards are. When taking photographs Bright doesn't really have any specific pattern in the photos since most of the photos she takes are in a studio, although she does use a slight vignette in the photos above to dramatize to make sure the viewer understands that the photographs are on a serious subject. I can tell that Bright uses a tripod because of how straight and in line the doll is in the photo, and since many photographers use a tripod during a studio shoot. The ISO would've been on auto since the photograph looks natural, but this could've been edited since the photographer mainly used Photoshop. The WB would've also been on auto but this could've changed due to the photo being heavily edited on Photoshop.
Homework
Shoot Plan:
I am starting my third project by taking images of the word discrimination, I would first like to take pictures of text, I think it would be best to start of with these kind of images to show people that this is the subject that I will be working with. Some equipment that I will be having is DSLR camera, lighting, a piece of paper with the words on it, a book, some fake blood, scissors, dictionary and a backdrop. An image I would like to take a picture of first is the word discrimination under glasses to establish that discrimination needs to be looked at and people should focus of the topic. I would do this by placing the paper on top of a desk and set the glasses on top of the word to get the zooming effect on it, I think this will reinforce the effect of the issue. I will take the image with a variety of different light settings and white balance settings to see which one will suit the image more. Another image I would like to be taking pictures of is the word discrimination ripped in half to solidify that discrimination should be ripped apart.
Shoot plan 1
Glasses
All messages on paper
Best and worst
Discrimination ripped in half
Black vs White
Best and worst
Injustice
Best and worst
Black Injustice
Best and worst
Crumpled up Words of discrimination
Best and worst
Bottle held in hand spilled over book covered in blood.
Best and worst
Black person holding bottle of wine (stereotype)
Bottle spilled over bloody book covered in messages
Photoshop edit
Photoshop edit 2
Injustice
Best and worst
Messages stuck to a bottle
Best and worst
Photshop edit 3
Photoshop edit 4
Photoshop edit 5
Final gallery
Evaluation
My main theme for this project was 'messages' and I did this because I would like to take pictures of meaningful things that matter in the world right now, for example things like discrimination. Discrimination is a very important thing for me at the moment and I would like to use my talent to spread the word in the most interesting way possible, like photography. For this project I explored many different ways to creatively express my thoughts of discrimination. Photoshop has been one of many, I enjoyed using Photoshop because I was able to develop my thoughts creatively in many different ways, I am also very used to using Photoshop so I was able to master my uses for Photoshop. I thoroughly enjoyed working on my third project and knowing that I worked on something meaningful.