Week 9 activities+homework

Mohamed Bourouissa:

1.      The main message here is about African-American culture. Some of it is good, however some of it has to do with police brutality.

2.      This is conveyed mainly through the expressions on the faces of the subjects. In some pictures the subject is crying, in others, they are smiling.

Anton Kusters:

1.      The series is about the expressions of pain of those who were present in the Nazi concentration camps of WW2. The pictures are of the blue skies at significant concentration camps. It offers a contrast between the innocence of the blue sky and the cruelty of the concentration camps.

2.      This is only conveyed with an explanation, however the coordinates of each photo are given so technically the viewer can find the meaning with research.

Mark Neville

1.      These photos are about the conditions of life for farmers in Britain. It was taken shortly after the vote for Brexit, so it intends to justify the vote for leavers.

2.      Again, this message can’t be directly gleamed from the photos; you have to have a description to know what they mean. However you can tell a lot just from the quality and age of the things in the photos: they are old and damaged. These people aren’t doing well financially.

Clare Strand

1.      This series is about the reception of information in the digital age. The artist takes typical images, and blocks them with either boxes filled with numbers of typical pixilation.

2.      This series does a better job of sending the message than the previous one, however it still struggles to and needs an explanation/description to really deliver a message. The only thing she does special here that actually contributes to the message is the pixilation/boxing of the photos.

Ultimately, I believe Kusters should win. His photos do something that none of the others do: they stand on their own. Although it isn’t strong, since you have to look up coordinates to figure out the message, once you do, the message is clear.

Photographs analysed:

Clare Strand:

Mark Neville:

Anton Kusters:

Mohamed Bourouissa:

My Photo:

Caption 1: Gym, condition: used
Caption 2: Just finished a long, hard workout!
Caption 3: So many choices for workouts, I'll spend more time picking one than actually working out!
Cropped version (cropped to the tv stand in the middle left of the original):

Caption: We can't even afford a tv!

       I care very much about the gym and working out, even moreso since being quarantined to the house with nothing else to do. The first caption (the best one), references two ideas: the gym is clearly messy, and the gym has clearly been used. This photo could be put into a series highlighting the life of me under quarantine and the caption would be perfect. The other two captions both build on the idea of a messy gym, but in different ways. One uses the mess to imply that many things were done during the workout, while the other uses the mess to display the many things that can be done in the gym. This photograph did not leave much room to crop it and completely change the meaning, however, since everything I've done with the photo builds upon the idea that the gym is of high quality (for a homegym), it is a nice contrast to point something out that is clearly lacking. We used to have a tv for the tv stand but we gave it away. The room hadn't gotten much usage since then so we had no need to replace it.