John Baldassari plays with perception in his photos and often makes his photos seem very open to interpretation as there is no location or other information on the picture meaning that the photo can be perceived by people in any way they want. I like that John's work can be thought of from different perspectives and that you have to think about what the photo means without having to be told what it means. I also like that the interpretations of his work can differentiate from being complex to very simple, for example the first photo is just a simple moment in time that was captured where the woman is enjoying herself and evidentially from her smiling is very happy. However, the second photo in my opinion has a deeper interpretation.
The group of business people standing behind the artist could represent their lack of creativity and maybe they are envious of the artist for their creativity. Another idea that comes to mind from the photo is that the people standing closet to both the window and the artist are the people more likely to be open minded to trying new things whereas the people standing further away from the window and the artist are the people in the group who are close minded and less open to an artistic or imaginative perspective of life.
John Baldassarri is best known for taking photos of things in there original form and then rearranging them to make the photo slightly more abstract. John also worked with lists when taking photos, he would write a list of five things and then use that list to decide what to take photos of. Working with a list allows the photographer to gravitate less towards the typical things to take photos of and take photos of things that may have been ignored usually.
Art of Instruction
Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia is an artist who took control of her artwork and despite her collaborator on some of her artwork being a man, she decided how the photos were going to be which would have been an abnormal thing in society because it was usually men who controlled how photoshoots worked especially when working with a female counterpart. She is best known for her close-up paintings of flowers however she is also known for her collaboration with John Baldassari. Georgia has been acknowledged as the mother of American modernism and her work is considered as some of the greatest American artwork despite her life and some of her art being considered as controversial. One of the main things about Georgia's work is that the photos have a calm atmosphere that demonstrates the freedom she had during the photoshoots.
Artist Analysis - Georgia O’keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz
The collaboration between the two began when Georgia sent a sample of her charcoal work to a friend who then showed them to Alfred who at the time was a very famous photographer who was known for his prominent presence in changing the perspective of American photography as well as the interpretations of the North American take on modern European art. The two began to correspond by sending each other letters, they then decided to meet and when they did Stieglitz decided that Georgia was the muse for his photography that he had always wanted.
I think the way in which they met had a large part to play in the success of their collaboration. Georgia and Alfred's letters were said to be filled with honesty and deep infatuation. Alfred got the chance to appreciate Georgia as an artist despite her not being as well-known as he was before he understood her as women. Because of this I think Alfred respected Georgia as an artist and therefore would not have wanted to ruin the connection that they both shared as artists as well as partners. The fluidity, comfort and relaxed atmosphere created in their photographs is a clear product of a healthy working environment where boundaries were respected and both voices were fairly listened to.
Georgia was part of many of Alfred Stieglitz’s multi part portraits where her poses are deliberate and confident which suggest that she was in control of the shoot as well as Alfred, it also demonstrates that there was no power dynamic struggle between the two artists which would have been revolutionary considering most portraits of women in the 1930s would have been very exposing and controlled predominantly by the man and the women in the photo would have no say in her poses or clothing.
Experiment 1
1- Take a photo of a dog catching a ball 2-Take a photo of a cereal box in a supermarket 3-Take a photo of a hand on a climbing frame 4-Take a photo of a train leaving a station
Evaluation
The one difficult thing about the task was making sure that you are in the right place at the right time to make sure you can get the right photo especially with how specific the instructions are. Being given strict instructions means that you may have to take photos of things that you wouldn't usually gravitate towards meaning the horizon of what you photograph is expanded. I had to adapt some of the photos like the dog chasing a ball in a park, this was because I couldn't get that photo so I changed it to a photo I thought was more accessible and would produce good results so that I could complete the task. If I were to do this again, I would also change the image of the hand on the climbing frame and try to find a more vibrantly coloured one with a child's hand on it. I am planning on doing this task again to compare it to the first one and try and get even better results.
Experiment 1 (continued) - Collaborative Zene
Here we created a sequence with the photos that we took from experiment 1 and together we worked out how we could group the photos together. Those groups could range from whether there are people in the photos, transport, the sky, the main focus of the picture. This however was not the final photo grid, we worked together to group the photos together to create a successful collage where we went from 51 photos down to 24. We very quickly decided that we wanted to group the photos depending on their light exposure, travel, people and architecture. We took the photos that didn't go into these categories out of the final piece.
This is our final piece. We moved the photos around quite a few times before deciding on an order that we were all happy with. As well as considering things such as the exposure of the photo and the subject object of the picture, we also had to take into consideration how the pictures that were not portrait would fit into the photo grid due to the vast majority being portrait and a few being landscape. Another way that we grouped the photos together and decided on their order was the colour focus in the pictures, so if there was a predominant colour in certain photos, we made sure they were next to pictures with the same colours in it to ensure that the final grid didn't look chaotic and mismatched.