 |
| Kitchen surrounded by Memories |
Susan Sontag excerpt from On Photography
“To collect photographs is to collect the world. In Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King's Army by the promise that they… [can] get rich. But the suitcase of booty…turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard's gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image.”
Response: What I find most interesting from this excerpt is how I never thought that the pictures we take of the world of famous things is like us taking it home with us. Although we may never be able to ever obtain these objects, places or general locations we can take with us a moment in time that no other can replicate and take from us.
Quote 2
“Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them.”
Response: This quote from Susan Sontag really shows how photographs are just about everywhere. Almost anything imaginable has been done to a photograph and nearly every form of value (monetary, emotional, mathematical, etc.,) has been placed on it. The same can probably be said about the devices used to take theses pictures. These devices have changed as much as the things they take pictures of do.
“Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them.”
Response: This quote from Susan Sontag really shows how photographs are just about everywhere. Almost anything imaginable has been done to a photograph and nearly every form of value (monetary, emotional, mathematical, etc.,) has been placed on it. The same can probably be said about the devices used to take theses pictures. These devices have changed as much as the things they take pictures of do.
NY Times: How Carrie Mae Weems Rewrote the Rules of Image-Making
Quote 1“Georgie O’Keefe once said, “Men put me down as the best women painter. I think I’m one of the best painters.” This marginalization, being categorized as “black artist” or “woman artist” rather than simply artist, is something Weems has dealt with her entire career.”
Response: I wholeheartedly agree with what many disadvantaged people and groups feel about being considered the best of a group and not just the best as a whole. Though until society is ready to completely let go of its prejudices and inadequacies regarding the treatment of various groups of people, such labels are needed to uplift those who were pushed down. If society can move past this, then such labels would not be needed to help the disadvantaged as they would not be in a disadvantaged position anymore.
Quote 2
“IT’S A COMMON fallacy in talking about an artist formative years to imply that it was all inevitable, That A led to B.
Response: This small line from the article is quite true for a lot of things in life. We all assume that through a series of cascading events that it was inevitable that a person would become an artist of a certain renown. Yet, life is always a wondering mess that leads to many dead ends and also many opportunities. In the day to day, we don’t feel this push towards some destiny because be dared to learn to draw one day or take up a lesson in bike riding. Each and everything we do is at times randomly chosen based on our whims and wants.
Revisiting Carrie Mae Weems’s Landmark “Kitchen Table Series”
by Jacqui Palumbo for Artsy
“I added the text just as I was wrapping up, and it was wonderful,” Weems told W about the series. “A man had come to visit me, and we had this wonderful talk about men and women, about our relationships, and he left and then I took a long drive. I always drive with my tape recorder, and I started reciting this text. By the time I got home, it was done, and I went upstairs to my computer and transcribed it.”Response: I’m surprised that she was able to write out the description for her photos from just one conversation and a car ride. Considering how long she portably spent working on the photos I’m surprised she didn’t write the descriptions as she made them.
Quote 2
“I knew that I was making images unlike anything I had seen before, but I didn’t know what that would mean,” she told W. “I knew what it meant for me, but I didn’t know what it would mean historically.”
Response: Interesting how she was trying to create something that she found was missing when looking at artist works during the late 80s. Due to “Kitchen Table Series” becoming popular it developed a history of its own irrespective of Weem’s own personal history when creating it. She intimately knew what it meant to her but to have it be known by someone intimately 50 to 100 years from now who really knows how said future people would view it.
No comments:
Post a Comment