PhotoMosaic in Grey Jessica Apel-Mifsud Visual Media Analysis Diane Shoos 05/03/2004
This piece, when originally conceptualized, was going to be similar to a Chuck Close painting. I think we’ve all seen one at one time or another, in one form or another. The kind of image that you realize is made of many, many, many images. And you can usually recognize those images as something you relate to by themselves. Then, as you step further and further away from the images, you see that the images are part of a larger image that can be recognized on its very own. The images become one comprehensive image. Chuck Close focused his material on portraits. He would start with photos and draw a grid over them and then transfer the grid to large, oversized canvases with paint. Standing close to the finished canvases, all you really see are circles and shapes and blobs of color laid out in a grid. Standing 20 feet away however, you saw a face, sometimes a face of someone famous as Chuck Close often did the portraits of famous folk. My point is, that that was my original great idea. I wanted the pictures to actually spell out the written statement. But due to time and the sheer mass of pictures I needed to process, it was not realistic for me to complete that idea within the timeframe I allotted myself. So what we have instead is what you see.
(I inserted a page break here because I wanted to keep the next block of text together)
I guess the first tangent I want to follow in analyzing my own piece, is the obvious conflict that goes on within the connotative message and the pictures themselves and the denotative message. There is the statement: (24) True or False The colors “black” and “white” describe the world around us.
with a decisive FALSE.
at the end. Let’s start with this. We have a true or false question here making the viewer feel that there must be a right or wrong answer. We as life-long students have grown up in the environment that there is a right or wrong answer for everything, especially for true or false questions. It’s inherent in the name. Next there is the actual question. A question about black and white. Black and white are associated with many things: race, photography, stereotypes, color-blindness, positive and negative, good and evil, and right and wrong (among others that I couldn’t think of). One way we can take this is that the question is dealing with whether or not you think the world can be divided into black and white. Can the world we know be cleanly split into right and wrong? Some people with very strong beliefs would say “yes.” But those are just some with opinions that not everyone shares. What about the good and evil notion? Essentially, good and evil boil right down to right and wrong. So in this piece you are being forced to decide whether you think right and wrong can describe our world. You know what I would say? “Well, sometimes.” I suppose some things are inherently
wrong and some are inherently right. But these things change from religion to religion and from culture to culture. In our own cultural ideology, we are instilled with the notion that we should not judge a book by its cover, in other words, not to judge before experiencing the real thing. The conflict then becomes even more complicated when you see the word “FALSE” at the bottom. So, things aren’t, can’t be black and white? What if I think it is true? The question folds in on itself so that we can’t defy or accept the answer. I debated for a long time on what I should put there, if anything at all. My original idea was to put “FALSE” there. At the time, my personal life was strewn with arguments with friends and an unsteady and complicated relationship with my boyfriend. I was pulled in so many directions concerning so many things. I was dying to just get along with everybody that I knew and not have to worry about upsetting the balance of life. “Why can’t everyone just get along?!” I kept thinking why can’t people just accept the fact that everyone is going to have their own opinions and their own ways of doing things. But as situations escalated I found that even I was becoming more polarized and opinionated, trying to get others to see my point of view. So I eventually decided to “force” the answer, because of my personal situation at the time. I guess the next thing to address is the other major element of this piece: the photographs. All the photos here with the exception of about 100, are from my
own personal collection. Those 100 are from a friend’s collection of photographs. Many of the photos are duplicates happening as many as two or three times throughout the whole thing and there are about 1700 little “picture rectangles.” The concept of “Photographic Truth” comes up automatically when dealing photographs. When we look at a photograph, we assume that it represents the truth. In this case the truth being represented is on a massive scale. Each individual picture represents something that really happened in my life. All the pictures together collaborate to represent a bigger truth: that I have a life. The photos serve a purpose here. My intention is to let the photographs help defy the true or false statement. The photos are a representation of the many facets of a person. A person is never black or white. They are filled with experiences that make them “colorful.” I also wanted to mention the fact that the photos are in black and white verses color. We know that these photos were taken of the color world and not of a black and white world. I guess I mean that both literally and metaphorically. Literally in the sense that the world is seen by our own eyes in color (unless of course you are color blind). And metaphorically in the sense that our experiences make the world feel colorful as opposed to black and white and stark. I am amazed at the variety my world shows me. So back to the fact that the photos are black and white. Since I did not show them in color, does that mean that these are not of the real world? Wouldn’t color invoke more truth? My opinion on this is that black and white photographs appear more archival. Perhaps this is
because historical photos are usually in black and white simply because of their age. They were taken back when technology did not allow for color photography. So in that sense, the presentation of the photos as black and white gives them more credibility. My life is real. Yay. As people live their lives they experience and with the experiences come understanding of their worlds. In our lifetimes we are not capable of experiencing everything that exists to be experienced. That is when we begin to develop categories and assumptions in the world around us. And that is when ignorance begins to develop. The thought of two large categories of “right” and “wrong” that you can categorize and sift everything into a big act of ignorance. I don’t mean to say that after contemplation, nothing can ever be wrong or right for one person. But I am uncomfortable and resentful towards the people that at first glance categorize what they see before ever looking. Since, in my opinion, the world cannot be seen as black and white, does that mean that all of these photos cannot be real or cannot have any truth in them? No. I think that the photographs defy that notion because we know they were taken of the color world. I also thought of how through these hundreds of pictures, the viewer may read into them and their own experiences to create a story. Because of the sheer volume of pictures and my short timeframe, I placed these pictures entirely at random. I had no intention of making a story from “frame” to “frame.” But I did intend that all the pictures be read as the collective “story of my life.” The viewer
might fabricate stories that did not happen in order to relate to my photographs. This is illustrated in “Big Fish,” the latest Tim Burton film. The stories of the father’s life in the movie are seen as lies in the eyes of William, the son. William sees his father as never facing his own real life, and making up fantastic stories to replace the mundane ones. In the end we see that all the stories were real, they just were embellished with color. William became to hate the “colored” stories and yearned for the black and white ones. To him that was the truth that mattered. Where was I going with this? Oh yes. I was talking about stories. There are truths that are recorded by these photographs. But every viewer will see a different story in relation to their own experiences. Along with the notion of black and white comes the notion of shades of gray. Even though each of the photographs is in black and white, viewed as a collective, they appear to mottle up into multiple shades of grey and the only distinct black and white found in my image is that of the true or false question. This observation strengthens the entire argument that our world cannot be seen as black and white. Because when you step back from it all it really doesn’t matter. At the end of your life, when you look back, you are not going to see two columns, one made of black, bad, evil, negative things and the other made of white, right, good, positive things; you’ll see a variety of experiences that have made you the colorful person you are.
{I want to give this project to my friends who have been so good to me in giving me so much to think about and experience in the short time that I have known them. They have made my life colorful and worth waking up everyday for. They are part of this project both physically in pictures and spiritually in memory and love. Thanks for becoming part of my life story.}
Response to class. I just wanted to let you know that I got a lot out of this class. This was actually my second time taking the course. Last spring I took it with Diana George. I am
kind of ashamed to say that I didn’t do well at all in the course. I didn’t do well at all in any of my courses that semester. I was emotionally stressed on so many levels and the number one most important thing to me at that time was to reestablish ties with my family and friends and to make my day to day life have value. I am ashamed of myself that I let my scholastic standards slip so badly, but I am glad I didn’t. I felt completely ready for courses this semester and am glad I was able to fully involve myself in this course. I have been interested in this subject, broad as it is, for ages and really got a lot out of class time. The texts were really great in the coverage of material, although Sturken and Cartwright was really dense and hard to read most of the time. It did a good job of covering the multitude of concepts, but I wish the authors had a less dry style. I really dug the video we viewed of Stuart Hall and British cultural studies. It was also very dense and I might not have gotten through it if I hadn’t taken notes. I also enjoyed the screening about the history of photography. And the McCloud book rocked my world. I was like “Yeah! I have thought about it before and never knew hoe to express it!” In my case, this class was all about feeling good about understanding what the material was saying and actually feeling a personal connection with the material. I am not much of a free time reader, but if you feel like there are some books out there that might actually do the same that this class’ materials have done, maybe you can suggest them. Thanks again for a great course. Jessie