Final Project Reflection: Pixel Pollution

I found the final project to be the most satisfying and thought provoking. At least for myself it was thought provoking, I'm not sure if the viewer took as much out of the images as I would have liked. For me the process brought up a lot of questions in terms what it actually meant to have the workflow that I did. This, in turn, brought up a myriad of questions about what exactly it means to live during a time of image saturation, where virtually all members of our society carry a camera of some form on themselves at any given time, and where we create virtual projections of ourselves through electronic images amassed on internet sites like flickr, facebook and myspace. This project pushed me to think about these things in depth and I had to consider what it meant to take unflattering portraits of people with a cell phone. Ultimately, I concluded that by creating the photo shoot from hell and capturing overly candid portraits, I was making a statement about this saturation of images. By taking these unflattering images that normally only exist in electronic form and giving them physical form I was eliminating the agency that people have come to recognize in projecting themselves through images. They could not simply untag or press a delete button. While this sort of image selfconciousness did exist before the rise of the digital camera (people simply deleted or destroyed undesirable photos of themselves), it was not as ubiquitous nor quotidiary as it is now; we hardly give a second thought the choices we exercise in representing ourselves through images. I don't view this as necessarily negative, but I did want to call attention to this phenomenon in my work. Because I beleive that the physical form of my photographs is crucial to their meaning, I've decided not to publish them on my blog as I prefer them to exist outside of the internet.

Mydan Gleaning

I feel that the commonly used phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words" takes its roots from photographers like Mydans.  His pictures truly are a testament to the decisive moment approach to photography.  Each one of his images seems to capture an essential amount of information to convey to the viewer.  For example, the earthquake image in japan is captured at precisely the moment when the women's foot lands between two cracks in the asphalt as she desperately flees from the smoke and fire.  There is so emotion much captured in this image it is virtually impossible not to feel empathetic.  I think this holds true for all of Mydans' work, even his portraits of McArthur and Churchill are decisively captured to make a statement about their respective personalities.