Project Change: One Picture, One Story

So in the previous blog I briefly described what kind of project I originally planned to do for this semester. That has now changed. I did a little bit of work on it for a week. While I like the idea, I didn't feel passionate enough to keep on going with it. Knowing this, the project has to change into one that can hold my interest.

I joined Andy's project that has an interesting focusing question: How to tell a story in one image?

The medium we use to do this project is completely open. At the moment I'm still deciding whether I want to do photography, digital art, cinemagraphs, or a combination of two mediums. Maybe have different sets of mediums expressing the same story and see which one is more effective.

The key theme I want to explore is inspired from a section from the documentary Objectified by Gary Hustwit (2009). The documentary is about the relationship between the users, the manufactured objects and their designers. Dieter Rams was one of the various designers interviewed. He said that "good design is as little design as possible."

Going from that quote it resonates well with me because for me it says "Less is more". So my key theme for the project is minimalism. How to tell a story in one image as simply as possible, using as few elements as possible.

I made a short search to look at examples of minimalist photography on the internet. They feature strong lines, interesting textures, geometric shapes, and strong sections of colours. Most of them don't tell a story. The ones that do rely on symbolism and implication to tell a story. Careful composition and lighting, I imagine, would also help.

My favourite example is this picture below.

Figure I. Khan, J. (2008). Racism ... IV. Retrieved from http://ahmedwkhan.deviantart.com/art/Racism-IV-81071008.

Here the burnt match is ostracised by the other matches for its differences. This theme remains constant despite various interpretations of what those differences are. A commenter suggests that it is about age as the long match is burnt and useless, which is eventually what happens to the other matches. Another commenter argues that it is merely the colour of the match. It conveys the theme of racism in a very succinct and clear way. Using as few elements as possible.

However, is there a difference between conveying a theme, a message, and a story? I think this distinction is important. A theme, for example, would be an idea or concept. Such as sadness. A message builds on a theme to express an opinion of some kind that the viewer is supposed to take from the picture. For example, "sadness is painful". A story, I think, grows further on the message. Fleshing out a full set of details. "This person is sad because this happened, and now they're doing this." I wonder if it's possible to differentiate between a theme, message, and story between pictures. Or maybe in every picture we are predisposed to making a story of our own?



Reference List

Hustwit, G. (Producer & Director). (2009). Objectified [Motion Picture]. United States: Swiss Dots.

New Semester, New Project

This semester I'm doing a new project on my own. It's to improve on an existing work I did last year I for Aotea Centre's DAL exhibition.

The context for the work was to show the world the artist painted in a different way. So the painting changes perspective depending where you are in front of the painting. Giving a sense that you are looking at a different world through a window.

In the improvement I plan to do this semester is to add a layer of context to the new work. Also, instead of paintings, this time the works are musical pieces. The context in question is more about the composer. For example, why they wrote the piece, what it was for, who they were as people, what time and place did they live in, and so on. Then to express these aspects of their music into a landscape.

Thus, the key thing I want to do here is to translate music into a landscape that reflects the world of the composer.

I originally planned out four different paths I can go through to approach this project. However, I quickly realised that it's a trap that I usually trick myself into walking into. I find that I always fool myself into thinking that no matter how much time I have there will never be enough time. Then I panic and begin to make restrictive plans. These plans hurt my project more than anything else. Because they trap me into a very narrow space so I can't really branch out and think in more interesting ways. In this way, the project doesn't develop or grow, but is stunted. Now that I'm aware of this I can relax and begin doing more research to expand ideas instead of caging myself into a small space.

I think the talk about group dynamics we did helped me realise this a lot sooner than I normally would have. I got maximum scores Completer-Finisher for the Belbin roles. I'm not surprised at all to be honest because if I think something is wrong I can't stop thinking about it until it's properly fixed. However, I wonder how effective the models for group dynamics we were shown are in real life situations. There must be many more different models and I'm guessing the effectiveness differs depending on personal preference.