#sandraliu

Here are my collages from Blogpost #14! They are made from pictures that I have taken over the course of this term.

Jarman's "On Seeing Red" made my eyes bleed red. It was almost as if his intention in writing this piece was to suffuse the reader's mind with so much red and shockingly red visuals that when the reader looked up, they would simply see an afterimage of red. Upon reading it, I visualized blood coming out of my eyes and covering the surrounding world around me with a red tint. It felt so vivid and visceral, as though the text had permeated me with its ferocity and passion, and I remember thinking fleetingly that if I were to blink, the world around me might turn crimson or burn in bright vermilion hues.

"The Blue of Distance," in contrast, was soothing and felt like a balm. Unlike the vivacious red in Jarman's piece, the blue that Solnit wrote of was subdued and subtle, as though it were an afterthought. I appreciated the analogies between the blue of distance and the paradoxical nature of being unable to obtain something beautiful because obtainment causes it to lose its beauty. However, I did not find the piece to be a commentary on the color blue insomuch as it was a commentary on losing and gaining beauty. I found it lacking and unconvincing in its depiction of the color blue, which I feel represents a lot more than what was written. Reading the chapter made me envision shades of grey instead, since I more closely associate grey with the emotions in Solnit's writing.

As a result, my red collage was greatly inspired by Jarman's piece, whereas my blue collage more closely represented aspects of blue that I wanted to explore.

I once read The Waste Land seven years ago and thought it was ridiculous - there were too many allusions, too many loose threads of dialogue, and too much to parse through. My literature teacher did not disabuse me of this notion; he deridingly called The Waste Land a poem that T.S. Eliot used as a means to show off his poetry prowess. As a result, our class ended up spending more time analyzing Eliot's other poems, which I found much more palatable. But years of my other literature-minded friends telling me to reconsider my stance on The Waste Land and this assignment have made me reconsider my feelings towards Eliot's magnum opus, and I approached it with the realization that I would have to spend time analyzing and reading about the allusions that he makes throughout his long poem.

As a result of this reconsideration, my approach towards this collage assignment and the visions and ideas evoked by the poem are a bit strange. Instead of focusing on the extensive imagery he writes in his poem, I focused on the various myths and repetitive motifs throughout the stanzas. I found myself drawn to the pearl eyes, the imagery of a broken Christianity, Philomel as a nightingale and her subsequent flight, and the symbolism of water. I also chose to focus on how The Waste Land teems with this juxtaposition of gorgeously written prose and broken segments of writing, images, and feelings.

I cannot even begin to hope that I captured any aspect of The Waste Land in my collages. Instead, I attempted to put together collages of the images and motifs that drew me into The Wasteland and I chose to focus on the idea of water. I wanted to showcase the complicated feelings that Eliot evokes in his poem and also the futility that he seems to feel throughout it.

Reading "In Defense of the Poor Image" made me think specifically of the proliferation of memes and I wondered whether Hito Steyerl knew of memes when she wrote this essay. I looked at the history of memes and realized that YouTube began in 2005, which is when video memes became popular, but truthfully, memes seem to have almost always existed as long as the written word has existed. In other words, the ideas of the "poor image" have been prolific, as Steyerl seems to imply in her work.

Another interesting point I noticed was that although the title of the piece seemed to imply that there would be a "defense of the poor image," Steyerl never seems to fully defend it. Her slightly disdainful diction throughout the essay, which derides the "poor image," instead argues that these beautiful, perfect, original images are not necessarily accessible to the general public and that the "poor image" creates an almost socialistic aspect to media, allowing more people to participate. This idea also draws parallels to both Sontag's and Flusser's writings on how photography "equalizes," but Steyerl takes it one step further with her discussion of how the reformatting of the image has become an equalizer. Thus, instead of fully defending the poor image, Steyerl argues that we should accept that it has some good qualities and is a part of the reality we (or photographic/media snobs) must face. Without it, there also would not be any rise of the independent movie makers or low-budget films.

If Narcissus had been alive in this day and age, would he have been a huge proponent of the selfie, posting hundreds of filtered images of himself on Instagram, and basking in the attention of his thousands of followers?

Perhaps this question is rhetoric - the answer seems trivial. After all, the myth of Narcissus follows the tale of a youth so obsessed with his image that he fell in love with it and wasted the rest of his life, staring intently and arduously at it. Reading through synopses online, I found many discussions about what exactly the tale of Narcissus meant, from both a moral and a photographic standpoint. Superficially, we know of the tale of an egotistical man, which can easily be tied with the phenomena characterized by an obsessive imperative to take selfies, called "selfitis." And, we know that the myth warns us against being egotistical and selfish, unable to love others. However, one issue we never talk about is the lost potential that embodies Narcissus. Narcissus, who is beautiful beyond compare, is loved and admired by many. He is surrounded by all of these potential love interests and opportunities, yet squanders them away simply because he becomes irrevocably obsessed with himself.

Much of the dialogue from A New Nothing revolves around a common theme, motif, or subject, and at times utilizes abstractions of shapes or colors. A few of the photographic dialogues I looked through also borrowed compositional elements from their previous pictures, such as the following pair of pictures from Curtis Hamilton and Timothy Briner, where the subjects share extremely similar poses.

Left: T.B. - 5/1/17, Right: C.H. - 3/14/17

There are also dialogues which almost appear to be an actual conversation happening between two people, such as the following pair from W. M. Hunt and Efrem Zelony-Mindell. The first photograph shows a person displaying the shirtless body of a muscled figure and the response is a picture of another person displaying a sign reading, "I HATE EVERY BODY."

Left: W.M.H. - 1/23/18 (Still from Die Hard with a Vengeance, 1995)

Right: E.Z.M. - 1/9/18 (Rory W H Hamovit, 2017)

That being said, the picture dialogues that appealed to me the most were the ones between Catherine Canac-Marquis and Laurence Hervieux-Gosselin, some of which are shown below. They represented both a playful dialogue, where the picture of a horse is followed by a picture of someone riding a mechanical bull, and also of a conversation framed by color abstractions and motifs. A picture of a sunset (purple at the top fading into yellow) is succeeded by similarly colored apartments (blue on top, yellow on bottom, with artificial light mirroring the natural lighting of the first image). The picture of a vibrant pink-leafed plant in a clear water jar on a beige background is accompanied by a picture of a pale pink sunset, sand, and ocean waves. Although the connection between the photographs is not as clear as it is in some of the other picture pairs I have seen, I appreciate the abstraction of color and subject in these images.

Top: C.C.M. - 9/28/20

Bottom: L.H.G - 11/16/20

Left: L.H.G. - 6/21/20, Right: C.C.M - 6/21/20

Hatred becomes a barrier and an impediment to relationships in James Baldwin's essay "Notes of a Native Son," where he writes about his emotionally complicated relationship with his father and about the ramifications of being Black during the Jim Crow era. The essay was both introspective and melancholic, with a brutish touch of frustration. Baldwin, throughout his essay, writes about the inevitable bitterness that he began to adopt and understand more as he grew older, an acerbity that pervaded his father's life and which he naively thought would never invade his own. "Notes of a Native Son" is heartbreaking in its ability to directly confront hatred and frustration and reveal Baldwin's regrets of words left unspoken. His father's funeral, juxtaposed with the birth of Baldwin's younger sibling, and set directly in the scene of the Harlem riots, seems to ground the essay and holds its emotional core.

The ending of the essay, on the other hand, feels a bit misplaced because of its slight optimistic and preaching message. His message felt akin to a sermon, with its idea that hatred eats away at people, but is also an almost necessary precursor to counteract injustice. It felt analogous to what was written in the foreword, about how Baldwin's "weakest passages occur when [he] starts sermonizing without a proper argument to back him up." For an essay which was mostly about his relationship with his father and how their lives had become poisoned due to the injustice of racism, the ending was incongruous and nearly hypocritical, as Baldwin writes that his embittered father believed that "bitterness was folly."

Reading the essay, in the context of our photography class, also made me wonder if Baldwin ever pursued photography himself. Although I did not find any accounts of his photography, I found an article about an exhibition called Time Is Now: Photography and Social Change in James Baldwin’s America. Looking at these images inspired me to think about what Baldwin would have chosen to take pictures of if he was a photographer. How would his photography have changed as he grew older, and what are the subjects he would have focused on? Many of the images I saw in the article focused on the racial disparity and the protests against racism, which Baldwin focuses on in "Notes of a Native Son," but would that have been the main focus in his photography or would he have shied away from it at times, worried about confronting it directly?

Founded over 70 years ago by four WWII photojournalists, Magnum Photos Cooperative was created with the intent of giving photographers artistic liberty and freedom of expression. Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, and David "Chim" Seymour wanted to be independent of the formulaic nature of magazine journalism, but still have the ability to document world events in an authentic and transformative way. This vision has resulted in Magnum photographers capturing many major events and people around the world, while also owning the copyright of their own photos.

Even though the idea of having legal ownership over one's own pictures seems like a given to an amateur hobbyist photographer, I can appreciate the impact and implications that Magnum Photos Cooperative must have had on its artists. The idea of self-copyright almost seems synonymous with an artist's relationship with their own artwork, and it must have been absolutely freeing for these photographers to finally be able to take pictures of what they wanted and have ownership over their own artistic expression. 

I am specifically a fan of Steven McCurry's work, because of the bright vivid colors and latent actions in his photographs. However, I wanted to explore other artist's works and chanced upon this whimsical photograph by Jonas Bendiksen.

A floating unicorn at dawn in Bunnefjorden outside Oslo. 2018

From there, I looked him up and found one of the most iconic pictures of his career, which looked like a scene out of a fairy tale. The white butterflies enveloped the entire scene, and appeared almost as giant snowflakes falling from the sky.

Villagers collect scrap from a crashed spacecraft, surrounded by thousands of white butterflies. 2000.

Looking through his pictures, I was immersed in the almost fantastical elements of his images, and loved the lighting composition in the following picture of a small child gazing up at the colorful lights above her.