Project #4 deadpan
The deadpan image, whether portrait or landscape, is characterized by a directness of gaze; the formality or silence of the image, a ripple across the surface of an otherwise still pool. It is not enough to just have your subject face the camera and throw a white seamless behind them, or to take a picture of an empty lot and say it has meaning.
What are the limits of exteriority? Why do we look to description to give us meaning? What is it about staring that we think will help us understand? How does the universality of a deadpan image trade off with the lack of specific information about what is below its surface?
Is the formal return of our gaze empowering? challenging? an acknowledgement of the relationship between photographer and photographed? With this somewhat objectified formal presentation of subject, how does our desire to stare at it change what we see in the photo?
In a landscape, how does the viewpoint of the photographer create distance? How does the depopulation typical of the genre relate to ideas of architecture? How might formal compositional strategies play against the lowbrow subject? How does size, in and of itself, imbue a subject with greater weight/meaning?
Consider the folks we've looked at in class, and the photographers covered in the textbook. Find a subject you find compelling, and explore it.
Deliverables: 4 prints at ~17x22/larger or 6 prints at ~11x17. Bigger is, in some ways, a characteristic of this genre, so that's included as an option here.
Make sure that you keep your original large files (anything we shoot is a candidate for the show), but you're also turning in a copy resized to 1600px on the long dimension, jpeg, sRGB, full quality.
IN ADDITION, you will hand in a 1-2 page writeup, describing what you intended to do, why you wanted to do it, what you thought it would accomplish, and how your final product relates to that original intent. Be smart and thoughtful. Don't just tell me what you photographed, because I can figure that out already. Save this as a PDF.
Files should be named:
Lastname_Firstname_PH341_Assig03_001.jpg, 002, 003, etc.
Lastname_Firstname_PH341_Assig03_words.pdf
Bring them in on your HD or a flash drive, but also zip them together and upload them the night before. No excuses.
Grading Criteria:
(5) Proper file naming
(5) Proper file size/not screwing it up digitally after you shot it
(20) Aesthetics, print quality
(20) Concept, creativity, originality, problem-solving
(20) Technique and execution of photographs (lighting, technical skills, camera handling, etc.)
(10) Presentation in Critique (cogent, thoughtful, can defend work)
(10) Write-up (reasonable analysis, thought about it ahead of time)