Globalisation

Zed Nelson - Love Me - Billboard, Rio, Brazil 

Zed Nelson's Love Me series approaches the subject of globalisation extremely effectively, he explores the vast different countries and how they approach beauty in their life. 

On this particular image he has taken a picture of a billboard sign, an advertisement for a cosmetic brand. It is a huge image that has been placed on a very large tall building to attract passers by to buy the product. 

The series shows the varied ways of how beauty effected individuals around the world. He talks about South African women who are driven by caucasian beauty that have operations to make them look barbie doll like. I agree that the world is driven by western media and commercials promoting a narrow idea of beauty. 

Nelson is worried about how out of hand it could get, how it could affect the social world around us, how it could affect individuals finding it hard to find a job because of how attractive they are? 

'We have created a world in which there are enormous social, psychological and economic rewards and penalties attached to the way we look' - Zed Nelson.

Repetition

Ed Ruscha - Twenty six Gasoline Stations

Ed Ruscha has made a book about documenting these 26 gas stations. He took a journey from where he lived at the moment in LA to where he first grew up in Texas. This is an interesting way to show a personal journey through documenting each gasoline he comes across. I really like how each image is completely different to the next but still has this repetition element to the work. This has been produced into a book which is sequenced in order of the journey. 
"Ruscha's books combined the literalness of early California pop art with a flat-footed photographic aesthetic informed by minimalist notions of repetitive sequence and seriality....Thirty years later, with a quarter of a century of mainstream artworld activity between, the aspect of shock-effect and humor has diminished somewhat. But in 1962 (sic) this work read against the photographic landscape of highly aestheticized image-making." Joanna Drucker^[9]

The Rhetoric of Images

Andy Warhol - Marilyn


One of the most iconic images from Andy Warhol. He has created this image of Marilyn Manroe and repeated it by printing it differently in each squared image. He hasn't just done one use of this image, he has used it throughout his years as an artist. 
He has took an image of a vey famous and respected actress and screen printed her face in so many different ways. Warhol is really interested in celebrities and death combined and I believe that this was his main inspiration for this whole body of work. Looking at these images like this doesn't make me feel any emotion, I just take them for what they are, beautiful pieces of art. I like how he has created these images from one simple portrait of Marilyn and then turning it into so many different interpretations of the image.

The Gaze

 Kohei Yoshiyuki's 'The Park' Series


Yoshiyuki's voyeristic shots of the series tie in with 'the gaze'. The woman is desired by the men around her and seem to be focusing all their attention on her.
'My intention was to capture what happened in the parks, so I was not a real 'voyeur' like them. But I think, in a way, the act of taking photographs itself is voyeuristic somehow. So I may be a voyeur, because I am a photographer'. He quotes which then asks the question is he part of the gaze?
This series 'The Park' features shots taken in Tokyo, Japan of picture having sex whilst strangers watch. This park was used for anyone wanting to participate in such activities and couldn't afford a room at a love hotel. Kohei looked out upon voyeurs who watched and sometimes touched other couples. Sex before marriage was frowned upon and thats why some couples went to park at night to make love. 
'He used a 35-millimetre camera with infrared film and a filtered flashbulb, allowing him to take photographs in the dark without hardly anyone noticing.'
My favourite was how he exhibited the project by turning off all the lights in the room and having the viewers go around with a torch to have a look at them, a relevant approach to the whole subject matter and to let the viewers see what e actually had to go through to capture these images. Yoshiyuki destroyed the prints short after the exhibition and returned to work as a professional photographer, I think that he was under pressure from what he had taken which made him change his mind about what he has created. 

Historical and Contemporary Documentary Photography

I have picked Paul Graham for the contemporary documentary photographer. His body of work called ‘Beyond Caring - (1984-85)’ features an unemployment office with people who have been made unemployed industrial working classes. It was published in 1986 and was evidence of what Thatcher created. 

This is one of the pictures featured in ‘Nobody Cares’. It shows waiting around, from the young to the old not knowing the future and maybe what they are even doing there. This is in my eye one of most effectual piece in ‘Nobody Cares’, simply because of the message it sends out to the viewer. unemployed folk sit bored less, head in hands waiting around with a toddler not knowing what is going on. I love how know one knows that their picture is being taken because they couldn’t care at this point because there is something much more important they need to worry about. The grimness of the piece with the floors and grey walls adds to the situation around them, a perfect example of surveillance created by Paul Graham.

 I have picked Dorothea Lange for the historical documentary photographer, her piece 'Migrant Mother' used for the FSA.

I have chosen to use this image ‘Migrant Mother’ because even though it was taken in the 20th century, it still went through some manipulation, even though she states:

'Hands off! I do not molest what I photograph, I do not meddle and I do not arrange’. 

This can be argued when discussing her image of the Florence Owens Thompson (Migrant Mother), because it has been ‘meddled’ with. On the original shot around the wooden post on the right hand side was her hand wrapped around it, but because the thumb was at the front of the post it distracted the viewer from what the intention was so therefore she removed it. In some ways I don’t blame her because it is not as if she has removed an arm to make the image look worse than it is she has just simply removed a distraction, so her statement is clearly hypocritical of her. Although the image was so successful for Lange making her a favourite in the FSA. The fact that the children are shying away from the camera shows that the woman is strong for her children under the circumstances, if the shot that was submitted was the one taken further away of where they lived and them sat in the distance I don’t think it would have made Lange as successful because this shows so much emotion and tragedy throughout the Depression.

Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Exhibition

 Merry Alpern – 'Dirty Windows' 1994.
A perfect example of how artists have used surveillance as a vehicle for critical art practice. The image shows a woman, not really doing very much but we assume because the artist has called the piece ‘Dirty Windows’ that it must be somewhat uncouth. It has been taken in black and white to add to the whole dark atmospheric mood of the image and the image is cleverly cropped without intention to. The image was created in 1994 and I believe was taken using a telephoto lens. Viewers looking at this voyeuristic shot feel somewhat uneasy but still want to know more about it. Merry Alpern took surveillance to the next level by spying on a bathroom window of a sex club near Wall Street. I really think that the work is aesthetically pleasing even if the subject matter is a bit hard to handle, I think that Merry Alpern just wanted to shock viewers with her latest work with this voyeuristic angle, nothing wrong with that and as Michel Foucault said ‘He who is subjected to a field of visibility and who knows it, assures responsibility for the constraints of power, he makes them pay spontaneously upon himself.’ Therefore stating that if you don’t want to be watched don’t make it easy for them.

Vito Acconci – 'Following Piece' 1969, Gelatin Silver Print

Vito Acconci, a designer, performance and installation artist has took surveillance in his own hands to make ‘Following Piece’. Vito would follow random people until they walked into a building then he would start to follow someone else. This lasted everyday for a month and wrote about each time he would follow someone. Strange? Very. I believe that Acconci was curious to see what people would do, whether they would turn round and see him? Maybe to see how long he could follow someone for? I’m guessing that the pictures were taken with a timer? Or otherwise someone else is taking it for him. I feel this is invading someone’s privacy, voyeuristic in the way of spying on someone but not in the same way as we view ‘Dirty Windows’ by Merry Alpern. Acconci interacts as much with the stranger as he possibly could, unless he talked to them but then there would be no point to the project.

Weegee (Arthur H Fellig) – ‘Lovers at the Movies’ 1940.

Another voyeuristic shot for its time, Weegee managed to use an infrared film to capture this visually pleasing image. It shows a cinema screen where the audience are blissfully unaware to what is going on in the cinema screen. What I find interesting is that you can look at each person in the shot to see what their reaction is to whatever they’re watching with creates two separate stories in the image. It is voyeuristic in the way that at the time public affection was often frowned up on so by secretly kissing in the dark thinking no one can see just shows that someone is always watching. The audience that would look at this nowadays would think it was romantic and sweet but very different opinions to the audience at the time as it was again frowned upon.