oprah

The Oprah Empire

Oprah

Oh Oprah, you shouldn't have!

muybridge study on motion

Ohh Oprah

reading oprah

Masculine Feminine

The Power of O

I Remember When...the Flowers Still Grew

Weekly Word: "Oprah"

"Wa-Waaa....."

I just had to.

I remember when....I could swing all day

now I just get nauseous.

I remeber when I had a bike like this

I remember when.... this door led somewhere else

Jared Vincenti, Film Director

I Remember...Flying Free!

Weekly Word #4: "I Remember When..."

Technical Focus: Shallow Depth of Field.

For those of you who'd like to refresh on "the science" behind employing a shallow depth of field, Wa-La.

Everyday

In the process of moving... So this is what I see everyday

Everyday

Guitar_Man

everyday...perspective

Allegory & Illustration

If the shoe fits wear it, right?


**Inspired by Cinderella & Dorothy's Ruby Red's

Everyday

clock

Pedestrian View

Repulsive/Compulsive

Weekly Word #3: Everyday

Technical focus: exaggerated perspective.

The "Oh, yes, of course" Chide:

"Perspective in photography refers to the appearance of depth or spatial relationships between objects, their dimensions and the position of the eye relative to the objects in an image.

As objects become more distant, they begin to appear smaller. This phenomenon is caused by perspective. The relationship between distance and apparent height of objects is not a linear pattern. If an object were actually touching the eye, thus being no distance away, it would appear infinitely tall.

For example, the parallel lines of a railway track are perceived by a standing human being as meeting at a distant point at the horizon. A person standing at the corner of a building at ground level sees each of the walls recede to an imaginary point on the horizon. The horizon itself is at the level of the viewer’s eye. The eyelevel determines what a person is able to see and what not. A person standing on the seashore sees the horizon with a lesser amount of sea visible than a person standing on top of a multistoried building."

AKA: Bird's eye view verses worm's eye view

Compulsive/Repulsive

repulsion/compulsion

Repulsion/Compulsion

Compulsion-Trash

Repulsion-Bush

repulsion/compulsion

Position & Authority

All figures are the same model, Lori Eiserman.

Quarter Pound(er)

Weekly Word #2: Repulsion / Compulsion

Create two individual images as your interpretation for each word.
You will then display them side by side to create a diptych.
The technical focus is The Rule of Thirds.

Basic Examples:
www.keithcotton.com

poppy

Jump-my perspective

Third Floor Balcony

Gods of the Storm

grace

ABW under

jump right in

Jump_Type

jump

Demo - Jump

She wanted to be photographed in the zoo.

Self Portrait Jump

SAAH Server Address

afp://saahxserve.art.uiowa.edu

"How Do We Read a Photograph?" by Graham Clarke

GREGORY CREWDSON Untitled (Sunday Roast), Winter 2005 Digital C-Print 64.25 x 94.25


Whenever we look at a photographic image we engage in a series of complex readings which relate as much to the expectations and assumptions that we bring to the image as to the photographic subject itself. Indeed, rather than the notion of looking, which suggests a passive act of recognition, we need to insist that we read a photograph, not as an image but as a text. That reading (any reading) involves a series of problematic, ambiguous, and often contradictory meanings and relationships between the reader and the image. The photograph achieves meaning through what has been called a 'photographic discourse': a language of codes which involves its own grammar and syntax. It is, in its own way, as complex and as rich as any written language.

The photograph both mirrors and creates a discourse with the world, and is never, despite its often passive way with things, a neutral representation. Indeed, we might argue that at every level the photograph involves a saturated ideological context. Full of meanings, it is a dense text in which is written the terms of reference by which an ideology both constructs meaning and reflects that meaning as a stamp of power and authority. Far from being a 'mirror', the photograph is one of the most complex and most problematic forms of representation. Its ordinariness belies its ambivalence and implicit difficulty as a means of representation.

To read a photograph, then, is to enter into a series of relationships which are 'hidden', so to speak, by the illusory power of the image before our eyes. We need not only to see the image, but also to read it as the active play of a visual language. In this respect two aspects are basic. First, we must always remember that the photograph is itself the product of a photographer. It is always the reflection of a specific point of view, be it aesthetic, polemical, political, or ideological. One never 'takes' a photograph in any passive sense. To 'take' is active. The photographer imposes, steals, re-creates the scene/seen according to a cultural discourse. Secondly, however, the photograph encodes the terms of reference by which we shape and understand a three-dimensional world. It thus exists within a wider body of reference and relates to a series of wider histories, at once aesthetic, cultural, and social.

Every photograph is not only surrounded by a historical, aesthetic, and cultural frame of reference but also by an entire invisible set of relationships and meanings relating to the photographer and the point at which the image was made. The image is as much a reflection of the 'I' of the photographer as it is of the 'eye' of the camera.

Thus we can read a photograph within its own terms of reference, seeing it not so much as the reflection of a 'real' world as an interpretation of that world.


Graham Clarke (1997): The Photograph. Oxford: Oxford University Press