100 Images continuing

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Well, last weekend I cropped all the images. I cropped them selecting quite small areas in all the photos, and used a square format, aiming for abstraction and non-representational results. Oddly, even after this, they still, in many cases, had recognizably similar qualities.

This surprised me quite a bit. Not only did they still seem to fall into visual groupings, but the single black and white drawing image, even though I cropped it down to just one tiny fish, still looks completely different than all of the others. It is still a category on it’s own.

I really thought that abstracting the images would allow for less-predictable organizing principles. Now I’m not certain that it has, or where to go from here. They do look quite low-res beautiful though.

October 7, 2008

As Gail mentioned in class  last week, I too sometimes dream about things when they are simmering.

I woke up this morning with a lingering images in mind. It was about my first idea for this project, the over-sized, single image with the tiny bordering pictures around it, though I thought that I had already moved past that idea. In my waking haze, I realized that I had been flipping through a beautiful magazine, with interesting articles on a variety of subjects by a mix of famous and more obscure authors.

The professional and engaging layout made the magazine feel lively and inviting. The articles ranged from philosophy and topics of social significance to reviews, a short story and poetry. It reminded me of a magazine I used to do interpretive photographs for, “Gamut International” (sadly no longer in existence).

What was strange though was that every single picture in the magazine, from the cover to the advertising to the editorial columns, was illustrated in varying sizes and crops of this same picture.

“History” in the making – what is pushed out into the world by the selection, promotion and archiving process, and later retained collectively as “truth” or “fact”?

October 5, 2008

A disc with 100 images, some interesting, many banal, that are to be structured or organized in some way, almost anyway,  and presented. Also a discussion about process, idea development, a summary paper and  an artists’ statement. OK. I’ve been stalling on this, trying to think of how I can turn this into something that I can get excited about. Something that feels like art, my art.

It’s not going to be easy!

My first idea was to choose one single image to display, in print, quite large, perhaps very large, and then use the remaining images quite tiny as a border or frame. These could be grouped in a variety of ways such as:

- sorting them by colour transitions, similarities or juxtapositions

- creating a narrative reading or context for the large image
- completely randomized
- repeating them in patterns, for purely aesthetic and decontextualizing purposes

Why this approach? Why subvert the archive approach?

For the sake of finding One image that speaks to me. One echo of connection. One piece of something that feels like my art, not someone else’s.

Then I thought of putting the 99 other images randomly on the back of the main image, thereby using all the images but somehow subverting the obvious categories, the banal pairings, the sense of meaningful multiples, by selecting one image, and more or less hiding the rest, making them secondary or less.