Liam Drury's ART 240 Blog

Color  This image reflects color to me due to the dominant presence of it in the image. The way the purple lighting covers almost everything in the photo really makes for a beautiful scene in my opinion, showing the contrast in body lines of the car well, as well as lighting up the sidewalk in a purplish hue. The contrast between the purple and the yellow street lights compliment each other nicely too.

 "A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth."      Avedon's quote contradicts itself twice. He states that there is no such thing as inaccuracy, yet none of them tell the truth. Does this mean that what is accurate isn't what is true? Maybe.       This quote does make sense though. Images like this photo from my digital photo 1 series capture an emotion, and looks to be taken straight from a film with actors. Of course this is just an image of toys standing in front of a fire on the Forest Volleyball court. It displays no truth as to what it actually is, but it creates a story on it's own. And sure, the photo accurately displays what I, the photographer had intended.      I think the point of Avedon's quote is to say that a photograph i...

 Man Ray was a photographer who focused heavily on Dada and Surrealism. This is apparent in his style of posing and use of models, as well as obscurity in his works in general. A good amount of his work uses human figures (usually women) who pose for the camera like it's a normal image that'd be in a photo magazine. He also has images that are just plain obscure, and rather tough to figure out what exactly I'm looking at. The first image I choose to look at seems awfully strange. There are no people like I spoke of earlier, and there's just shapes and patterns. It looks like a negative or a photogram of some sort to me though, and upon further inspection, it looks like the subject may be a slinky, and shown around it looks like the reflection of clouds and a hooded individual looking upon it. Was this image double exposed? I'm unsure. But it is surreal to the point where it has an indistinguishable subject matter, which allows the mind to fill in the gaps. This seco...

 Surrealism Surrealism to me is the construction of images, or manipulation of drawings to create something that just doesn't align with any set idea. It captures no essence of direct meaning upon first glance, and may not have any meaning at all. But surreal images are strange depictions of things, meant to look like something familiar, yet so outlandish that it's unrecognizable. The images usually look like they could be very authentic, displaying an odd sense of realistically in terms of lighting and depth of the subject(s). For my own surrealistic image, I felt the need to make something fun and whimsical rather than something scary or odd looking. It's simply a Shiba Innu Dog that the owner had put a magnifying glass towards it's face, showing a funny picture of the dog's enlarged face. I replaced the dog's face with an image of Walter White from Breaking Bad, and then placed the dog on a tropical water background I'd simply found on the internet. So wh...

 Lee Friedlander has a unique style of street photography, often featuring himself as a part of the subject matter. His self portraiture in his images can be very subtle, or very direct, but you can usually tell it's the work of Friedlander when you see his images, even for the first time. This first image is from his street photography, using the woman in front of him to frame the shadow of his own portrait. This image without his shadow would look over exposed, but the bright contrast of the back of the woman's head perfectly frames Friedlander's shadow. This second image uses Friedland's own reflection in the car mirror to fill the empty space in the left third of the image. He turns a rather uninteresting sight, a disheveled looking church, into an interesting photo. He frames it nicely with the car window, the mirror, and the lights around it. His camera is pointed at just the right angle that he can't see the lens in the mirror.

 Photography is often done to document, or beautify things. What do we do when the documented image is beautiful? Often times it isn't an issue. Mixing these two attributes for documenting that of tragedies however, is taken very differently. In 2001, September 11th, Magnum Photographers and many others took pictures of the horrific events at the twin towers. Many of Magnum's photographers' images were not used, as their technical skill and eye for images were too beautiful to be used to display such a horrendous sight. So morally, should these images even exist? This first image by Larry Towell, a Magnum photographer, shows a man standing among the debris. It looks staged, almost like a sort of odd scene from a movie. But the fact that this image is real, especially in the moment of devastation is astounding. It display's Towell's mindset of making the most of every opportunity to create a spectacular image, but also makes the viewer question his morality. This nex...

 When one thinks of photography, we often imagine what is taken on a physical camera. But what about what can be taken virtually? Surprisingly enough, the game "Gran Turismo" offers a highly intuitive camera system in their virtual photo booth called "scapes." It allows players to adjust things like focus modes, aperture, shutter speed, and exposure compensation, just like a normal DSLR. It even displays your lens zoom in mm too. The game offers thousands of different locations where players can take snapshots of their in game vehicles. They also have the ability to adjust things such as steering angle, headlight/brake light positions, and the speed of the vehicles as well. With the seemingly endless possibilities, players have created scarily realistic images, all within a virtual landscape. This first image is taken in one of the Tokyo scapes using a Toyota MK4 Supra. The car is placed at an angle to look like it's moving through the tight city streets slowly,...

Alexander Gardener's Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter (1863)  Susan Sontag's In Plato's Cave  touches on the notion that photographs are very different than that of a painting, but rather that they are true evidence or proof of something's existence. She explains that a painting is merely an interpretation, and that a photograph is undeniably the truth. Sontag later goes on to explain that photography isn't exactly proof. Sure it may be visually accurate, but photographers still take photos to try to display what they see, the way they want their subject to be viewed. "In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects." (Sontag, 13) Photography is another way to interpret the world. Images can be made to give off a specific feeling or mood, as well as moving things around to convey a different message. An early example of this would be Alexander Gardener's Home of a R...