think! respond! finally.

A good picture engages and provokes a response from the viewer. I think that some formal composition, such as use of framing and lighting, is necessary in order for a picture to be good in and of itself. I think it’s important that a good picture communicate an idea with its audience. These ideas don’t necessitate profundity, but they should force the viewer to react, and provoke a response to what they are looking at. I also think a good picture needs to do more than solely provide an aesthetic experience that catches one’s eye.

I think that there are some pictures I would like to see in black and white and others that I would prefer in color. I feel that making black and white pictures is more intrinsic to working with film, while in this class, digital has allowed for a great deal of potential printing with color. I am drawn to both kinds of mediums, although I think ultimately I prefer film. I like the purity of actually using light to make a photograph, and I don’t think that digital images capture the lighting as well as film does, but this may only apply to specific pictures. I like both, and ultimately my conclusions on these questions are unclear at best. I think that color can be used for a purpose, but there are times where black and white is more apt to illustrate the idea that the picture is communicating.

I caught myself initially trying to make a more profound statement in my project than was necessary or desirable. I thought that the feedback I got from discussing our ideas and projects in class over the past couple weeks was meaningful and helped what my project eventually evolved to become. I found it challenging to get a bias perspective on the theme of the project partly from Bowdoin being a relatively homogenous community, but I think that it conveyed with some success ideas of the close surrounding community that we are a part of. My intent was to portray the ideas of individuals, to reflect on what I thought to be logical and meaningful questions that people should ask themselves in relation to the country we live in.

I had a lot of fun with the panoramas and thought that the night shots were especially successful. The juxtaposition of the panoramas of the gas station and the empty Wal-Mart parking lot to the ones during the day of Maine Street with the cars and cemetery worked well. I thought mounting on the foam core worked well to provide for some relief off the wall. Velcro is awful and pretty expensive. Stapling on walls also sucks. If I could do it over again I would’ve grouped the answers to the questions in each row between the panoramas but I still don’t know if I like grouping the panoramas and the individual pictures separately. I was intrigued by the idea of portraying this multiplicity of opinion and ideas surrounding this issue of patriotism, and thought that if I installed something that had a lot going on, it would communicate that idea. I think that not revealing the questions was the right decision, though I should’ve grouped the pictures respectively.

Ultimately, I was relatively happy with the end result. I feel like it was a really satisfying and rewarding culmination of the work that I’ve done throughout the semester. I’ve really enjoyed how this class is structured in such a way that we’re able to do what we want to do and make decisions with legitimate rationale.