Assignment 2 – K I M .

I decided to change my topic after the previous thing.

It was a beautiful thing but I felt that it could not sustain itself – you can only exploit sorrow so much before it gets jelat and stops carrying the depth you want it to carry.

-scene-

What is the value of the photograph when the trigger happy individual can –
compose (carelessly);
snap (carelessly)
to satisfy an insecurity borne of the nature of mechanical reproduction?

I dug up my old archive of photos (the one that was collecting dust in that one folder in the hard drive that never gets touched after it’s been dumped there) and looked through them. I was really drawn to a particular set of photos that I took a few years ago when I was in a particular place. (I wish I still into photography now like I was back then).

The photos were nice. They were very pretty. And I’ve got to hand it to younger Kim for the good colour correction (really, it was more like batch automating the same photoshop action on all of the photos).

Then I looked at the photos – really looked at the photos. And I realised that I had an unnecessary number of them. Almost all came in pairs, and some were repeated 3, 5, 10 times. It was cute to see my thought process back then – just take more than 1, just in case one turns out bad then I can just filter them out later. Then I realized that I still do the same thing today, but to an even greater degree. It’s so easy to take photos, and so easy to throw them away. It didn’t use to be like that with analogue film. Hah. I say that as if I lived in that generation. But yes, film is precious. Each shot counts, so you actually take the time to compose and use the correct settings before actually pressing the shutter. With the digital camera, none of that matters anymore.

4d-assignment-2-final6 — Including more than just pairs to vary the pace of reading, also to imply quantity (more is better when it comes to this)

4d-assignment-2-final8 — 4 trains of thought – 4 camera settings

4d-assignment-2-final9 — 4 trains of thought – 4 camera settings

4d-assignment-2-final13 — The last spread reveals the location.

Processed with VSCO with hb1 preset — The cover.

Other things I wanted to say –

As much as possible, I didn’t want the images to have people in them (collectively, living things). Because people move and people change in their state of being – it makes sense to take multiple photos of a living object because it is different at every slice of time. With still objects like buildings, however, it makes no sense whatsoever to waste frames on the same thing over and over again because the way it is one second ago will be the same way it will be one second later. The only thing a second photo will satisfy is your insecurity of not having taken a good photo.

picmonkey-collage — People change in every slice of time.

2.What is it about another country that makes it so much more beautiful than your home country? Does an American find America as beautiful as outsiders do? Do foreigners find Singapore beautiful? I have tried to answer this question for myself and have found that (personally), anywhere with a good amount of sky is beautiful. There is not enough negative space in Singapore.

The thing about memories and old photographs is that as time goes by, what you remember of what you remember becomes less concrete in your head, and you begin to make up your own realities and construct your own past.

All babies look the same – kind of. So when we look at old photographs that don’t belong to us, we kind of place ourselves in that scene, and so begins a process of memory construction.

Processed with VSCO with a5 preset — All babies look the same. This could very well be you

To really remove the identity of the person in the photograph, I thought of ‘erasing’ the facial features of said person in the photograph by physical means. Rubbing it off with turpentine seems to do the trick.

There are other methods too – like erasing, sand papering, liquid papering it off, but I really like that the turpentine preserves the original skin tone, and is easier to control (makes it easy to go for small, detailed areas).

Robert also threw out some ideas about physical alterations of photographs, and this really caught my eye:

polaroid-lifts — Polaroid emulsion lifts

I think this would tie in really well with the whole idea of memory being a distant thing, memories being distorted and ethereal etc. The instructions were fairly easy – plunge in hot water, put in cold water. But actually doing it was another thing in itself.

Plunged in hot water for a while. Some parts of the backing kind of flaked off but nope, nothing happened

Then went looking for alternatives and recalled a photo-transferring process I’ve heard of before –

I think I’m heading in the right direction, but perhaps a thinner layer of varnish (it was too thick, so I wasn’t as close to the thin, fragile effect of polaroid emulsions).

Category: Assignment 2

Change my mind_Just In Case

Of course it is happening inside your head, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?