Project 2 [Foundation 4D]

My Preliminary Idea –
How I’m linking this new project with the last is that…

In the first project, I explored the relatively “outer sphere” in communication through the use of payphones, since one party would definitely be outside of the house, while the other may or may not be in public.
Instead of that, I wish to explore the opposite in this assignment. Looking towards “inner” communication, communication in a more personal space such as within a house. As they say, you don’t hang your dirty laundry outside(with reference to your anger/issues with certain family members outside, but you can voice out your entire feelings at home). Hence I decided to concentrate on communication between people within the confines of a home.

When we think of communication within a home, the most common place would be in the living room(I assumed that the dining room is part of the living room as that is the case for many HDB dwellers). Within this space, where would most communication happen? Most likely the dining table, maybe the sofa. That’s about it.

First, looking at the idea of the dining table. I originally thought of photographing people at the table eating and chatting. However, I thought that it was too literal. It would also look very posed as the family would be very aware of my presence or the presence of the camera staring at them snapping away as they eat and hence would be uneasy and unnatural.

The next idea I thought of was to photograph the dishes they had for dinner. This is a more subtle approach of tackling

 

 


Ikea magazine
Cube magazine

TRYOUTS FOR IKEA MAG

 


ARTIST REFERENCE – BRITTNEY PANDA

 

brittney-panda 2 3 4 5 6 87

She goes by her pseudonym Brittney Panda and uploads her images onto Instagram. What I like about her work is the sense of ethereal and strong presence. Her trademark is that she takes most of her photographs in abandoned houses or forests, with herself being featured, but you can never see her face. She then creates a very powerful narrative. I learnt that you do not need facial expressions to create strong moods. In a sense, for me, without having the faces appearing, our usual focus of looking at the person’s face is now redirected at the scene and it’s atmosphere, and how the artist’s body inside enhances that narrative.

 


ARTIST RESEARCH – TAMAE IWASAKI & EITARO OGAWA

authors-artists-editedhttps://www.facebook.com/todayonline/videos/vb.147858757571/10154102223292572/?type=2&theater

I came across a Facebook post by the TodayOnline, featuring a video about this Japanese couple living in Singapore who have published a book. It starts of with them being apprehensive of living in a HDB flat as their original perception of it was that it was a bore, living in units that were the same row after row, block after block. (Which I guess is a stark contrast to housing in Japan where it is very common for them to buy over a building unit, demolish it entirely and rebuild it again to add their own interior design ideas and flair.) When they got invited to a friend’s place did they realize you can put a lot of your own personal character into the place hence they started their project knocking onto stranger’s doors to ask to photograph their homes. According to them, the residents were mostly very nice and welcoming, even bringing them to the hawker centres to show them around their favourite and best Singaporean food available. However, I highly doubt it will work the same way with me as they have distinctively foreign accents, and Singaporeans are generally less weary of Japan “tourists” than a Singaporean girl knocking on their door asking to take photos of their house.

marine-parade-home 1

 


SOFAS OF PPL
-Pictures I received
-Pictures I couldn’t use
–> They were too low resolution or pixelated when they were sent to me. (And’s)
–> The sofas were too zoom in and cropped, since I have already decided to go with the full sofa image and not just a cropped section of the sofa (Nad’s)
–> I really loved this photo in that there is a sofa present behind all the neat clutter. However, I feel that it’s too stark a contrast with the rest of the photos. Especially when the sofa really cannot be found even after close inspection. (Abi’s)

 


TREATMENT OF PHOTOS (PROCESS)
As I did not take the photos, I do not have immediate first hand control in how I want my pictures to look like in a certain format.
I did give my participants a brief to follow
– frontal center point of view
– full image of the sofa
– email the full resolution

Assuming that they followed the 3 main point instructions above. There were 2 main problems I encountered. Firstly, the sofa’s were straight, most were slanted hence I had to photoshop the photo to tilt it till it was more or less horizontal. Secondly, due to the different dimensions of photos, due to different phone and camera configurations, I photoshopped all the photos to fit into a A4 paper. This meant I had to be selective on which parts to keep and which to discard. I also used the clone tool to clone certain areas of the background as I couldn’t enlarge the photo to fit the A4 sizing if not significant parts of the sofa would be cropped out.


THINKING ABOUT FINAL LAYOUT
For my first project, I printed my photos in passport size photos (1″ x 2″) hence they can be said to be really unconventionally small for photos being put up in an exhibition. It had it’s own meaning whereby I wanted to force the audience to step closer to the piece so that they can interact with the subject matter. This created an intimacy through tension.

However, in this piece, I don’t feel that the earlier approach would fit as in ___________. Instead, I feel that by blowing up the size of the image would I get my intended message across. Here, the emptiness is in your face. The sofas are all shown from a frontal point of view, all of which are taken from the center. They take up most of the image. This forces us to come to terms with this subject matter blatantly placed in front of us. Our eyes would observe this lingering presence left behind by someone who once occupied it – creases on the sofa seat, clothes strewn over, pillows flopped over etc.

The background further gives us a slight insight to the lives of these people.

Also, since these photos are sent to me by the respective people living in the homes, the dimensions it came to me were all different. Some photos were longer, others were wider. Thus I cropped all the photos into the same size so there is a subtle sense of unity across instead of it being a very messy array of varying sizes.

I also encountered the problem of the photos being too pixelated when I blew them up to print. Since I didn’t have control over the size of the image as I had no choice but to leave that to the people residing in those homes(although I did specify to send in full resolution, but I am aware a camera’s resolution is almost always not as good as a DSLR’s).

 


CHOSEN FINAL LAYOUT

I chose to print on A3 sized 190gsm art card as I wanted a large size but I really couldn’t afford any size bigger (the bill came to $62, byebye pocket money)

Documentary like. Somewhat similar to a catalogue, yet it does not have the pristine quality.


ARTIST STATEMENT – SO CLOSE, SO FAR

The series of photographs aims to confront the viewer with the lack of physical human presence upon a subject matter (sofa) that we usually associate with people as a place of communication and interaction – the heart of the house apart from the dining table. Even though some of them have remnants of being occupied by belongings, is it a mere dumping ground for our items or do we actually use the space for meaningful communications?

 

(the title is a play on the word sofa if you haven’t notice)