very rough drafts for self-design

This weekend, I visited Harvard for their annual Harvard-Yale football game. I thought this would be a good opportunity to take stereotypical pictures. My struggle for this project is to define digital photography as a fine-art. I took some images on my iPhone and used an application called CameraBag which can alter the photo to have certain tones. I'm planning on using a digital pinhole for my final so hopefully they will have somewhat of a similar effect.
Here are a few:

making taking redo

self-design

I was very inspired by the exhibit we visited as a class in Portland. This exhibit showed the two reactions to the accessibility of the camera and photography.  Two very different groups coped with the threat of photography's loss of recognition of a fine art: the f64s and the pictorialists. The pictorialists photographed scenes in which the artistic and aesthetic quality took precedence over what was truly in front of the camera. These photographs had painterly qualities: causing the viewer to question whether the piece of art was either a photograph or a painting. I feel that in our era of digital photography, photographers are confronted with the legitimacy of photography as a fine-art. Thus, in my self-design I want to apply this pictorialist mind-set to digital photography. I want to use the same techniques of haziness and posed photography, but use them on my digital SLR camera.  Over Thanksgiving break, I want to use New York City as my primary subject and attempt to photograph idealistic scenes that can either be a painting or a photograph. Some non-photographic inspirations:
- portland f64/pictoralism exhibit
- historical context of pictoralism and how it relates to our era of digital photography
- what constitutes a fine-art photograph from a "facebook" photo through digital photogrpahy
- the men who sell the quintessential images of New York around Central Park
- the feeling of holidays, tourists and consumerism in New York
- how parts of New York can look like they're from the early 20th century, where other parts are very modern and their relationship
- my family's relationship to New York and what it means to grow up in the city v. a visitor
- how doormen experience New York - they're forced to spend all day outside looking at the exact same scene - what do they see? what changes? do they become phased?



And here are some photographic inspirations....

Robert Demachy 

 

Alfred Stieglitz 

Redo Rough Drafts