Lighting and "Reframing Photography"

     Light, especially in photography, is a mysterious and beautiful component that I would love to play with more and more in my own work. In the last year, I have found that I'm very drawn in by creative lighting; for example, in terms home decor I think it is the most undervalued aspect of design, yet it can be an amazing tool for transforming the feel of a space. Within photography, light is an essential component in the material process, but beyond that light aesthetically plays with creating depth and contrast in a photo. You could never say that light isn't present in a photograph, but I am captivated by photographs that somehow showcase light. When I came upon Reframing Photography's Artists' Gallery, I zeroed in on the videos that were listed under Light & Shadow.  Two videos that stood out to me- the first was Rebecca Cummins: Another Light, and the second Force Field by Lindsay Page.

     Within Rebecca Cummin's video, I specifically liked the project Simply Smashing where she turns landscapes upside down "by converting a red wine goblet into a lens." With the shot of her larger installation that used 870 goblets, I thought it was really interesting that her work creates a mosaic of images that occupy space but still are an "image" of the space they reflect, much like traditional photography.  However as the sun sets and rises, the image is in a perpetual state of change.

http://www.reframingphotography.com/artists/rebecca-cummins

I imagine that Lindsay Page's project was a very engaging installation, and I was appreciative of the efficacy of the illusion it seemed to create. Every year Disney Imagineers (the designers and engineers that create their theme parks) host a competition for an internship opportunity, and recently my best friend and I (who are both Disney-philes) have begun brainstorming what kind of ride we would create if given limitless resources for our application. I liked this project because it successfully suspends disbelief, and it got me thinking of more ways one could play with the same materials she used. Towards the end of the video, when I read "Endlessly looping, the birds encapsulate the figure emphasizing the tension between flight and capture" the work took on a different association for me. Suddenly, the uncertainty of the dark was a source of some anxiety with this reading of "no way out." Additionally, I thought that tension was added by the only auditory component of the constant grating sound of the projectors running.

http://www.reframingphotography.com/artists/lindsay-page-0

All in all, I enjoyed seeing the work of both of these artists who effectively and creatively installed images, and played with the importance of light.

"What is photography for you?"

Photography, for me, makes the most sense when it is thought of as an art that extends from the universal human eye. It is of course a way of seeing, both literal in its capture of an image via light and metaphorical in its meaning which depends on individual perspectives. What I took away most from reading "Photography's Expanded Field" by George Baker was thinking of photography's placement between extremes, and the tension and ambiguity that is created in so doing. For example, the reading set up the extremes of stasis vs. motion, and how those dichotomies at first correlate to photography and cinema, but once "film stills" and "still films" are introduced each genre is expanded. Perhaps I enjoyed thinking about this spectrum because I am currently enrolled in both Expanded Photography and Introduction to Video Art; I am looking forward to exploring how my previous exposure to photography will help inform my foray into video and discovering more about how the two mediums relate to one another. Additionally, thinking back to the human eye, our vision records fluid continuous visual information (like video?), yet memory for me is often encapsulated in frozen images. This I think perhaps explains my initial inclination to describe photography as the capture of moments in time (be they real or imagined.)

Here's a "film still" from a video I produced with my best friend in high school. While the image is "hidden" in the video footage indiscernible to naked eye, it captures the energy of the day and the fun we remember. It is simultaneously "still," yet charged with memories and explicit meaning of motion.