Rationale

In this assignment I have looked at celebrity culture and the insane fascination we have with celebrities; always wanting to know their every move no matter how ordinary it is. Reading about them in magazines and following them on social networking sites like twitter just to hear they had a coffee from Starbucks that morning.

By using photomontage I was able to create an image that puts emphasis on this idea. Using paparazzi photo's from magazines and online gossip sites that reflect and portray this idea of constantly being watched. I chose to contrast this with animal enclosures, playing on the similarities between the way we watch animals at the Zoo and way we watch Celebrities.
The four photograph's in the series each display different mundane activities we commonly see Celebrities doing, whether it be drinking coffee, out with their children. exercising or relaxing at the beach. I have carefully chosen the background enclosures enhance each these activities and also replicate the animals who originally occupied the space, such as the Bears wandering around exploring new things, the Baboons sitting in separate little groups, the Meerkats scattered around each doing their own thing, and the giraffe's constantly walking back and forth along the path in a circuit.
I arranged the final series so the background enclosures in each photo link together unifying the images creating visual flow across the series.

How to present?

How to present? Looking at the different layouts I can have my series - What works best?

 I quite like having the series in a grid as the first and last photo's are walking/running towards the other two photo's - making eye flow through series?

Linking the heights on the enclosure walls between photo's. Again I quite like how the series starts and finishes with the celebrities running into the other photo's. Also breaks up the green grass enclosures nicely. 

I like how the tree's line up the the first two images and the wall lines up in the last two. Although the first two images have a lower skyline than the last two.. could be a bit weird.

I like how the last two photo's create a diamond shape with the wall and the log, but i don't think the series flows so well in this order as it does in some of the others. 

Being portrait I quite like having the images in a line, I think when the photo's are printed 14 x 9 they might look a bit weird in a grid and be a bit harder to see and wont be at the viewers eye line.. 

Refinements

Refining my final images for the series.

I think changing Lindsay Lohan who was running away from the camera for Reese Witherspoon works better as Lindsay was the odd one out, and also adding Jessica Simpson which I find balances out the space created by the smaller Reese Witherspoon.

After adding Amanda Bynes like suggested in class I find photo feels more complete. 

Looking at these two images.. Although I want the enclosure to look crowded, need to work out how much is too much, and have a certain amount of composition to the image and placement of the people - scale of people needs to also be reasonably consistent with perspective of image. (Arnold Schwarzenegger is too orange!) The second photo seems more resolved.

Contact 2

Feedback

Class feedback from final presentation before hand-in:

 

Backgrounds seem a bit dull

Full Meerkat enclosure will celebrities at the beach.. replicate packed beaches at popular holiday destinations.

Include celebrities with their children

Look at having people on the footpath of celebrities with coffee

Crop photo's to the same shape/ crop out giraffe 

Print Big!

Celebrity Zoo

What I have so far...
Celebrities grouped by what they are doing: exercising, eating/drinking coffee, and at the beach.
Things I need to consider:
- colour of each person (so they fit with the background/get the colour/brightness of the skin tones consistent)
- decide if I want them bigger in relation to the background (down size the background image?),
at the moment I haven't changed the size of any of the celebrities, they are at the size of the original sourced image.
- get an idea on how big I want to print the final images.
- how many people should be in each image? How many is too much?
- composition of each image... what are the people doing in relation to each other

Also looking at other scenes for the series - Celebrities with their families/children (images happen to be bigger in this photo.. do I like this? does it need more people/better composition - feels unfinished) and other possible backgrounds. Don't know if I should use the image on the right as although it has good equipment/objects in the enclosure it also has the city/suburbia in the background so doesn't quite fit with the other photographs.


Below are all the images I have sourced and played around with while deciding who to use and what they should be doing.


Celebrities

Little People

Here is a blog I found which has these cool installations that play with juxtaposition and scale. I like how they show both a close image of what's happening and then one which gives us an idea of the scale of the scene. It reminds me of what i'm doing as he is putting people in a space creating a scene that wouldn't normally happen.

"My 'Little People Project' started in 2006. It involves the remodelling and painting of miniature model train set characters, which I then place and leave on the street. It is both a street art installation project and a photography project. The street-based side of my work plays with the notion of surprise and I aim to encourage city-dwellers to be more aware of their surroundings. The scenes I set up, more evident through the photography, and the titles I give these scenes aim to reflect the loneliness and melancholy of living in a big city, almost being lost and overwhelmed. But underneath this, there is always some humour. I want people to be able to empathise with the tiny people in my works." - Slinkachu


 http://little-people.blogspot.com/

Celebrity Culture

I've decided to portray celebrity culture looking at the insane fascination we have with these people for my photographic issue for this assignment.

I think it's interesting how we are constantly wanting to know what they are doing, we can never get enough of them even if what they are doing isn't very interesting or glamorous.

What I need to improve from my concepts:

- get the colour the same between images (are the whites and blacks the same?) 

- good quality/ high resolution images of celebrities; source magazines, high resolution images of the web?

- what do I want the people in the images to be doing?

- do I need more pictures from the zoo?

The different cages/areas in a Zoo separate different species: Lion, Giraffe, Chimpanzee.... How can I replicate that in my photography?

- Divide them by era - 60's, 70's.. to present 

  (might not be as strong a comment as media has changed so much in this short time) 

- What they do/ their career: actor, singer, socialite, model

- What they are doing in the picture: working out, at the beach, shopping, at a premiere? 

  (might not fit with the others/ or could be a nice break.. puts them in a kind of context?)

Ectoplasm Reading

Ectoplasm: Photography in the Digital Age

Notes:

The effect of widespread introduction of computer-driven that allow "fake" photos to be passed of as real ones.
- viewers will discard their faith in the photograph's ability to deliver objective truth
- digital images that look exactly like photographs, photography may even be robbed of its of its cultural
  identity as a distinctive medium.
         loss of objective truth - image processing = fake images

The suspicion we are entering a time when it will no longer be possible to tell any original from its simulations.
- the whole world will consist of an undifferentiated "artificial nature"
- distinguishing truth from falsehood
          boundaries merging/ being crossed


          original vs. simulation
one technological (computerized images), one epistemological (broader change in outside influences)

          photography's association with death
Old Processes: if one wanted to appear lifelike in a photograph, one first had to act as if dead
- miniature painting was quickly made extinct; other art practices also under threat
- influence on capitalism?

- it (photography) is a force that is simultaneously positive and negative

- photography's birth pangs coincided with both the demise of a premodern episteme, and with the
  invention of a peculiarly modern conjunction of power-knowledge-subject; the appearance of one was
  only made possible through the erasure of the other.
- A life born of death, a presence inhabited by absence


           photographies effects on viewing time
"photography has already enabled us to hand down to future ages a picture of the sunshine of yesterday"

photography was a visual inscription of the passing of time and therefore also an intimation of every viewer's own inevitable passing.

even photography is therefore a chilling reminder of human mortality.

the reality offered by the photograph is not that of truth-to-appearance but rather truth-to presence, a matter of being rather than resemblance.

Digital Images: "film-based information is a dying business"
- Bill Gates company only bothering to acquire the ELECTRONIC rights

- question of image integrity
- whereas photography still claims some sort of objectivity, digital imaging is an overtly fictional process;
  abandons even the rhetoric of truth that has been an important part of photography's cultural success.
- digital images are actually closer in spirit to the creative processes of art than they are to the truth values
  of documentary.



What makes photography distinctive is that they depend on this original presence, a referent in the material world: photography doesn't cast doubt on reality's actual existence.

Photographs are privileged over digital images because they are indexical signs, images inscribed by the very objects to which they refer.

Digital images are not some much signs of reality as they are signs of signs.

Photography will cease to be a dominant element of modern life only when the desire to photograph, and the peculiar arrangement of knowledges and investments which that desire represents, is refigured as another social and cultural formation.

Concepts

Here are some rough concepts I have come up with while thinking about which political issue I should do and the different ways I could show it.

My first Idea: Animal Cruelty. Showing how we place animals in really small places and expect them to live happily and stay healthy. Although these are all just images I have sourced of the internet, I think they explain this idea quite well. I like the studio aspect of the cages confining the people.

If I decided to go with this idea I need to think about what animal's and situations I would replicate and if like with the fish tank image what kind of photography would best suit each photo. 

 

My second idea: Started out as another way to look at animal cruelty and how we treat animals at the Zoo, keeping them in these places just for our viewing pleasure by substituting the animals for people. Like a how would you like it? idea. But while editing these photo's, I started to see the photo's as more of a statement about people watching, which made me start to think about how we treat celebrities and the whole idea of celebrity culture, always wanting to know what they are doing at every moment of the day. Maybe I could look at playing this idea against the concept of Zoo's and watching animals compared to people... How would this work?

And third idea: How technology runs our life?
Although the image above I experimented with  doesn't exactly show it - could be about
how technology has become part of how we define ourselves. Things like radio, television, tapes, computer, film - cameras, video games, phones are everywhere. Look at how influential they are in our society, and how these technologies reflect how we live out life... we are so linked into the world.. always reachable with phones, email, facebook, twitter.

Selection Tools

Using the images provided in class, looked at the different selection tools in photoshop. In this image I used the lasso tool and the quick selection tool to mask out different areas of the photographs to create this image. This image uses all the different aspects in photoshop including blending modes and layer styles which I can use when creating my photo's for this assignment.

Technology

I found this really cool digital artist Kazuhiko Nakamura who inspired by the novel 'The Metamorphosis' creates mechanical looking humans, which are made up of various bugs.
Here is a link to his website which not only has a great gallery of all his work but also goes through his working process explaining how he pieces together his images.

http://www.mechanicalmirage.com/index.html

Although he is not technically a photographer his work made me start to think about how much we rely on technology in our modern day society. Maybe I could think about this as a political issue, looking at the influence it has over us without us really realising it. What would happen if we didn't have these technologies.. what would our world look like? Is technology a good thing or a bad thing?

These kind of statements on how technology controls the way we live our lives have come up in a lot of science fiction movies and tv shows like The Terminator and The Matrix, which ask us how much can we rely on technology and still be in control of how we live our lives. Although it may not be quite as obvious as technology controlling our body and direct actions, could be interesting to look into for this assignment.

Below are some more photo's I found that also show this idea of technology and it's relation to us. 

http://www.webdesigncore.com/2010/09/13/20-unimaginable-surreal-artworks/