Monday, January 9, 2017

What's that buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing?


         I’m interested in the image not only as an aesthetic experience but as a manipulative one. The images below come from a small photo book given to me by my mother a few months ago. I’ve quickly come to cherish the images that fill it, photographs of women I will never know. It makes sense that the people captured in these moments are distant from me; I'm not supposed to know them as they were in these moments - grandmothers and great-grandmothers, are not young. While most of the people living in this book are now dead these images momentarily resurrect them - but it's a strange kind of disjunctive resurrection where the person whose presence I feel is seen in a time and space far removed from my experience of them. The image has the power to evoke both presence and absence  while remaining fixed.



My grandmother, Adele, stops scrubbing to pose for my grandfather's photo - I wonder if  he helped her clean?

  
                                                             The tree across from her porch
 
My mother’s photo book also speaks to a specific relationship to the image. These images, taken by my grandfather sixty some odd years ago are not unlike images I consume,create, and share today. However, while my grandfather had these images printed and bound, so that I can hold them today I share the equivalent image on Instagram. In my work I am interested in exploring how the images you consume and the way you consume them shape your consciousness particularly in terms of a rapidly changing culture of images.
For these collages I pulled images from the 1966 book to be alive! based on a film of the same name . Using digital manipulation I hoped to distance the found images from their visual and narrative contexts. 


                                                              T E A S E

                                                                           S P I N

D I V E

 M U N C H






3 comments:

  1. Dear Lilly,
    I think your post is quite eloquent and I believe we might share some troubling feelings on the photographic image... I lost my train of thought and now I have a question for you: When you are obsessed with an iphone game, do you begin to imagine the world in terms of that game? do you look at the tiles on the floor of the bathroom and want to swipe one to the left like in candy crush? or absentmindedly attempt to switch the item in your hand through a virtual command rather than actually picking up a pen? Couldn't we use this as a perfect example of how profoundly a world saturated with images must have affected our conciousness', except this time permanently?
    I find the photograph of the woman by the car absolutely lovely.. I find it interesting the way the digital scan has flattened and digitized an object that is clearly three dimensional... The process and viewing of photography, I think, used to have a profoundly physical relationship to the referent, and in digital image making and sharing I think that is much less the case... This personal item you have digitized and given to the cyberspace, shared with everyone, deprived it of its physical importance...

    How plead you?

    Jack

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  2. hi lilly,

    I was wondering how do you think the way we consume images shape our consciousness like do you mean just in general like our whole sense of consciousness..i think that may just be general too? I do think there is something that is significantly different from looking at digitized forms of physical art that before scanned and posted seem like almost different pieces of the art. The tactile form seems like a completely different experience also maybe it is from our conscious association with the mediums. Like for me, i feel like when holding the photographs, I thoroughly look at them whereas on the internet I tend to be more ANSty about looking at them. Maybe its from my habit of opening a bunch of tabs to "read later" like this medium makes me feel like I can always read later or go back to it without a sense of urgency or something.............. I guess maybe medium can be manipulative too???? Or maybe from scrolling through images on instagram too. Hey! The way I consume.....do you think though that it is almost two different things when the image is seen on the internet rather than printed. To me its almost like they are in different categories and maybe thats just because I notice myself consuming them in two different ways. i am interested to hear more about the manipulative experience you talk about. Is it a manipulative action of the audience or the photographer? Both?
    Thanks for taking the time to read this, I love your work!!!
    The collages you made are absolutely beautiful, Lilly!

    Annie

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