Critique was mixed. I felt like I got everything across with my picture that I wanted to. The sterility, the sense of height, how it the perspective changed the perception of the space (going from creepy and claustrophobic to open and emotionless). Geffeler's work always seems a little strange to me - I'm not sure why; I think I captured that feeling in my image and maybe it wasn't well received. It's definitely not like most of the American photographers we study.
The three photographers I was looking to for information were all european, and the pure documentary style reflects that. I wasn't trying to evoke some strong emotional response with the photos, I was just showing the subject from a different perspective. Geffeler's work is not made to evoke strong emotions, and it's not made with any clear reason other than to show spaces from a different spacial and temporal perspective. It looks like it could find it's home in an archive, but it has little use there. His work (and mine as well) occupy this niche between blue print and building. The blue print is this sterile representation of a space. It has no dimension, no color, nothing left behind from human presence. The space has so much more character, dimension, color, texture; it moves through temporal space and requires a space many orders of magnitude greater than the blue print.
The transition between blueprint and building is one example of the transition of ideal to real discussed in philosophy and many of the sciences. One may have an ideal mate, who has A and B and does C and D, but the real mate who falls into these ideal categories will always have other characteristics that make him/her less than idea. This dichotomy of real and ideal is the reason I chose to pursue this style–because it falls in-between what is ideal–the blue print, and what is real–the actual space. It represents the space in a totally unrealistic way that is like the ideal in it's dimension and sterility, but like the real thing it shows signs of human presences - the worn paint, the graffiti , and the drawbacks of the transition from ideal to real - the poor lighting, the unnerving corners; all this without being in the real space.
I took a different approach than much of the class and because of that it wasn't appreciated. My use of text was criticized because it was secondary to my image. Some of the projects had far too much text that dominated the image; I was trying to stay away from this. My fear in this project was that it would turn out as text accompanied with photos. We talked about some photographs resembling post secret submissions in critique; this should hardly be taken as a complement because these postcards are only ever text accompanied by image. It was quite obvious that many of the images were made for the text; the connection was obvious and the art seemed pointless. Last year I had a conversation with David Opdyke, the 2009 Beloit artist in residence, we discussed the role of text in art. One of things he told me, why make art if you can just write it [meaning] on the wall. He made his art because he couldn't express his ideas in words. The idea's were complex enough that it was more efficient to build these huge models than to write it as text.
When text is dominant in a pairing of text and image, does the piece continue to be a photograph, or is it expressed as text equally well? Full sentences often seem overwhelming, and to pair a paragraph or an essay with image seems ridiculous to me. maybe I didn't include as much text as I could have, but I was certainly not going to allow the text to consume my image.
