Evaluation

For my independent project I decided to continue on from last year as I felt like I had a lot more angles to experiment with. I started off doing a lot of research into different artists, after doing my research project I had a lot more knowledge of ‘appropriation’ and realised how relevant it was to my project. It occurs a lot with found photography as the images are often used and recycled to portray a different meaning. I then researched a lot more into found photography, and realised it was quite widely used for a variety of reasons and wanted to continue using images I had found myself. This is when I decided to search for negatives over the internet as I found it interesting that with using negatives I wouldn’t know what I would be getting and this could prove quite challenging. I ending up receiving film stills from a couple of different movies, which was quite interesting as I was expecting generic family, or travel images.  At first however this seem quite problematic as most of the images were well known shots from popular films and I wanted to take the images out of their original context.  I did in the end chose two with interesting contents and where not film specific. I wanted to make a piece in response to Barbra Krugers work, however I wanted to highlight the fact that I did not agree with the gender stereotypes that are shown a lot in the types of films where my images came from. That’s why I layered an obvious stereotype in text over the images and then manually stuck quotation marks over the top. After these pieces I did more research and tried some more different angles of layering words over images, firstly with found words and my own images, and thirdly with my own words over my own images. Towards the end of my project I started to research more into whether words or images can represent the real life more accurately. However I only just touched on the surface. I think that my project is still unfinished due to the large subject I chose, there where so many avenues to go down I didn’t have enough time to experiment with them all to finish with one final piece or outcome. But I do still think its interesting enough to continue the project in the future. I think I have experimented enough with found photography and hopefully will be moving on to using different techniques such a Jenny Hozler inspired projection or larger scale images covered in words. Over all I am happy with the work I have produced so far, but have a lot more to investigate until I come to a solid conclusion.  My favourite outcome was the experimentation with my found negatives as I feel I had successfully got to grips with the use of appropriation and discovered how photographs can be edited in ways to completely change the image intentions and meanings. 

After researching into Alexander Honory's work of using words to represent pictures it started to get me thinking about which medium of representation is more truthful. Which is when I constructed this image. I decided to take the same concept but instead of removing the image altogether I wanted to integrate both ideas into one. I printed off loads of words and physically covered them over the object they were describing. This was my way of investigating what is more trustworthy the words or the images? Here I have not been too descriptive with my truth of words because it is only a basic background.