A Picture Paints 1000 words...

Developing my idea from taking out elements of an image and replacing it with words, I decide to take 2 photographs and replace the whole thing with words. The way I did this was just listing words in the position they are in the image.I then overlaid the text and image on photoshop but didn't really like the outcome.

Joseph Kosuth

Kosuth is an American conceptual artist who lives and works in New York. His work consists of investigating the nature of art, focusing on what makes art, art. His most famous conceptual piece of art is 'One of three chairs'. Where he has a physical chair, next to an image of the chair, next to a dictionary description of the word 'chair'. He is looking into different 'forms' of art and the differences in physical , representational image & text. Showing how the physical object is the thing, and it is accompanied only by representation (similar to this is not a pipe). Even the title reflects the view, as there is only one physical chair, yet there are three chairs. This work pushes the boundaries of conceptual art and asks the questions of "what really is art?" "what is representation?" "how is a chair important?" In 1966 he started a project named Art as Idea as Idea. Where he he took clippings from dictionaries for the words: art, chair, meaning and definition. He then photographically enlarged them to a certain size to be exhibited. He states that the 'art' is the description its self.

Rene Magritte

This image is a painting by German surrealist artist Rene Magritte. It’s a painting of a pipe, with the caption “Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe”, French for “this is not a pipe”. She is trying to be clever and use text to state the obvious, somewhat being flippant and cheeky. The pipe is not a pipe, but a painting of a pipe, there is not a physical pipe in front of you, therefore it is not a pipe. This is just a playful way to include text in an image, were as lots of images anchored by text is reflecting political and social views.

My response to 'This is not a pipe'. Its a photograph of a landscape, an image I have taken myself but now anchored with the text "This is not a landscape, it is only dots". The dots are referring to pixels. The image is not a landscape, and while on the screen it is not even a physical photograph, but thousands of miniature dots making up an on-screen image. I liked this original idea but thought the image came across a little cliche, so decided not to peruse it.

Joachim Schmid

There are millions of photographs being produced around the world every day; most of them have no second thought towards them, useless snapshots that’s added to the uncountable number of images in the world’s print/online libraries. Each one is contributing to using paper, chemicals, storage and ultimately visual pollution. This is the view of photographer, Joachim Schmid. Joachim Schmid is a German based photographer who has been working with used photography since the early 1980s. At first he would purchase large amounts of used photographs and public images in flee markets that became his body of work. It was his awareness of consumerism and recycling that drove him to start collecting used art as well as his passion for photographic history. In 1990 he started a group called Reprocessing of Used Photographs, where he would ask people to send in old photographs instead of throwing them out, where they could be analyzed and deemed useful or worthless, in which case they would be disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner. He uses the photographs in a large variety of ways from merging two or more different images together to tearing up and repositioning segments of photographs as well as simply just arranging a group of images and presenting them in different ways.

Heres an image i found that had already been cut out. I found it interesting because its a family photograph that was found in my house, yet no one can recall who was sitting there and why they where taken out. This is what I like about found photography, each image has an unknown history and all the audience can do is speculate. I inserted the question mark myself keeping it within the text & image project.

NINE ERRORS A recent project named Nine Errors takes a step into the modern world of technology and smart phones. When I came across this I found it without a doubt the most interesting/diverse form or photography I have ever seen. It starts with a QR code, a barcode that can only be scanned and recognized by smart phones. Schmid created these codes and publically posted them around the world in cities such as Berlin, Paris, Rome, New York, London, Amsterdam ect. Once the public scan the code on their phone they would be taken to his online exhibition. Except unknowing to his audience his work was a selection of images of words and phrases. When a QR was scanned it would take you to one of nine ‘errors’. For example: “404 error: file not found” was what came up on my phone when I scanned one of his codes. Confusing the audience to think that the link was broken, when really they were looking at his work. Now with this project can arise debate on whether its classed as 'art' or even photography. But if you break it down, in actual fact you can to take a picture of the QR in order to open it, and the error codes are actually images of words. Making it a form of photography.

Conceptual Art

Conceptual art is a form of art in which the idea or meaning of the work takes priority over how it was constructed and the materials used. An important conceptual artist, Sol LeWitt, defined this method in the 60s quoting: “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art”. Toney Godfrey, author of ‘Conceptual art (art and ideas)’ suggests that conceptual art questions the foundations of art itself and wanted to challenge the assumption that the role of an artist was to create an attractive object out of materials. This is why conceptual art is so controversial as it challenges the viewer to understand the true meaning of the piece of art as opposed to labeling it ‘bad’ or ‘unworthy’. Some artists have even gone the extra length to leave instructions on how to view their work, such as John Baldessari (see bellow). Once the viewer can understand the form of conceptual art they can then recognize an important statement about society the artist is conveying. I look to experiment with this strategy in my work, by capturing images of no significant or technical attrition however integrating text within the image to highlight the concept. Theres a large relationship between conceptual art and language. A lot of conceptual pieces have captions, bold titles or is just made up on a selection of words or phases, for example Annette Lemieux's 'Where am I'.