Week 51: Constructing the image III.

Still focusing on the same concept of construction, I have explored different events including different members of society. The environment of these subjects has to suit otherwise the relation between audience, photograph and subject would be invalid. This week has lead to a development in the project where I have been traveling to people's comfortable settings and analyzing relationships between individuals.

This construction of images lends itself to my scientific argument that I have so recently written an essay about. Relationships between people and objects are key to understanding and interpreting the photograph.

Human emotions, memory and imagination are as real as the books right in front of me. However, they are illusive and trick your brain into thinking they don’t physically exist, but in fact they are reacting to this text and traveling around your body right now. They can be both physically and chemically suppressed or encouraged. There is no magical phenomenon behind it. There is a fine-tuned chemical reaction within our hormones that makes us aesthetically attracted to another human being (it is built up of years of selection and rejection), just as there is one for when we are aesthetically attracted to a photograph. This is the aesthetic relationship between art and science.

Thank you for reading this week.
Dan.



I would like to thank Penny for letting me borrow her family and home for an afternoon last week. It was an inspiring shoot and put my faith back into the idea of family. It took a while before I could decide what situation the snapshot would include, I first intended to have a photograph of the boy (Sam) on the horse. Fate stepped in and bucked him off, so that was obviously a bad omen. I'm slightly frustrated at myself for not snapping the moment he was flung into the air, but I would have felt bad had he been seriously hurt. I then took a 5x4 of Sam washing one of the ponies to correlate with a photograph of my Father washing his motorcycle in the 1970s. However, this didn't work quite as well as the simple snapshot of just him, the horse and the house. It was simple and looked just like any other snapshot you would see in a family album, working well with the picnic photographs featured before. I am still keeping the irony of the snapshot behind these photographs. Of course, they are still being shot on large format to give that hint of construction within them.

Song listening to right now: Hey Good Lookin' - Hank Williams