John Baldessari
For this idea. My photographer to look at is American John Baldessari. John Baldessari is considered the Godfather of Conceptual Art. Where you have an idea and you try to portray through any means of art, so painting, sculpture, photography. John Baldessari is incredibly well known for loads of photographic and art ideas. His work includes 'Wrong' which was photos with deliberately bad composition, sequences of images, which I will focus on here. His most famous piece of work simply called 'Dots'. One day Baldessari had a photograph of 2 people. He had some sticky circles, he stuck one over each face. Then the idea of dots was born. John Baldessari believes his dots are his most famous work. As he famously said in a video created by him.
"The Guy Who Put Dots Over People's Faces" "Probably one of the worst things to happen to photography is that cameras have viewfinders" |
Baldessari is clearly likes the old-fashioned photography techniques. So shot onto small negatives, developed in a dark room. One of Baldessaris famous quotes is also on the left underneath the first quote. He clearly didn't like the idea of us seeing the image before we take it, and then see it a second later after we've taken it. Which was can do with Digital SLR's. He clearly feels that the old fashioned way of going out, taking 36 shots on a roll of film. Then developing the whole roll at the end of the day was better.
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On the right is a video about John Baldessari which I really enjoy watching. The music in the advert makes it very rememberable. Also the short humorous lines like "John is instantly recognised by his big beautiful beard" make this short documentary easy to remember. When it is easy to remember, you rarely forget the information. This video shows how conceptual John Baldessari is, how he can take even the most basic thing, putting dots on faces, waving at boats, hitting stuff with a gold club. He takes very simple ideas, but turns into to some fantastic exhibits.
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First attempt
This is my first attempt at a sequence of images. I really like Baldessari's idea of swapping a carrot between every shot. So I decided to do it with chess pieces. Just like the carrots. My friend would pick which chess piece to move then, it would be replaced. The piece that was added and changed was decided by rolling a dice. Pretend that the piece dart pieces in the images are going from left to right. Roll 1 or 2 you move the left one, roll 3 or 4 you move the middle one, roll 5 or 6, move the piece of the right. We did this with deciding which chess piece replaces it. I was going to shoot these from a birds-eye view. However I felt that we wouldn't really see much change, the only change would be in colour and that would be boring to look at. So I shot the photos from a 0 degrees angle. That way we could see the chess pieces actually change, along with the colour.
Refined Version
This is my refined version. In the previous sequence. Me and Ms Gibson realised a couple of flaws in it. The first problem was you could see the gap between the 2 sheets of paper. The second problem with the sequence was the illusion. The chess pieces moved quiet a lot. This would mean that the illusion of change would be lost.
After making this second sequence. I decided to merge the images over each other in Photoshop. The result is great in my opinion. When looking at this. I defiantly feel a sense of movement. It feels like a long exposure. This merged image shows that there was still some significant movement to the chess pieces, however it is nowhere near as bad as the first sequence.
Overlay
I tried different ways of merging the images together and I came across the Overlay tool within the Layers. I like the dreamy effect which has been created. Especially for the finger being in multiple locations.