Power of the Hood

When brainstorming on what to do for this project, I knew I wanted to do something that not only served as a performative art piece but also included a meaningful narrative behind it. Even though I initially struggled with coming up with an idea to base my photo series one, I enjoyed the freedom of being able to run with whatever idea I finally chose. In this series, I aimed to compare and contrast the reaction of an audience to how different people wore their clothes, hooded sweatshirts to be specific. While these five pictures were taken with my phone and surely do not seem to be of great quality, they surely met my expectations.

The difference in gender, skin color, and overall size between my models surely seemed to impact the way that the surrounding bystanders reacted to their presence. During the process of snapping the hooded vs. unhooded photos of each model, the looks of uncomfort from bystanders tipped the scale toward the photos where the models were told to have their hoods up. You can see in the photos where they are unhooded, no one seems to be paying the models any attention even though they are uncomfortably and awkwardly placed. I posted these pictures on Twitter as a series of 5 photos, and they did not get much of a reaction from my followers. Possibly because the post isn’t the most aesthetically pleasing, or because it is hard to understand what is going on in the photos without an explanation.

POTH 1

POTH 2

POTH 3

POTH 4

POTH 5

POTH POST

The sealed part of your soul that…

… needs a striking light…

… to help you overcome the fear…

… of embracing your vulnerabilities…

… and become strong.

For this assignment, I wanted to explore how one can perform using props in front of a camera. In the end, I played a lot with lights and the reflection it has on white- the white t-shirt, white backdrop, white toilet paper. I also wanted to implement movement in order to make it more explicit that the subject was performing. At the end of the photo session, I looked through the photos and carefully chose those that I will be including in these series. After choosing them, I organized them in order to draw a story among the images and write a quote across all the photos that would represent that story. The quote itself contributes to the lie of the artwork because it puts the photos into a context that they were not initially in.

Before posting these photos, I felt a little uncomfortable because I normally do not post my photos/artwork. I personally appreciate more the privacy of authorship because it allows the images to keep their quality as an intimate work of art and become exposed to a selective audience. Once posted on media, anybody can claim authorship and/or use the images to satisfy their personal desires. i have no control over what people do or don’t do once they are on social media.

I really enjoyed this project because I was able to pretty much do whatever I wanted and perform for the camera. I wanted the chance to recreate the style of pictures you see on muradosmann’s instagram but with a more normal twist of not being in an exotic place. I have always been fascinated by his account since I have started having an insta.

I posted the pictures to my instagram account, every hour, to get a more real reaction since this was my most used account and I surprisingly got a nice amount of likes. I am most surprised about the fast that I lost around 6 followers from doing this project. I did not post any captions with these pictures, so i guess people thought my posts were annoying. When people asked me about the pictures, their questions really consisted of the same thing: “were they taken on different days?” “where are they?” “why did you post so many”. I guess if the timing of the posts were spread out over a few days it would have been less of an annoyance to people. the editing of the pictures are close to the style of muradosmann’s in the sense that they have a deep depth of field and lots of colors. I really enjoyed looking at them after.

The theme of my project was how people spend so much time trying to get the “right angle” that they don’t enjoy the moment. I made a polaroid frame and asked two of my friends if they would reenact some of their favorite memories for me. In order to emphasize my point of focusing on what is happening in front of oneself I made sure that my phone’s camera focus was on the polaroid frame rather than the humans in the picture. If you look at the photos you get a general idea of what is going on in the photo, but without the focus or the context you can not fully grasp the situation.

I posted these photos on Instagram because it is a photo oriented social media platform and people generally put a lot of time into what photos they post on Instagram. All of my photos I posted recieved likes, but none of them recieved a big response in the comments. The comments were more along the lines of “cool picture” or “nice idea”.

For my performance photographs, I decided that I wanted to do something that captured the reactions of my friends in a situation. For my project, I decided that I wanted to make them feel uncomfortable. I would ask the person if I could take a portrait of them for my art class, and once I had them all set, I would say, “oh, you look kind of fat right now”. The photographs came from their reactions to what I had just said. I got a range of reactions, most of them being shocked or laughing. When choosing subjects, I chose my friends who knew my sense of humor and knew that I didn’t actually mean what I had said, but were still shocked by it. After I took the photographs, I would tell my friend what my project was, and they loved the idea and wanted to see what their pictures looked like.

I decided to upload the images to twitter, using the repeating caption of “Right before this I told them that they looked fat #part_”. I had 9 subjects over all, so I decided that I was going to break it up into 3 separate tweets. The first two tweets had four subject’s pictures, and the last tweet had four pictures of the same subject, but was taken in succession to each other.  After a few hours after posting to twitter, my friends had favorited the tweets.

The part about the project that I liked the most was the range of reactions my friends had. I also liked this because it is difficult to guess the context of the photo if you didn’t know it.