Reflection Module 2 3.1

How many images  do we see in a day? How many do we see and not notice?How many move us? How many do we recoil from? One study, available here, www.redcrowmarketing.com/2015/09/10/many-ads-see-one-day/10 Sep 2015     suggests the figure is somewhere between 4000 and 10000 images. And it has to be said that most of these are trying to sell us something. Not only advertising, but we might look at this car or that coat, this sandwich or that drink, and decide that is what we would like. This subliminal desire to possess is what fuels and motivates advertisers.

as far as individual images aqre concerned, they can be used to create a need, to create a mood or to create fear.

 The following video, The damage of life by Hawkwind (Agents of chaos) is an example of  anti propaganda. I have muted the music so it doesnt detract from the imagery. The sheer volujme of disparate images contained within it serve to show allegorically the kind of onslaught we are bombarded with on a daily basis.

 


 So where does this leave my practice? What bearing does it have on anything I do?
My work is becoming increasingly Post Modern.  There are cinematic inflouences creeping into what I am producing. I find myself harking back to the work of Edward Hopper.

Landscape 34 (2016)

Landscape 34 is an attempt to create a narrative within the viewers mind, a subconscious storytelling. There are elements both seen and unseen, shown and also implied. I have only realised its cinematic properties since engaging with this module.

So where do I go from here?  It was formerly my intention to show that visually challenged people can hacve a photographic voice, and that voice can sit shoulder to shoulder with almost anybody else holding a means to take or make a photograph. I am still persuing that objective, indeed I am running tutorials for other visully challenged people and organising an exhibition of their work in an effort to prove what I am saying.
My own work however, is shifting towardsa more constructed approach. I am finding more opportunities to photgraph images which consist of two colours or shades of two colours

 A30 Traffic lights, green (2016)

 Blue moon over petrified forest (2016)

 Moon over Sherborne (2017)

The three images above serve to illustrate this point about limited palettes. I am amazed by how many of the images I take have only two colours.
But back to advertising. The consumer society exploded into life in the 1950s in America, with every mod con and futuristic car being snapped up by the Jioneses and all their neighbours.

Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? Richard Hamilton 1956
accessed at http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hamilton-just-what-was-it-that-made-yesterdays-homes-so-different-so-appealing-upgrade-p20271   12/02/2017

Richard Hamilton's collage sums up this period perfectly, he asks a question wryly, the answer as we can see is that to be different we have to be the same. To appeal to us  we have to possess all the things advertisers are telling us we must. Mayhbe this is the lens we should look at all the images thrown at us on a daily basis. Hamilton shows us the vacuousness of advertising, 

One last thought. If you waqnted to advertise yourself and all your ideals, what better place than on a stamp?

These are stamps featuring the head of Adolph Hitler. Suddenly his image was all over the world. .