Month: May 2021

I ended up using 9 of the pictures for my final set because of the fact that my files were not original and would look bad if it was only one photo, another part is it fits Sophie Calle’s style of having a collage to tell the stories of the hotel guests. My final presentation fits my vision in the way that it shows the amount of detail and hard work the sport takes, although I do not address the issue of if horse riding is a sport or not, rather the fact that horse riding takes a lot of effort. I think that it is better that way because it shows my identity as well as the fact that I work hard for the sport. I do believe I achieved Calle’s purpose of showing an identity through portraits without people, something I did differently is the fact that I kept the photo colored instead of shooting in black and white.

This photo’s subject is the objects of hotel room 47. I see the objects in their rooms, a twin bed, shoes, balloons, missing shoes, their bathroom, their messy bed etc. This was taken in 1981, and the backgrounds are generally plain, although you can tell that it is a hotel room and the subject is clear and distinctive, like the picture on the top right corner with the subject being the pieced together photos. The person (s) being described in the picture are pretty messy people, with the unmade bed and the missing slipper, the postcards show that they were either writing to or receiving letters from someone, and the packed suitcases show that they were planning to leave soon. Obviously, the situation is that the person(s) are traveling and this is the hotel room they were living in, it gives us a historical context of what 1981 hotel rooms were like and the condition of which a person lived in a hotel room. The photographer’s point of view is usually above the subject or eye-level to the subjects, my eyes are immediately drawn to the white subjects in the black and white photographs since the white is more catching, there are not a lot of lines but the pattern is mostly always that there are one or many subjects that she focuses on and it is one part of a room. The lighting usually draws our attention to the subject, like the bottom right corner, the lighting draws our eyes to the limp balloon that the guests left behind (according to the journal entry Calle included). The subject is always in focus, although you can see the background quite clearly as well. The subject almost always catches my eye, like the middle picture, I always focus on the black slippers because of how bright the white is in the picture, the white always stands out and that is another pattern in her photos. This picture makes me feel curious about the residents and it makes me think of who the guests are and why were they travelling, where would they go next, etc, I think the college makes it easy for me to feel curious because it creates a sense of mystery. I think that Calle wanted to express that you can understand someone just by looking at their belongings and that is something I want to do with my experiments, and show that horse riding is hard work, not only the sport but taking care of the horses as well.

 

 

 

The vision for this set was to capture the passion of the horse riders and the partnership between the rider and the horse, developing my identity as a horse rider in the process. I think this set did fit my vision, and it did capture the passion and partnership.

 

My inspiration for this set was Sara Shier, a photographer known for photos of my type. The favorite picture I chose to model my blog after was a black and white one:

The picture I liked best from my set was this one:

 

I think that I related to her pictures a lot with the style of her photographs, although I could have focused more on the eyes as well as shift the angle of the picture more in line with the rider. This picture is my favorite because I think I captured the passion, focus, and partnership very well, the background is nicely out of focus and the subject looks clear and crisp. Something I would change would be to shoot the photo in a better file and not lose the original file through putting the photo into iPhotos.

This set reflected Calle’s portraits without people because I focused on taking pictures of people’s objects to reflect how hard they worked on taking care of their horses. Something I could do better if I wanted to improve this project would be to try and focus my photos on a smaller group of objects so that there are fewer subjects in one photo. Something that I could do to get these photos ready to be presented is deciding if I want the photos to be in color or black & white and deciding if I want to make a triptych to show the steps of horse riding or a collage of multiple different photos I took in this set, like Calle’s style.

 

My favorite photo is:

Something I could improve with this photo is cropping the photo, so that the background is not as cluttered as it is now, the lights behind the stables are catching the attention on something that I do not want and the horse behind the subject is also distracting, so cropping it to not include a lot of the background will make the photo better.

Compared to Calle’s style, I still need to make my pictures a collage although I did focus on one definite subject like many of Calle’s photos. I also need to decide if I want to follow in Calle’s footsteps and make the photograph black and white or keep it colored.