For our final project, I took a total of 11 portrait photos in the studio. I was able to find 2 people to pose for my photos, and since their responses to the prompt I included in my statement of intent were quite different, I think it would be best to do 2 projects like I did for the trip to 798.

Full contact sheet (includes 3 cropped photos): A Final Moment – All

The photos in this contact sheet are all unedited save for lighting, and three of them are cropped. I’ve changed the lighting for most of the pictures since the original raw images were far too bright to be palatable. I shot these images with the subjects in front of a black backdrop. I wasn’t able to smoothen it out to make an even surface, but I think that this actually works better since the folds in the fabric make it look a bit like a stage curtain.

In response to my question, Chelsea said that she’d probably contemplate/think about life or be happier and more appreciative, so we took photos of her posing in both scenarios. In my opinion, the photos of her in the thinking pose turned out the best. Though there was some apparent motion blur in some of the shots, I think it really adds to the surrealism of the situation. Out of the 4 photos of Chelsea in that pose, I cropped 3 of the best to an identical size. I think that the photos chelsea_c1 and chelsea_c3 can be put together into a diptych since they evoke a similar contemplative feeling while keeping poses consistent. For these two photos, I decided not to apply a grayscale/silvertone filter since I prefer how they look without one. Chelsea gave a realistic, unsurprising answer, so I think it’d be better to separate her photos less from our real perception of the world.

Final diptych:

Emma, on the other hand, said that she’d just sleep through the end of the world. It’s a really simple answer but I think it still turned out great. Rather than presenting a diptych or triptych, I think a singular photo would work better since emma_4 has the best angle, lighting and pose. For this photo, I decided to apply a black-and-white filter to it.

Final image:

Photos featured are by Ernst Haas: https://ernst-haas.com/bw-portraits/

Portrait photography consists of staged photographs with a defined, living subject, usually a human, and represents said subject’s identity through the photo. Common examples of portrait photography include (but are not limited to) school/work photos, and magazine covers. Subjects will usually dress up in an outfit representing their identity or bring props to convey a message visually about themselves, like wearing a school uniform for school photos or a musician holding a guitar in their photo.

Finite

The message of my triptych will be to represent small choices and events that one makes daily, which one may take for granted and forget about in a week. I want the viewers to really think about what makes an event insignificant and to see small things in a different light. For inspiration, I will find a photographer who explores things that humans interact with and photographs of purer abstraction that can still apply to our lives. In my opinion, we have to appreciate the process as well as the result it gives us. We take many things in our lives for granted, but to do so is to take away time spent to think and appreciate something from our finite lives.

Link to contact sheet of selected works: Andreas Gursky selected works (This contact sheet includes image citations.)

Photo 1: Politik II

In this image, Gursky depicts thirteen politicians, all engaging in discussion. All the politicians are positioned in the foreground at the bottom of the photo, with a piece of art (Five Past Eleven) by Ed Ruscha taking up nearly the rest. This photo has an ambivalent tone since the background (the wall) is black, but the artwork is a lot brighter, establishing contrast. The background is also fully in black and white, which establishes a contrast in color against the colorfully dressed politicians. In the background above the politicians is a large levitating piece of white bamboo. Bamboo symbolizes strength, resilience and longevity, which can all be beneficial characteristics for a politician or public speaker. The piece of bamboo also intersects the line created by the clock’s hand, neutralizing it and denying it the ability to be a prominent subject and forms an X above the clock displayed in the artwork, which can symbolize running out of time. The thirteen politicians pictured also mirror the biblical scene “The Last Supper,” but the politician equivalents of prominent characters such as Jesus and Judas are not given. This is a good way of representing how political betrayal isn’t rare and how many politicians make grand remarks and promises like Jesus when giving his disciples wine and bread; however, unlike Jesus, politicians often don’t deliver on their grand comments and promises.

Photo 2: Rhine II

This is a straightforward image of a river surrounded by grassy banks, with a sidewalk towards the bottom of the image. This image is almost entirely made up of straight horizontal lines (grass, sidewalk, river). The sky takes up the top half of the image, and the land occupies the bottom half. Though this image is straightforward, I find it to be an excellent abstraction of rivers since what one most likely pictures when asked to think about a river would be a stretch of blue or light gray water flowing between two green banks. This image also symbolizes finding order in the chaos since rivers typically have lots of turns and bends but this image features a perfectly straight stretch of river.

Photo 4: New York, Mercantile Exchange

The New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) is a commodities futures market in Manhattan. It started when a group of dairy merchants in the area created the Butter and Cheese Exchange of New York in 1872, and after more products were introduced to the exchange, it became the New York Mercantile Exchange in 1882. Today, NYMEX exchanges mostly energy-related commodities such as coal, natural gas, propane, and uranium. This image shows a scene in what is presumably a trading area. There is no clear subject, but the image is darker at the left and right sides. The image also vaguely follows the rule of thirds (the black screen with multicolored text takes up about a third of the image). It also looks like the shutter speed was turned down slightly when taking this photo, resulting in a subtle but noticeable motion blur among the people in the room. This is a good abstraction since it really captures the energy of hundreds of people discussing the exchange of such valuable commodities – buzzing back and forth in multicolored suits, white papers littering the dark cyan floor. It’s a fantastic way of capturing a key area that tourists may overlook in the city that never sleeps.

Photo 7: Las Vegas

This image shows what appears to be a piece of artwork comprised of a wall with a pattern of short golden metal rods on it. There is no clear subject in the photo, but I think it still serves as a symbolic abstraction of the city in its title. When I (and I’m sure many others) think of Las Vegas, the first thing I think about is gambling. “The Strip”, which is probably the most iconic road there, is dotted with casinos on both sides. Gambling activates the reward system in the brain, which makes it highly addicting. Inside a casino, you can probably see people playing slot machines over and over, hoping that the odds will be more in their favor this time than last time. They all follow a pattern, just like the metal tubes in the artwork in this picture. And, just like the image’s pattern, this cycle will end, but definitely not as pleasantly as depicted in the image.

Other citations:

“Bible Gateway Passage: Matthew 26:17-30 – New International Version.” Bible Gateway, 2019, www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2026%3A17-30&version=NIV. Accessed 18 Sept. 2024.

Wikipedia Contributors. “New York Mercantile Exchange.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 13 June 2024, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Mercantile_Exchange. Accessed 18 Sept. 2024.

“The Uncontrollable Urge to Keep Gambling despite the Damage-Compulsive Gambling – Symptoms & Causes – Mayo Clinic.” Mayo Clinic, 2022, www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/compulsive-gambling/symptoms-causes/syc-20355178. Accessed 18 Sept. 2024.

Before you start reading, a warning: this blog post contains spoilers for “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot.

In our last Humanities unit, we learned about literary non-fiction by reading various books of the genre. I chose to read “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot. This book details the life and legacy of Henrietta Lacks, a black woman who had a sample of her cervical cancer cells taken without her knowledge. Doctors then discovered that her malignant cells were able to infinitely reproduce, which made them millions since her cells could be used as a reliable source of testing material for drugs, vaccines, and cures for cancer. All of this happened as her family suffered from poverty, not getting a single penny from the doctors’ profits. This book is a poioumenon – it describes Skloot’s journey to Clover and her experience recording all this information about who Henrietta really is. Some themes and central ideas present in this book are the concept of family, medical consent, the development of the sciences, and discrimination. In this blog post, I will be sharing some pages from my notebook to share my experience reading this book in a book club.

Multiple Ideas

This page was made very early and was one of the first I wrote while reading this book. During our lesson, we read a bit of a short story called “Hidden Figures,” which was about a black woman, Dorothy Vaughan, who worked as a computer in World War 2.  We discussed what central ideas were present in the text and did the same for the book we were reading. I wrote about my central idea and also wrote about some recurring ideas and motivations that I thought would be useful for future notes.

Tracking Complexity

Not long after writing about central ideas, I put my analysis to good use when we needed to create a map of motivations, conflicts, and interactions. We were also tasked with identifying some character traits. On this page, I wrote about our most prominent characters so far: Rebecca (narrator), Deborah (Henrietta’s daughter), Courtney Speed (owner of a grocery store in Clover), and Henrietta (Deborah’s deceased mother, whose cells were one of the first immortal cell chains discovered). It wasn’t hard to get three traits for all of them since the book contains lots of breaks from Rebecca’s journey to talk about Henrietta’s childhood and explore her family’s backstory. These passages tend to stray away from the clinical operating rooms and omnipresent unjustness of Deborah’s present life and meander into the past, vividly describing Henrietta’s childhood and life.

Back in the present, Rebecca goes on a winding journey to find out the truth about Henrietta. Her determination gets her on the phone with various members of the Lacks family. As seen in the map I made, the family is exclusive since they regard Henrietta’s cells as a sensitive topic. Most family members don’t pick up her calls or deny her the information. This part was also not h

ard to make since the book is so explicit about Rebecca’s journey (being a poioumenon).

Perspectives and Argument

This page contains our script for the town hall debate. This activity was where we used a central idea as a claim and made a speech supporting it with evidence from the book we read, and the audience could pose questions after our speech. To prepare, we each came up with a point to support our central idea. Niuniu introduced the first piece of evidence, and I provided the rebuttal. By having a strong rebuttal, we were able to thwart many possible denouncements of our argument, so the risk of us failing was much lower. To write this script, we each made a CER and implemented it into the script (like we did for the boxer essay).

Central Idea 1 & Central Idea 2

The last two pages I will be sharing on this blog post are part of the Central Idea summative. In this task, we wrote down a central idea present in our book and constructed an argument to support it, CER style. For this task, we worked individually and not in groups. The central idea I wrote was “Henrietta’s cells helped to further medical knowledge and establish laws and regulations about informed consent.”. I chose to write this since it was prevalent in the book (it was one of the most prominent and important ideas Rebecca wrote about) and it was easy to provide strong evidence for it.

Overall, I found this to be a very fruitful unit and I took a lot away from it. I got to read a fantastic book about something I’ve never even heard of before, and I got to practice and improve my writing and speaking skills.

This is my Process Journal for the creation of the app I am making for my client. This will be updated each class.