Reflections About Project 2--> "The Spirit of St. Mary's"

My Reflections about Project 2:

Group Four

By: Renessa Copeland

It was really exciting being able to sit down with the four books and flip through them, taking in all the colors and experience of turning the pages. After looking through my own section of our book ‘The Spirit of St. Mary’s’, overall I was pleased with what I saw, but I think that there are some things that I could have paid more attention to, changed, or fixed. After flipping through the six pages I realized that I still could have sent more time formatting the borders on my page. For me it was a little disturbing that the words were cut off the page, making it harder to read the words. At the same time, I was glad that I made the choice to move the words over one inch from the gutter.

After looking at the second spread, that spelled out SMCM, although I was really pleased with how everything came out, I feel like I could have lighted a few of the faces, because some of the faces were darker making it harder to identify the student who was smiling. I wanted all the images distinguishable. Also after looking at the images on this page, I realized that I should not have duplicated any of the images. I feel like I should have just taken a little more time to take a few more images so that they would not be duplicated. For me it disrupted my flow of looking at the images, because when I got to an image of a person I had already seen, I would look back at the first image and it made viewing the images disjointed.

One think that I really liked and was pleased with was that there was versatility in the picture formatting on the pages. I was glad that I chose not to repeat the exact same order on any page, or that I did not make each page very cluttered, because I think I made if page overly cluttered with visual information then it would have been to stimulating and would have taken away from my idea. What I am still not sure about is if I should have included color. Since the rest of the book relied so much with color, I feel like maybe I should have subtly included the colors, blue and yellow. Maybe making the images that spelled out SMCM monochrome images, in either the color blue or yellow.

As a whole I think that like others in my group have mentioned our topic was to broad and I think that we really branched to far away from our original topic to create a cohesive whole. After looking from one section to the next I feel like the book was not as much as a collective, I think there was to much variability. One thing that really helped to make the book appear to be more cohesive was the use of the division pages. But, I think that we need something within the book, or even on the division pages letting the viewer know how the section represented St. Mary’s. With the opening page followed by images, it was hard to follow why that particular topic, that the person chose to present to represent St. Mary’s, was important.

One thing that really bothered me when looking at our book was the front color. I feel like the front cover colors were contradictory, I am not sure why the front colors were the pastels that were selected. I feel like our claim, in representing St. Mary’s, would have been stronger if the colors in the front cover were St. Mary’s school colors (white, gold, blue, or some variation).
Within the book as a whole I really feel like my section was so different that my group member. I feel like the way I worked with text and images, in no way shape or form flowed with my group members sections. I feel like my section being complicated with words and images disrupted the other sections of the book and interrupted the flow of the book.

Overall I really enjoyed working on this project because it really allowed me to challenge myself. When I began working on this project I realized that what ever avenue that I took I wanted to challenge myself, think outside of the box, and try new ways of working.

Reflections on Project 02

Reflecting on Project_02: What it's like

I have to agree with Jordan about the covers. They are very nice but very dirty, it seems like black really shows fingerprints well.

I found looking through the book was different from looking at it on the computer screen (not a really big surprise). Having the pages in my hands to flip through at my leisure was nice. The pages felt a little stiff a couple of years/many viewings should help resolve that issue. I found that some of the pages had the same problem as the cover fingerprints everywhere (at least you can tell how people hold books).

Starting with my section then moving on to the rest of the book: the gutter surprised me. I thought I had left enough space for some of my words but apparently not. I lost a few letters here and there but overall I could still read what was being said. The pages I was most disappointed in were I’ve seen a loser win and Everything in between. The idea I had behind Everything in between was portrayed but it was done so with the loss of more lettering than I thought would be lost.

I think knowing the song helped a lot; I knew what was coming up next and what the general idea of the song was. I am not sure if knowing the song allowed me to see the book as joined when it could have looked a little disjointed.

Overall, I enjoyed looking at the final product and look forward to working on the third project and my final project.

Project_02 Assessment

Photo Book Self Assessment
Project_02


Having the book in-hand was not as positive an experience as I had hoped. I immediately felt that the book was too large for my section, as well as a couple others. Because the pages were so large, the pages were far less rigid than I thought they would be and it seemed that some details were easily lost in the physical act of trying to hold the book comfortably. There was also the things that don't survive the computer-to-paper translation: for example, I was disappointed by how pixelated some of the images turned out. I was also surprised by how the colors on the front cover, which were much more pastel than they appeared on the computer.

Individually, I think we all achieved our goals for each section we worked on. For me personally, I was glad that I was able to get feedback from the class about resizing my student portraits so that they were roughly the same size as the admissions photo that they were juxtaposed with. Correcting this detail helped the section flow together much better. Conceptually, I was happy with the way the student portraits and quotations represented both positive and negative perspectives of St. Mary's (without being overly disparaging or overly complimentary). It was a difficult process, because I struggled to find a diversity of students who were also willing to be quoted/photographed - not to mention that I got extremely sick toward the end. Despite all of the hurdles, the project did come together and my group was extraordinarily patient with me. I was glad to see that the others in my group seemed to be happy with their own work.

As a collective, however, I did not think that our book was very cohesive. I mentioned earlier that our topic wasn't quite focused enough, and seeing the physical book reaffirmed this. Aside from the unifying divider pages, I think our stylistic choices (text, color/bw, subject matter) was so varied that it did not have a continuous flow. Considering that we had such different takes on St. Mary's as as whole, I do think that we arranged the book was thoughtfully as possible. The flow from one subject to the other was done as best as we could. In some ways, the fact that we didn't have more unifying features is regrettable, but I wonder if it might also be a good thing. Given the topic that we selected (The Spirit of St. Mary's), I think it would also be disappointing if we had produced a book with cookie-cutter uniformity. A balance must be struck, and although I'm not sure we achieved it as a group, I do think that it represented our individual visions clearly. Midway through the project, I remember a group meeting we had in which everyone was worried about asking each other to alter their visions, and the few alterations that we did try to make were often objected to. In the end, I think we were all trying to preserve each other's artistry to the point of forsaking cohesion.

Reflections on Project 02

Reflecting on Project 02: Portraits with Words

by Jordan Grant

 

After opening up our completed photobook, Portraits with Words, my first thought was: Jeez, this thing is going to get dirty. While the black cover looks great, it has already accrued a solid layer of fingerprints and dust. Given a few years next to the darkroom, close to the eager hands of young photographers, I can only imagine the smudges our book will show.

 

            All jokes aside, I made a number of observations when I first held the printed version of our book. To put some organization onto this reflection, I’ll start with my thoughts on my own section, “I Would”, and move on to the rest of the book.

 

            To begin, I realized that my decision to place a photo of text (“I would”) on every page underestimated the memory of my readers. Initially, I inserted the text-photo into my spreads because I wanted my section of the book to have an obvious, formal parallel with the section created by my partner Jenny (whose pages contained two photos, one with a person and the text “I am not”, the other with the same person and text that answered that statement). However, when I actually saw “I would” scrawled across every page, I realized that readers might feel like I was banging them over the head with my  theme. If anything, I could have removed the “I would” text from one page of each spread. Even better, I could have removed the “I would” text altogether. My title page would have been enough of an explanation for most readers; after reading “I would” once, the reader would probably assume that the photos that followed would show people giving an answer to the stated question.

 

More importantly, removing the text from every page would have freed me to blow my pictures up. Full bleeds, though different in style from Jenny and Rachel’s sections, would have tied my own section to Elle’s work, tightening our book as a whole. Full bleeds would have also improved my images. As they are rendered now, I feel like my photos are too small for their own good. My subjects get lost on the page; their words don’t “pop”. A larger canvas area would have helped correct these problems.

This observation leads me into my largest critique for the book as a whole. Simply put, I think our photobook reads to fast for its own good. In my own section, the relative “smallness” of my images hampers (in my mind) the readers’ inclination to stop and see the relationship between the images being presented in each spread. On a larger level, I feel our book does very little to slow down the reader’s eye. In my own browsing, for instance, I often caught myself skipping over the title pages for each section. Though I can attribute this to my own familiarity with the book, I feel that other readers, less tied to the project, would also skip over those key title pages. If those same pages had given readers a sudden jolt –say, if they were rendered black, contrasting with the rest of the book- then our photobook may have become a slower, more methodical read.

 

Though I’ve focused on the negative in the past few paragraphs, I really am quite happy with our group’s final work. With some caveats, I believe that we managed to sequence and integrate four very different styles of photography on both thematic and formal levels. In the end, I think we managed to create a book where our individual voices combine to make something that’s more interesting than what they were alone.

           

            [One last aside: our group didn’t anticipate that iPhoto would insert gray pages at the beginning and end of our book. If we did it again, we would probably add in our own black or white pages, particularly on the spread that compliments Elle’s final self-portrait].  

 

Thoughts--> Richard Nickolson "How to Tell A War Story"

The Washingtonian, Richard Emery Nickolson’s lecture on “How to Tell a War Story” used both war images and stories to depict reveal the truth through war stories. He brought to this lecture not only research but also experience with war, being a Vietnam War Artists. Currently he is a professor of painting and drawing at Indiana University-Purdue University”.

He began his lecture reading a quote from Tim O’Brien, about the importance of stories. The line that stood out the most to me was that “stories are for joining the past to the future”. I found this quote to be so relevant to Nickolson’s lecture because each war that he described had a different text and images to help illustrate the truth behind the war. The texts that he chose to complement the images were from different periods than the images.

When Nickolson described the section of his talk, entitled “The Art of Combat: ‘Then and Now’”, it had an impact on me because of the way he related text and images. This section relating stories to imagery was engaging because it seemed to reveal the war stories in the most truthful, real manner. What grasped my attention when he introduced this section was how he started with a story that was personal to him, related to his experience as an artist during the Vietnam War. Describing how while being involved with the ‘U.S. Army’s Combat Artist Program’, photographers, drawers, and other artists, like Robert Knight and William Harrington, used different artistic mediums to “document military and civilian life”.

In the “The Art of Combat: ‘Then and Now’” segment of his talk it was full of elements that really grabbed my attention, but the most powerful aspect of his lecture for me was the way he depicted how Vietnam soldiers used their stories and experiences from the war as their text to create art that helped them to tell the viewer their story and ‘heal’ from the war. The artists in this section that engaged my attention the most was Sandoval. His technique and the uniqueness of his work, in which he weaves pieces of students’ trashed artwork together to create his art, was really fascinating. The way that he worked with recycled materials in this manner really interested me because in my opinion he uses creative, abstract, and personal expression to comment on events in his life or events, and war events of the pasts. As a Vietnam veteran he expressed his story about the war in his 1984 flag series entitled ‘State of the Union’. The other series of textile art that he made was his 1985 work ‘Ground Zero’. The way that he created these masterpieces in my opinion have such a profound message in relation to war and politics.

Richard Nickolson’s talk was unique, in the way that he weaved text and images together. Rather than having his images and text together or simultaneous, the words had more of an impact on me with him reading the text orally and then playing or allowing the viewer to read them also. His talk had a lot of surprises, meaning that there were many thing, images, and ways that he presented his work that I would never have imagined to do.