tangible memories

If I do not photograph and document a particular place, do I actually see it and experience it? Without the artifact of documenting, how real is the experience? Without the tangible memory, how can the particular instance live on?

I feel that whenever I am experiencing a place, I have to document it. I have to capture that particular moment, that time of day, that mood, or that setting. These photographic transcriptions are time capsules to “freeze” and then evoke the particular characteristics of the places I visit and want to record for myself to remember, and re-represent for others to see.

These are not narratives or stories. Rather, they are perceptions of settings which are capturing something that existed for a stretch of time, something that may or may not be repeated or re-experienced. Through my transcription and translation, I hope to capture that character to prevent it from being lost forever.

wintersession proposal

GOALS
Utilize last semester’s photographic documentation—photographs of landscapes or cityscapes—to construct new narratives of juxtaposed meaning by adding words to pictures, and contextual bodies to isolated parts. Integrate new photographs of vacant landscapes to compare and contrast with existing transformations. Consequently, develop sequence and narrative out of seriality and multiples.

OVERVIEW
After reflecting about my thesis over wintersession I came to three concluding, interdependent questions: What do I want to capture, what is the subject matter of my studies, and why do I want to study this? Then, even more difficult, I asked myself what I can do with the subject matter that captures my interest that will make that content relevant and interesting to other people. I have been reflecting on exactly what kind of places I am drawn to documenting and then when I can do with those documentations and transformations.

The goal of my thesis is not to study signs, or to necessarily study California landscapes. Those are subjects to me, and are means to the end of constructing space. I use the desolate landscapes as characters of my creations, places that act as content.

But what do my transformations achieve? They construct new spaces, spaces that do not exist in the normal 3D world. They are layered, simultaneous compositions of multiple images. They flatten an experience (where the experience of a pedestrian walking down a street, or the faster driving experience behind the wheel of an automobile) They compress time in the way that multiple perspectives, and multiple vantage points and moments in time are existing simultaneously on one flat page. One panel shows the same sign from different angles, and in different sizes. Using the graphic designer’s vocabulary of expression: form, hierarchy, scale, positive and negative space, symmetry and asymmetry, these compositions deconstruct and reconstruct something real from its original content and create a new context. The documentation is no longer a literal transcription of that place, it is a transformation and construction of a new place.

Yet, the question remains. What does this space do and why would anyone want to look at it? I think the compositions are interesting when people take the time to look at something they would not usually look at. Everyone is familiar with the San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, but probably not the 101 freeway underpass. In LA, the Hollywood icon is the famous site, but it is not a real definition of the normal Angeleno’s daily commute along wide, suburban concrete boulevards. These non-places are taken for granted, and are overlooked. No one cares to notice.

Route 66 signs, desolate industrial sites in San Francisco, Central California fields: all are places which capture my interest. Sometimes I had no time to stop, and photographed out the window along my road trip. They are all desolate, empty of characters, moments I captured while on a road to somewhere else. They are kind of anti-destinations, anti-places. Route 66 is surly an iconic cliche, but most of the buildings I captured on my drive are not really significant.

The isolated, graffiti covered underpasses of San Francisco’s Potrero Hill are not destinations. They exist on the margins of society, out of site and mostly out of mind for most people. But, these are the places I am drawn to, containing photographs I want to take. They are vacant lots, vacant rooftops and alleys. They define the city to me more than famous icons do. The light of day, the material juxtapositions, the exuberant colors of the graffiti markings make these places beautiful, even though they are also nondescript and possibly downtrodden. I want to capture what most people ignore, or even avoid. I want to translate this place into an interesting representation, to call out the beauty that I see, to transform it through my own manipulations.

Not only do I want people to notice these places, and see beauty or at least interest in the mundane, but I want to transform them into new spaces. This transformation thus adds interest and my personal perspective to what I am documenting. I am not just capturing a scene and putting it on the wall, but I am adding my own perspective and interpretation of it. And, the longer someone looks at this piece, the more they notice details that could not have originally existed in the original place: a garbage truck is larger than a building, or the same building is repeated onto itself. Normal perspectives and scales of the urban landscape are thrown into a non natural, even impossible configurations. This is how I add interest to the mundane, and reconstruct original content.

PROPOSED PROJECTS
I have been taking numerous documentations of places: close up graffiti textures, signs and billboards, exterior urban and natural landscapes. I hope to juxtapose this “collected” content with excerpted texts to study relationships and juxtapositions of non sequitur pairings. Studying words and lines of text with individual photographs will allow me to construct verbal and pictorial sequences. These sequences can be serial multiples or linked events which construct a climax of progression and development. My goal is twofold: utilize collected images and make something out of them, using sequence to connect words with images, to create more direct comprehension of the original subject matter. I will start by reading narratives about specific places, starting with Route 66 descriptions to create the framework that links the separate scapes. Then, combining pictures with words, I will create layered collages of flattened space, 2D representations out of 3D contexts.

What is the nature of juxtaposition and comparison, narration and translation. How does the transformation through juxtaposition enrich the original content? How does it allow the original content to be more accessible to its viewers? Not through literal transcription or literal definition but a pairing which results out of the relationship between seemingly unrelated images. This in between relationship creates richer meaning and provides a depth of experience which has multiple interpretations and definitions. Rather than narrowly define the subject that the viewer is seeing, it allows the viewer to create multiple comprehensions and a prolonged interaction with the piece. Studying the nature of this juxtaposition, with alternate means of constructing the pairings: the scale and scope of the printed word against the image, and its direct or non direct relationship with the image will be the outcome of these pairings.

PHOTOGRAPHIC CONTENT
Some of the relevant photographic content includes: Southwest desertscapes, San Francisco industrial sites, Central Valley fields, and Los Angeles streetscapes. Although these “nonplaces” come from different cities and different landscapes, similarities exist among their characters and associated moods. Most of these places are unimportant on their own: they link other places along a route, individual buildings or signs along a street, or landscapes along a highway. They are not beautiful or iconic places. Rather, they are vernacular, dilapidated or gritty “nonplaces.” They are unimportant, insignificant, vacant, possibly even mundane moments rather than destinations.

The journey. The space. The experience over time: these are loose boundaries for my studies. These photographic studies construct a pedestrian space of travelled experience. Tying in the pedestrian interaction, collecting details of travelled routes and streets, creates a new cityscape, which is framed through the lens of multiplicity. These fragmented, decontextualized settings are transformed through their multiple viewpoints and through framing. They deconstruct, and reconstruct existing places out of their three dimensional contexts into two dimensional assemblages.

These original documents contain different amounts of abstraction and non figurative subject matters. Some are gestural fragments of walls, others are transcriptions of billboards and signs. They juxtapose horizontal and vertical space, man made and natural forms.

VERBAL CONTENT
Poignant words and phrases written in evocative prose will allow deliberate, juxtapositions with photographic content. Some of the text might come from descriptions of deserts written by my brother. Certain text excerpts,“inside versus outside,” “rural versus urban” “flat versus dimensional” might be categories to frame these studies. Some descriptions might be written by me in response to certain pictures. I might write some of it myself, but I prefer collecting and documenting text as I collect photographs. I like the additive and subtractive nature of this collection.

My transcription comes in the transformation, the reordering of the text, not by painting a blank canvas or writing on a blank page. I always start out with information and start and transform it into a new form. The verbal content is yet to be determined, but I want to treat its mixing and juxtaposing approach as a similar process to the photographic layered compositions.

PROCESS:
DOCUMENT, DECONSTRUCT, TRANSFORM, RECONSTRUCT
I have purchased a few toy cameras which have multiple lenses. Playing with a 4 lens, an 8 lens, and a multiple exposure camera, allows me to see how the framing of the same original place through different lenses transforms the space and the transcription.

I will construct a combined series photographs that I have gathered over the course of last semester. Route 66 streets, southwest landscapes and vernacular signs and billboards. I will then combine these pictures with new photographic juxtapositions, as needed, as well as focus on signs and letterforms/words taken from different contexts. Finally, I will add specific words and sentences to the translations.

FINAL FORM
What is the final form? Your work exists without a body, and that is why it seems to be continually in progress an unresolved or not fully defined? This comment was given to me in my final fall review, and I agree with the lack of body for my content. I hope to define the body which will give framework to my images. Right now, I cannot yet determine in what form the juxtapositions will live. I tend to prefer working in time based media (books, maybe film sequences) rather than single image experiences (posters). I am taking a 16mm film class, so I might tie some of these nonplace studies into that format.

PROPOSED READINGS
I have been reading the book, Space and Place and enjoyed the detailed description of the psychology of settings in the experience of people. I have also been recommended Tony Hiss’s Experience of Place. Other books which I am still applying to my thesis include, Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, and Kevin Lynch’s Image and the City. Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas has also been an applicable case study, as has Lisa Maher’s American Signs: Form and Meaning.