photograph of objects

I was not in the class so I did not read and learn from critiques other participants' works. One person took a photo of a tattoo ỏ stain which looked small and like a birth mark, but if I looked closely to it, it was confusing. it is like a skin made cover of something, like an old album. Other person took a photo of a laptop, a Lenovo which looks old. One took a coin with "dream game" but I like the two hands holding it. The hands are big but the coin in the center so it is still catching attention. One participant took a photo of a shirt and I like the light through it. The shirt saying something about the owner who might be an old man. One photo is very funny. The purse is open and it looks like a vagina to me.

One person took two photos. one is a box of broken glasses and the other is a black and white photo of someone. I dont like the way she took the photo though. She put on the floor and take picture from the top down to it. It does not sound she treated these objects well. I agree that some photos saying much more about the photographers than about the objects which are taken. One take a picture of a hairpin. the object looks nice and clean. That's it. It might be qualified but not interesting. And it also seems not very personal in the way the photographer chose the white background.

Ok, here is my process.

Here is the assignment:

"photograph and object belonging to that person - do it in a way that says something about them, about who they are as people. Can an object tell us something personal? Let's see!"

at first I thought the object belongs Linh whom I took a portrait before. So I told Linh to come over. I thought about taking photo of his paintings or makeup stuffs . I thought I would take a photo when he was doing his work.

but when Linh came, I looked at his bag and I thought it would be better object to talk about him rather than other things.

so we when out again and i took several photos of him with his bag.

I was quite happy with the result, then I thought does it have to be objects of Linh? I took a toys car belonging to my friend's sons or just my friend. I took it when I was on his car.

still not quite happy, I thought about taking somethings belongs to my family. I thought about the old bicycle my Mom still uses when she went home. It is very old. but my dead tried his best to make it in one piece so mom can use it to go to the local market.

but I still search something strong for me to take a photo. Then I walked to my family kitchen and took these things.

I dont know how other read this photo, but to me, it is telling about our family cooking habit. We are not over the traditional way of cooking in which we use stuff that burns and make all the pans black and then we switch to using gas and we mix up between the too. The wall is also very personal to me with the line my late father draw to make the electric box. He never finished this work though.

Then I took picture of this radio. it was hard. I took many pictures . Some I tried with the photo of my late father. He was given from his older cousin who liked him and so did he. He used it a lot, but somehow, I could not make strong image of it. How? I did not have any idea. So I put it on the old cupboard. the photo looked boring. I put it on the altar. Huhm, it seems more failure than ever.

After the class, the instructor send us three links. here they are about some people taking pictures of objects. Would I do differently after watching them? They looked strong and beautiful, but I am still not sure about taking different way.

. this woman took photo from her window. she used cloud as black ground. She might did something to remove the thing holding clothes. I dont know, but the background is quite interesting.

"her “Clothes” series are paired with her “Birds” series for the first time, displaying never-seen before diptychs. These bodyless “Portraits of Clothes” associated with the blurred feathers of birds taking off with a flap of wings, produce a powerful contrast between static and dynamic, between still-life and animation, transcending Roland Barthes’ concept of “that has existed” and Carl G. Jung vision of birds as messengers between heaven and earth, connecters between the living and the gods. As a result each work becomes a portrait of an angel."

the other guy did Alive project. I like his using of black background. Krama, old photos, scissors, gold bracelet, rice bowl, kettle, silver belt, perfume bottle, silver spoon, small Buddha statue, vase, pottery, army box... The things have been reclaimed, digging them out of the dirty land after the Pol Pot period, or they have been kept throughout families’ histories. I wanted to learn more about the personal items from my mother, Mor Rean. One time, she explained to me about her kettle, “We fed the chickens, but we could not eat them. We stole the chicken in the night and cooked it, so we could eat… It is a bittersweet memory, that is why I kept taking care of this kettle, it holds so much souvenirs.

and finally, this guy took did "ひろしま/HIROSHIMA 2011 These are objects irradiated by the great fireball that appeared suddenly one summer morning, and personal effects left behind by those who perished because of it. I catch my breath at their vivid hues and textures, surfacing from the long shadows cast by their extreme circumstance. They seem much too ordinary, the very stuff of daily life, to belong to an Atomic archive. They are also too subtle to serve as anti-war, pro-peace icons―but I found Hiroshima in the gentle, everyday textures surviving in the silhouette of a one-piece dress, worn, perhaps clandestinely, by an unknown woman, and in the deep folds of a gathered skirt, in a fabric woven of silken threads."

I like his work the most.

I might go back to Linh and took more pictures of his belongings and might be only them.

and my next assignment is to take a very simple, ordinary scene or setting - it could be in our own home with our own family, at work in the office, at the gym or in the park after work, etc. So the homework is simply to make an image which shows something true to us, makes a comment about, or offers a visual critique about something very ordinary in our own life or in Vietnamese life. Just look at the ordinary with a fresh eye. This is brutally difficult. I have not had any idea yet. This requires to think more than just click but I should not sit here and think. Tomorrow i will drag my lazy ass out to find and think :(