For my project, I wanted to base my theme around the relationship between pets and humans. Pets have always been considered loyal best friends and helpers to humans throughout history, in the 1800s dogs mainly helped their owners by hunting, herding, or guarding. For this I wanted to highlight the importance of me and my dog Ginger. In the piece I used an old baby photo of me with Ginger laying on the floor next to me, with this I wanted to represent an old style family based photo of how some portraits were taken in the 1800s and how often my old family photos were constructed. After I decided to add plants to the back to give the photo a more displayed look, I wanted the photo to feel normal and authentic so I decided to keep it very minimal.
This work gives off the feeling of a photo that would be taken and kept by a family of a child and a dog. The two subjects are placed in a room that has been constructed to look like a living room, or perhaps a staged area for the photo to be taken since the background is blank. The work is in a 4:3 ratio, is black and white, has distressed edges, and has a texture overlay which creates the illusion of it being older than it actually is. These components work together to create the illusion of an old photograph that has suffered damage over time.
ReplyDeleteThe two main subjects of this work are the child and the dog. This makes the image feel like a commentary on the relationship between the two. Since it is structured like a photograph a family would have, you can make the assumption that the child and the dog are both in the same household. This is also backed up by the body language of the two as they both seem relaxed and comfortable with each other in the composition. For this particular piece while the scratches and distressed edges help set the tone of the work, I don’t think they hold any further meaning.
The overall tone of the work fits the concept of a wet plate collodion image. It is in greyscale and the marks composited over it give it an aged look. However I think it possibly could have been pushed further. Adding some bright areas that look like they were affected by light leaks, and giving the image a sepia tone could have elevated it to appear even more realistic. The compositing work is mostly well done, there are a few areas that seem to have some blending issues like the lower left corner and the right side which have some harsh cutoffs. The subjects could have been blurred very slightly to help them not look as sharp in comparison to the background, and a bit more shadow under the dog would help push the realism.
Overall I think this work achieves both goals of conveying a meaning and mimicking the wet plate collodion style. Adding some of the elements I mentioned or revising some areas of the work would help to improve it further. I tried to understand the meaning of the image before I read the description and the conclusions I made matched what was written. So as it stands I would consider this a successful response to the prompt we were given.