Old is New Again George Stern:
Horseshoe Timeline
A lot of us envision the future with holograms or space age technology reaching for a further frontier. But instead maybe technology rubber bands back in time, and the old technology of the past is all that can be used. No longer nostalgia but used from a place of necessity, cars sink draining their last ounces of battery. The only way forward is technology once thought useless. Our future looks eerily similar to our past, and through this project a new view of a post apocalyptic world can be seen. Boats blur forward in their attempt to readapt to the new world, and the advanced technologies obsolete as they flicker into dormancy.
Critique #1
ReplyDeleteThe image looks to be set in the wilderness, with a remote village nested in the background. In the foreground lies a river where a blurred figure stands on top of a viking ship, the ship is moving quickly towards a car submerged in the water with the window open and the headlight still on.
The Image seems to reject modernity. The car is really the outlier in this scene, almost as if it is an alien or unfamiliar entity. The use of the wet plate technique adds emphasis to this though by reminding us of a time before ourselves. Furthermore the fast moving ship makes it seem like there is no respect for the modern, or that the modern is the new past.
This piece is very reminiscent of a Wet-Plate Collodion. The blurred background shows the shallow depth of field, and the scratches / distortion on the image, which are staples of the process; not to mention the wet plate helps the viewer find meaning within the image. Yet the wet plates would have required an object to be immoble, so the moving ship wouldn’t have been so feasible. Furthermore, the blur effect on the water looks a bit uncanny, especially when you can still see particles of still water being mixed with the motion blur.
This photograph made by George is a great concept that can definitely be explored further at a later date. But there are some details that feel off, whether that be off from the Wet-Plate Collodion Process or from the actual environment being created in this photo.