I. Inspiration

A. John Baldessari – Dots

 (For John Baldessari, Conceptual Art Means Serious Mischief)

John Baldessari adopted the technique of placing different dotted colours over peoples faces in photographs. He claimed to do this to draw the attention away from the identity of the people in the photo and instead look at the actions and what they are wearing.

B. Amirali Ghasemi - Tehran Remixed

 (Tehran Remixed – Party Series)

Amirali Ghasemi’s ‘Tehran Remixed’ (2006 - 2008) was a project what's the project with the intention of viewing people from Tehran (capital of Iran) away from the prejudiced inflicted upon them from the mass media. By censoring their faces the viewer cannot tell what race they are and that they are from Iran; seeing them in such a familiar setting that takes the context of where they are from out of the image and helps remove the discrimination away from them.

II. Responses

For this task I source is by going to my parent's house. My search through a box of old family photographs and I stumbled upon a collection of the negatives from the early 1960’s which neither me, my mother or my father had ever seen as we never have the images for them. After scanning these negatives are not having the aid of my mother to provide context the images, I realise that I didn't know any of the people and the photographs, they were totally unrecognisable (With particular focus on the image attached where half of the negative had been exposed to light aligning perfectly to hide the subject’s face). I was quite drawn back by this I wanted other people to see what I saw in these photographs. By scanning the negatives printing them out and then using a scalpel to cut out the faces of the people in the photos, removing their identity’s; the context of the photos had been totally changed. These photos now appear not to be from my family, But could be from any family as nobody knows who these people now are.

III. Bibliography

For John Baldessari, Conceptual Art Means Serious Mischief. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/2013/03/11/173745543/for-john-baldessari-conceptual-art-means-serious-mischief

Tehran Remixed – Party Series. Retrieved from http://amiralighasemi.com/tehran-remixed-party-series/