I. My relationship with photography

My relationship with photography has changed after doing the practice unit. Before starting the practice unit I viewed photography (And still do) as a way for me to capture and contain and emotion either inside me or in my subject which through the image I can then present to the audience and emphasise with them. This unit has challenged my view on photography, I now question what an image actually is in a technical sense and has made me think about whether any image I’ve taken is actually mine; The subject in front of me is the most real version of what I'm trying to capture, I then take a photo with a camera not built by me where I can only control where I want the light to come into it onto a negative/sensor created by somebody else who has determined how the light will be read. I then push the negative through chemicals, again out of my control. Then I scan the negative with a machine that decides how much information it will record and compress. Then the image is printed on a printer which again will compress the image to its specifications. So now with the printed image in front of me can I truly say this is an accurate representation of the subject at the start once it has gone through all these different manipulations?

II. What do I want to develop in Image & Reality

I currently have two ideas which I am considering pursuing to image and reality. The first idea is playing more and developing the theory stated above possibly three large-scale portraits which are then compressed so much that they are far from the reality at the start. A big inspiration for this would be Thomas Ruff’s ‘JPEG’ series where he blew up low-resolution images two enormous scales revealing the pixel mosaic which up close makes the image up close look unidentifiable, but once you step back you can see parts of the reality forming.

My second idea would be to develop upon what I did for task five ‘appropriation’. After finding a few old negatives from the 1960s of family portraits I scan them and then realise that I didn't recognise any of the people and photos. I wanted to reflect this to the audience by cutting out the faces from the images creating an eerie effect. For the project, I could gather many negatives look at my family scanned them and create a book of these abstractions showing how through image the reality so close to me, my family is altered and becomes so distant.