For Image & Reality, I set out to explore photography's inability to represent reality. My inspiration for this started after visiting Thomas Ross exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery; his ‘jpeg’ series of digital appropriations had a profound effect on me mainly from the way he used scale: up close all you rendered was a mesh of pixels, but when you take a step back your Brain identifies this ‘mesh of pixels’ into a scene from history. And isn’t that photography? Just a series of random colours which harmonise together to then provoke an emotion in the viewer.

After reading books by philosophers such as Roland Barthes & Walter Benjamin, I discovered that people had been questioning how close photography is to reality. Barthes talked about how what was in front of us in the real-world is in fact, real. But once appropriated into a different medium, it is immediately taken out of its original frame and fragmented into a distorted version of the original.

I wanted to visually express my concept by taking something from reality, that we all can identify, a person. And challenge our perception of that through the use of scale, I invite the viewer to see the differences that happen when you go up close & step back from the print. How perception changes from “pixels” to “person”.

Along with this journey, I started to appreciate the aesthetic beauty of the pixel. I feel it is the digital age’s version of Neo-impressionism’s pointillist paintings, such as the work of Georges Seurat.

Although I was pleased with my outcome, I did notice what I could improve.

Once the image was printed, allowing for me to view the image at different distances: I felt that the image should've compressed the image further and resized to a lower resolution. My idea of how the perspective changes from a random series of pixels into a person would have been achieved more efficiently if I did this.

I could have developed this project further into a series of images: More shoots with different models or objects. This would have also worked because you can identify objects like you can identify a person, and still compress & resize the images.

 This project has changed my way of viewing photography as "all truthful" and I aspire to take elements from this onto future projects.