I'm a fourth year (senior, whatever you prefer to call it) and I'm taking a seminar course about Bruce Chatwin…have you ever heard of him? Ever read any of his work? There are seven students in the class which is pretty damn fantastic and the professor is, I want to say amazing, because he's extremely knowledgable and tells great stories (they usually involve some historical aspect and I usually find history lectures to be prosaic but not these).
Anyways, I've had to read all of Chatwin's work (which amounts to seven novels/books of essays). I got stuck, I mean having the privilege, of writing a reception history for The Viceroy of Ouidah. It's just okay.
Hands down my favorite Chatwin piece is On The Black Hill. It's a beautifully written, more traditional, novel. Each of his books (In Patagonia, The Songlines, The Viceroy of Ouidah, Utz) is set in a different part of the world (he was a 'wander,' believed a nomadic life is best) and each book falls into different genres (In Patagonia actually ended up in the travel section originally--which is why Chatwin was known as a travel writer, The Viceroy of Ouidah falls under historical fiction, The Songlines, according to Chatwin, is fiction and so is Utz). All the books are great, except The Viceroy of Oudiah…because it's just meh. But you might love it, don't let my lack of enthusiasm deter you from reading all of his work. The biography on Bruce Chatwin from 2000 (written by Nicholas Shakespeare) has great information and it's rather entertaining. Chatwin creates fantastic and quirky characters, much like himself.
As part of my research, I had to watch Cobra Verde (1988), a film directed by Werner Herzog which stars Klaus Kinski (it's actually the last film the two made together, they hated each other). Kinski as a Brazilian slave trader? I just didn't see Herzog's vision. I can still see Kinski's face… Needless to say, the film is a very very very freely adapted version of the book.
Monday, November 18, 2013
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Photography Portfolio
My photography portfolio is finally done! I've put many hours into this and I've gotten some great feedback so far. All the images are mine; I took them all. I'm kind of proud because I think it looks great!
If you'd like to see it for yourself, click here or visit acohen32.wix.com/photography
If you'd like to see it for yourself, click here or visit acohen32.wix.com/photography
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Postmortem photography research
Dear reader--
We meet again...
I was thinking the other day about how I blog, this is my blog, yet I don't really read other peoples blogs. So why do you read this? Do you find what I say interesting? Or are you bored and you've just now come across this delightful Internet campground full of rants, random essays, poetry here and there, and every now and then, a cute photograph of my pet(s)?
Anyways, this is usually where I inquire to whether or not you'd like to know what I've been up to. Interested? If you are, keep reading--if not, skip to the next blog because this is a focused post (not allowing myself to ramble on, oops, I'm on a tangent)--so I've previously mentioned I've been writing a research paper on postmortem photography: art versus reality. I did a very very very small study in-class on the response towards postmortem images (Image 1 was a Victorian postmortem image, Image 2 was Margaret Bourke-White's photograph of a South Korean holding the severed head of the North Korean (1952), Image 3 was Ambulance Disaster from Andy Warhol's 1963 Death and Disaster series). The results were, lets just say, astounding. My plan was to categorize the responses as emotional or intellectual, but I needed a consistent method to measure each response. So I thought, and I played around with how to decipher the responses, and I thought some more and then the light bulb…I analyzed each response based on whether or not the response consisted of nouns and adjectives! Nouns are concrete: people, places, things. Adjectives are descriptors. Ergo, nouns correlate to intellectual responses and adjectives correspond to emotional responses.
My preliminary research, in which four of my Google+ followers were kind enough to participate, showed that there were two types of responses according to my method; a mixed response (the response had attributes of both an emotional response and an intellectual response) and a purely intellectual response. The results from the in-class study show that these two response types exist. To cut to the point, not one respondent in either study responded to either the concept of postmortem photography or the visual stimuli purely emotionally. My hypothesis was that people respond toward reality-based and artistic postmortem images differently and in fact, this is true. In Study 2 (in-class study), every respondent viewed Image 3 (Warhol's work) completely intellectually. My reasoning for this is because art is representational, the death in the artistic image is representational--this causes a detachment between the viewer and the piece and the response reflects this detachment. My reasoning for my people only have an emotional response in conjunction with that of an intellectual is precisely because the subject matter makes people uncomfortable (it could potentially be too upsetting to allow oneself to respond fully emotionally). This could be related to subconscious versus conscious and the filter…anyhow, that's a separate topic of study.
Fascinating huh? I think so.
We meet again...
I was thinking the other day about how I blog, this is my blog, yet I don't really read other peoples blogs. So why do you read this? Do you find what I say interesting? Or are you bored and you've just now come across this delightful Internet campground full of rants, random essays, poetry here and there, and every now and then, a cute photograph of my pet(s)?
Anyways, this is usually where I inquire to whether or not you'd like to know what I've been up to. Interested? If you are, keep reading--if not, skip to the next blog because this is a focused post (not allowing myself to ramble on, oops, I'm on a tangent)--so I've previously mentioned I've been writing a research paper on postmortem photography: art versus reality. I did a very very very small study in-class on the response towards postmortem images (Image 1 was a Victorian postmortem image, Image 2 was Margaret Bourke-White's photograph of a South Korean holding the severed head of the North Korean (1952), Image 3 was Ambulance Disaster from Andy Warhol's 1963 Death and Disaster series). The results were, lets just say, astounding. My plan was to categorize the responses as emotional or intellectual, but I needed a consistent method to measure each response. So I thought, and I played around with how to decipher the responses, and I thought some more and then the light bulb…I analyzed each response based on whether or not the response consisted of nouns and adjectives! Nouns are concrete: people, places, things. Adjectives are descriptors. Ergo, nouns correlate to intellectual responses and adjectives correspond to emotional responses.
My preliminary research, in which four of my Google+ followers were kind enough to participate, showed that there were two types of responses according to my method; a mixed response (the response had attributes of both an emotional response and an intellectual response) and a purely intellectual response. The results from the in-class study show that these two response types exist. To cut to the point, not one respondent in either study responded to either the concept of postmortem photography or the visual stimuli purely emotionally. My hypothesis was that people respond toward reality-based and artistic postmortem images differently and in fact, this is true. In Study 2 (in-class study), every respondent viewed Image 3 (Warhol's work) completely intellectually. My reasoning for this is because art is representational, the death in the artistic image is representational--this causes a detachment between the viewer and the piece and the response reflects this detachment. My reasoning for my people only have an emotional response in conjunction with that of an intellectual is precisely because the subject matter makes people uncomfortable (it could potentially be too upsetting to allow oneself to respond fully emotionally). This could be related to subconscious versus conscious and the filter…anyhow, that's a separate topic of study.
Fascinating huh? I think so.
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