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INTENSIVE PRODUCTION. PROJECT PROPOSAL. PICTURE THEORY. BY W.J.T. MITCHEL. “Any picture is a visible mark no matter how simple…is capable of becoming a metapicture .
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INTENSIVE PRODUCTION PROJECT PROPOSAL
PICTURE THEORY BY W.J.T. MITCHEL “Any picture is a visible mark no matter how simple…is capable of becoming a metapicture. Pictorial self-referance is, in other words, no exclusively a formal, internal feature that distinguishes some pictures, but a pragmatic, functional feature, a matter of use and context. Any picture that is used to reflect on the nature of pictures is a metapicture” “The image-text” is neither a method or guarantee of historical discovery; it is more like an aperture or cleavage in representation, a place where history might slip through the cracks”
PICTURE THEORY BY W.J.T. MITCHEL “A text is already inside the image, perhaps most deeply when they seem to be most completely absent, invisible, and inaudible” “The pictorial turn is a “postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality” “All media are mixed media, combining different codes, discursive conventions, channels, sensory and cognitive modes”
PICTURE THEORY BY SUSAN SONNTAG What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems prov en when we’re shown a photograph of it. The camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture.
PICTURE THEORY BY SUSAN SONNTAG It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation. A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer; picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on. Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera’s interventions. While real people are out there killing themselves or other real people, the photographer stays behind his or her camera, creating a tiny element of another world: the image world that bids to outlast us. Photographing is essentially an act of nonintervention.
THE MEDIATION “Manipulation, censorship, authenticity, journalistic ethics — ebb to the forefront of our collective conscience in an age when photojournalism is both more accessible and messier than ever before.” “Believing Is Seeing,” though perceptive about photography, is fundamentally concerned with something very different: epistemology. The nature of knowledge, the truth and lies.” - Errol Morris
METHODOLOGY THE PICTURE, IN THE PICTURE, IN THE PICTURE, IN THE PICTURE For my project this year I would like to use the visual aesthetics of a picture-inpicture portrait. The methodology involves two images that together form one complete image, complementing each other. What I am hoping to draw on with this technique is the decontextualisation of media context and the way in which the consumer is not always given the complete picture of the depiction.
PLAN OF EXHIBITION THE IMAGE, BEHIND THE IMAGE, BEHIND THE IMAGE, BEHIND THE Having thought a lot about “pictures” as a medium and its nature as such I felt it would be an interesting approach to exhibit more than a “flat image”. Instead I want to create more than one layer of the image: - One layer on the surface (the actual picture} - A second layer behind it which shows “what it behind the image” and its production In the exhibition this will mean that (similar to an advent calendar) individuals can access several layers of the image. Automatically this does contribute to the reality and “truth’ of the picture, reflecting on debates of mediation.
THE PROPOSAL For my Intensive Production project this semester I am planning to create a series of picture-in-picture imagery. In total I am aiming to produce 3 complete images that address three different themes of media context such as environmental concerns, debates about beauty & body size or cultural stereotypes. In addition my method of exhibition will aim to push the restrictions of a normal image by providing more than one layer of the image. It is a critical approach to the “truth of Photography” and the nature of an image.