Had a tutorial with Isabel yesterday. She asked me which series of photos I preferred and I picked the later one because I thought the narrative of the later one was tighter or more closely related to my idea of useless attempts to try to fill the empty inside with external distractions.
Isabel was interested in the clothes I piled up in the photos. She shared Colin Smiths’ paintings of wardrobes and clothes. I thought of a painting I saw before and I found it’s really one of those paintings.
Isabel said the fluffy hanged clothes indicated absence of people and the clothes in my photos made people curious especially when I was buried with only a part of my face showing. It reminded me of what Clare said about how I always showed a lot of things in the photos, however, not showing could make viewers curious. It makes me think again about what I take photos of. My photos have always been serving the narratives I want to tell, which decides the props, space, models and their positions I use. I hardly think about what they would make viewers feel. I only think about if the photos make sense for the narratives. I’m not really after good photos but expression. But if the photos are not good or interesting, no one will care about the ideas. I’m still not sure how to deal with it and it’s a bit frightening to doubt what I’ve been doing. I guess more practice would help maybe.
Isabel also mentioned private human activities unfolded in domestic places and interior space related to psychology could be interesting. She shared Giorgio De Chirico’s paintings of studio space and Freud museum.
She also shared Edward Hopper and mentioned architectural features, different private spaces could be interesting. I looked through his paintings and I kind of liked their sense of silence.
I was not sure how big I wanted to make the prints and Isabel said small pieces would be more private for single viewers while big ones would be public for multiple viewers. The prints may also be piled up on the floor.
She also shared The emergence of the interior by Charles Rice, The experience of architecture by plummer and the domestic space reader. She mentioned the relationship between different culture and interior, different rooms, different areas of interior such as cupboard or kitchen could be interesting. I still don’t know what to do next. Have to think further.
Made my first prints yesterday. Thought for two hours about the size of the prints… Finally I decided to go big because I wanted the viewers to keep a distance to the photos. The photos are about the failure to connect the inside and outside world, so I think certain distance relates to the theme better. I wanted to use Epson but it’s broken so I could only use colorwave. It’s strange that the color got greener when I converted the file to pdf…
Eva Wang 