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Making Images vs. Taking Photos

Visiting the International Center for Photography last Monday for class was a truly inspirational and motivational experience for me!

It feels appropriate for me as I took Photography 1 last semester with the Visual Arts department at Columbia University. It is cool to contextualize the world of photography and understand the limited accessible spaces for dark rooms and film processing. I am excited to be able to use these facilities for our final project!

The presentation on photography was also interesting and reminded me of the ways in which we talked about art and photography in the art history classes I have taken. In fact, Bradley, with whom we will be working closely, concluded the presentation with works by Brooklyn- based artist, Lorna Simpson, an artist I have written about for the class, Feminism and Postmodernism in Art.

to revisit old pains

Our conversation at the ICP about the practice of imposing text on photograph to produce an image – distinct from the practice of photographing – to relay a story/narrative that is non-linear and moves in liquid form through more than a single channel amplifies my understanding of embodied knowledge.  Both Decarava/Hughes’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life and Shange/Kamoinge’s The Sweet Breath of Life are artistic undertakings that function through text and photograph to relay multidimensional images/narratives/stories. They attempt to render a full account of Black livelihoods via explorations of the extraordinarily mundane and familiar landscapes around which existence in kinship and individuality take form.