Final Piece Ideas
For my final piece I plan on designing a photography album, which looks as though it has been passed down from generation to generation, and therefore has become extremely beaten and bruised, linking with the idea that it has decayed over time. Inside the book, the pictures will look very modern and the prints that I have made of them will be of good quality. However, as the book progresses this will change, and the further on through the photos you look, the older and less developed they will appear, signifying a decay in the quality of photography itself. The older the photos look quality-wise, the older the surroundings and contents of the photos will have to look also, therefore I plan on photographing things and places which make sense and link with the time period in which the photos have been supposedly taken. This all links in with the idea of time and how it has played a part in the quality and production of photography. I also though it was a good idea to represent decay this way as it completely reverses the process of documenting photos, i.e., in a photography album, the older photos generally are at the front of the book/album and the newer ones more towards the end, however, in the process of decay, the older something is the more it would have decayed and therefore it makes more sense to place the older-looking and more deteriorated-looking images at the end of the book, inverting this common trait in an ironic way. To add to my final piece I plan on printing an image that represents this idea in one photo, for example, making the quality look as though it has decayed. I will do this buy dividing the photos into three, one third representing a modern-look at photography, one representing an older less developed look and the final third showing photography in its early stages, where the quality wouldn't be very good and the overall image will look less precise. This therefore should highlight the overall theme of decay in photography in a more understandable way, and I also believe that the landscape in which I choose to photograph, may look as though it has partially decayed also due to the quality of the image. In order to get my photos to look how I want them too, I will put them onto Photoshop, and edit them using the Gaussian Blur tool and the add noise tool, as well as adjusting their colour balances to give them that antique look. This may include having too desaturate the images to make them black and white. These are techniques that I learnt when producing my Carsten Witte experiments in order to make them look like authentic replicas, and I therefore thought it was important to include these skills into my final piece. I will then print them on glossy paper, adjusting the sizes so that they are able to fit inside of my book sufficiently. I will damage the book in order to make it look dated, and I plan on doing this by using sand paper to roughen up the cover of the book making it look more worn out, as well as dying the colour of the pages so that they look brown and disintegrated towards the back in order to add an elderly sense to the last set of photos.
Final piece contact sheet/Enlargement
Evaluation
For my final piece I attempted to portray the look of decay within the boundaries of photography. In order for me to do this I had to make particular photos look extremely dated and therefore in relation to that, make them look as though they have been produced poorly. I then planned on displaying these photos from the best quality to the worst, relating the look of the transition to the idea that the photography has decayed. I also wanted to represent this in one photo, and therefore had to divide the photo in order to clarify the transition from an accomplished conditioned image to a far lesser and poorer quality image. However, I thought it was best to use only one image for this as the contrast that it went on to produce was not only visually pleasing to look at, but it also highlighted how relevant the quality of a photo is in relation to how we interpret it. I think that my final piece resulted in an accomplished and satisfactory way, as I was able to produce my ideas fluently through the images and concepts that I provided. However, if I was given another opportunity to do it, I would definitely make some clear and important changes. Firstly, the transition in my photo album (from good quality to poorer quality) could of been made more thorough, and more ideas could have been related to the look of each photo. The photos also could have displayed in a more linear transition, as the differentiation between the qualities of them are quite sudden and in a way random. I would also add more detail in the book, such as footnotes and messages, portraying the idea that it is a real album that people treasure and have put thought and effort into producing. I would also damage the photos and make them look time-worn much like I did with the Luis Alverez contact sheet, demonstrating the affects that time has on real, tangible objects in relation to the process of decay. For my enlarged image, I would again demonstrate these effects, making the actually presence of the photo relate to decay, and not just the look and contents of it.