From Cafes to grave sites:looking at people and forms

With my new found need to observe people because of my experiences in the arcades also came a need to investigate form and space. I found myself doing this in cafes, museums, and even the cemetery. In addition to color tone of the pictures I was taking I wanted to investigate how my angle changed perception of an object or scene as well.

We talked in class a lot about how the photographer represents the world and if they are showing you the world "as it really is" But for me, it is not about whether I am showing the world better than you can see it, but rather that I am describing visually and unknowingly what has influenced me and my perception when I am somewhere. In this way I think photographing adds to "the collective unconscious" that Benjamin describes. The collection of all our different perceptions is perhaps why photographs could show the world as it really is. For me the world, reality, scenes are what each of us make of them and we could get closer to seeing the giant collage of the world if we saw the world from many people's different viewpoints.

So at the cafe, museum and grave sites I looked at forms and images that had an influence on me. Some of them were because they made me feel excited about the Paris atmosphere as in the case of the cafe and others because they made me feel very desolate, like in the cemetery. I wanted to manipulate space, to show what things made me pay extra attention to them. I wanted to show how it was that I stumbled upon Susan Sontag's grave without even knowing it when I read a quote on a grave and realized it was hers. I wanted to show how the people in the cemetery looked and I wanted to show how dark and odd it feels to take in images of other people's graves.