Starting to work with color

This week I forced myself to work with color a bit because I had used so much sepia last week. After our discussion of whether this choice was problematizing or whether it was perpetuating nostalgia, I decided I wanted to force myself to get away from my own preference for non color photographs in order to discover whether this preference is caused by nostalgia or whether it is just an aesthetic preference.

As I began taking more pictures with color, I noticed myself beginning to look all around me for what I thought was a great color combination and great line to photograph. In a lot of ways this took me out of the moment of my day to day life and into a space of creativity. For me it was a lot like the experience I have when I am acting and I just let go of reality. It was very strange to me to think that I was somehow taking myself out of reality when we've had so many discussions in class about whether photography does or doesn't present reality. In those moments the act of photography, like that of acting, became my reality, whether it was the one everyone else was in or not.

And then I remembered some things that Susan Sontag had written about photography. She says, "But the notions of image and reality are complementary. When the notion of reality changes, so does that of the image, and vice versa. "Our era" does not prefer images to real things out of perversity but partly in response to the ways in which the notion of what is real has been progressively complicated and weakened" (160). When I start thinking about photography and photographs I often think about the perception of the photographer themselves. What makes each photograph interesting to me is that this person might have a different reality than me. I don' t know if there is one single objective reality, but when I take photographs sometimes I feel like my reality is a bit skewed.

I' m struggling to figure out why switching to color made me realize that I was being taken out of the moment and into my own separate little world. Perhaps it is because when there is no sense of nostalgia working on me then I can better see how time is being transformed in the act of my photographing. When I look back at the photos now I get a better sense of when these pictures might have been taken, which is why I question their reality. I see in color and so it is a bit easier for me to believe that these photographs point to a reality (mine that is) whereas my sepia toned ones point to an alteration of my reality. Perhaps I like non color photographs because I like to alter the perception of my reality.