This was this weeks task which asked us to reconsider our relationship with our preferred apparatus by NOT using it.
Having 24 hours to produce a mini-series of five images relating to our research projects, without using apparatus that is familiar to you.
All images must be produced on Wednesday 26th June between 00:00am and 23:59 (local time).
Without using apparatus familiar to me?
My first thoughts were entirely mechanical, cameras, types of cameras, that led into processes and types of processes. A small pile of vintage polaroid and other stocks came out of the freezer. Then I realised I was missing the point and they all went back in again. Its not the gear or the film or the means of capture its the image, the story, its so easy to start thinking about the means of capture first when we should be thinking about the image or story.
Ive never appropriated imagery and Ive never used screen grabs or downloaded images as a means of creating a final image beyond illustrating an academic doc so this is totally alien to me as a means of capture.
My project is concerned with artificial borders and notions of nation state and identity so I thought of a few keywords, Border, Trump, Wall, Frontiers to see what they generated as a search selecting the news option for Google and then screen grabbing the first five.
In the event I ended up with far more than five but it was interesting what stories emerged, Many showing great tragedy and suffering as in the father and daughter who drowned in the Rio Grande this week after the bridge to the frontier was blocked. ironically the next a story about the kind of meaningless blustering politics that leads to some of this tragedy. The next story about a wall intended to keep a population contained in a kind of ghetto built by the relatives of some people who dies in ghettos themselves. Then as a weird juxtaposition, a story about the great wall of China now under threat from mass tourism and needing its own barrier to limit tourist numbers. Finally a story about 200 migrants who died alone crossing into South Texas from Mexico, their identity unknown. The ‘border’ they attempted to cross being the desert and more than anything else erected economically.
So the images are what they are, screen grabs using the Mac, easy to do, shift, command 4 but something Ive never done to create a ‘final’ image. Its also made me look at the web pages captured differently too. Looking at them as a still image, their functionality removed they become objects in their own right, I decided to retain the browser address bar but allow the story to trail out of the image indicating there was more to see.
The screen grabs frame imposing its own border as to what part of the article it allows access to.
It would be interesting to experiment with abstracting these images to see how much of the overall screen image could be removed before the news value of the article was lost.
References.
Screengrab artistry- Martin Brent 2019.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/04/us/texas-border-migrants-dead-bodies.html?
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/boris-johnson-brexit-no-deal-irish-border-backstop-unionists-tory-leadership-a8973471.html
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-15-years-of-separation-palestinians-cut-off-from-jerusalem-by-a-wall-1.5888001
https://www.thatsmags.com/china/post/28103/great-wall-of-china-sets-cap-on-number-of-daily-visitors