Alice Wells

"By studying the art of the past it is possible to learn two things: (a) something from our own responses about the nature and organization or our own visual systems and expectations, and (b) some notion of what the perceptual world of early man may have been like. However, our present-day picture of their world, like the museum pot which has been patched and mended, will always be incomplete and only an approximation of the original. The greatest criticism one can make of the many attempts to interpret man's past is that they project onto the visual world of the past the structure of the visual world of the present... man actively though unconsciously structures his visual world. Few people realize that vision is not passive but active, in fact a transaction between man and his environment in which both participate." -Edward T. Hall

A photograph is a representation of something passed, whether that be set up (staged), or not. The moment the shutter was released was captured and time has gone by since then. I think the quote above is essential for recognizing why we look at work from the past. People have been looking (vision as a active agent) at their world since they were born, this hasn't changed. Even so, if a person cannot see the world around them, they interact and there is a transaction between the person and environment. This transaction is carried out differently in cultures and spaces. But the act of vision occurs. The interaction between a photographer and their environment determines their path. What is left in the frame is how the viewer then interacts with what they are given. For the most part photographers take photos of things recognizable to the viewer (landscapes, faces, buildings, rooms, etc.) all of these things are related to because we interact with them. My point is that what is included in the frame is what will be related to, clearly. But I must constantly remind myself how important this is. So, for example if someone is taking a portrait shot, they have to consider the depth of field and distance to which their subject is placed. Does the photographer place the subject at a close distance to the viewer (within conversation range), at an unreachable distance, or a far distance? Each of these placements determine how the viewer of the photo will interact with the subject within in the frame. For example a bigger face will cause the viewer to back off, but a distanced face will draw the viewer in, just due to how our culture defines conversations between each other. A physical distance between two people is prevalent. The closer people get to one another, the more personal and beyond comfort norms.

For me, I am not so much dealing with this situation in my recent photos, but I still question it. In the past I was the model in much of my work, and this makes me ask: What does modeling in your own work do? Mainly, because I haven't seen anyone in our class try this. Maybe the intermediate people will try this for a fear project? Nonetheless I question if putting yourself in the frame "works." I did a lot of my own modeling last semester, but I'm still not convinced if it worked. I think that Alice Wells did some strong work here. She is the model and I feel like she knows how to interact with the camera in a way to question social distance and her as the subject. I think she understands the sort of conversation/interaction that happens by placing herself specifically within the frame and how the viewer then interacts with it. Simplified, one of the main differences between photographs is how the frame is set up (where things are placed). What I think we should remember, as quoted above, "vision is not passive but active...a transaction between man and his environment...man actively though unconsciously structures his visual world. This is the greatest thing about photography- that we actively structure our visual world! We should always look at previous artists because they have been doing the same and thus we can learn from them. We're all living in the same world, but how we see it is different, and in the case of photography, can be drastically different.