
Like this image something is appearing out of the dark. All of us want to take a photograph that gets ourselves to go ‘wow, yes that is what I wanted to capture’ and also to have an audience moved in the same way. We know that photographs can impact our emotions. We also know that words around a photograph can influence what a person sees and how it impacts them.
A research question along the lines of ‘what is the relationship between the photograph, its narrative and the emotions triggered in the taker and the viewer?’ I am going to have to smarten this up in some way to make it a powerful piece of work. A photograph on its own does something to all of us. Not necessarily the same thing to each of us. Some impact our basic emotions and others are driven by our own experience of life. All of us are influenced by any words that go with an image. I will demonstrate this shortly.
I am interested in somehow bringing in Robert Plutchicks’ Wheel of Emotions around his polar opposites of joy/sadness, anger/fear, trust/distrust and surprise/anticipation. I also want to bring in narrative. There is the narrative of the actual scene, the narrative of the photograph and the narrative of the viewer and taker.
To illustrate what is going on my first question is what are your thoughts about the image here? I went with my best mate Rob to the Sony Awards exhibition in Somerset House last year. We talked about images. What interested us and what did or did not work for us. For this series of images I had read a review which did impact the way I oriented myself towards them.
Rob…what do you think about this image? Perfectly good image, anybody could take it, it is a piece of paper with some lighting on it that is dramatic but I lose interest quickly. What is the piece of paper I ask? Who cares he says. They are photographs of suicide notes, I say. It was as if he thought I was going to hit him as he physically recoiled and his face shaped in to shock. This relationship between photograph, narrative and emotion is what interests me to explore further.
The title of the Edgar Martins shot provokes thought more as it is classified as a ‘Still Life’.
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