Too True

In sequential order:

  1. New York Times, 2010. Photographer unknown. Doing some research, it turns out that this image was staged. It is an image I have seen over and over again and found it to be compelling because of how it was composed, and how concentrated the subjects are on the artwork. Their gaze seemed natural but apparently was not.
  2. Lunch atop a skyscraper, 1932. Charles C. Ebbets. This photo is one that hangs in my friend’s dorm room here at Bowdoin. I also found it scary and given this assignment, I’ve come to realize my uneasiness with it stems from the fact that it can’t be real. It doesn’t seem probable that these workers could be sitting far above an outlook of NYC.
  3. Sarah Jones, 1997. The scale of the tea cup makes it seem unlikely that this is one photo but rather a compilation of multiple images to produce one image.
  4. Unknown. I found this one an art site called haasandhaas.com and they had some tableau photos that I found aesthetically pleasing. This one in specific seems real but at closer look it is apparent that the sun is hitting one building and not another, causing me to conclude that they are two different photos.
  5. Unknown. Haasandhaas.com. I chose this photo because I like the color in it. It’s a great photo, really. The woman looks like she will either fall backward or forward and when analyzed deeper, it appears that this is two different photos; the background photo taken at a low angle but facing the sky, while the foreground is also a low angle but taken from the ground up.
  6. Fandra Chang, 2000. Aesthetically pleasing photo as well but the angles and uniformity of the houses, especially as it extends back, questions the plausibility of the photograph.
  7. Robert Adams, 1974. I’m a fan of Robert Adams and this specific photo makes me question scale and the origin of the smoke. To me, the tree seems too small from where the camera is positioned and the smoke seems too uniformed. It’s all really odd but pleasant to look at.
  8. – 10. John Pfahl from his series “Altered Landscapes” (1974-1978). We viewed some of Pfahl’s photographs in Photo I and honestly, I’m not sure whether some of these are false creations or not. The thing is, is that everything seems too perfectly aligned to believe it to be natural. There is a play with scale and distance in his photos and they seem like interesting photos to analyze.