Assignment Links
Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills
https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/cindysherman/gallery/2/mobile.phpLinks to an external site.
(listen to the short intro and then click on some of the examples in thumbnail above)
Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/arts/design/bleak-reality-in-nan-goldins-the-ballad-of-sexual-dependency.htmlLinks to an external site.
(this article describes the photo series and reprints some examples)
Ali Mobasser’s A Life Told with ID Photos
https://www.lensculture.com/articles/ali-mobasser-a-life-told-with-id-photos#slideshowLinks to an external site.
(this “found art” project is written about in the article; click the “view images” tab at the top of the page to see the collection)
Manuel Cosentino’s Behind a Little House
https://www.lensculture.com/articles/manuel-cosentino-behind-a-little-house#slideshowLinks to an external site.
(you can read the article and click the “view images” tab at the top of the page to see the collection)
Instructions
In this age of the smartphone, we’re all potential photographers. For this journal, come up with a theme for a photo collection, and try to realize that collection with your own phone photos. Describe the unifying idea in a short paragraph, explaining its importance (you may be as serious as you’d like with this). Then snap photos for the collection (minimum 5), and write a brief title and description for each photo, situating it within the overarching theme you’ve selected. You might also choose to have some concluding paragraph to tie the collection together.
The point here is not to come up with award-winning photos (though that might be a fringe benefit); in fact, you’re not being graded on the quality of the photos at all. The purpose of the exercise is to see how a unifying idea can join different images together into a collection, and to explore how verbal and visual ideas interact. Have fun with this assignment, but take the project seriously for its having the potential to reveal how we understand images within broader contexts.
Once you have this project together, post the photos and text in the text box, a file upload or on your blog.
This assignment will be a minimum of 350 words, and will be assessed on its formal clarity, the quality of the writing and editing, its degree of engagement with its topic, its creativity/inventiveness/originality of ideas, and the sophistication of thought it expresses.
