Medium Specificity: Filming a Photograph

The Video

Artist's Statement

      For this week's topic, I was worried that I would not be able to produce anything that actually captured the idea of medium specificity, and that I would end up just creating a few Pollock knockoffs and resign to unoriginality. However, once I started thinking past the well known and into newer mediums, and idea formed in my head and I realized that I had found my project: Photographs. Specifically, amateur photos people take of their friends and family in order to remember that specific event.

     Vacation photos, graduation photos, birthday photos etc. all share a common aesthetic: people standing, posing in what they believe to be the most natural way. Except, it isn't really a natural pose at all. It is an idealized pose that the subject uses because that is how they want to be remembered when they look back at these photos. Although people want to have nice, candid photos of themselves, they usually end up with idealized forms of themselves, slipping their way down uncanny valley.

     So, I wanted to explore this idea, this space that last all but a fraction of a second when someone takes a picture. Only, I wanted to expand that small moment into uncomfortably long moments. I asked subjects to act as if I was their brother, father, uncle, friend taking a photo of them at a significant moment in their life. And then, I pressed record. They assumed I was taking a picture, so they waited until I said I was done. After a while, they typically started to change their pose slightly, to make it more comfortable. Eventually, they caught on and told me to stop recording. At that point, they realized just how silly they had actually looked.

     I do have to admit that the idea of filming people when they think you are simply taking a picture is not originally mine, I first saw the concept about a year ago on Youtube. A man named Dean Fleischer-Camp took five second long videos of his friends in a short he titled Smile (Warning, some language). Drawing from this inspiration, I decided to extend this thing that is only supposed to be a second of a second, into a clip long enough to show how silly posing really is.

     The people who helped me waited to be captured, without realizing that they were already being captured. Without realizing it, the people on camera were a part of the creation. This is a similar idea that John Cage had in his song 4'33", which is a piece of music which has no notes. It is performed by having a man or woman sit at a piano and time themselves, occasionally shifting for each movement but never playing a single note. This causes the audience to become a part of the piece, every sound they make becomes the music of 4'33", and without knowing it, by just is existing a space, they have embodied the meaning of the piece of art.