Week 3: Emotions

Image of the week

Nan Goldin, One Month After Being Battered, 1984

I think emotion is pivotal for a photograph because it brings out the mood of the photo as well as evoke feelings to the viewer; something you can kind of control. That's why i picked this image by Nan Goldin. The artist is staring directly at the camera, seemingly well groomed, composed, donned with her dangly earrings and red lipstick. Everything looks well composed except for the bruise on her eyes. This is an image which marks the end of her long-term relationship, and a particular period in the artist's life and provides the emotional climax of Goldin's slide show and book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.

"For a number of years I was deeply involved with a man. We were well suited emotionally and the relationship became very interdependent. Jealousy was used to inspire passion. His concept of relationships was rooted in …romantic idealism ,I craved the dependency, the adoration, the satisfaction, the security, but sometimes I felt claustrophobic. We were addicted to the amount of love the relationship supplied ... Things between us started to break down, but neither of us could make the break. The desire was constantly reinspired at the same time that the dissatisfaction became undeniable. Our sexual obsession remained one of the hooks. One night, he battered me severely, almost blinding me."

Source: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/goldin-nan-one-month-after-being-battered-p78045

1850, Loss

Jaquith , Rosaline Holmes Harrison (Mrs. Stephen Decatur Harrison) with baby before the funeral,1850 (ca)

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1950, Lust

Robert Doisneau , Le Basier de L'Hotel de Ville , 1950

I am so in love with this 'candid' photograph, but apparently this, one of history most romantic photo, was staged.

Quoting from BBC;

"At the time, image rights were already protected by law and a cautious Robert Doisneau preferred to use friends or young actors to feature in some of his commissioned reportage, in order to avoid legal issues. One afternoon in March 1950, Doisneau went out into the streets of Paris with young actor friends and just let them be: they walked, held hands, talked, and kissed, with Doisneau never far behind. “His models weren’t models in the sense that they didn’t pose. Doisneau was simply catching them flirting and kissing, in a very natural way, ” says Deroudille.

The result, a kiss caught at the corner of rue du Renard and rue de Rivoli right across from the city’s town hall, feels like the best of Doisneau: a suspended moment whose beauty is known only to the lovers and the photographer. Around them, indifferent Parisians walk, hardly noticing the young couple; cars shoot by and people seated at a café (now a shoe shop) speak animatedly."

Truth here lies in the beauty of the impulse and a spontaneity that is closely linked to the French spirit and its capital city.

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1960-1970 Drama

Pedro Luis Raota, Drama,1960-1970 (ca)

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Joy

Ruth Orkin , Einstein ,n.d.

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Now

The full spectrum of human emotion

Mark Zuckerberg and friends have announced that the coveted ‘like’ button will now include a drop-down menu of the following emotions; love, sad, anger, haha and wow. It’s like the seven deadly sins for the digital age.

The feature, which came about from a pressure to include a ‘dislike’ button (this will never happen) has run a successful trial in Spain and Ireland where it was tested. Tom Alison, director of Facebook newsfeed engineering has said “everyone’s had one of these posts in News Feed where they’re like, I want to respond in some way, but ‘like’ doesn’t feel appropriate at all”.

Source: http://www.hungertv.com/feature/facebook-like-button-gets-expanded-to-more-emotions/

GIFS

I think apart from emoticons(emojis) we also express ourselves a lot via gifs. It's not everyday that we're in the mood to send a selfie to our friends to express our frustrations and what nots so it's a lot funnier and expressive when i get to express my emotions via screen grabs from a movie/tv show but it's even more cooler when i can express my emotions with an animated image.

Excited

Mad

Annoyed

Hungry

The Graphics Interchange Format (better known by its acronym GIF /ˈdʒɪf/ JIF or /ˈɡɪf/ GHIF) is a bitmap image formatthat was developed by US-based software writer Steve Wilhite while working at the bulletin board service (BBS) provider CompuServe on June 15, 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability.

The format supports up to 8 bits per pixel for each image, allowing a single image to reference its own palette of up to 256 different colors chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space. It also supports animations and allows a separate palette of up to 256 colors for each frame. These palette limitations make GIF less suitable for reproducing color photographs and other images with color gradients, but it is well-suited for simpler images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF