Lise Sarfati

http://www.lisesarfati.com/

Lise Sarfati's pictures feature most portraits of people doing nothing. Often times they are sitting in bed, smoking a cigarette, hang off porches. All with rather bored looks on their faces. Most of the time these people are adolescents, and an overarching theme in her work is that these adolescents are trying to find themselves, trying to be something they are not.

In the first image, Sloane #30, stands a girl who had recently had a drastic change in living situation. Her and her sister moved from Phoenix to Oakland, California. In the series of photos of the two of them, they are almost unrecognizable from picture to picture. Each dresses up in bright costumes. In this picture in particular they she has on a wig, and sunglasses that she has dressed herself in.

In the second image, Sloane #34, Sloane is seen looking completely different.

#5

I agree with the quote by Mary Ellen Mark, about being honest about why you're photographing someone. It is important not only because you are taking some of their soul, but you are also displaying that soul to others. People have a right to decide how and if their person is displayed to others.

#6

I think that people are beautiful as they are. No body is perfect, and to attempt to edit someone so that they appear perfect is saying that person is flawed. I also think this directly relates to the Mary Ellen Mark quote, if you are editing someone's appearance it can often times be unethical because you are not allowing the person themselves to choose how they will be seen, particularly if you edit something drastic and do not tell them what you will do.

#7

In the newspaper the portraits are often action shots, someone doing something. Rarely there is just a person looking into the camera to be seen. Normally, the important thing about the picture is the action a person is completing, and not the person themselves. This is different in facebook pictures, the portraits are specifically to show a person as close and as much of their likeness as possible.

Recreate (Portrait)

The original photo is on http://www.timtadder.com/. It is a photograph of two poses of a football player. The image uses a lot of bright whites and is a very commercial looking photograph. Immediately, when I saw this image I thought of my brother (the subject of my image). He is an eighth grader and aspires to be a college football player. He often tries to look like he doesn't care about anything, much like the subject of the original image. I tried to get my brother to mimic the football player's pose and facial expression. I also tried to use the same well-light bright white light that was present in the image.

Written Statement (Part 2): Assignment 2 (Explore)

It's difficult to really write this second part, I did not get a lot of feedback from the review of my photographs. No one really tried to interpret my images, nor did they give me any constructive feedback. It was said that the concept of Illusion (using a mirror to reflect the grass) was working well.

If I were to expand this project, I think I would try to do a larger project using the concept I used in Illusion. Images of nature reflected onto unnatural polluted areas.

Written Statement: Assignment 1 (Explore)

Image Title: Illusion, 2010

In the frame I included the entire mirror, and also much of the background of pavement to show the contrast between the grass in the mirror and the pavement. The most focused part of the image is the grass reflected in the mirror, and the rest of the mirror is blurred out, I did this because I wanted the mirror to be less of the focus, so the image just seems to have a patch of grass in the middle of pavement.

When taking this picture I wanted to create the illusion of natural grass on a polluted and very unnatural surface. With the image, I hoped to show what has become of nature, that it is now a world of pavement, unnatural, polluted area with merely mirror-image illusions of nature in the middle of all of it.

This image is a social image. It contains an environmental message that makes people think about their behaviors and also their own views of what nature is to them. Much of Earthwork Art (like Smithson and Turrell) also use the earth as the media to create pieces that make people think about environmental issues.

Image Title: Instability, 2010

For this image, I cropped some of the merry-go-round to create tension, but kept enough of the merry-go-round to see the circular pattern it makes when it spins. I also used a slow shutter to blur the merry-go-round to emphasize the motion.

When I thought about instability, I thought of my childhood how after every time I got off a spinning merry-go-round, I felt the world shift underneath me. That instability always frightened me. I used the merry-go-round and the motion of it to recall the instability I felt when I stepped off, and can relate it to how I now feel I have stepping off of my childhood, and onto the second step of my life.

This piece is psychological, and personal. It explores my current fears with instability by using childhood memories.

Image Title: Repetition, 2010

The image has dramatic lighting in order to bring more excitement to an object that is really repetitive; I also focused on a part of the image that is different from the rest to create more interesting elements.

I constructed the three-dimensional collage with old magazines and old Jones Soda caps that I collected when I was younger, then photographed the collage. I used repetition of the elements to show the vast amounts of objects I had collected.

This is related to Andy Warhol’s works, in particular, his Coke Bottle images, which were full of repetition and have a similar subject. Instead of Andy Warhol’s art which was created with no intention at all, I intended to have my piece function as a social commentary on how much waste humans create.

Assignment 1:Explore

Blog Entries #3 and #4

The quote by Duane Michaels seems to be accurate to me. Photographers search for the "right" moment or "right" scene to capture. Most pictures are well-thought out and planned. Even people who are not professional, not adjusting shutter speed or light, are still perfectly framing or posing for a picture. These things mean that photographs create images of an idealized world, not the one that actually exists. The world in the photograph is not the same world we live in, it is a much better looking one.

I am more of a writer than a photographer, so I have every instinct to disagree with this statement. I prefer my stories to be completely words, most of the time. I suppose though, there are times when photographic images are necessary. For example, I went to New Orleans to help with hurricane clean-up and I found myself frustrated when trying to explain the absolute devastation to people. The photos I took helped to explain better than I could have every described. The photos helped because no one who had every seen the type of thing I was describing would have ever been able to imagine what I was describing. Those times, when people cannot imagine what I am describing with words, is when photographs are better than words.

Recreation.

I recreated the photograph "Die Befreiung Der Finger" by Dieter Appelt. It depicts the decaying of hands that are breaking free from bandage. In my recreation of the photo, I used a similar composition. The hands I photographed were covered in dirt as a way to symbolize the decay that was in the original image, and are bandaged with band-aids that are coming free.

Blog Prompt #1 and #2

A world without photographs would not appear any different on a surface level, trees would still look like trees, houses would still look like houses.

However, saying that, people in that aforementioned world would be incredibly different. Their "world views" would be much more limited, because there would be no way to accurately see other places and people around the world. Thus people would have a hard time imagining what the rest of world (both locations and other people) looked like. It'd be much more difficult to motivate people to do certain things, like send relief money to the site of a natural disaster, visit a certain vacation spot, or even buy a sweater because whatever medium was used in place of photographs would not have quite the emotional power that photos have.

A photograph to me is an image that has been captured from real life. Though I think photo-editing can enhance a photograph, too much of it can wreck the integrity of the photo and makes the piece into something else. For example, right now, I would not call an image that is a mash-up of two different photographs together a photograph still.