Contrast and Compare

The two images from the blog initially came off as very different to me, but the more I studied them, the more similarities I could find. For the first photograph, I was pretty confused as to what I was looking at. Because I couldn't really define the objects I was seeing, I sort of just let my eyes take in the whole scene. There doesn't appear to be a single focus to the picture and I found it kind of creepy, metallic, and cold. It doesn't have the organic feel of the second picture and I imagined that it was an image from some far off planet. The bright misty light pouring in is more ominous than heavenly and I find the image generally unsettling.
The second photograph is much more wild with a majestic feel and a sense of grander. This one also isn't directly focused on one thing, but your eye is definitely drawn to the bright, plummeting waterfall. So though I find one kind of creepy while the other one is more grandiose, they are very similar in the sense that there is this harshness about them. I think it's mostly due to the fact that they are black and white instead of color, especially for the bottom picture because it just has such high contrast between the black and white. Also, both images feel unreal to me, sort of strange and heavy. This is probably because the water in both images is misty and ghost-like and not really like water at all.

A Story Through Photographs

I couldn’t decide on a single favorite while looking through William Albert Allard’s The Photographic Essay. I picked it up because I really wanted to see someone tell a story through pictures alone. He does supplement each little collection of photographs with a short article describing the scene and his method of photography, but it’s photographs that really do all the talking. All the photo’s were in color, which I really liked because the last few books I browsed through were black and white. I definitely like color photography over black and white and I think it’s because black and white pictures seem a little less real to me, a little more fantasy and movie-esque. Color photography seems more organic and I have an easier time envisioning the situation and feeling a part of it rather than like I’m an outsider watching it.

So anyhow, the first photograph that caught my eye was of this dirt path stretching away from the camera with mountains in the background, a hill with sparse trees leading up from the left of the road while a rocky gully fell away to the right. You can see a village is up ahead, peaking out of the gully and from behind trees. There are two little children on the road, both of them with their arms outstretched running and jumping. The feeling of the picture is very rustic and foreign and when I read the caption underneath I see it was taken in 1967 in France. I like the composition- the hills, the gully, the village up ahead with a mountain backdrop and a smoky mist settled in the valley in between. Though the components sound very fairytale-like, the picture is so real and comprehensible. The trees aren’t lush, the ground looks rocky and sparse, and the mountains aren’t so much grand as just earthy- so any magical quality the scene could have had is replaced with a more realistic image and I really like that. My absolute favorite part of the picture though is the two little children running away with their backs to the camera. They give off such a happy, free feeling. One of the girls (I think they’re girls) is mid jump with her hands outstretched and her feet off the ground. You can really just imagine them giggling and running, their hands and feet all dirty from playing make-believe in the little forest beside their village.

My other favorites from Allard’s work are world’s different. He took a lot of pictures of this Peruvian slaughterhouse which was definitely morbid, but also the kind of thing you can’t help but stare at because it is just so shocking. The bodies of the dead animals curve and twist in these really strange angles that you know they would never be able to do while alive and the brightness of the blood is really disturbing. The worst part was his description of the place, “The slaughtering isn’t done in the neat, clinical way we do it in this country. Watching it is a little like witnessing a murder. Cattle are brought in on a lead rope and just held by one person, and another man comes in with a little dagger, the kind they use at bullfights to severe the spinal column. The cow is killed with a knife to the back of the neck, and it usually goes down as if hit by a cannon. But the hogs are simply stabbed in the heart and left to flounder around until the life drains out of them in great gushes of blood, and they’re squealing all the time.” Honestly, just typing that made me a little nauseous and his photographs show exactly what he just described. Though I would never want to hang a picture like that up in my house or ever really have to see it again, I couldn’t help but be a little morbidly curious. I was so shocked by the whole thing that it really had an impact. I think that just goes to show that you can get all the technical things together and frame the photo in such a way with the light’s hitting just perfect with your aperture at the correct setting and whatnot, but if you have a shocking, or bizarre, or emotional subject people are going to be affected regardless of the mechanical piece.