Yixuan Liu
English 201
Zack Depiero
July.16 2015
Interesting Thinking World in Photography
Art is everything for me. This is how I feel when talking with Olivia. To me, she is living in her own world that no one could interfere her. She has been in still life photography for 35 years with a self-taught lighting experience. According to Olivia, she would prefer to work with natural light than using strobe lights and hot lights. Her way of using window light are shown in a lot of her glasses where you could see huge window in all sides of her studio.
With the bachelor of History of Art, Olivia is being influenced deeply with every piece of artwork in the past and even from different culture. She has been to China couple times and she was stunning by the architecture that China had which were built hundred years ago. To Olivia, she is a vicarious watcher who is carefully observing all her surrounding environment potential element. She is always ready to be inspired. One thing that Olivia does to help her think and create idea is by drawing. She has been taking painting and drawing classes and due to her childhood, her nanny always took her to museum and gallery, Olivia scratches her ideas out and then will produce them in the way she wanted to.
When photographers and writers are doing their work, they tend to have their own purpose to produce each piece and then put them together to complete the idea. For writer, is a complicated and time consuming process to related every piece of writing and bond then well together in order to relate audience with their book. So do photographers. In this case, after all writing is done and all pictures are framed, it is time for their targeted audience to give comments on. Now is the most important point to decide whether or not, your work is good. It is interesting to hear two different voices: Olivia Parker do not have targeted audience and all she is doing is for Art. However, on the other side, Chuck Place has clearly audience- ordinary people who will have services in the restaurant as well as his potential clients.
Chuck Place’s food photography is more about tasty food photos and beautiful restaurant pictures. Plus some food culture and travel photos. So clearly, Chuck has his own purpose and audience when he was producing his works, which makes his work way more easier when you know who you audience are. And this is one of the reasons how he made several publications about tourist books. According to Chuck, publishing a book is not a easy case. At first, as a photographer, you would need to gather with the writers to generate the ideas. And then, you would bring to publication to get feedback. After the idea of the book is solid, the writer would give Chuck a list of pictures that he need to produce about this tourist location and the Chuck will go and shot them. Before the shooting, when he is doing his pre-production, Chuck has to do some research about the location, people, culture and good spot to shot. And then, he has to think how to draw people’s interest in pictures and how will pictures help to extend the feeling of writing. Finally, all maters is interested or not.
I just realized I interviewed two totally different genre’s photography which make this essay more interesting to write about, and at the same time, harder.
As mentioned before, Olivia Parker is a Fine Art photographer who is all about Art. Her works are more towards the aesthetic world and is less related to the general people. Therefore, when Olivia is producing her work, it is a different way then photographers who work with Art directors or clients who already have their own ideas and shot list. Olivia will walk around her stored room and poked around her collected objects. She will pick up one thing and then observe, 1st order thinking to think how could I make this dull thing active. And then, 2nd order thinking, make a scratch, talk to her and then think more about possible ways to make it look good. Further, she will think verbally and visually back and forth to get the essential idea. For Olivia, writing will be used after she is done with her work. To note down the idea and feeling that she had to produce this series of work. For example, in her essay about “The Eye’s Mind”, she said “She is exploring the relationship between visual and verbal thinking”. Here is a good point to start develop the idea.
Individually talking about the uses of 1st order thinking and 2nd order thinking, which are being used, in Olivia and Chuck’s everyday life and photography.
Since Chuck is dealing with Clients and Olivia is dealing with gallery, they have two completely different thinking and writing process involved.
Olivia do not have specific audience. This helps her to focus on producing her own feeling of the work a lot. Because she does not have targeted audience, she has more freedom to make art which could have different meaning related to different kinds of audience. She thinks everybody looks picture differently. Why I made pictures. What I was thinking about. And then she thinks maybe put some words that audience will respond better. To her, it is very interesting to hear people have very different opinions on single pictures. Olivia always believe that the more you work, the more likely you will develop your own way of thinking own way of styling. Therefore, just keep photographing. Being as a visual learner, visual art like painting, sculpture helped Olivia to learn a lot- compose, and color. The more you look, the more impression it will have on you. Being as a verbal thinker, Olivia reads History of Art and she think that also add the range of your knowledge. No harm.
Chuck Place do blog post to keep people updated about what he is doing.
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