WangN+Week+11

=4/9/2012= Images: Google searched for "nightmare monster," "fear," "thousand yard stare," "sleeping boy," and "abandoned teddy bear." Found images for all. Took one from each search and turned them black and white in Picasa. Unable to upload due to Internet problems at home; will upload on Prezi tomorrow on campus. Removed the photograph of the army helmet.

=4/11/2012= “…Lisette Model, who dwells on its special quality of innocence—a quality, she feels, that the professional photographer can never achieve: ‘He may try to imitate the snapshot. He may wait on purpose for the loose, unconventional moment. The moment may be unstructured, but the photographer is not. He may make a masterpiece by selecting the moment but he can never make a snapshot… The picture isn’t straight. It isn’t done well. It isn’t composed. It isn’t thought out. And out of this imbalance, and out of this not knowing, and out of this real innocence toward the medium comes an enormous vitality and expression of life… We are all so overwhelmed by culture and by imitation culture that it is a relief to see something which is done directly, without any intention of being good or bad, done only because one wants to do it’” (Malcom 62).

I sense that Model is among those avant-garde sensible people that are willing to accept—and are excited to accept—snapshots as a new form of art. There is something in a snapshot, perhaps the “innocence” that she speaks of, an unguarded, undiluted reality…something that just is.

“The stronger a work’s challenge to accepted definitions of literature, the stronger the initial resistance to it usually us. Throughout history, revolutionary works of art and literature have baffled, even outraged, their first audiences. Indeed, such works are not seen initially as “bad” literature so much as they are seen as “not literature.” One of the distinctive features of art and literature as a class of symbolic acts is their continual commitment to challenging our sense of what art and literature may be” (Ramage 138).

The reaction of the first audiences depends entirely on the political and social context of that particular time period. Art and literature have, historically, been classified as an elitist culture, with some being called masterpieces and the rest left unlabeled. When art is considered “good” enough, it is shoved into a museum. When literature is considered “good” enough, it is printed and labeled as a masterwork, complete with a shiny badge of honor on the front.

I think it's important to approach art in a more avant-garde sense. When it comes to my visual story project, I don't want to be affected by qualms about whether or not each piece of photography/imagery I use is art.