Proof of Existence
© William Eggleston, Memphis from William Eggleston’s Guide
In 1976, the William Eggleston exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York marked the first occasion for the museum to display color photographs as an art. Seventy-five images were selected from a group of 375 taken around Eggleston’s home in Memphis. While his work shared with conceptual art a focus on the everyday, Eggleston’s images showed an affection for image-making that was out of step with both the critical climate of the time and the traditions of monochrome art photography. While utilizing the popular culture strategies of commonplace everyday experience and the domestic that one would be familiar with in the family album, Eggleston’s photographs proposed a ‘fiction’ of experience. These were pictures that one might see in any family album, but rather, he had taken this private experience and made it public. Some of William Eggleston’s most important photographic books include William Eggleston’s Guide and Los Alamos.
© Stephen Shore, from American Surfaces
During this time other photographers explored the vernacular scene, including Stephen Shore (American Surfaces and Uncommon Places), who at the age of 14 had already sold some of his color prints to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Like Eggleston, Shore was also interested in the American vernacular scene, but exploring a public space as opposed to Eggleston’s seemingly private experience. Initially utilizing a point and shoot camera and then an 8 x 10 camera with color negative film, Shore traveled across the United States photographing urban and rural moments, shopping malls, places where he stayed and ate as well as people he would meet along the way.
© Hasan Elahi, screenshot from website Tracking Transience
Today, photographers, such as Josef Koudelka (Exiles), Byron Wolfe (Everyday: A Year-Long Photo Diary) and Hasan Elahi (Tracking Transience) are making images as a source of “evidence and truth” as it relates to their personal experience, including making photographs on an obsessive daily basis, the use of global positioning systems, video and the Internet to track one’s existence.
Assignment
Visually investigate the conceptual idea of the role and function of photography as a means of proof of one’s existence.
Shoot analog and/or digital images that reveal a sense of personal space and existence. In shooting your images, focus your energies on creating visually engaging compositions as suggested by your use of the photographic frame, point of view, details, moments of exposure and light.
The assignment needs to be completely executed with either black and white or color materials (analog or digital). The images are required to be digitized, optimized and sized (maximum 1024 pixels on longest dimension at 72 ppi saved as JPEG) prior to uploading on the course Flickr website (see PHOT 167 Course Page).
Requirements
For the critique (see Calendar for Due Date) and evaluation, please complete the following:
Ten (10) photographs, black and white or color photographs that reveal a sense of personal space and existence. The photographs are to be uploaded to the course Flickr website prior to the critique.
Click on the Adobe Acrobat PDF file to download: Proof of Existence Assignment.pdf
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Student Work
© Dewey Keithly, 2008
© View Patibhanthewa, 2008
© Guilherme Marques, 2008
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