This week's reading by Zettl: "The Two Dimensional Field: Forces Within the Screen" was particularly interesting to me as he talks about a variety of visual optical illusions. In the section where he talks about vertical versus horizontal, he mentioned that we as people have "applied" it to our civilization. The most obvious example of course is the architecture around us. Why are some buildings horizontal and why are some vertical? He claims that this is because horizontal images "suggest calmness, tranquility and rest," whereas vertical images suggest "dynamic, powerful, and exciting." I never noticed it, oddly enough as someone who grew up in a huge city with gigantic skyscrapers everywhere. But if I were to apply what he was saying about vertical versus horizontals, it definitely seems to me that houses, for instance are obviously horizontally shaped and generally flatter surfaces than say, big corporate office buildings. But anyways enough about that. Although I'm not a psychology major, I find it absolutely fascinating, especially during the part where the author talks about this idea of psychological closure, which is called gestalt, a german word. At first it was kind of hard for my mind to wrap around what exactly he meant by this, as his definition was puzzling. He defines it as "a perceptual whole that transcends its parts." To break it down, I think the main concept is that the bigger picture as a whole is more important than the "sum of its parts," and he also says that our brains naturally fill in the gaps. With this combination of psychology and visual art, I started googling examples of this and came across how gestalt can be applied and even used to enhance photographs. Photography is one of my favorite hobbies and interests, so naturally I was immediately drawn to this idea. With this particular image, this photographer only captured a close-up image of the top of what appears to be color pencils. Although you can't see the rest of the pencils, you know what they are because well, we've probably all been using them since kindergarten - so naturally therefore you put the missing pieces together. In light of our next assignment that is going to be a video, I thought I would look up some examples of this concept, gestalt, in film. I came across so many that I wanted to share, but I thought this advertisement for Baskin Robbins in South Korea was hilarious!! All jokes aside though, I thought their use of gestalt was actually somewhat effective as well!
In this week's reading of Rowe's Framed and Mounted: Sport Through the Photographic Eye, there were several aspects that he covered in which I found to extremely intriguing. In the beginning, Rowe talked about the definition of still photography, as "a form of communication that relies on the notion of 'capture', frozen for all time is a gesture, an expression, incident or landscape." With this definition, it would seem to me that still photography is capturing a real life event that couldn't possibly be altered if it is history, but Rowe begs the question of whether or not those pictures could be actually "manufactured representation of the real." He further explains this with providing the example of a man waving a stick at a policeman, which would make for a great picture in the realm of photojournalism, but Rowe says, what if the picture was really representing something else, such as the fact that maybe it wasn't even really all that dramatic because the man may have just been waving the photographer away, something that is very plausible. With photography, I suppose you can't really make an assumption of whether or not that picture was altered a certain way without actually being there. However, with that being said, I don't know if I necessarily agree with his statement "whatever the motives of the photographer, a framed, two-dimensional image can never be 'the thing itself'"because I don't think that applies for all cases within photography. Another aspect of this article that I found to be thought provoking was the author's comparison of sports photography and pornography. He claims that they are similar in the sense that they are "both fixated in the body, minutely examining its performative possibilities and special qualities," as well as being "concerned with arousal." Generally, I didn't want to believe that that statement had some truth behind it, in the sense that they are both designed to provoke some sort of sexual attention, and I even went so far as to think it's almost insulting to sports photography that it can even be comparable to pornography. I decided to do some research to prove that photography and pornography were really not the same thing, that maybe it was just Sports Illustrated's Swim Suit Edition that happened to be more provocative. But then I googled ESPN's online magazine, and on google the first link lead me to the normal ESPN page with you know, pretty PG - 13 stuff, and then right below it was a link to "ESPN's Body Issue." And of course, the first thing I see on the page is that image above, which completely and utterly destroyed any and all of my argument I was going to make. Which then leads me to my next question, why on earth are humans so incredibly fixated on the human body? Source: http://espn.go.com/espn/bodyissue
But anyways enough about that. Although I'm not a psychology major, I find it absolutely fascinating, especially during the part where the author talks about this idea of psychological closure, which is called gestalt, a german word. At first it was kind of hard for my mind to wrap around what exactly he meant by this, as his definition was puzzling. He defines it as "a perceptual whole that transcends its parts." To break it down, I think the main concept is that the bigger picture as a whole is more important than the "sum of its parts," and he also says that our brains naturally fill in the gaps. With this combination of psychology and visual art, I started googling examples of this and came across how gestalt can be applied and even used to enhance photographs. Photography is one of my favorite hobbies and interests, so naturally I was immediately drawn to this idea. With this particular image, this photographer only captured a close-up image of the top of what appears to be color pencils. Although you can't see the rest of the pencils, you know what they are because well, we've probably all been using them since kindergarten - so naturally therefore you put the missing pieces together.
