I really enjoyed Mark Cohen's exhibit for a number of reasons. The method he used to obtain most of the pictures was unusual in its aggressiveness; not only was he approaching random people in the street and taking their pictures (which he did at such a close range that he was frequently invading their personal space; many of the pictures are just of necks or legs or hands), but he also frequently used a flash, adding to the “in your face” element of his work.

These decisions are interesting because they don’t really document the subject in a distanced, objective way. They aren’t average moments in an average person’s life; Cohen creates these moments in the actual act of taking a photograph, making the subject of each one the person or people’s reactions to being photographed. I wondered while looking at these pictures if many of these were just one off, random pictures he took, or whether he took several pictures so that he would have a better chance at capturing something interesting.

In terms of the content, besides documenting the moment of taking a picture, formally the pictures are all about the details. The subjects, ranging from surprised faces to clutched handbags, are in sharp focus, the backgrounds are blurred. Also, random visual phenomena, either from nature (such as a rain drop on a lens) or a result of of the photographic process (such as a strange reflection of the flash in glass), are important making each picture unique and interesting, and similarly make the subject about the moment or action of photography, rather than what was there before.

Journal 1

The first picture I've chosen for my blog is by one of my favorite artists, Salvador Dali. I love this image for several reasons. First, it is quite surreal, as Dali's work usually is, but this is especially interesting because it is a photograph rather than paint on canvas. Second, the amount of work that went into setting up and actually capturing a shot like this is astounding. The cats and splash of water had to be timed just right, and turned out beautifully. Third, the composition of the shot itself is interesting. There is a lot of action in the shot, but it is all evenly spaced out, giving each thing in the frame room to be interesting without being cluttered.

The second image is of a staircase in early Soviet Russia. I really like this picture because we usually think about photographs as being snapshots of individual moments in time, an illusion that is destroyed by the dozens of ghostly workers shuffling past the camera. Only the stone and steel of the staircase and buildings in the background stand still, mirroring how these things will endure, at least in comparison to individual, ephemeral human life.

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