Fall ’20 – Week 5 – Photography I – Documenting Place

Due this Week:

  1. This Art Activity
  2. Artist Essay for Bobi Bosson
  3. Discussion on BeachBoard
Image: This Must Be The Place: a community snapshot project, Mariposa Arts Council

Documenting Place

Photography can take many forms in an art practice, and we’ll explore a few of them this semester. Our first is to explore the idea of place. Our extra motive this week will be for all of us Art 110 peeps to get to know each other a bit better. Our mission is to paint a portrait of where and how we live.

There isn’t anything you are required to show. You shouldn’t feel pressured to reveal anything you don’t want to. But as much as your comfort level allows, let’s take our classmates on a tour of where and how we’re living during this off-campus semester of pandemic isolation.

Some things you might include:

  • Your room
  • Your Stuff – this could be wide views of, for example, your room. But if you’ve got Action Figures, or something small, you could make close-up photos so we can see details.
  • What you’re wearing – you could take pix of your clothes in the closet, or you could actually put them on and show us different outfits
  • Your Peeps – if you’re living with parents, siblings, friends, or anyone else, you could show us their exciting lives, like eating a bowl of cereal, playing Call of Duty, cleaning the house or yard, or whatever else they do
  • Your street – the houses, the cars, what goes on
  • Your City – I’m definitely not asking anyone to leave the house! But if you do happen to leave the house for any other reason, you could snap some pix of the houses, the cars, the buildings, the pedestrians, try to give us a feel of what goes on
  • Anyplace else you go, if you go anyplace else

Structuring Your Photos

  • Try not to just dump a dozen random pix. Try to organize your images to tell a story and share some aspect of your life with us.
  • Each photo should have a descriptive caption that advances your story narrative!

Timeline

The time frame of your pix could be whatever you like. But one great way to go might be 24 hours. What’s your routine in a day? Get up? Eat? Zoom? Work out?… Sleep!

Your Blog Post

  1. You do not have to answer any “questions” in your blog post this week. (there is still “discussion” on BeachBoard). Instead, you should write great captions that enhance the experience of your images and your narrative flow. You could write text between images to further immerse us in what you’re presenting.
  2. Name your blog post: Wk 5 – Art Activity – Photo I – Documenting Place

Useful

In some careers, like Marine Biology, documenting place can be critical. In many other careers you might not need to “document” in a technical sense, but developing the ability to share the feeling of a place can benefit many projects.

For any online project, there is, as we’ve all noticed since COVID-19, a degree of detachment. People do love online shopping, but if you can embellish it with the sense that there are actual human beings on the other end, customers can feel more connected and, over time, more loyal.

Even a technical business project still revolve around humanity and human beings in some way. If you can develop the ability to let people feel like all these numbers or whatever you need to present impact people and place in some way, you might keep a few more people awake during your PowerPoint presentation. You just might pique someone’s interest in a project that sounded technical or dull.

Let Love In, screenprint by Bobi Bosson

Bobi Bosson

The full materials for our Visiting Artist Bobi Bosson and the talk she gave on Monday are on BeachBoard.

Visit BeachBoard for a copy of Bobi’s PowerPoint presentation and her email address if you want to ask her any questions.

Name your blog post: Wk 5 – Visiting Artist – Bobi Bosson

Comments

Comments? Questions? What great art did you see, make, or experience today?

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