Social Networking - Books/own opinion I had some trouble finding information about social networks in the library, so i decided to give my own opinion about them. The top 3 most used social networking sites on the internet are Myspace, Twitter and the most popular of them all is Facebook. There are more than 500 millions users signed up to Facebook, 50% of them log on at any given day, the average user has over 130 friends and people spend over 700 billion mintues on facebook a month. More than 30 billion pieces of content shared each month. One of them is photographic images. One of the main features for Social Networks is Photo sharing, over 60 million photos are added each week, this makes photography one of the most important parts of creating a social networking profile. Using a social network not only lets you communicate with friends and family, but it is also used as an electronic photo album, it lets you upload almost any and every photograph you take with a camera. Now as the popularity of using social networking grows, the demand to upload more and more images grows also, now it seems that people have to upload images of anything an everything, such as holidays, weddings, birthdays, days out and just day to day life. From coming from an age of people sticking family photographs into albums, to entering a new age of uploading many images at a time and not worrying if the will be worn out with time. I have come to think of what the future holds for photograph albums in social networking sites and what new ways to store and view photographs will come in the future.

Photography and Surreal Objects : Athens/Web

I tried looking on Athens but i couldnt find anything of value for this blog. So i decided to look on the web.

I started looking at Michiko Kon's work. I found a small piece of writing describing her work.

''Kon's work creates a delicious tension between the animate and inanimate. Diverse biological matter such as fish, plants and insects, are unexpectedly combined with clothing, shoes, furniture and even body parts''

From looking at Kon's work i found that the work is visually interesting to look at and also i like how the combination of the of the objects work together well.

My favourite image is the one called ''Brassiere and Gizzard Shads'' I like this image because it could be an item of clothing that could be worn and it also combines clothing with fish, which are named in the extract of writing that i found about Kon.

I found another artist called Kevin Wilson, although i couldnt find much information about him i did find a website with his images on. http://www.insomnium.co.uk/photography/

Photography and Gender - Web

I had a little trouble finding relevant information on this subject, but i did find a few artists that i thought might be usefull.

Anthony Gayton Photography : http://www.anthonygayton.blogspot.com/

This is a Anthony Gayton's blog, here he has put his images of his photographic shoots and he has also written some text about his thoughts on the images.

Arnaud Delrue : http://www.delrue.fr/

I dont really know much about this artist but i think that it is relevant to the subject that i have researched.

Bruce Weber : http://www.bruceweber.com/bw/index.html

Typeologies - Periodicals

Typeologies - Periodicals

Eadward Muybridge and Etienne Jules Marey both recorded movement in humans and animals e.g birds, horses, elephants etc. they did this by taking multiple exposures on a single plate.

Although their work isn't classed as categorised it is still considered to be put into the category of movement images.

As the times moved on the typeologies subject has grown widely, it has been split into categories such as criminals, cars, sports, colours, books, houses, people etc. All these are being recorded as evidence for example in museums insects are categorised by size and shape.

A photographer Omar D gathered together a set of images of people who had gone missing in Algeria, by doing this he was trying to keep their memory alive for them to be found, i feel this runs in the category of people.

From what i found there was more than just one set of images with missing people's faces on them. I am not too sure if this is exactly a typeology, but the way that they have been gathered and shown it could be a part of a typeology for missing people. This image i found while looking through the journal ''Camera Austria''.

Another image that i found while looking through the journals were of portraits of military personel, these had all been taken with with the head and shoulders showing giving it more of a formal photograph. This could be categorised into high ranking officials.

Although i found this search hard to do, i also feel that after looking through the journals that i found that typeology can categorise anything that has something in common with another, and this can go under any subject.

• Blind Spot- 2008
• Camera Austria - 2010 Issue 111 pg 23 Omar D
• Professional Photographer - 2010 pg 66
• PhotoWorks 2010 pg 52 Muybridge and Marey
  
  
  

Politic Photography

'The Body' - William A Ewing

Quote :- ''The body is a highly contested site - it's flesh is both the recipient and source of desire, lust and hatred. As a pawn of technology, it is sacred and sacraficial, bearing the politics of soceity and state. The body is our common bond yet it sepeartes us in it's public display of identity, race and gender.'' Diana Augitis on the work of Helen Chadwick.

An image becomes political when it is used to sway our opinion, this can be relevant to the 1930's when the Nazi's used propaganda posters to try to change what people think.
Where as today, propaganda is still used in protests and demonstrations, such as a demonstration clled 'Pro Life', when photographs were held up of fetus's in the womb, this was to argue against abortion. I see that bringing more controversial subjects and photography together can make people look and listen to the issues raised, such as the abortion demonstration.

Not only do demonstrations and protests use this type of politic photography, but a clothing manufacturer used an image of a man dying of aids for an advertisement, even though this had nothing to do with the product, it still got people to look at the advertisement, as shock photography.

Another book i researched was 'Photography and the body' by John Pultz, a section in the book talks about taboo subjects, such as children and adolescents and also gay men, these are also controversial subjects to talk about, but when shown in a photographic image it has to been seen and spoken about as a subject of politic intrest. Sally Mann photographs of her children seemes more daring than a family photograph, this could be because she had them posed, this removes them from traditional photography and into politic.

Recorders - Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Out of the eight pieces In the exhibition some of them do not need a lot of space, but by no means does this make them less powerful.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer sees technology as an inevitable part of our culture, but it also shows how technology can be misused.

The first piece Pulse Index recorded fingerprint images and heart rate by one person placing their finger onto a sensor and that then puts your fingerprint image in the catalogue with all the other prints that have been stored, from this it becomes a large collage of fingerprints.

Choosing this piece as the first to show to the public was I good idea I think because it gets the public involved straight away and makes them want to participate more with the other exhibitions.

After looking at the Pulse Index installation, I grew more curious about the other art pieces, when walking round I immediately was drawn to the Pulse Room, when you first walk into the room you are drawn straight to the lights above. So I immediately wanted to take part and see what it was about.

Although I didn’t know what was actually happening in the installation at first, I soon realized that the installation records your pulse beat using the lights that are above in the room. This has to have been my favourite out of all the installations, because it is recording not only your pulse but everyone else’s pulses that have been before. This brings back the subject of getting the public involved within Hemmers work.

After taking part in the exhibitions I felt like I had made a contribution to Hemmers artwork, but at no time does anyone think why or how this could be used for other sources. It shows how eager people can be to use technology without thinking. Could they be used for a predatory gathering of public information?.