Another Realisation
After looking at all these images by countless different photographs during this project but also being bombarded with images, like the real life ones I have been looking at as well as the staged images, I have started to question how shocking these images really are to the viewer, I mean not for one moment am I saying they’re not heartbreaking. Images of war and terrorism are devastating but I see it all the time. I have began to wonder if myself and the rest of society are increasingly getting immune to theses kinds of images of war, death, poverty as well as I whole host of other humanitarian atrocities. One of the things that brought me to question my own immunity to these images was the fact that so far during my research and idea development I have only found it hard to keep myself together once. That was during looking at the Kevin Carters work (Stricken child craws towards food camp) but that was more a combination of the images and finding out that Carter killed himself because he couldn’t live with the horrors that he had witnessed as well as reading his suicide note and I have been looking at some horrific images that I wouldn’t even put in my blog. These images include pictures of corpse of the people who jumped from the twin towers during my 9/11 research and scenes of civilian mass murder during my war photography research.
This got me thinking, so far I have discovered that there seem to be a few easy to follow conventions that seem to make images memorable. Firstly the shock value that I keep stressing on about. This can be achieved in a number of ‘easy to follow steps’ it seems if you include the subject matters of nudity, death, drugs or addiction you sure to shock certain people but keep it simple, you don’t go bombard the viewer with to many things to remember all at once.
So from this realisation I have decided to create a number of images that explore this idea of the notion that if you include ether nudity, death, drugs or addiction you have a sure fire easy step by step way of shocking people into remembering your work. But I also want to juxtapose that with another idea of ‘do we care?’ I am going to include along side my clichéd, desperate looking attempt to shock people imagery that delve into are growing immunity to these increasingly convention driven, try-to-hard constructed and overly staged images.
