Saturday, May 06, 2006

Press Project

Since the sad day that my camera left me, I've been unable to create new photos for this project.  Instead of photos from an organization at UWM, I'm presenting previously published photos from a organization at my prior college, the University of Dubuque in Dubuque, Iowa.


Every year, young aviation hot shots and professional pilot wannabes get together in Washington DC.  Students are chosen a handful at a time from universities with aviation majors across the nation.  In all, the week-long DC seminar has just around a hundred attendees.  I was lucky enough to be one of the five students from the University of Dubuque to attend the conference in 2002 - the first one since the cancellation of the 2001 conference, which was scheduled for late September.


All students attending head to DC with ideas that stimulate or improve the aviation industry.  We form groups to discuss our ideas and march around Washington DC talking to congress members and heavyweights in the FAA.  At the end of the week, all groups presented their new idea to either the FAA or the NTSB with the hope that their proposed allowances, regulations, or laws will become a actual allowances, regulations, or laws.


This project required photo documentation for a blog as well, which was setup to promote the trip to other aviation students in following years.  These are a few of the photos of DC that I included in my blog posting:




This is the particular group I secretly named "Team Dan."  Our mission in Washington was to convince the FAA to allow airlines to hand down their recently increased taxes to the passenger, specifically the taxes related to the TSA's airport security.




Just over a year after the 11th of September, the Pentagon was business as usual.  It was hard not to remember what had happened at this same place when a plane would fly overhead on it's way to DCA. 






The tourist bait: the notorious gift shops featuring "official DC merchandise."  If one store is out of something, you'll be able to find the exact same identical item (in the same colors) at the shop across the street, down the block, in the park, or anywhere else you can think to put a shop.  DC is similar to Six Flags in that way.





While running around talking to senators and congressmen, it doesn't take long to bump into a CNN crew or two.





The law.





The man.





The monument.





Meet one of the only survivors of this plane crash.  This particular cockpit recorder saved all the conversations that took place inside of the cockpit for the entire flight, right up until the end.





The flight data recorder saves information about what the plane is doing in flight.  This allows researchers to recreate every mechanical event about the aircraft to determine the cause of a crash.  The NTSB can read data about the flaps, ailerons, the vertical stabilizer, landing gear, lights, cabin pressure, oxygen masks, seatbelt lights, and any other recordable piece of information.  The NTSB can simply plug this computer into a simulation computer to create virtual simulations with virtual people flying a virtual plane.  Far out!





The accident investigation room is very secret, and this photo probably shouldn't have been taken.  In this room, the NTSB, employers, or family members are the only ones allowed to put on headphones and listen to the cockpit recordings.  No other person may listen to the recorded data, as strictly stipulated by the FAA.  No employer may make take any disciplinary action to a crewmember based on information found on these recordings, even if a pilot was, for example, to be recorded discussing a three martini lunch and an after-work joint.  The recordings are for accident investigation only, but never for the media.





Not very related to this project, but worth the photo anyway.  This was 2002's first snow in DC.   The photo is taken through my Holiday Inn hotel window, just a few blocks down from the capitol building.





Some of the many statues depicting heroes of Greek mythology that permanently stand downtown.  But what's with the Boy Scout?





This photo's my favorite, because it's such a good representation of the city - a fusion of politics and an American ghetto.  The city that runs the rest of the nation has the highest homicide rate of them all.  Many of the forgotten neighborhoods are covered in graffiti, which uniquely blends gang signs and political expressions unlike anywhere else in this country.

posted by Fergison @ 6.5.06 0 comments

Monday, April 24, 2006

Alone


On a Saturday afternoon, fifty-six year old Samantha whimpers and watches the entrance of Stone Creek for her owner to return.  I learned her name off of the collar she was wearing, as her owner was nowhere to be found.  After waiting outside with Samantha for exactly twenty-five minutes (that's just under three hours to Samantha) and already pressed for time, I decided to step inside the Stone Creek Coffee to find out more about the dog.  Inside the coffee shop, there were four men and two women all sipping coffee and surfing the web with complimentary wi-fi. The Stone Creek employee said she never saw which person the dog belonged to.  Even after asking all six of the coffee shop's customers, none of them said they had seen anybody tie up the dog outside.  I was a block away when Samantha's "rightful" owner slinked out of the coffee shop red with embarrassment to take home the animal she previously denied knowledge of.





Thirty-five years ago, Chandler was purchased by Bruce Marolf.  Bruce named him after Eddie Murphy's character in the Golden Child because, as Bruce himself puts it, "he's black like Eddie."  On this particularly cold Tuesday afternoon, Bruce needed run to Sendik's to get everything he needed to cook dinner.  When I met Chandler, he was standing alone on the street howling loud enough that a few other Sendik's shoppers inside the store stopped by the mounds of apples to get a good look out the window.  As people would pass Chanlder on the street, he would stop for a moment to see if his howling had worked - if somebody would stop to untie him.  Nobody did, so Chandler and I waited outside for twenty-seven minutes (that's three hours and nine minutes to Chandler) as he continued to howl.





Zoey was born sixty-three years ago.  On a sunny Thursday morning, Jan and her daughter Christy wanted to spend spring's first gorgeous day shopping indoors Deb Silvers Goldi.  Since Goldi's doesn't allow pets, and Zoey sat outside in the cold and waited for his owners to finish shopping.  Exactly fourty-two minutes later (almost five hours to Zoey), Jan and Christy returned empty handed and distressed that somebody had been taking pictures of their animal.  I talked with Jan for the exact amount of time it takes to untangle her dog's leash from the railing and angrily drag it back home.




Max is alone.  He's been sitting quietly in the passenger seat watching the front doors of the Pick n' Save waiting for the driver to return.  Even though the air is chilly, Max will continue to pant in the passenger seat for exactly thirty-two minutes (that's three hours and forty-four minutes to Max).  Although this particular Honda allows up to six windows to be opened simultaneously, Max's driver closed them all.  Nine grocery bags later, he returned.  He ignored me.




Moneypenny just turned fourteen last week, and now spends today barking at the top of her hound lungs for close to an hour (seven of Moneypenny's hours).  Sharon is getting her hair cut and highlighted at Oakland Glow, a small privately owned salon on Oakland.  The Milwaukee Humane Society took custody of Moneypenny while she was a stray in South Milwaukee.  At the humane society, Sharon was warned that Moneypenny developed issues of abandonment because she spent the early part of her life scavenging for food and finding places to keep warm for the night.  However, now Sharon ties Moneypenny to public benches outside of overpriced beauty salons. 

posted by Fergison @ 24.4.06 0 comments

Sunday, March 12, 2006

Known/Unknown

If the eyes are the windows to the soul, as Leonardo da Vinci said, what can a photograph tell us about a person?  By examining the settings of the photograph's subject, what does that tell us about the photographer's relationship to that subject?

There are two groups of people in the photos below:


  • The Known:

    Four of the subjects are friends.  I know their full names, e-mail addresses, cell phone numbers, screen names, mailing addresses, career paths, and ages.  The four of us have shared time, stories, and drinks together.

  • The Unknown:

    Four subjects I had never met before.  All four agreed to be photographed for my photojournalism class within a few minutes of our initial contact. I have no knowledge about any of their ages, names, or contact information.



Click on any of the thumbnails to view the full-sized photos. 


Stranger?


Stranger?


Stranger?


Stranger?


Stranger?


Stranger?


Stranger?


Stranger?


Move to the bottom of the blog to reveal
the known and unknown.





posted by Fergison @ 12.3.06 0 comments

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Document Project

Document
Project





What is a document?

In terms of photography, a document is a personal record of the way things are at one precise moment in time. This documentation does not necessarily explain a history or represent something static in the future, but merely a brief second in time represented in two-dimensional terms.  This document is a truth of history, and can only be verified now by other visual documentation.


In this project, I attempted to capture one specific short moment.  These photographs do not represent the past or the future, but simply one moment in the middle.


 

posted by Fergison @ 8.2.06 0 comments

Monday, February 06, 2006

Lighting Project

Lighting Project

My favorite time of day is early in the morning, before the rest of the neighborhood is awake.  The air is still, and the only noises to be herd are the ones I create for myself. Unfortunately for this assignment, that's also the time of the day when the lighting is worst for photography.





4:00 pm: West • natural evening shadows







5:00 am: Shorewood • artificial outdoor lighting







12:00pm: West • artificial indoor lighting







9:00 pm: City Hall • low/distant lighting







8:00am: Walker's Point • natural overcast






11:00 pm: Downtown • traffic / street lights






4:00 am: Shorewood • minimal lighting

posted by Fergison @ 6.2.06 0 comments

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Journal Entries:
#1What's Truth?  An Idea?  A Reality?  Abstraction?  Can it be represented in (an) image(s)?
Truth is a tricky issue when it comes to photography.  In the world of digital pictures, anybody with a good understanding of Photoshop or Picture It! can change truth into a lie. The lighting of a picture can be modified to falsely indicate a different time
of day.  An image can be cropped to exclude vital information, like a child that appears to be alone in a photo could be missing a cropped parental figure. A person or object can be removed or inserted with little or no indication of editing to the photo. In the addictive MegaTouch Photo Hunt game that's found in taverns and bars all across America (and that I'm shamefully addicted to), that is exactly the point of the game: to spot all five digital photo edits in every set of photos.  Aside from some of the few obvious edits, the modifications to the photos are usually individually undetectable.  It's not until you compare the photo with the original that you can see the difference.  It's easy to lie in digital.


But modification after documentation isn't the only way that truth can be compromised.  Most of the choices the photographer makes about accurate documentation actually take place at the time that the photo is taken.  Take, for example, Castle Doune in Scotland:



The infamous castle where, among many things, a cow is thrown over the wall in one of my favorite childhood movies, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  This was to be the highlight of the trip for me.  Imagine my shock when I discovered that the castle was a farce - it was hollow on the inside.  After passing through the front entrance, the inside was just as plain as the lawn on the outside.  There was no roof to the castle, and certainly no way to get animals high enough up to hurl them over the wall.  I had been fooled by images from 1975 that implied this castle was as real as I had imagined it to be.




A photo cannot tell its own truth or reality.  Photos serve as evidence to reinforce a narrative or a story, but cannot stand alone as a representation of truth.  A photo must be accompanied by a history, story, explanation, or caption to explain what the photo is, when the photo was, or what conditions were taking place that established the photo. 


Time is most important when it comes to truth in photography.  To be truth, a photo must be accompanied by a "born on" date like on Budweiser bottles.  A photograph of a child doesn't tell us any truth unless we know how old the child is.  A photo of Baghdad says
nothing unless the viewer knows if it was taken five days ago or five years ago. Without a background to a photo, all that's left is just an image.  It holds no more truth than a doodle on a piece of notebook paper.



#2
Are you better in front or behind the camera?  How does it feel to be photographed?
I have a double standard about photography that I can't even attempt to deny.  I hate having pictures of myself taken.  I don't want others to see them, and I don't want to see them myself.  I have a few photos of myself on my laptop and a few Internet profiles here and there, but even those are few and far between.  I avoid the image I see looking back in my mirror and photos of myself so much, I would probably adjust to life as a vampire with little transition.  I already love the night time so much, I'd just have to get used to that whole blood thing.


Back at a Christian school I used to attend, we had a PE teacher in 5th grade who never appeared in the yearbook because it was against her religion to be photographed.  She explained that taking a picture of someone is like plucking off a rose petal and keeping it. Essentially by giving someone a picture of you, you're giving them a piece of your soul - they own a little bit of who you are.  As more and more people take a petal, there is less left behind to give to God.   Suddenly one day you realize that you have nothing left to give to Him; that everyone else already owns a part of you.


OK, OK.  Yes, it's a crazy theory and I don't really believe in God, but she kind of had a good point.  Maybe I don't want other people to have a piece of me.  Maybe I'm the kind of individual that would prefer to keep to myself, or rather, keep myself to myself. Or maybe I'm just looking for cheap, religious justification when I duck out of photos or turn my head away when someone tries to snap my picture.


The whole double standard comes in to play when I'm holding a camera in my own hands.  The only people I ever give the courtesy of asking before I take a photo are perfect strangers. Friends and those I associate with get no warning.  I have more embarrassing, ugly, and just plain bad pictures of my friends than they know about.  I don't intentionally try to catch people at their worst, it just happens.


I'm also one of those people who just pretends to delete the photos out of my camera when people ask me to.  I never do.



#3What is Visual Impact?  List examples you have seen?
To me, visual impact is a is a little neuron that fires somewhere in the brain.  It's a level of understanding that could almost be conveyed without any other means than the visual senses.  It's a message that can be understood with little explanation because the picture itself does most of the talking.  Photos with strong visual impact often require the viewer to put image and knowledge together.  It demands one level above casually glancing at a photo to receive the visual impact.


Here in Toronto, the Chinese population grows and flourishes every year.  This photo's visual impact demonstrates this.  In the backdrop of a English-speaking Canadian city, the ever-present Chinese culture has been pasted overtop of the previous culture.  The impact in this photo is the moose, a very Canadian symbol, almost disguised by the elements of Chinese culture. 


In downtown Tokyo, space is an ever-present consideration.  On a densely populated island, there is often nowhere to build but up. The visual impact of this photo demonstrates this verticilization of life in Japan, even in what they do with their dead.







Ask any Scottish native their favorite movie and most people will pick the 1995 United States blockbuster Braveheart, the story of the Scottish hero who battles to overthrow the English rule. Wallace has been celebrated by Scots since the 13th century, but it wasn't until the 90's that there was a major motion picture to put a face on their hero.  That face was Mel Gibson, now immortalized in stone several hundred feet below at the entrance to the actual Wallace monument.  Old pictures and drawings of the Scottish Wallace have disappeared to be replaced the face of our New York native, their hero Mel Gibson.




This photo from Montreal last year needs little explanation because its visual impact explains it all.  The upside down flag, the swastika, and the plea to God explain one Canadian view of the USA.




#4What moral obligations (if any) do photographers have?
If any morality exists in photography, it lies in the how we treat subject.  If the subject of the photo is aware of photography and the function of the camera, then they are also aware of your intentions when you point the camera at them. 


I like to think of it like publicly gawking at someone with your mouth open.  If I were to walk to the edge of the Grand Canyon, it would be perfectly acceptable to stand eyes wide, mouth open, and take in the scenery.  However, if I were to come across a parapalegic eating a sandwich, it would be inappropriate for me to stand, mouth open, gawking at this person.  It would be obvious that my reason for gawking was because the person was strange to me.  With one action, I'd be conveying that their entire way of life is strange to me.  I'd be willing to take a picture, but not to trade places. In cases like this, a simple "May I?" would suffice. 


In the Scottish town of Stirling, I walked by an event that was both public and private.  A restaurant called Wistlebinkies was spending what would be their last day open to the public catering to a couple who had just gotten married.  Weddings are a private event between two people, but I wasn't the only person who was gawking and the people at the reception were aware of it.  Even in Scotland, men in skirts are very aware that they still get noticed.  In this case, taking a picture was acceptable.  A wedding is a way for a couple to brag about their relationship success, so little privacy should be granted.


I asked this man in Chicago if he wouldn't mind if I took a picture.  I had a feeling that he was going to let me take the picture, but I offered him $5.00 anyway.  Somehow, if I walked by and took his picture without his permission, I would feel like I had deliberatly kicked dirt on the guy.


However, my moral obligations are voluntary and can be turned off and on at will, much like I did at the Strawberry Festival in Cedarburg.  If I see a manatee cleverly disguised as a tropical vacation while hovering over a plate of free cookies, I can't help myself.


My other thought on moral obligations is that they're only applicable to the living.  Ethics only apply to the people, not their bodies.  If you come across a dead body in a creek, snap away!  If a journalist wants to photograph and publish the fatalities from an exploded car bomb, then by all means do it.  When a person dies, all that's left behind is nothing more than people-shaped litter.  When we bury a person, we're not really doing anything but disposing of the garbage they were too dead to dispose of themselves.  The body is nothing more than the wrapping paper on a gift.  When the gift is gone, there isn't anything sacred about used wrapping paper with no gift inside.



#5What do you wish you could have a photograph of?
Me! 
My childhood has gone missing!
My dad is one of those incredibly meticulous and detailed people who never throw anything away because they might just need it some day.  My brother has a big, fat photo album for every year of his life up until he was in the fifth grade.  He documented everything from "Robert's first solid poop" to "First tree climbed by Robert."  His entire childhood is extensively documented, which is incredibly easy to do for a home-schooled child. 


My photos?  Oh yeah, they started just fine.  I was one of those babies that came out all icky and yellow and had to live in the hospital's incubator for a few weeks.  Somehow by the time I got out, my father had an entirely new outlook on his photography.  He either added up the cost of all the film he was using, or maybe he just noticed that I was an ugly baby. 


I have one photo album.  It starts with my brother (go figure) and my dad posing around pictures of my mom's pregnant stomach.  The album later transitions into photos before and at the hospital.  A good portion of my album consists of pictures of a disgusting, naked baby me inside the hospital incubator, eyes closed and yellow skin.  Right after that, a photo of me standing in front of a Cessna 172 with my private pilot's license at 17.  Right after that, high school graduation.  Now my memory might be a little blurred with the whole lack of documentation an' all, but I'm pretty sure there was a lot more that could have been photographed between the life stages of three weeks to seventeen years.  There's no such thing as a yearbook or class photos in home schooling, so I'll just have to assume I was far too ugly of a child for documentation.

posted by Fergison @ 10.1.06 0 comments