Part 3 Proposal - Brandon Lawson

For part 3 “Physical and Material” I want to focus on digital photography and how the medium is often distributed for people to see. Computers, the internet and digital cameras have come together as one giant medium and made it so photography can easily be disseminated, but the problem is that everyone’s computer monitor is differently calibrated and physically made. This can make images appear very differently depending on who views them and where they are. In the digital format they also have the power to change the image size, and perhaps view it much larger than originally intended.
To illustrate this difference I intend to take my picture from part 2 (the long shot with Kyleigh on the railing) and display it on 12 computer monitors to try and show the difference between all the displays. This will occur by taking digital pictures of the images displayed on the screen. The inspiration for this comes from Liz Deschenes, and while she attempted to mimic the digital display by using analog technology, I want to show the flaws in digital using digital. This will be accomplished by splitting the original picture into 12 identically sized sections (like a grid), displaying these on various screen, and then placing all of the different pieces back together to form the original picture. By doing this it will not only show the differences in the various displays, but will show the different dot patterns produced by the monitors, and their quality. Both LCD and CRT monitors where used in this project. While taking an image of a screen will never be perfect the camera and camera settings used to take all of the photos were the same to cause the differences to come from the monitors. I think since it will be nearly impossible to keep the perspective exactly the same on all of the images you will get some distortion similar to Liz Deschenes works.
The final product will involve making 12 prints probably 8x10 and then having all of them displayed so that when looked at from a distance it would look perhaps “normal” but as you get closer it would become more and more obscure, as the colors would be different, as well as the dot pattern. Due to the fact that the original image is only around 14 inches wide, when taking a small section and displaying it on a screen that is over 20 inches it leads the images to be soft. Seeing an image in this way is not possible in the analog work of an art book. I think the imperfections would speak volumes as well as the distortion that would happen showing the flaws in our modern viewing devices. This will be accentuated by the fact that since the different pieces of the photo should look identical but do not, a viewer will naturally want to figure out what has caused the change. The problem however, much like in the digital world, is that you may never know which image is correct due to the fact that everyone that views work on a computer could be seeing something different.