Identity and Place

I’ve just received the November assessment report and I’m very pleased with the grade that I got, since it’s a significant improve from the previous course, and the assesors took into account and did a special mention to the creativity show on the Assignment Three.

Bernardo Franco: una foto en la recámara

Today the Spanish TV news surprised me with a collaborative photography project that these days exhibits his work at the School of EFTI Photography of Madrid: “Una foto en la recámara” (literally “A shot in the breech” and it means the last pictures you can take with an old and rejected camera). This project, coordinate by the Spanish photographer Bernardo Franco, seeks to approach photography to children and youth from marginalized and very poor communities in Latin America.

Assignment Five: Formative Feedback

Overall Comments

This is a very good final assignment Blas, pulling together everything you’ve learned from the CN course. Well done.

Assignment five: The Good Death

If my first assignment for this course began at the cemetery of Vigo telling two subtle stories about memories and forgetfulness, and with the coplas of Jorge Manrique to the death of his father as an excuse and atmosphere, I finish the course with this last assignment with a story where the main character returns to be the Death.

The Archive: Recording

For this exercise I arranged an appointment with a friend of mine, who is a witty person and with a great ability of conversation. Sarah is an Irish woman who lives in Vigo for more than 30 years; she is an English teacher and she also a psychoanalyst, having her own office where she attends her patients.

The Archive: Question for Seller

It’s a bit difficult to understand how someone can get rid of an old family photo, selling on eBay or on a flea market, but there can be many circumstances by which a photo might have fallen into the hands of someone who decide to sell it because they see in it no more than an old object, and family or emotional context that could give personal meaning to photography is gone forever.

The Performative Body of Cindy Sherman

Although the author doesn’t recognize herself as a feminist activist, in Cindy Sherman’s photographs is remarkable how she uses her own image to denounce the use of women in visual communication media (advertisement, TV series, movies) of women as objects of male exploration.

A brief comment about DiCorcia

It is not easy to make a brief summary of such an interesting photographer and with such a broad experience as this American author, who practices a photo style quite different from Crewdson and Wall styles.

Jeff Wall: Pictures Like Poems

Jeff Wall describes himself as an observant, understanding that as the ability of identify situations that have a potential value as subject matters for his photography. And as we see below, such capacity of observance is not applicable to the visual realm, but it touches some other situations, as reading, listening to music, walking, etc.. In an interview for the Louisiana Channel he admits that “this is his basic feature as a photographer”.