thinking about robert frank's the americans...

My series is intended to be a commentary on my environment. For my photos, I scanned all of the text I could locate in my room, which is mostly found from the posters on my wall. Instead of taking a photo, I scanned them so that they appeared very flat. Taking them into photoshop, I increased the threshold, isolated and then exported the text. Pulling letters from each photo, I placed them all on a single document. I’ve been wanting to create my own font alphabet from found imagery for a while and I thought this would be a fitting excuse to do so. While I did not photograph my outside environment, in and around Appleton, I did photograph an environment whose imagery and type I know well. The posters and writings hanging from my room’s wall each have specific memories/stories associated with them. It was interesting to isolate these objects I know quite well from their own environments. Honing in on specific aspects of them, they were still identifiable but more abstracted and without their context. The font reminds me of cereal box ransom notes, because of the apparent randomness of the lettering. In a way, I intended to build off Robert Franks’ technique of isolating and darkening his subjects. The people in his photos are often in heavy contrast, darkened by or alienated from their environments through coloring. Frank does this interesting technique of making everything less like reality. It's too dark and it's somewhat unsettling to my eyes to look at photos with such a high contrast. The way I grabbed different letters to create a font is also rather upsetting, it's mismatched and disordered. Using flickr, allows me to see these images together easily, which I think the concept comes across only when you view them together. As singular images, they are rather flat and lack a message. Viewing them together, the text and imagery pops out more, you see the repetition across the works. This series is sort of a “step” in my project, I plan to collage with these assets and alphabet I appropriated and create with them, my book.

flickr!