Take Two: Contemporary Photographs

Jimmy Coble

11/4/2015

Philadelphia Art Museum Reflections

Take Two: Contemporary Photographs (read "Multitude...." entry first)

This second exhibit was much less engaging. Many of these photographs were of inanimate objects as opposed to real people. It was also a collection of works by different artists. Many of these works were in color. There were a number of interesting pieces that stood out as individuals. I thought the picture of the person inside the photocopier and the picture of their face was something that drew me in but it was quite absurd. Another that I thought was really inventive was the black and white picture of a face that had been painted over. This was a process that I thought worked, and something that I want to try in the darkroom at some point.

Though there were cool pieces, I felt as if the exhibit made little sense as a collection. Many of the pieces seemed like pictures of life, but not of interesting parts of life like the other show.

I also thought that the use of color took away from some of these pieces. It looked like the artists artificially made these pieces brighter in the development phase and gave them a fake looking quality. Also, several of these pieces were quite old and not contemporary. 

Multitude, Solitude: The Photographs of David Heath

Jimmy Coble

11/4/2015

Philadelphia Art Museum Reflections

Multitude, Solitude: The Photographs of David Heath

This was an interesting exhibit to see. I was struck at first by how dour and stern almost all of the subjects of the photographs were. As I went through the exhibit, I saw the contact sheets from his film. Two of the negatives showed a crowd. In one, there was a man smiling at the camera and another laughing. In the next negative, it was the same crowd taken maybe a second or two later that showed all of the subjects frowning. These were pictures of events in real life, and without context, I would interpret very different things. For the rest of the pictures that I saw, I kept this in mind that photography shows an instant, but without background into the picture, it doesn’t mean anything.

I personally liked this exhibit more than the other one. This could be a number of things. I first of all felt that it was a more cohesive theme. I also thought that the photographs were related in that it was all by the same artist. This made it easier for it to seem more linked. But more than anything, I thought this show was more interesting that the other one in a visual sense. These photographs made me want to look at them, whereas in the other exhibit, I looked at the photographs without feeling that pull. It felt like there was an order to view this collection of prints.