What I learned from videos

Today Mr Slade showed us two videos of 2 photographers. The fist one, Slade's friend Travis, talked about his project photographing Utah Lake. He said that the way students reacted to these prints was suprising, because they found them beautiful, but when they learned that they had been shot at a location as ugly and smelly as Utah Lake, they were suprised. It's so true, that something ugly can produce a beautiful photograph, you just have to be creative and know what to photograph.

The second, Taryn Simon, did a 20 minute presentation on her photographic work. The fist set was all about things going on in the world now, like nuclear stuff, Iraq and weed. It was very interesting. I loved her second project called, innocence. She took photographs of people wrongly convicted of terrible crimes which they never did. All of them were convicted based on photographs of them that the victim selected. One story I found terrible in particular, that a young victim selected a photograph of a man, but then decided he looked too old to be his attacker. The police then got a picture of the same man from 4 years ago and sowed it to the victim, who said that was him. Turns out he was innocent and had to spend a part of his life in prison. Another man was just drafted to play professional baseball, but was wrongly convicted and had to not accept that opportunity. These were really cool photographs, she shot them at the place of the crime, or their alaby, or where they were arrested. These innocent people had to spend a fraction of their life in jail thanks to the misconception of a photograph.