THE MOST DIFFICULT SNAPSHOT

Some “Street” Photography (click link to see video)

The biggest problem, and the only solution, to this assignment was the scope of the project. The fact that we were allowed total freedom in what to shoot meant that anything was available to be captured on film, something so unrestrictive as to become intimidating.  Despite this, however, I still advocate that art should never be restricted because, much like Einstein found the answers to physics hidden deep within calculus, so too can an artist find his final inspiration in an area he had previously ignored.  For me, art never meant deciding upon something and then following through with it until the end.  In my opinion, art is a constantly dynamic endeavor wherein the artist repeatedly shuffles ideas through his or her head.  The end result is that the original inspiration simply becomes a starting point and the final product is a formation of all the ideas that went through the artist’s mind in the creative process.
What I had originally intended was a simple walkthrough of my most familiar environments so that I could faithfully depict my relatively simple style of living, thus I turned on my video camera and started following my daily schedule.  However, I soon realized that my environments were much like the rest of New York and the project would thus be nothing original.  Then, a few steps later, I realized that a daily part of my schedule was the Staten Island Ferry, something even many residents of Staten Island only occasionally experience.  It was then that I looked up as I was recording and saw a flag on top of a building.  The flag was placed atop a low balcony of a tower whose highest elevation was not adorned with the same stars and stripes.  I thought to myself as to how ironic it is that the architect’s ambition is placed above the memory of all those who died to for the right to wave that flag proudly above the structure.  It was somewhat unfair, seeing as how that highly implicit metaphor could have clearly escaped the mind of whosoever mounted that flag lower than the building’s peak, but the current economic condition of the United States has made me very cynical.  Lately, all I have been thinking of is how corporate moguls have been keeping the money from Congress’s bailout plan to invest in luxuries such as cruises and better office buildings instead of refueling the economy, a deceptive, blatant destruction of the nation our forefathers had worked so hard to build.  It was this very thought going through my mind that convinced me that my work had to be a criticism of the current economic condition of the United States.
Since I realized that I had chosen one centralized focus, I thought it best to arrange my pictures in the form of a storybook.  I also realized that my work had to be highly symbolic because I was focusing on such an abstract concept, so I took the pictures I normally would have taken but searched for little nuances that could be applied to a grim situation like our economy.  Out of roughly ten minutes of recorded footage, nearing six hundred individual frames, I chose twelve pictures after noticing some detail that I could apply to our nation’s economy.  I chose images of New York City because of its significance in the world’s economy, pictures with dark clouds in the sky, and simple acts that could be used metaphorically.  Some of these I had noticed while filming, others I had not.  None of these, however, proved particularly difficult in the process of finding the right picture.  The actual problem in this project came from having to take the picture with a low-resolution video camera.  Not only were my images shot in poor quality because of the camera’s capabilities, the fact that I was isolating images from video meant that the slightest motion in the video blurred the picture even more.  It took many tries to find moments with the least motion and the result, while passable, was still not on par with some of the better digital cameras.
I know I tried something that I had never seen someone else do; to so clearly focus on a topic that can’t be communicated directly through pictures.  Such a blind leap of faith may translate to failure on my half but, as Herman Melville had once said, “it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”