Strange Faces in Strange Places
My name is Thomas
Keane and I am writing this proposal for my Understanding the Image
module. I am a first year Film Studies student
at Dublin Business School. The photo assignment I am proposing is called
Strange Faces in Strange Places. The basic premise of the project is the
anthropomorphising of everyday objects and surroundings. I would like to
explore the idea of seeing faces in every day surroundings on inanimate objects
or in places where they shouldn't be. I got the idea when walking and I saw,
what to me, looked like a face on the ground. In reality it is just two leaves
and a mark left by a bicycle tyre. I felt it was strange that I immediately saw
a sad face staring back at me and that was when I was struck by this idea to
investigate how people will make a connection with a random assortment of
things and transform it into an emoting human face.
I will be taking
photographs from now up until March, to be presented at a photography
exhibition in Temple Bar, Dublin in April 2014. As this theme is not locked to
a specific area it means that if I see a face somewhere I can take a picture anywhere
at all. I will be, however, mainly looking for photo opportunities in the Dublin
and bray areas as I live in Bray. I intend to shoot these pictures on my iPhone
which again gives me another level of freedom to take pictures whenever I see
them occur. I feel that because there are faces in everything around us, it will
not be difficult to find my subject matter. As long as my phone is fully charged, there is
no limit to the amount or variety of photographs I should be able to take by
March 2014, in time for the exhibition in April.
I am very interested in how people relate to their
surroundings, be they man made or natural, and how people try to make
connections with everything. We feel happy when, by chance, an item or a group
of items happens to look like a face. Sometimes the products we buy have a
vague resemblance to a face. There have been movies, books and various other
forms of media devoted to the anthropomorphization of objects: Herbie, Christine,
The Amityville Horror to name a few. I would
like to investigate this and I think this photo book assignment is the perfect
excuse to explore this issue further.
I will view this investigation a success if the people
looking at the pictures also identify faces in the photographs I have taken. The
face should never have to be pointed out and be instantly recognizable. I feel
to achieve this goal I must take clear concise photographs but I also intend to
edit some of my pictures in Photoshop to make the face stand out that little
bit more.
In Conclusion, the goal of this photo book is to see how
people humanize their surroundings to understand them better and relate to the
world around them, simply by seeing a smiling face in the foam in their coffee
or a sad face made of leaves and tyre marks in the rain.
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