I had just written a paper on the LArge Hadron Collider when we got this assignment.  Aa a result, i was thinking a lot about physics, and all the cool looking pictures of complicated metal tools and pathways.  i imagined a big dance party on these things would look pretty cool, so i tried putting that down on “paper.”

For my title sequence review I looked at the Mad Men.  The show is in its second season and it is about the biggest ad men in New York in the  1960’s, about their lives at work and at home and the general culture of those people at that time. 

I happen to really like the show, but I think the title sequence is a great piece of work on its own.  It opens with cartoonish office and a man standing with his back to us putting his brief case down.  I think the contrast of the man in black and white and the cartoonish room are very suggestive, the men in the show are always dressed to the t and doing things the way they should, but to them life is all a game and despite whatever they see on the outside, or how things around them might look, they are definitely suffering inside.  The contrast of the two different styles draws attention to the man but entices us to look at his office as well.  The things on his desk are only in a faint outline and the whole opening has a very eerie feel to it. 

The framing of the words is the next thing I noticed, they did a really interesting job with this.   They played with color to emphasis the people’s first names and highlighted the names by having them each appear off center next to whatever was happening, offsetting the action a little. 

The music is a fantastic choice in my opinion; RJD2’s a Beautiful mind.  Its ascending tones match perfectly the businessman falling, but it also sounds classic and clean not panicked, just eerie. 

As for the fall itself, it’s a metaphor for many things and works very well visually in my opinion.  I believe the creators looked at a bunch of live action shots and then created an animatic sequence on the computer, which makes it look so real.  Slowing it down also allowed the viewer to wonder whether it was supposed to be a dream or reality.  I think the fluidity of the fall in contrast with the sharp lines of the silhouette of the man work well together too. 

As the man falls, the ads that have consumed his life fall around him, I wish I could see their detail more clearly, that the color would be more vibrant. 

Over all, the design choices were good ones in my opinion but I think it is the choice of action that really tells the story of don draper the main character and pushes you (or lets you fall) right into the story.  The many is falling through is life, through the ads he creates but at the end he is suddenly sitting in such a confident position with a cigarette in his hand and we are left wondering if maybe it is all in his head.  Several references in different interviews are also made to connections between this title sequence and images of the stock market crashing or 9/11 which add a lot of depth and power to this particular sequence in our society and our country.  

I grew up in Israel and since being on AU campus I have just been thinking so much more about the peace conflict there, and this song in particular has been on my mind, so I decided to use it.

I chose to review Annie Leibovitz.  In particular, I spent a while looking at a collection of her photographs in a book called Women, which is edited and put together with Susan Sontag.  I was going to find a more obscure photographer on the Internet but this book caught my eye and I have been doing a lot of reading in another class about gender so I figured I might find this particularly interesting. I had very mixed feelings about her photography.  Leibovitz is pretty well known for photographing people, and creating photographs that convey an intense relationship between the camera and the person being photographed. In this case in particular, I studied a particular body of her work that focused on women, but I also spent some time looking at other famous photographs of hers to get a good idea about her entire body of work (which is quite large.)  I have to admit, though she is VERY well known, I had never really taken the time to have some opinions about her work. 

I think a lot of her photography tells a truth about people that is sometimes less than comfortable.  That said, I think sometimes it also tells a truth about who people WANT to be or who WE want people to be as opposed to who they actually are, but I am not sure that that is any less relevant.  I noticed that I much prefer the pictures that are less “happy.”  I find them to be more intimate yet simultaneously more mysterious, which makes me study them longer.  I think Leibovitz does an exceptional job capturing the story of a person in their body language. In many of her more posed photographs she plays a lot with the light in the room, which I think adds to the composition of the photo, but also makes it more staged, which is less unusual in my opinion.   I am also very impressed by Leibovitz’s ability to cover a large sample of people without making it feel stereotypically “inclusive.”  This is probably partially due to her renowned status, but I think it also has to do with how she sees the world.  Her photography is very simply composed, and the subject as far as I have seen, is always human.  I think what makes her so successful, is how simple her photography seems at first, but how intricate it is when you look again.  Leibovitz takes photos of things that people have opinions about, but she manages to leave her opinion out very skillfully, and let her audience make their own judgments.    I like the way Leibovitz uses skin.  I think its daring and coveys a variety of emotions (depending on the picture) without destroying the rest of the picture.  I also get these sense that Leibovitz has really mastered the power that the eyes of her subject have on her story and the picture’s composition.  I like her work a lot, I think it is an interesting study in people, but she has a very particular style and studying Leibovitz eventually left me really wanting to look at something different. I wonder if she ever feels that way. 

This is the Link to my Photo Essay.  I find it fascinating to look at the way ads totally skew a product to make it look so much more desirable and give it a personality of its own, so i tried it myself.  i took something as mundane as getting a drink from the vending machine and ran with it. i was hesitant about using the color accent feature, and in retrospect i wish i had used the color swap instead, but i think it gives more character and focus to the object instead of the person.  Thanks to Courtney for letting me take a billion pictures of her behind.

I chose to critique a photo taken by Daniel Nicoletta titled Juanita More, October 8, 1996.  This photo was intriguing right from the start.  At first glance it is a portrait of a very dressed u p women sitting in front of a busy background.  But this photo grabs your attention and holds it for a lot of reasons. First of all- its hard to identify the gender of this person.  This is particularly common for Nicoletta, who has done a lot of work focusing on the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community but regardless I think the gender question makes for a much more interesting photograph.  Though the person is shot in the center of the frame, her body is angled in a provocative yet serious manner that opens up the picture and gives personality to the subject.  The next interesting thing I noticed about this picture was the backdrop.  I think the pictures of the people on the wall add a a fair amount to the story of the person in the front.  Sexual and posed, all the men in the background are looking at the person in the fore ground- or at the viewer.  The next thing I noticed were the chains around this person’s neck discreetly connected to a Cross hidden just beneath the animal printed shirt and a hint of cleavage.  This added a whole new element of sac religion to the story of this photo.

 I think the photographer did a great job composing this photo to both accentuate the beauty of this person and intrigue his audience by challenging them to question their eyes and perhaps their ideals. Though it is in black and white, the photographer was able to shoot a large range of grayscale- and he used his light source very well to add beauty to his subject.  I like that the artist used photographs of others in his photograph and as noted on his site, the person’s hair is an artwork in itself done by Brent Haas.  I think this is a very interesting photo that challenges the viewer but is still very aesthetically pleasing and well composed.  

Photo Word

My word for this assignment was High Angle.  I thought a lot about tall buildings and the washington monument, and about all the really tall people i know, but then, i started thinking about a birds eye view, and about what it might look like if “god” took a picture.  This lead me to think about messing with peoples fate, like in a game (Risk).  I arrived at this picture by playing with maps and soldiers and focusing on my thoughts and experiences around the inauguration.

I chose to review an ad from a Vogue magazine dated October 2008.  This ad REALLY caught my eye as I was flipping through the magazine.  Amongst all the models and the make up it really grabbed my attention without seeming out of place or wrong.  The ad has a pair of legs in black and white stripped tights and high heel Mary Janes photographed from an angled profile and cut off right below the calf.  Beneath the pair of legs is the Coach logo in black. 

I think this ad is so successful for so many reasons.  First of all the composition of the photograph is clean and crisp.  The backdrop though very simple and white, lends itself to a visible shadow that adds good depth to a very simple image.  The shoes cut the page in half but in a creative way that opens it up and leads the each from the center upwards. The angle of the lighting showcases the shoes well too, making them pop and look very appealing.  The shoes and the legs look sexy in a very subliminal way, and more importantly they tell a fantastic story. 

When I first saw this ad I immediately thought of the wicked witch of the west.  A symbol of evil and a visual icon from a very famous movie, this ad takes the special red shoes, which were such an important part of the Wizard of Oz, and makes them black which is a little bit evil, and there for, a little bit naughty and dangerous.  As a timeless movie and a great story I think Coach chose The wicked Witch, Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz to appeal to an audience of women that recognize the meaning and remember that pair of red shoes they owned as a little girl.  This is key since being able to evoke a sense of sentimentality combined with innovation is a great way to connect people to a product. 

Finally I also have to commend the designer of this ad on his or her ingenuity and thoughtfulness towards this ad’s surroundings.  Vogue is covered in colorful photographs of people, showing tons of skin, and lots of curvy voluptuous body parts.  Coach chose to take the ideas these things represent, the sexiness of the skin, the daringness of the colors, the fairytale story of the people and convey all of that in a very different manner.  I love both the artistic choices of this ad and the story behind it that all work well to advertise a shoe and a brand.