ohgodhowdidthisgethereiamnotgoodwiththesis

llllllllllllllllllllet's get ready to rambllllllllllllllllllll
ok! well, i've just been correcting midterms and discovering that people seem to think that neodada and ab ex are the same thing but they are wrong and here's why it is because you are wrong and ab ex is all like sup we're existential and such and neodada is all like duchamp is the man. yeah. \/mark'down\/
but: i am trying to figure out what my thesis is going to be. here's what i've been telling people. the idea of fact and fiction in contemporary photography as it relates to the cultural assumption of photos as documentary evidence and the influence of cinema and the cinematic; all this stemming out of Cindy Sherman's Film Stills from the 70s.
going to work in gregory crewdson there, and jeff wall probs, and maybe margot quan knight. we shall SEE.
talking about large photos that are extremely staged and how when people look at these photos these days they're all like sup we know that isn't real, but there is this cultural memory and tendency toward believing photos as documentary evidence going all the way back to the early days of photography. when they used cameras in order to document the "vanishing race", the new West, etc. but why then do people still get weirded out by something they know is fake and staged. BLAME THE CINEMA. in a society so pervaded by the idea of the cinematic, screen media, television, et al., it is sometimes easier for people to suspend their disbelief instead of dealing with images that make them uneasy. images from real life (war, violence, all that bad stuff) have become fortified against because the viewer is used to seeing these types of things in movies, tv, video games and so it is not as much (although it still is sometimes) of a shock. i don't want to say that people don't want to or can't care about the horrible things that they see, it's just a defense mechanism to help them cope. in the other vein, the same is true in the inverse. people see fake images in movies, magazines, all that and they pretend they are real in order to "get into them" or to make things more interesting. people like gregory crewdson use the tactics of cinema in order to play on this in his photos. jeff wall has elaborate sets and backlit cibachromes that recreate similar effects. margot knight shows "real" photos too but has set them up and, in some works, has doctored them. this comes out of cindy sherman's Film Stills in that those were photos, self-portraits, of her in dress and pose and black and white tones that were meant to invoke a certain period in film. even further back, pictorialist photographers like gertrude kasebier were setting up things and people in order to get a shot full of meaning. the new pictorialism focuses not so much on the fictive scene in order show a touching moment between mother and child, but to make reference to the cinema, to itself, to its metaself (you know i love THAT junk), art history (Crewdson's 'Ophelia' btw), and society. it's got all the trappings of a good thesis topic. yeah!

and this is what happens when i drink a bunch of coffee and really need to get working on my degree!

oh em gee well tee hee hee

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also there is a hilarious little baby with the face of a 45 year old smoker/mulletresse in here and i usually don't like them kidz but it's pretty hilarious to see it bob around in its snowsuit to animal collective.