Thursday, February 9, 2012

Pompeii

 I'm glad that I had a chance to talk with most of you on Monday and apologize to those of you who I didn't have time for...      Next Monday, I'll catch up with the rest of you and also check in briefly with all of you...just to see if everyone has been able to get going...with hope that the camera problems have been solved.   Feel free to e-mail me at melissa.shook@umb.edu.

We'll talk about JR at the beginning of class and then you'll be free to work.

If you're e-mailing me a document, it has to be a word.doc, not one of those x docs..

Remember there's a holiday on the 20th..

My friend, Susan Landry, has joined the class by long distance. If you look at the previous posting, you will find her blog address so that you can check out what she's doing if you want to.....

Some of you seemed to turn a bit green when I said I expected hundreds of digital images...often...   The expectation for film is at least 20 rolls of 36 exposure film..which  means developing it and making contacts..for those 720 images...Naturally not all that many negatives will be printed, but the whole process is very time consuming.


Digital is easier, faster..and only involves making prints. (Thinking about what to print is the same for both processes..the difficulty of choosing the images that best support your idea..)

There's a very good show of artist books at the Boston Atheneum on Beacon Street. It costs $5 to get in and that allows you to stay all day, if you choose, sitting on one of those elegant red chairs, reading or writing. Though I was only really interested in five or six of the books (that's about the average I'd expect to find interesting in any show, whether of paintings or photographs), it was really worth seeing all of them.

The Pompeii show at the Museum of Science will be over on the 12th, so I spent 3 hours there yesterday. IT IS OUTRAGEOUSLY EXPENSIVE....BUT I REALLY WANTED TO SEE THE BODY CASTS... Taking over 180 photographs, just for the pleasure of it. None of the images are particularly interesting, but they function as note taking.

The heads above are reconstruction from skulls and I thought it was interesting to get some sense of what the people really might have looked like...

There are a number of  overt sexual images -- frescoes or the tiny little sculpture that is in this image to the left which is a case displaying the many little objects for the afterlife.... the walking phallus that was carved into something or other, a little holder for oil... the hundreds of noisy children probably didn't notice any of this since they were so eager to rattle around, dodging in and out.....
 


There is a casting of skeletons from Herculanium....

1 comment:

  1. That's nice pictures. Great sculptures.I like the conceptive for them.
    And actually I just created my own page on facebook, I hope everyone would like to come and give some advices or thoughts for my photos. Search "Simon.P Photography" on facebook. Thank you!

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