For my first assignment, we were tasked with going out into Lincoln and taking pictures with the theme of “appropriation”. This is where an artist/photographer “claims” art by recapturing an image for themselves and putting their own spin on it. For me, I found this subject quite interesting and felt the task would be fairly simple. Once our images were taken, we had to upload them onto Instagram and tag it with “#ULImagesInTheWild”.
Despite it being a task, this wasn’t expected to be our great leap into professionalism. Therefore, simply taking a picture on our phones was more than sufficient [we hadn’t gained permission to book out cameras at this point anyway].
I noticed that a lot of people were going around the high-street in Lincoln to find their images, but I wanted to try do something different. I went into a couple of shops with one of my classmates, Jenny; and set out to try capture a more unique image. By the end of the day, we had gone round several locations and taken a few images but by time I had gone to upload my own image on Instagram- I noticed there were a few duplicates of what I had taken an image of.
Admittedly, I was a little bit annoyed I had spent so long trying to find something original to copy from [which is littered with irony]. This resulted in me trying to find something nobody else could possibly have seen so that I could be the only one to photograph it. On my desk in my room, I have two photos of my cats; these would have fit the mark, but I am the original photographer- which defeats the point of even trying to reclaim an image. It then dawned on me that I had a photo taken at the Warner Bro Studio Tour, it’s a photo of me and my friend from home- but it was photographed professionally and therefore not by myself despite it being a photo of me. It also fitted in with photographing a “photograph” rather than something like digitally printed art or photoshopped based prints. I chose this image because I feel like it could be an inception of sort, since it is a picture of me- taken by someone else, recaptured by me.
For the second half of the task, I had to browse the hashtag on Instagram and choose an image that I liked. At the time of me picking my image, not many people had uploaded anything, so it was slightly slim pickings. Nevertheless, I found an image posted by “tomfalk99” which was what I was going to do before I realised someone else would’ve already done it. The image is taken from a calendar in a card shop. I like the almost pop-art style and the uniqueness however I later realised it doesn’t quite match the brief. Given that this was our first ever task there was no great consequence of not quite executing the task exactly as given, but even so- I do think it is a good image and was one of the better ones I looked at.
