When making my series photobook I was thinking about advertisement. Advertising is a huge part of the modern world and a large part of the photography and graphic design industry. We see products and people and beliefs advertised to us no matter where we are, in the digital space as well as in real life, you can't escape it unless you live on a remote island with no wifi. A lot of advertisements feature a model, someone to utilize or hold the product, and in video advertisements, talk about the product. This model is important to advertising, as it connects the product with a face, with another person who is supporting the use of the product. It's influential, people are more likely to purchase a product if a familiar face or persona is attached to it. If you were a big fan of Tom Cruise and he starts promoting a specific brand of protein powder, the likely hood of you purchasing that protein powder over another brand is greater. In my first photobook, I photoshopped my face onto different appropriated billboards alongside some kind of slogan and a product. I am not a celebrity, nor do I promote the products featured in my faux advertisements, but I wanted to poke fun at how absurd advertising can be. Since the photos of me used are just the same scanned image of my ID, there's no deliberate posing or dramatics, just my face and the product, and in this world where I am a celebrity, maybe just that would be enough to convince the average consumer into purchasing something as common as a cardboard box. I organized the photos to slowly, as you flip through the images, start to shift from actual products you could find for sale, to trash. I feel as though we as humans have started to push the limit when it comes to product creation, we've made a lot of things in our time, and they all serve a purpose, but how many times can you recreate something before it's considered garbage? How many times can we revolutionize an idea before we realize all we're doing is selling future landfill pileup? Funny thing is, we're already at that point, but what are we without money?
My second photobook pulled inspiration from the two books I checked out from the library, Museum Photographs by Thomas Smith and Antiquity & Photography by Claire L. Lyons, John K. Papadopoulos, Lindsey S. Stewart, and Andrew Szegedy Maszak. Most museums hold artifacts and artworks that once belonged to someone, or to a group of people. These objects are viewed hundreds and hundreds of times on the daily by thousands of people, all who most likely weren't there to experience them being utilized. Antiquity means the ancient past: especially the period before the Middle Ages. A large portion of these museums hold objects of antiquity, things that haven't been used since probably around their fabrication. People are fascinated by these artifacts, people flooded to see objects pulled from the tomb of King Tut just to revel in this 'ancient beauty' that we wouldn't get to see otherwise. In my photobook, titled New Perspective, I thought about the objects we put into museums. When we look around our personal spaces, we have things that we probably don't even think twice about, a poster on the wall, a deck of cards, our phones. If you go to a museum, maybe one like the British Museum, you'd see these sort of day to day objects displayed in a glass case never to be used again. The people who used them never thought that hundreds of eyes would see the comb they use every morning, I couldn't imagine any of my belongings behind glass, catalogued in a collection. Thinking about this, I focused my imagery on things that are a part of my every day life. Objects I use and see every day, posters I was excited to buy because they represent the things I enjoy. None of them are in a museum, nobody but me is seeing them of a regular. They hold absolutely zero importance to anyone but myself, but maybe 500 years in the future, someone might decide that my magnet collection is of cultural significance. Probably not, but that's what I was thinking about while creating the book. My images vary from very close up to eye level, certain things might have more detail or brighter colouring than what surrounds it. I focused a lot on what I see as a representation of me and how someone else might decide to view it.
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