For this brief, I chose an image I found on Twitter via Pinterest, taken by Kensuke Hosoya, a Japanese photographer. The image is one of those typical, trendy, symmetrical food editorial shots. I was of course, drawn to it because of its aesthetically satisfying colour palette and arrangement. But, I also love dessert and this photo frames a creme caramel, topped with whipped cream and a single cherry, placed in a silver bowl with a stand, a silver spoon at its foot.
I was honestly quite lost when first approaching this brief, admittedly because I was putting far too much weight on what material I was going to be translating, despite the brief’s instruction to choose “instinctively and quickly”.
I turned to the readings for guidance and found that all four of them resonated with me quite a bit. Michael Rock’s ‘Designer as Author’ and ‘Fuck Content’ challenged my learned notions of having a direct hand in the creation of content or the critical thinking behind its generation; these texts instead allowed me to detach myself from enforcing some sort of narrative while choosing a material to work with. Additionally, they forced me to rethink my role, not only within this brief, but in practice as a whole, as one that is more concerned with the remodelling or orchestration of material to create new meanings and forms, or to reach new audiences, as expressed in the following passage from ‘Designer as Author’:
Translation is neither scientific nor ahistorical. Every translation reflects both the character of the original and the spirit of the contemporary as well as the individuality of the translator: An 1850s translation of the Odyssey will be radically different from a 1950s translation.
In certain works, the designer remolds the raw material of given content, rendering it legible to a new audience. Like the poetic translator, the designer transforms not only the literal meaning of the elements but the spirit, too.
Rock, M. (1996) Designer as Author. Available at: https://2×4.org/ideas/1996/designer-as-author/ (Accessed: 09 November 2021).
I was particularly hooked on the idea of the transformation of spirit, mentioned above.
One of the many ideas proposed by Hito Steyerl’s ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’ (2012) was that of imperfect cinema, originally coined by Juan García Espinosa in the 1960s. Both Espinosa and Steyerl argue that the poor image of imperfect cinema “merges art with life and science, blurring the distinction between consumer and producer, audience and author” (Steyerl, 2009). I wasn’t initially interested in resolution or image quality as such, but I was drawn to merging of two distinct things, whether that’s art with science, or the perfect with the imperfect, in order to, as Steyerl writes, blur those lines between the production and consumption, as well as authenticity and imitation.
These ideas, combined with Queneau’s great skill of telling the same story in countless different ways, drove my decisions and the experiments below. This resulted in not a series of super distinct tests, but rather a progression of experiments as I began to factor the aforementioned ideas into the work.
My initial response to Hosoya’s original photograph was that 1) it was a perfect image and 2) I wanted to recreate it, knowing that my methods of mimicry would inherently undermine the perfection of the original and produce “poor images”.
I began by using the perfect image to create an imperfect version of itself. I cropped the image to a square frame around the cherry, and began shifting the image within that frame 70 pixels in all four directions (up, down, left, right). The result was a fragmented image that changed the scale of the subject matter, and that still retained a sense of that symmetry from the original.
From there, I decided to try and physically recreate the image with whatever objects I had in my room at the time. I used my raincoat as the backdrop and eclairs, yoghurt and cherry tomatoes from my fridge to build the imitation.
I then applied the same method of fragmenting to my imperfect imitation and compared the two versions.
I noticed that this method seemed to represent the two images, both very different in their quality and level of ‘perfection’, on a similar level. Because of the now “poor” quality of the images, it was difficult to discern whether my imitation on the right was just that – an imitation, compared to the left.
As the images began to blur, I decided to rebuild Hosoya’s photo using fragments of my imitation, and use Hosoya’s fragments to build back my own photo.
Now, both images have a certain “third” quality about them – neither perfect nor imperfect, but rather a reference to the imperfect cinema from Steyerl’s piece, blurring art (a perfectly staged photo) with life (a hastily arranged and crude recreation).
While shifting the pixels, I found my eyes straining to resolve or make sense of the image at times on screen. I had to zoom out or step back from the screen in order to be able to make sense of the image as a whole. I wondered if this would be the case if the image was printed, so I printed a double sided A2 sheet with one version on either side. Beneath the image is a sort of eye test – the idea being that the further away you stood from the print, the clearer the image would be, but the smaller the text. The closer you stood, you’d be able to make out the text clearly, but the image would start to become fuzzy and more difficult to distinguish. The text within the eye tests are derived/inspired by the caption that accompanied Hosoya’s tweet, which translated to “It was very sweet”.
Another quick experiment was to present my imitations as ‘styled’ spreads for a fashion editorial piece; I listed the items I used and their respective costs alongside the image.
Finally, I took time lapses of myself creating the imitations. Giving the ‘non-content’ of the original photo, I wanted to create similarly nonsensical verbal narratives to accompany the videos, to try and see whether two forms of non-content would combine to generate content, or some sort of narrative. (Two negatives make a positive, right?) The idea behind the narrations was to also read the subject within the photograph as more representational and abstract/open to interpretation (perhaps just visual cues) rather than literal, which is why I didn’t simply narrate an instruction on how to assemble the dessert. This experiment was more directly inspired by Queneau’s stories, as I wanted to test different stories based on the exact same video.