Introduction Selfie- Adriana Crow

self portrait 23

 Sasha Vidakovic's "Sarajevo 92-95"

Introduction Selfie

Something that's been a lifelong inspiration for me has been movies, especially those that are either animated or have a really stylistic out-of-the-box approach to the presentation (such as dramatic colorful lighting, use of practical effects, ect) With being a fan of movies, the genre that fascinates me the mosts is horror, or anything that uses horror elements to drive storytelling. One of my favorite directors that does exactly what I listed above is Guillermo del Toro, who's best known for Pan's Labyrinth. I have a very equal interest in graphic design and illustrating, and I'm hoping to utilize them both for my future jobs, and hopefully land one that caters to my tastes in unsettling storytelling, whether that be for a film production or something else entirely. 

This is why for my introduction selfie, I based it off of Sasha Vidakovic's political poster series Sarajevo 92-95 from 1993. He has a wide variety of work, all varying with various colors and shapes that completely differentiate from each other, making it kind of hard to choose one that really captured his style. However the halftone image with a bright red object piercing through was so striking, it immediately caught my attention. Vidakovic says his biggest struggle is "making the complicated simple" which as an aspiring designer, "less is more" is something I try to work by all the time. For make picture I made the red object my tablet pen, since it's what I use for both designing and drawing, and it's something I associate with both passion and pain. (In reference to both physical wrist and back pain, as well as mentally when I hit a creative block) 

Susan Sotag- On Photogtaphy 

"To collect photographs is to collect the world." 

    Susan Sotag's perspective on photography as a whole is very unique, and something that hadn't really crossed my mind. In this day and age, we are a culture that's defined by photos and videos. If you use social media, you're likely not going to share an event without photo evidence to go along with it, and if you don't you're going to see thousands of people daily sharing their experiences, with different locations. I think we're so desensitized to photos that we forget how much significance they hold, and forget how they're even still new in human civilization.  We can virtually travel the world with just a press of a button. Even still, while it's still a snapshot of reality, Sotag mentions photographers will take multiple photos just to get a perfect shot, so it's still an idealized reality. I think this is even more true when you remember technology is capable of color adjustments and face tuning. 

"Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are"