Ad Buster

The original BP ad that I chose is targeted towards American oil consumers. The intended audience is any American who owns a car and buys gasoline. This leaves out people who do not own cars or do not live in the US. The message is that Americans should buy BP gasoline. BP markets itself as a “green” or environmentally friendly company. Its logo invokes images of the sun, flowers, and other things associated with nature and the environment. The clean, simple aesthetic of the ad also portrays BP as “clean” and implies that buying its products will benefit the environment, which is something consumers should feel good about.

To subvert the meaning of this advertisement, I took the original ad (which is the top part) and added a picture of a shorebird covered in crude oil and the text on top of it (in yellow). The 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was a huge, well-publicized environmental disaster for which BP was directly responsible and received much criticism. This event brought to light the fact that BP does more harm than good to the environment, which is the opposite of the image it is trying to portray to consumers. This is highlighted in the ad with the image of the effects of the oil spill on local wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico.

Body Photography Project

For my project, I decided to explore the idea of movement using the body. I used longboarding as my subject because it is an activity that I really enjoy and also one that involves unique types of movement. When I first learned to ride a longboard, I was surprised by how challenging it was to balance and move in the direction you want. It involves types of movements that do not necessarily come naturally. Longboarding is much harder than it looks when you see someone moving fast by you on the sidewalk. Stopping this motion in photos and looking at the progression as you move reveals a lot about how the body changes position, rather than simply standing still on the board.

            This project was also about personal photography because I took images of myself doing something that I enjoy and is important to me. For me, riding a longboard or seeing images of it brings back memories of my first two years of college, when my friends and I would ride together almost every weekend. These images, then, mean having fun and good times with friends to me on a personal level.

            How the human body moves when engaged in various activities has been of interest to photographers for a long time. My project was influenced by the work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who explored how the body moves. He did this by taking many images of people in rapid succession as they moved. At the time, this was revolutionary work because movies were not yet common, so people had not seen photographic images that involved movement. Using technology that Muybridge did not have at the time, I was able to combine multiple images into one rather than placing them side-by-side as he did in his work. By setting my camera on a tripod and setting it to take pictures continuously, I was able to freeze the movement in each frame. I then superimposed the images in Photoshop to show the progression as one seamless image.

 

Documentary

I chose to explore the historic buildings of downtown Tucson’s El Presidio district in my documentary. This area of Tucson has a rich history from Spanish colonial times through modern day, and the buildings and structures that exist there show evidence of that history. While this area is only a few miles from the University of Arizona, I had never visited there in the two years I have been at U of A, and I think that is probably true for most students who are not from Tucson. Walking around this neighborhood, I noticed how much modern urban structures have impacted the historical nature of many of the buildings. Office buildings and parking garages peek out behind old adobe houses and parking meters and traffic signs line the sidewalk beside the reconstructed Presidio wall. However, these two elements are not at odds with each other; rather they appear to exist in harmony and form a composite that is the basis of Tucson’s history and culture. This coexistence of historical and modern elements was the focus of these photographs. I think it is important to recognize how much of this culture exists just outside the U of A, and students would find it interesting to explore this area and learn more about Tucson’s history. As students, we tend to live in a bubble that extends just outside of campus, but there is a lot more to Tucson that just the University of Arizona.

 

Lighting

The second element I chose to explore with this project was lighting. I took these pictures early in the day when there was plenty of directional sunlight illuminating the cactus and creating some good shadows. I think this kind of lighting shows the 3-dimensional nature of the object, since photographs sometimes have a tendency to make things look flat. For the cactus, the lighting highlights the grooves that surround it and the shape of the arms, which makes more interesting photographs.

Texture

I chose to explore the element of texture because a cactus has very unique textures and it is not all uniform as one might expect. To photograph the texture, I got very close to the cactus. By taking pictures on the side that was not in direct sunlight, I was able to eliminate shadows and let the textures stand on their own. I tried to photograph a variety of textures on the cactus, but by no means did I capture all of them since there were so many to choose from. Still, I think photographing the texture of an object gives us a more complete perspective of what it looks and feels like (although I would  not recommend touching a cactus).

Perspectives on a Cactus