Carol's Ideas and Responses: October 2015

Research: Cyanotype

Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as blueprints. The process uses two chemicals: ammonium iron(III) citrate andpotassium ferricyanide.

Experimentation: Blue makeup

Experimentation: Blue has no Gender

Research: Guy Bourdin

"While conventional fashion images make beauty and clothing their central elements, Bourdin’s photographs offer a radical alternative."

Bourdin was the first photographer to create a complex narrative.^{[citation needed]} His photographs are often richly sensual but also rely heavily on provocation and ability to shock. Additionally integrating erotic, surreal, sinister components— Bourdin configured a whole new visual vocabulary with which to associate the goods of haute-couture. The narratives were strange and mysterious, often plainly exhibiting violence and graphic sexuality. Evident through astute reading of his compositional and thematic presentation, Bourdin's profited from the influence of a diverse collection of contemporaries: first and foremost, his mentor Man Ray, Also the photographer Edward Weston, surrealist painters Magritte and Balthus, and Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Although less of a commercial success (and perhaps less aesthetically ambitious) than his colleague at Vogue, Newton, the legacy of Bourdin's images has had an equally profound impact on younger generations of fashion photographers up to the present day.

Because Bourdin's models "often appeared dead or injured", some critics have accused him of objectifying women. His photographs were described as "highly controlled" and "famous for a mysterious sense of danger and sex, of the fearsome but desirable, of the taboo and the surreal".^[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Bourdin

Research: Rodchenko

In the fall of 1925, using a camera he had bought in Paris, Rodchenko embarked on his first extended series of outdoor photographs--oblique views, from above and below, of his own apartment building on Miasnitskaya Street in Moscow, across the courtyard from VKhUTEMAS. Although he did not make further pictures in this vein until 1927, the series laid the cornerstone of his mature photographic aesthetic.

Rodchenko's Lef colleague Viktor Shklovsky had defined the principal aim of art as recovering the immediacy of experience by making the familiar seem unfamiliar. Many of Rodchenko's photographs achieve this simply by departing from the habit of looking--and photographing--straight ahead. He intended to encourage people to see things from fresh points of view by doing just that in his photographs. His style of oblique angles extended into photography the dynamic diagonal compositions of his early paintings. And it helped to shape a vibrant, experimental aesthetic of mobile perspectives, which flourished throughout Europe in the second half of the 1920s. Rodchenko regarded photography as mechanical and objective and therefore socially progressive, but much of his best work of this period was made independently, not on assignment, and it had no use as propaganda.

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/1998/rodchenko/texts/photography.html

Blue in Religion

Hinduism

Ganesha

Krishna

Lord Rama

http://www.sanskritimagazine.com/indian-religions/hinduism/meaning-of-different-colours-in-hinduism/

Catholic

Blue colors symbolize heavenly grace. The Virgin Mary is often depicted wearing blue clothing. Blue also represents hope, good health and the state of servitude
http://www.catholic-saints.info/catholic-symbols/symbolism-of-colors.htm

Judaism

Blue in Judaism is used to symbolise divinity, because blue is the color of the sky and sea. It can also represent equilibrium, since its hue suggests a shade midway between white and black, day and night.^[1]

In the Torah, the Israelites were commanded to put fringes, tzitzit, on the corners of their garments, and to weave within these fringes a “twisted thread of blue (tekhelet).”^[2] The oral law requires that this blue thread be made from a dye extracted from a sea creature known as the hilazon. Maimonides claimed that this blue was the color of “the clear noonday sky”; Rashi, the color of the evening sky.^[3]

According to several rabbinic sages, blue is the color of God’s Glory.^[4] Staring at this color aids in meditation, bringing us a glimpse of the “pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for purity,” which is a likeness of the Throne of God.^[5] Many items in the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary in the wilderness, such as the menorah, many of the vessels, and the Ark of the Covenant, were covered with blue cloth when transported from place to place.^[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_in_Judaism

Islam

In the Middle East blue is a protective color and it can be found coloring many of the most famous mosques. These famous Blue Mosques can be found in Afghanistan, Malaysia, Egypt, Armenua, etc. One of the most famous is located in Istanbul, Turkey. Sultan Ahmed Mosque is one of the greatest tourist attractions in Istanbul, the former capital of the Ottoman Empire.

http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2007/09/08/colors-of-religion-islam

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints

https://www.lds.org/?lang=eng

https://www.lds.org/topics/book-of-mormon?lang=eng

Presentation Ideas

Installation

-baby crib
-baby mobile??
-photos of blue things around crib
-baby shower things
-"it's a girl" written above crib

Image of nude silhouette of person with blue images around it

Large outline of girl with blue images inside it.

Concepts: "Blues" the Limit

Colour has no gender
- take pictures of blue lips, both male and female
- take picture of lip prints
-blue nails
-blue eye shadow
-take picture of blue clothing, both male and female clothing (hanging on clothesline/ folded/ in drawers/ on hangers?

Colour has no religion
-look up the different meanings of blue in different religions
-photograph statues, images, books, symbols etc

Colour has no culture
-look up different meanings of blue in different cultures
-photograph traditional clothing, statues, food, etc