visualcommjournal-blog

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This is an advertisement from 1900, when the Brownie debuted. The Brownie Camera was an affordable, personal camera. You would mail in your entire camera to the Eastman Kodak Co. and they would mail you back the photos along with the camera restocked with film. Various versions continued to be sold through the '60s. 

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Four kinds of movement: actual, apparent, induced and relative.

Actual - real life movement

Apparent - appearance of movement (as in a movie)

Induced - a movement causes another object to move

Relative - you perceive something has moved relative to another object's movement

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This video explains the basic visual components of film.

Space - refers to the space in front of the camera, as it appears on the screen and the dimension of the screen itself.

Line & Shape - line is perceptual; shaped are made of lines

Tone - refers to the brightness of an object

Color - a powerful and complex component

Movement - refers to objects on the screen, the camera and viewer's eyes

Rhythm - refers to visual, stationary rhythm - in editing and moving objects

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Constructivism was an art movement that began in Russia in 1919 - it was art to serve the people. It was "practicality married with beauty" according to this informative video about Constructivism.

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This image is from a collection of photographs by Jose Ferreira called "Trash Land."  This trash land is in Mozambique. From Ferreira's Behance portfolio: 

"The grotesque conscious / unconscious inertia of people as human beings takes us to nasty scenarios that characterize any underdeveloped world, from nothing less than astronomical distances. 

Such distances, makes the twenty-first century scenarios, as I testified in the Huléne dump."

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For a class poster project about free speech, I created this poster from an image I found online of Pussy Riot. I changed the colorization and filters and added a quote by Rushdie that I thought helped illustrate what Pussy Riot was doing. Members of Pussy Riot, an all-female punk band in Russia, were charged with "hooliganism" and sentenced to labor camps. Here is a video of what they did with translation below the video.

Freedom of expression is seriously threatened when two young mothers are sentenced to work in penal colonies because they protest their government.

FREE PUSSY RIOT: Amnesty International has taken up the cause.

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Paul Conrad was a three-time Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist. He was chief editorial cartoonist at the LA Times from '64-93. During that time, his confrontational editorial cartoons pointed at many presidents and political figures, but he managed to make Nixon's list of enemies because of his many Nixon cartoons such as one where Nixon nails himself to a cross.

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Thomas Nast is considered to be the father of American cartoons. As an illustrator for Harper's Weekly, Nast created iconic symbols such as the  Republican Elephant and the jolly, rotund Santa Claus. His political/editorial cartoons helped bring down Boss Tweed.

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"Five caricature heads" by Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci is one of the earliest known artists to experiment with caricature. His interest in the grotesque led him to seek out people with deformities as models for his drawings. A caricature is a satirical illustration of a person or thing. Historically, and even now, caricatures are often made of politicians in editorial cartoons. 

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21-yr-old Theodore Roosevelt

from Daguerreotype Boyfriend 

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We are studying photography in my class right now, and going over daguerreotypes. 

Dageurrotype photography was invented in 1837 by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. Its a direct positive made in the camera on a silvered copper plate.

My Daguerrotype Boyfriend is an awesome collection of daguerrotype photographs of (mostly) handsome men - some are even colorized (cool!).

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In photography, you can control depth of field using the aperture or f-stop setting. A short depth of field focuses on the subject in the foreground but blurs the background (like f/2.8). For a deep depth of field, you would use a narrow f-stop setting (like f/16).

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The first person to coin the term "graphic designer" William Addison Dwiggins, a book designer who worked for the famous publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. This is the book cover of the book I am reading now. 

Here is a list of the best covers from 2011. 

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I've always loved this 1961 poster for West Side Story. The font is bold but rough like the west side itself. I love the way the stacked words are bordered by the staircases on the side. We talked about Saul Bass and his contributions to graphic design in class. The amount of work he has done that I recognize is mind-boggling. What a master. 

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DAYLIGHT SAVINGS!

What time is it?

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Image Analysis

In image analysis, one goes through the below perspectives to gather as much information about the image and apply meaning to it.

Personal perspective

Historical perspective

Technical perspective

Ethical perspective

Cultural perspective

Critical perspective

Someone posted their own application of these 6 perspectives of visual analysis to this Banksy image: http://andragroza.wordpress.com/2011/09/04/image-analysis/

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Briefly revisiting our topic on semiotics, I had to post this image that has been making the rounds on the internet. THIS IS NOT A POPE!