MOPA In-Person Visit AMD 105
On March 28, 2022, I visited both exhibitions at MOPA and really enjoyed looking at Aaron Siskind’s work. There’s a lot of rhythm, repetition and texture to his photos which helped accentuate a sense of abstractness. Much of his work has a shallow sense of depth, leaning more into mere shapes that were nearly indiscernible from the actual objects. Despite being more shape-based, there was a lot of detail visible in his works, creating an interesting visage. The indiscernible nature of his work made it really fun to navigate through the spindly and rough scratch-like lines of some of the images. As for Jed Fielding’s work, I enjoyed the variety of expressions and situations. It truly created this sense that the viewer delved into the subjects’ lives. He mentions in the short clip that I watched while I was over there that he allowed his camera lens to be directly touched when he was taking a photo of blind kids. He quotes that he doesn’t intentionally take pretty photos and would really get in there to capture these portraits. I really thought that was compelling in how he would let things happen, even shrugging off a bruise or slight mishap. I took inspiration from both artists for my 3 photos. For the latter two, I tried to emulate this sense of “flatness” that Aaron Siskind’s work tends to embody by taking more texture-y photos while for the first one, I directly snapped a close-up photo when my sister was in the middle of a conversation.
