Monday, January 17, 2011

Media Contexts

The readings deal with visually focusing on the details and the overall mood that a text has because the writer, photographer, or artist chose them to have these things placed therein. The first photography by Roe Ethridge, Kitchen Table reminds me of my home. The first thing my eye was drawn to was the egg hanging on a string in the background. Since this egg is close to the center of the photography I wondered why something so delicate would be hung up in a kitchen, which is a busy place of cooking and movement. The orange of the previous page saturated my color receptors in my eyes so then I was drawn to the oranges, which are Sunkist. Those are good oranges.
These are the oranges that stayed in my mind as I read Ode to an Orange. What is very interesting to me is that one text of media will inherently affect the next text of media that you encounter. I love Larry Woidwode’s statement that, “For some reason the purest and simplest sentences permit the most meaning to adhere to them.” This to me a big hint on effective writing and making sure the context is well understood. I can apply this to the author’s longing for oranges in this passage, “There was no degradation that we wouldn’t descend to in order to get one.” This is referring to claiming sickness to get tons of oranges on false premises.
Context provides a framework that I use to analyze a text. We are lucky that the context is explained right after the texts that we read. For example there are the beautiful pictures of the Wu family followed by a listing of objects in the pictures and each of the individuals named. On the following page we read about the photographer Leong Ka Tai who is an award winning photojournalist. We also learn that this picture was an effort by the photographer to picture statistically average families in thirty different countries.
My favorite visual images in the readings where the works done by Pinkhassov, a Russian photographer. According to the biography about him he is one of the foremost important color photographers. The pictures he has carefully arraigned are quiet moments of prayer across many different cultures, some I identify with and others that puzzle me.
-Jeremy Ashworth

1 comment:

  1. Jeremy, I liked your insight that media in sequence affects each other. I found the same to be true (see my post for further discussion), though I focused more on the essays we read.

    There were definitely some profound sentences by the authors and I like the quotes you pulled from "Ode to an Orange."

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