John Baldessari is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California. He was a painter, however Baldessari began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid-1960s. He painted in a gestural style but by the end of the decade he had begun to introduce pre-existing images and text often creating riddles that highlighted some of the unspoken assumptions of contemporary painting and in the 1970s he abandoned painting altogether and instead made a large range of media. His interests generally still focused on the photographic image.
We spent a lesson outside the classroom to do a an outdoor photo shoot task. Started out in pairs we would throw balls up in the air in an attempt to try frame and photograph them with no blur and the ball being in the centre of the view finder. We did this by using a high shutter speed on our cameras in attempt to clearly capture the object. The point of this task was to try and teach us how to photograph a moving object while ensuring the subject was framed in the correct way.
We then focused on our partners. In this task we again used a high shutter speed on our cameras and tried to photograph our partner who was consistency moving around. This tasked also focused on moving objects and trying to capture them without motion blur.
Further experimenting
I wanted to experiment further by editing my Images in the style of Baldessari’s works by covering their faces with coloured circles. I did multiple experiments but found these three were the best due to the original image being stronger than other images from the shoot. I found these images where strong as they had multiple subjects in the image and worked the best when creating images the same way as John Baldessari.
Video evidence from the shoot