Krista Wortendyke
Friday, 29 May 2009
Work from (Re:) Media.
This is fascinating work about appropriation, photo history, media consumption, etc. It runs the gamut of critical analysis / critique about photography. I strongly recommend you look at Histortical Intervention as well.
“Although most of us have never experienced war, we are surrounded by its imagery. This project is an exploration of the way that imagery and information from movies, videogames, the newspaper, and the Internet come together to form our perception of what war is. Explosions are war’s most universal and most spectacular signifiers. We are never falling short of this imagery. I have made use of these magnetizing images to show not only how the lines between fiction and non-fiction blur, but also to show how a mediated experience can become indecipherable from a real experience. ”
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” I have always been interested in the idea of the iconic image. Throughout the history of photography there are certain photographs that have gained a position of importance that surmount other photographs. It is claimed that this happens because of the power of the reaction it elicits from its audience. Once these images claim their authority, they are used over and over as a surrogate for that experience. As a culture, we tend to go back to photographs when we want to know about our history and our past. These iconic images become explanations for the “that has been,” where we gain our knowledge of who we are and where we came from. Through the inherent reproducibility and repetition of these images they become deeply imbedded in the fabric of our culture. They become instantly recognizable and familiar. My work has been the exploration of how recognizable these images really are. I am using the blur, a common photographic tool, to obscure these images and strip them of any detail. It is my conclusion that the viewer, given a minimal amount of information, will be able to fill in the details of the photograph through the recognition of their shapes. ” – Krista Wortendyke
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“For several decades, photographers have been exploring the aesthetic values and virtues of scenes of environmental degradation; now some of them are doing the same with the contemporary battlefield, including Krista Wortendyke. In her brightly colored, graphic and digitally altered photo-collages of the killing fields, Wortendyke serves up great clouds of red, orange and yellow fire filled with shards of black metal, around which aircraft buzz and soar, and beneath which soldiers scurry in the midst of their doom machines. Neither glossy propaganda glorifying boys with their toys, heroism or bracing adventure; nor grim denunciations of willed destruction, Wortendyke’s photo-works are spectacles of grandeur to be contemplated with or without whatever moral judgments viewers happen to bring with them. By placing her scenes in backgrounds of elegantly interrelated rectangles of earth and sky tones, Wortendyke lets us know that she intends to sublimate warfare.” – Michael Weinstein
*images updated 31.7.09