Ethnographic Essay

My first image, which conveyed detail, depicted a banquet being served on the Dean Dome basketball court. I chose to use this image for several reasons, including its repetitiveness, unique color, and relative uniformity. Although many of my classmates chose to photograph minute details of a single subject, such as a piece of wood or stream of running water, I found that this photograph was more expressive of detail in a much larger subject. When taking this photo, I intended to capture as many people as possible with a maximal amount of clarity. This would allow my audience to view the scene as a whole before zooming in to study each individual. As Szarkowski wrote, the details in a photograph suggest “that the subject had never before been …show more content…
Through a combination of physical and digital techniques, I created an image focused on construction workers framed inside of a mesh barrier. In this photograph, the cut-out hole in the mesh formed “the line separating the in from the out”. It clearly depicted the workers as the “in”, as the rest of the photograph is uninteresting and mostly featureless with one exception—the sign. I put considerable thought into the sign, which I almost decided to crop out as an unwanted distraction. But instead, I experimented with black and white settings, burn/dodge, and blur effects in order to reduce the sign’s presence. I found that, after blurring the text and eliminating color, the sign in fact contributed to the framing element. By explicitly instructing viewers not to enter the framed area, the sign further defines the “out” as described by Szarkowski. With some digital processing, the sign was changed from an imposing distraction to an essential compositional feature of the image. Because of the strong frame created by the cut-out hole, almost all of my classmates interpreted this image as frame—even with the potentially distracting