Mas110 Photo Assignment: Mailbox

MAS110 Photo Assignment Rationale

By Kathryn Camilleri & Andrew Gillin

Our choice of mailboxes as our theme for this photo assignment with a sub-theme of varied textures was influenced by Susan Murray's article in Journal of Visual Culture, as she explores the creation of photo blogging sites such as Flickr in which uploaders are not involved in distinctions between amateur and professional photographs, but rather in many online communities that seek to enhance the value of inanimate, everyday objects.

We chose mailboxes as our everyday object and set out to find a wide range with a definitive set of textures, evidently providing a varied perspective of existing mailboxes. We montaged them in ascending numerical order to give it a more linear storyline, thus making it more of an accessible viewing experience for the audience. We decided to capture the photos in the daytime, as receiving mail is primarily associated with midday. In terms of the framing and composition of our photos, we discovered that trying to capture the varying textures and shapes of the mailboxes through the employment of close up shots would prove most effective.

The musical piece used in collaboration with the photo montage is Last Night I Heard Everything In Slow Motion by Oliver Tank. The build-up of the music compliments the ascending order of numbers shown on the mailboxes, and evokes an emotionally reflective response for the viewer. The emotion that we aimed to evoke, by using the musical piece, is a sense of discomfort and not belonging. It gives the audience the feeling that they are looking into a perspective of homelessness (i.e from the mailboxes and address juxtaposed against the lyrics "...you said it will be alright, but i just don't know").

In terms of editing, using iMovie was a creatively enjoyable experience as it is user-friendly and are able to choose a personal aesthetic that was well suited to our chosen photographs, that we think we have positively achieved.

Photographers: Kathryn Camilleri and Andrew Gillin
Musical Composer: Oliver Tank

REFERENCES
Murray, S 2008 'Digital Images, Photo-Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics', Journal of Visual Culture, vol 7, no. 2.

Original music track can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZnqxoGNoHo