Photo Essay: Teacups Hannah Moore & Melissa Bahrum

 

MAS110 PHOTO ESSAY: TEACUPS

 

Hannah Moore & Melissa Bahrum

 

 

Rationale

 



The theme of cups and the secondary theme of teacups were chosen as a result of their relation to Murray's conceptualisation of the “everyday aesthetic”(Murray, 2008, 147). Teacups capture the “new aesthetic” (Murray, 2008, 155) one focused upon an “ability to locate beauty in the mundane” (Murray, 2008, 155). The emphasis upon a relatively unnoticed everyday object such as teacups works to reiterate the amateur photography trend of expediency or “ephemera” (Murray, 2008, 155) that Murray discusses. Such a choice of theme encapsulates the idea behind social photo-sharing sites such as Flickr that photography works to build a narrative and an acknowledgement of temporality in digital photography.

 

The approach that was taken during the editing process involved alterations to brightness, contrast and exposure in order to highlight often neglected structural and stylistic elements, such as colour and pattern, of the mundane object of the teacup. Highlighting elements such as these is pivotal to the representation of the ' everyday aesthetic'. The aim was to augment the natural beauty of the objects in question. Therefore, it was essential that the photos were not over-edited or stylised. The same aim was addressed when creating the video. Panning, zooming and simple cutaways and transitions were used to highlight, again, the structural and stylistic components of teacups whilst remaining engaging and interesting to the viewer.

 

The music selected for the video essay is an instrumental guitar track; ‘A Quiet Night’ by Roberto Diana was accessed through the Creative Commons search portal. This particular piece of music was selected as a result of the mood and atmosphere it evokes. The song connotes a sense of mystery as well as an atmosphere of serenity. A song such as this, despite its simplicity, helps to lift the concept of teacups outside of a mundane, everyday context, instead, it provides an interesting edge to these objects in an engaging manner.

 

REFERENCES 

 

 

Murray, S 2008, 'Digital Images, Photo-Sharing, and Other Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics', Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 7 issue 2, pp. 147-163

Australian Research Council Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation, 'What is Creative Commons', Pooling Ideas

 

 

Music

 

Roberto Diana (2012), 'A Quiet Night' from: http://www.jamendo.com/en#/en/track/888919/a-quiet-night.   Accessed under an "Attribution-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported" license" http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/