Post 1: Jim Kazanjian

Untitled_House (2006)

Denotations: An extremely large house (or set of houses) stands on stilts above the edge of a gap in the rocky earth. Water either recedes away from the structure or pushes towards it. In the foreground, a partially fractured roadway curves out of the frame, and a man lays on his stomach near the precipice. In the background, another structure on stilts is burning and creating smoke that clouds into the air around a glowing moon. A flock of dark birds fly behind the houses on the opposite side of the image. The image is in black and white.

Connotations: Although Kazanjian uses black and white partly because it helps homogenize the different images he uses, the color choice also lends a somber air to the image—I end up viewing it as a documentary image and taking it more seriously than I would something in bright or odd colors that call attention to the surreal nature of the photo’s content.

I think we’re supposed to be a little unsettled by the photograph—not only does the viewer suspect extreme fragility of our focal point, the grand, manmade structure (the foundation seems to be sloping and close to falling apart on the left side) but the composition and content—the glowing moon in clouds, flocks of dark birds and the turreted grand house, like a castle—seem to suggest, well, a haunted house.

Don’t take my word for it though:

Heh heh. That’s kind of silly, but I do think we are supposed to get a sense of the eerie, as well as the awesome power of nature. We can assume a narrative about this image – this seems to be right after some kind of natural disaster like an earthquake that caused the tide to go down, the ground to open up, and the structure in the background to catch on fire—and because there seems to be no real motion in the image, we aren’t sure if this is all over or still in process, if at any moment what appears to be a tidal wave in the left-hand corner (but might just be rocks) could come tumbling towards this lone building. A tiny man perched at the edge of the broken road (who is, scale-wise, probably much smaller than humans really are in relation to road lanes) reminds the viewer of the smallness of man in comparison to the natural world. The lone human in this photo is almost incidental: not only is he shown in a defenseless position laying on his stomach on the ground, but he is not the focal point of the image, almost only incidental to it, something you could easily overlook.

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untitled_Bubble (2008)

Denotations: A large orb hovers above the coastline, including a city and a long bridge. The image is in black and white.

Connotations: It’s not clear what the orb is—a giant bouncing ball like from The Prisoner? The moon? A bubble that is actually quite small but has been distorted by the vantagepoint? It’s also difficult to tell where the viewer is—there’s really no place they could physically stand and see the coastline like this and the layers of clouds and then into the sky to objects above the clouds. This disorientation makes the apparent close proximity of the orb to the earth somewhat unsettling. The viewer questions the real distance shown in the photo, as well as their own perception. The orb is perfectly round and white, which makes it seem not quite natural but also heavenly, pure. What appears to be the shadow of the object on the water, however, reminds the viewer of the threat that the object poses to this tiny (and because so tiny, one assumes defenseless) coastal town—after all, is the orb holding steady in the air, or is this an image of it moments before it collides with the earth?

photos: http://www.kazanjian.net/