John Baldessari
“A photograph and a painting are essentially the same thing. One is just a series of pigments in emulsifier put down on canvas, while the other is silver nitrate deposits put down on paper. There is very little difference between the two.”
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John Baldessari
John Baldessari (1931-2020) was an American conceptual artist associated particularly with photography, found imagery, text, and appropriation. Rather than treating a photograph as something that simply records reality, he was interested in how an image communicates and how easily its meaning can be altered. He frequently took existing photographs - especially film stills - and cropped, rearranged, combined, or physically intervened in them. His work therefore asks the viewer to think less about what the photograph depicts and more about how we interpret what we are shown.
In the mid 1980s, Baldessari began placing brightly coloured circles over people's faces in found photographs. Initially, these were circular price stickers placed onto photographs; the resulting compositions could then be enlarged or developed further using paint or other processes.
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A face is normally one of the first things we look at in a photograph. We use facial expressions and identity as shortcuts for understanding what is happening. Baldessari removes this immediate connection to a photograph leaving the viewer responsible for creating the narrative. He also demonstrates that meaning isn't contained neatly inside one element of an image. Once the face disappears, we start constructing meaning through the connections between everything else.
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Baldessari also often gave the colours associations of their own: red could signify danger, green safety, yellow chaos, and blue harmony. In which he isn't simply removing information; he's replacing one kind of information with another.
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His work interests me because he disrupts the information normally used to understand a photograph. By obscuring faces, he removes identity and expression, forcing the viewer to create meaning through connections between gestures, objects, surroundings, and figures instead. This relates to my own exploration of whether connections exist inherently within images, or whether they are created by the viewer through context, experience, and interpretation.
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Inspired by Baldessari's work in obscuring photos, I wanted to create some experiments of my own. I found photos I had on my phone involving people and uploaded them to photoshop where I used the paintbrush tool to add a circle over each individual's face. Initially I found the plain circles to be fairly boring and also a direct copy of Baldessari's work, so I decided to find some texture images on pinterest to use as overlays. With this being a first experiment, I had no texture images of my own however, I would like to incorporate that into future experiments. With the textures, I wanted to make sure they were all different and in some way corresponding to the images. Like Baldessari used colour to add a new layer of information referring to emotions, I wanted to do the same and allow viewers to read in as much or as little as they'd like about the specific textures used on each person. Some are pretty plain while others are quite busy, and the thought behind this was emotion - the darker or busier the frame, the deeper the emotion I wanted to convey.
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I also added a layer of texture over the entirety of each image, I felt the clear and modern feeling images weren't as effective as old film-like images in this experiment and wanted to add a layer of texture and age to them. Overall, I think this experiment went well. I felt able to build on Baldessari's work in my own way and experiment with a new style of image-making. I also like the effect it creates in relation to connection - removing key information from each photograph while simultaneously, making each individual appear the same or 'connected' through matching disruptions. I definitely want to carry the idea of obstruction through my project, whether that be in a literal sense like this or a more subtle way like purposefully capturing a scene with something missing or obscuring a subject in camera.