DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

A few months ago I brought you this story - from my fridge.

And now I see that there is a wonderful blog here all about ‘passive-aggressive notes from roommates, neighbors, coworkers and strangers’

Do other people find notes round their houses?

This is the latest one in my house:

Rosa likes to leave notes … another one here…

I think it is interesting the way people leave text around the place. Sometimes with no hope of seeing most of their audience.

This one is quite bemusing:

And I like Lemon2’s shot here which captures a moment where the text seems to have a relationship with the person in front:

But the relationship is only made by the reader. There are just two items in the image and we as readers join them in a narrative; we make connections between one element of the image and another.

I am really interested in the ways in which environment can change the meanings of text and vice versa. I am interested in the way text changes over time. This one is funny:

But really I am interested in interactivity of the environment - including people, and even the weather - with texts that are in the street …. specifically streetart and grafitti. The life and meanings of street texts.

I feel a a new project coming on ….

And the forecast was rain. So we have had two solid days of it.

If I had wanted rain I would have chosen to live in Manchester or Wales.

So this is NOT what I expect or want. It is COLD as well as wet.

Liz Jones, also fed up with the weather and also from Sheffield, has whiled away the hours by uploading photos and the photo on the right is an excellent example. (I love photos of dolls. They are just so ABSURD in my opinion. THIS is one of my favourites ever.)

And in the meantime I have been documenting the further liberation of Sugardudes. See here for latest story.

The story ends horribly:

This is not the first time people have been involved in their rescue. See here.

The whole thing is a story of global bonding through PLAY. Play that happened through the meeting of Flickr people from New York, Sheffield and even Sweden.

I love to take photos and then fiddle around and use photoshop to crop or fiddle with colour etc.

Lots of people are against such post-photographic tampering. But I see it as aprt of the whole photographic process. Even in the ‘darkroom’ used for processing film, there are decisions to be made about chemicals, exposure time etc etc. The type of film used brings about differebnt results, and of course printing can make a qwhole lot of difference in terms of colour outcome, type of paper (glossy or matt), size and even borders.

I like to use photoshop and because I think that because you have to frame the image, focus in a particular way, shoot at a particular angle, wait for the right moment (etc.) the image is always just a representation, never ‘real’. It is not a snap from reality but a version. It is the photographer’s view; it reflects a set of choices or circumstances. It is amazing how you can get so many different types of image when many people take a picture of one thing. (Compare the shots of the same Banksy stencils, for example.) .

I photoshopped this image:

I wanted to also play with the idea that you can shoot in black and white or colour. I called this ‘Shooting in Colour’.

I also wanted to show my position on streetart - that it brightens the environment and can improve and humanise negelgted and forgotten spaces.

I like this video about transforming a model through photography. The video is supposed to shopw how shallow we are in having only one version of beauty. It is apart of a campaign for ‘real beauty’. What is ‘real’? I like the transformative process. It interests me a lot. And what do we mean by ‘natural’ or ‘real’?