I believe that The Grey Area is the nebulous and disorientated realm of every individuals mind. It is the place where we feel the most anxiety and unease, our thinking goes all somber and we feel grey thus, we are stuck in 'The Grey Area'.
DOCUMENTARY UNCERTAINTY
Photographs have been used for documenting key things in life however, how can we be sure that the resources we are given are reliable? Photographs may appear as reliable forms of evidence as a photograph just captures what is in front of it however, in the end, the photographer is in control of what is within the frame and what stays outside the frame therefore, we never get a full story from one picture. Previously, tampering with images was more difficult to do as people did not have access to the same resources as we have now and pictures were more convincing however, now we have access to programs like Photoshop and images can be tampered with very easily, since people are aware of how easy it is to edit a photograph, they are less likely to trust what is put in front of them.
Documentary Photography is a genre of photography which produces accurate representations of places, people and events, often used in reportage. However this type of photography is also unreliable as pictures can be manipulated or edited to display something that was not actually there in the first place, or erase something from the image completely.
While the notion of a document is historically tied to ideas of certitude and confirmation and is primarily used in the legal realm, the certitude has all but vanished from contemporary consciousness. The experiences of the 20th century, its large-scale enterprises of propaganda and disinformation, have created an attitude, which could be called habitual distrust as well as advanced media literacy. Documentary modes still appeal to institutional modes of power/knowledge and cite their authority, but the effect is rather a perpetual doubt; a blurred and agitated documentary uncertainty...
-- Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl, The Greenroom: Reconsidering the documentary and contemporary art.
SUGAR PAPER THEORIES BY JACK LATHAM
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Forty years ago, two men went missing in southwest Iceland. The facts of their disappearances are scarce, and often mundane. An 18-year-old set off from a nightclub, drunk, on a 10-kilometre walk home in the depths of Icelandic winter. Some months later, a family man failed to return from a meeting with a mysterious stranger. In another time or place, they might have been logged as missing persons and forgotten by all but family and friends. Instead, the Gudmundur and Geirfinnur case became the biggest and most controversial murder investigation in Icelandic history |
Sugar Paper Theories, created by Jack Latham, follows the story of the biggest murder investigation in Icelandic history. In his book he includes pictures from the actual investigation from the 1970s, as well as his own recreations of the case and pictures of the surroundings. The combination of photos from the investigation and Latham's recreations of the investigation make the viewers question what is factual and what is fictional within the book.
PARLIAMENT OF OWLS BY JACK LATHAM
PHOTOGRAPHS #1
This was my first set of photographs I took for my Grey Area section.
Overall I think I could've definitely taken more pictures however I am happy with my photograph compositions. On the right I have chosen my favourite images and created a triptych out of them. I have picked these ones in particular as I feel like they most relate to the feeling of the 'Grey Area'. We can see a person grabbing their hair, facing in the opposite direction, away from the camera. Then them turned around, facing the camera however not directly, taking a leap of faith into uncertainty, the grey area, and finally we see them after they have taken the leap of faith, staring directly at the camera confidently. The triptych acts as a progression or process towards something, the middle photograph playing as the in-between two worlds, the fact and fiction.
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FURTHER EXPERIMENTATION
I created a few collages using my first batch of Grey Area photographs via the software Photoshop.