I just read something about Susan Meiselas's photo book "Carnival Strippers" shot back in 1973-75. She incorporated audio in her project, in the first printing of the book there were text interviews with the working girls and in the second reprint a few years back she included a CD of those taped conversations. I have the 2nd version of the book but do not remember a CD, I need to look into that and give it a listen.
The idea behind the audio inclusion was to give a more rounded complete picture of these workers lives. Often photographs alone do not tell a complete enough story, things in real life are complicated and documentary photos do not always communicate everything clearly.
According to the book "Photography The Whole Story" by Juliet Hacking she quotes Meiselas" The whole point of hearing voices is to challenge what the pictures themselves show, that is the tension and power of 'stereotypes'; contextualizing with voices/texts hopes to counterbalance and reveal what is missed by images alone."
Should I try to include interviews for the same reasons if I do the "Lost Innocence" brothel worker project? Language would be the major problem I would face. I can see an exhibition in my minds eye. Stark large 6x6 contrasty b/w head shots, displayed at an important gallery with headphones under the pictures. When you pick up the headphones you can listen to a 10 minute MP3 of the worker telling her own story in her own voice. Something like this could be extremely powerful and might jack up the awareness level 10 fold with the viewer. The visual/audio combination could be bang on strong and very compelling. Maybe I could get the person telling their story in their own language and then hire translators to do a voice over. Not sure how I can pay for all that on a security guards salary but its worth the effort.
Here I go again, I have lots of grand ideas, not sure how close to reality this sort of thing is. It is easy to make plans like this while laying on my sofa in snow bound Edmonton but turning it into a reality, that's another thing.
Here is the Susan Meiselas book mentioned:
Carnival Strippers
The idea behind the audio inclusion was to give a more rounded complete picture of these workers lives. Often photographs alone do not tell a complete enough story, things in real life are complicated and documentary photos do not always communicate everything clearly.
According to the book "Photography The Whole Story" by Juliet Hacking she quotes Meiselas" The whole point of hearing voices is to challenge what the pictures themselves show, that is the tension and power of 'stereotypes'; contextualizing with voices/texts hopes to counterbalance and reveal what is missed by images alone."
Should I try to include interviews for the same reasons if I do the "Lost Innocence" brothel worker project? Language would be the major problem I would face. I can see an exhibition in my minds eye. Stark large 6x6 contrasty b/w head shots, displayed at an important gallery with headphones under the pictures. When you pick up the headphones you can listen to a 10 minute MP3 of the worker telling her own story in her own voice. Something like this could be extremely powerful and might jack up the awareness level 10 fold with the viewer. The visual/audio combination could be bang on strong and very compelling. Maybe I could get the person telling their story in their own language and then hire translators to do a voice over. Not sure how I can pay for all that on a security guards salary but its worth the effort.
Here I go again, I have lots of grand ideas, not sure how close to reality this sort of thing is. It is easy to make plans like this while laying on my sofa in snow bound Edmonton but turning it into a reality, that's another thing.
Here is the Susan Meiselas book mentioned:
Carnival Strippers
