We photographers have been hoodwinked into believing the best way to exhibit our photography is hanging them on a gallery wall. If my photography is going to hang on a gallery wall, I really would like be there all the time and tell everyone who walks by about my photographs. Clearly this is not possible and creates a problem for those of us that would like to talk about what our photographs mean.
“After the Memories” contains my second attempt at a solution to this problem. The first attempt was a web site that accompanied my “Winter Day, Summer Morning” exhibit providing more information to the audience. That didn’t work well because I didn’t have a close connection between the exhibit space and the web site. I did leave a notebook with the same information as on the web site, but I had no idea how many people read the notebook during the exhibit.
“After the Memories” has two improvements on that effort. One is creating some short (approximately thirty second) videos made at the location of selected photographs. The second is assigning a QR code to each video and including the QR code on the gallery wall near its companion photograph. With the prevalence of smartphones I hope people will take advantage of the QR codes and see several short videos about the exhibition. Now I can be in the gallery whenever it is open.
Creating videos and assigning them QR codes were the other problem that did not live up to their anticipated difficulty (for which I am grateful). I created a single video a few years ago for another project and learned some basic editing skills in Adobe Premiere. For “After the Memories” I took a few hours of refresher instruction on the Adobe web site and then I completed that phase of the project is fairly short order. I had so much fun with the videos, I am wondering how I can include videos in future projects.
This is one pair of photographs of 208 Academy Street. The house and yard that used to be there was bulldozed out of existence a few years ago. There was no warning or announcement of the impending demolition. The bulldozers showed up one morning and a day later there was nothing left. The first image was made in 2001 and the second was made earlier this year. The QR Code below links to a short video I made about this particular series of photographs. (And yes, I do know that I made a mistake on the address that I didn't discover until I was in post-production.)
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