Everything on my list of what i expected to see and hear at Southern Cross station i definitely did but because of the formula, my eyes were heightened to spot objects that were situated in a certain way whether they were standing alone or in group of duplicates.
In one way the formula i made up could have restricted my process of collecting media but on the other, it guided me to discover objects that i never would have taken pictures of. What i usually notice and record are things that are out of the ordinary and ironic. Even when i do notice things, unless i need it for evidence or it’s out of the worldly and feel like it’s crucial to share I don’t normally record it. Through this work of noticing and recording i have come to understand the idea from Bogost’s Ontography of Shore’s photographs being “deflationary not because their subjects are subordinate but because their composition underscores unseen things and relations.”
By looking at the pictures taken from my location, although the subjects (public transport, vending machines, fast food stores, seagulls and bicycles) may be considered subordinate, the unplanned composition of the camera was definitely what brought out unseen things and relations forward.
I refer to the composition being unplanned because honestly when i was taking the photos on my preview-less film camera with the tiny view-finder, I had very little idea on how the photo was going to come out and it was a huge risk to take on. The quality of the photo was not promised and some of the pictures actually turned out to be quite blurry. However it forced me to practise the process of ‘seeing the scene to be captured separately from the way the camera will see it.’ (Bogost) Although my camera didn’t have a ground glass that rotated the view like Shore’s ancient film plates from the Brassai’s era (so the parallax wouldn’t have been as ‘phenomenal’ as Bogost describes) but the parallax I experienced with my film camera was enough for me to draw curiosity towards the objects in the scene.
When the film got developed there were a lot of surprises that i did not notice or expect when taking the photos. For example the picture of the single bicycle i didn’t know the man who just walked into the frame was gonna be in the photo but he was and it really doesn’t matter because regardless of having to had a particular subject, a focal point of the image(the bike), there weren’t any regulations on what i was supposed to be noticing. I’m glad he was in it because now i can relate to Michael Fred’s suggestion (Bogost) of Shore’s photographs being ‘imaginatively liberating’ and Shore’s unironic relation to the subject in the images.
Shore’s photography is conceptualised in the reading as ‘Nothing is overlooked, nothing reduced to anything else, nothing given priority. Instead, everything sits suspended.’
During the process of collecting media my mind was on noticing singular objects that were standing alone or two or more objects that were identical. I knew those objects were going to be given priority and be the focal points but as i actually started taking photos, tsk don’t worry about the objects being the centre, all i hoped was for the object to be posited inside the frame. When the images came out, i looked at them carefully and found that there was no definite focal point on anything. Since the film camera doesn’t have the ability to focus on one particular point nothing was emphasised or reduced. It was perfect, as my own focal point I had set in my head in the process, disappeared when i started observing the results and every little object i noticed in the picture became the subject or the focal point of the photo.