Monday, February 14, 2011

Sample Post #1 - Irina Werning's Back to the Future



Irina Werning's fascinating series of photographic portraits, "Back to the Future" gives an interesting example of defamiliarization. It's very conceptual--she photographed people by recreating the look and pose of their early childhood photographs--but there's a formal component as well. By painstakingly recreating the "look" of each photo, she's making us think about the ephemeral quality of time, memory and photography--how we hold on to our past and our past selves.



The juxtaposition of past and present also forces us to slow our gazes down and look at, in great detail, the features of each face, and how time has changed them. That's defamiliarization in a nutshell.

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