After exploring a lot of differing techniques and processes I felt it was time to start thinking about how they could be employed with an effective contextual result. I felt that the images I had been creating were saying a lot about contemporary times and how we see and experience images. One theme that I had been consciously thinking about in connection to this project was this new phenomenon of click-bait. Im sure than any person using Facebook or any social media has been in the past year will have been exposed to click bait even if they are not aware of it. The main offender for the most part is BUZZFEED. Theses catchy prompt headlines have one aim and that is for you to click their link. Often theses titles will be wildly spurious or just intentionally controversial but more often than not they are terribly annoying.
As a quick exercise into the unimaginativeness of click bait, I created theses telling examples using a ‘click bait link generator’, if you can believe such thing exists. So here are 12 times Tommy Harpin tried his hardest to be amusing:
Why Tommy Harpin's photography is destroying america
10 ways marketers are making you addicted to Tommy Harpin's photography
11 things the media isn't telling you about Tommy Harpin's photography
How Tommy Harpin's photography can make you filthy rich
guns don't kill people -- Tommy Harpin's photography kills people
Why Tommy Harpin's photography sucks
10 Tommy Harpin's photography secrets the pros won't tell you
10 Tommy Harpin's photography myths busted
Why you should forget everything you learned about Tommy Harpin's photography
8 things the media hasn't told you about Tommy Harpin's photography
Tommy Harpin's photography dies every minute you don't read this article
12 reasons Tommy Harpin's photography is the end of the world as we know it
Regardless from making silly headlines about my self I thought that there was an interesting path to start to explore in relation to theses articles that seemed to be appearing all over the web. there were two that partially caught my attention as I saw an opportunity for images to be made.
27 Incredibly Beautiful Places You Won’t Believe Actually Exist
I will start of with this title and introduce the other in another post for now, but one of the most popular posts on Buzzfeed was this list of places you wouldn't believe exist. I when I saw this post I knew that I had to utilise the ‘Erase’ process that I had been working on. Instead of places you wouldn't believe exist I wanted to turn this into to places that you could never believe existed. In some of the images i kept repeating the the process or erasing until the image was barely any detail left, where as others i retained some of the visual information when i felt it was appropriate.. In this sense i felt that the work was closer to Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Erased Van Kooning’ than any of the previous work that i had been creating. Overall what was created were these perplexing mixes of shapes, colour and abstract form. I feel that the images are working well and I've started to engage with the idea of appropriation in an effective manner. There is a humorous aspect to the series and one that stems from postmodern irony. I feel that my work its self has returned from being quite brutal and harsh to experience to something that feels a lot more engaging.