"I love it when a plan comes together!"
“When we decode a cookbook, every one of us is a practicing chemist. Cooking is really the oldest, most basic application of physical and chemical forces to natural materials.”
Your project proposal is your “recipe” for success. Your past work and influences will help to situate your intended, final project. Are you a pastry chef or a backyard BBQ griller? Do you prefer home-cooked comfort food? Health food? Haute cuisine? The big question is, of course, “What’s for dinner?” The answer to this question will be partly informed by your very individual, artistic motivations—your personal taste.
To (over) extend the metaphor, your subject matter and key concepts are your main ingredients while your technical choices are your cooking instructions. Ingredients and technique must work together in concert to produce desired results. No amount of expert cooking technique can make up for poor quality ingredients. Conversely, no level of quality ingredients can make up for poor technique.
In Unit 2, we will more fully explore the signifying power of technical and materials choices. By way of introduction, begin thinking about how technique has meaning. As you complete the Technical/Materials Choices content area of your project proposal, be certain that your choices “make sense” in relation to your genre, subject matter, and both your conceptual and aesthetic intentions. These choices should not be made arbitrarily or solely out of convenience or familiarity. Sound technical choices are key to successful project synthesis and resolution.
As an example, consider the technical choice of shooting with a camera-mounted flash. This technique yields a very specific look, and one considered somewhat unflattering—especially when photographing people in low light. When we see a photograph obviously made with camera-mounted flash, we typically reference the roughness of spot news, paparazzi, and/or amateur photography.
One last use of the cooking metaphor: Say that you want to make fashion photographs (cookies) with a camera-mounted flash (jalapeno peppers). Not many cookie recipes call for jalapeno peppers. However, if done right, it could work. Surprising choices can be interesting.
Iconoclastic photographer Terry Richardson shoots fashion and celebrity portraits using a camera-mounted flash (see Figure 3). The results are gritty and hard, yielding a kind of “punk-rock” aesthetic that puts a fresh spin on the genre—“red-eye,” hard shadows, and all.
