Week 6: Noticing The Ignored
- Jordon Powers
- 32 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Design is sitting, and observing occasionally. And that's what this week taught me. Sometimes it's not about just picking up a paintbrush and/or mouse and designing for hours, but rather sitting and seeing what life has to offer. Gaining inspiration from the calmness of the outdoors, the world around us, and the people about.
In my reflection of this week, it made me think.. how often do I actually do that? I'm constantly scrambling with a Red Bull in hand to get a thought out of my head in order to design, and rarely do I just sit there and just observe these days. I used to shoot a lot with a SonyA6000, now I barely do.. it helped me see the world around me and document that experience as well. Maybe I should pick it back up again in order to notice what's really around me.
Lecture
This week's lecture can be summarized into just three words:
Seeing, Looking and Capturing.
And it begged the question:
How do you look, research, and record to find a unique insight to a problem?
The lecture went on to speak about The Most Radical Gesture, by Sadie Plant. The 'derive' and 'drift' which acted as a playful creation of all relationships.
There was the Naked City, where the maps of Paris we're cut up to form as an experiment. My second favorite topic brought up this week.. I enjoyed the idea that it had similar themes to a collage as shown in an earlier research topic I had done.
As for my favorite portion of this entire lecture, the film of The Girl Chewing Gum took that cake. It had me realize that what I was starring at hadn't been him actually directing the individuals at least a handful of times. It's amazing what a bit of confidence, tonality, and an astute attention to what's going on around you can make. Even for a film so experimental and short, in my head it lasted a lot longer than I had thought. Kudos to the director/experimentalist for making me double-take.
Come to think of it, I suppose it's worth wondering if I should do a similar experiment in the future with my camera..the possibilities!
Research
When it comes to research, this week had me thinking about the subject Noticing The Ignored.. how could it be represented in modern media?
A page that instantly came to my head was Humans of New York.
I had been watching their content and interviews for years, until about 2020. Where I seemingly completely forgot about them until now. Certainly thankful the topic this week made me ignite my passion for their interviews once again.
One video that stuck out to me was this one..
It literally describes noticing the ignored to a tee. And not just your average person, but someone who is ignored by modern society on a daily basis. Tossed aside like a bird that fell out of their nest. Not only do I feel horrible for this individual, but it makes me want to go help at a soup kitchen, give food to the next homeless person, or even just sit there and listen to their story.
I think a lot of people resonated with this interview rather than just me, as it has over a million likes. What Humans of NY are and have been doing is providing exposure to the 'ignored' like no other. Technology and the rise of it have put a footprint on the people who were once gum underneath the shoe. And in a twisted, beautiful way, that's a positive thing.
This is a form of art and videography that has stuck with me for a long time. The pureness, the grit, the openness to interviewing anyone and everyone. What HONY is doing is remarkably special. It shows the power social media has and what a creative eye can do if they just sit and observe.
Task
This week's research task was..
Research designers, artists and writers who have explored experimental methods in order to reflect on their relationship within a given area. How do people pay attention to the unnoticed? How can we use recording tools to capture information? How can you really look at the environment from multiple perspectives? How can you capture and record places in multiple ways?
Why not answer this question by diving deeper into who Humans of NY are?
It all started with one photographer, Brandon Stanton. Back in 2013, he would photograph portraits for a variety of people around New York for a census. He then began to speak with a lot of these individuals. One thing led to another, and he would record them, post the clips of raw, unedited conversations and stories about their lives. Turns out.. a lot of people wanted to listen to the ignored.
Ten million followers later, multiple books, awards and stardom in such simple clips. It's an art form caught by doing one thing in my opinion.. documenting the unnoticed.
There's a certain level of beauty in mundane, everyday life. With social media as the microphone, people will listen. All walks of life watch these videos, there are heaps of perspectives to be drawn from just a minute or two video. Brandon encapsulated this first by taking photographs of New York.. this transformed into being the voice of New York.
References
Humans of New York. Brandon Stanton. (n.d.). https://brandonstanton.com/humans-of-new-york
John Smith. (n.d.). https://johnsmithfilms.com/selected-works/the-girl-chewing-gum/
Humans of new york on Instagram: “Every system starts to fail.” Instagram. (n.d.). https://www.instagram.com/p/DYUzHIRtrzH/?hl=en
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