Sketchbook Prompt Twenty-Seven

The Cinemas Project

Photographs and text by Zubin Pastakia

The Cinemas Project visually traces the lives of Bombay’s disappearing single-screen cinema halls.

Once symbols of modernity, the relationship that many of these halls share with the city has changed significantly as colonial Bombay metamorphoses into an increasingly post-industrial Mumbai.

On the one hand, this collection of images is a repository of the architectural form and interior detail of these buildings that range from the classic to the idiosyncratic. These buildings seem to exist today in defiance of the generic aesthetic and cultural experience of the city’s new multiplexes.

However, to view these halls merely nostalgically — and to cast them off to history — would be to deny them a place in the present; our lived present that is in constant play with time past and pending.

As I explored these cinemas, which are simultaneously spaces of dwelling, labour and spectatorship, they revealed themselves to be sites of deep affective investment, traces of which are evident in every nook and corner.

Writing Prompt: Based on the information provided in the imagery itself and the accompanying article, what is the purpose of this photographic series? If you were to create a similar series based on a different, yet also fading architectural form, what would you shoot?

Sketchbook Prompt Twenty-Six

Useless Things

Photographs and text by Leopoldo Plentz

In the series Useless Things I try to explore tiny findings: remains of torn, destroyed, deformed wrappings found on the street. Choosing these wrappings is totally intuitive, just seeing and picking them up, without second thoughts, otherwise reason would take over and then they would be left behind.

The photos were taken in my studio later, without any significant change to the objects — not on purpose, just because the objects made themselves that way.

The images were taken by placing the objects on scanner glass, like photograms at the beginning of photography. This method gave me the coherence and the uniformity of light I desired. A purist may question whether this is photography, even though "photography" means "writing with light".

And my work's making is also contemporary: digital. Guided by my desire to experiment with new paths, along with the freedom granted by technology to edit the images on a computer — where I can impose my will on the images, as I would in a black and white laboratory — I started to investigate the plastic possibilities of color digital photography.

Useless Things is based on the premise that we are the only species that produces trash. Some selection criteria were established: look for shapes with an appearance connected to the human figure; reverse the scale notion, sometimes enlarging the object's original size a hundred times; explore the substance of the objects as paper, plastic, metal; and finally, research color, a new element in my work.

The superfluous, all those things without any value which are generated by mankind in the process and in the consumption of useful goods, materializes in images of what is left behind in our daily life.

While I was producing this essay, there was a basic question always present in my mind: What is useless? Or, from a different perspective: what is essential? By trying to answer these questions I decided to look at the most common things: ghosts of our own existence; to look at what no one notices: beauty and fantasy of those who are carried away by the subtleties of shapes and colors.

And to find in the ordinary, the extraordinary.

Writing Prompt: Is the work presented fine art? Support your opinion with definitive reasoning.

Sketchbook Prompt Twenty-Five

Photographs by Donna Pinckley

Writing Prompt: Choose one of Pinckley's works to produce a formal analysis writing.

Sketchbook Prompt Twenty-Four

Hydrology: Visions in Ice

photographs and text by Douglas Capron

I am inspired by transformations and transitions that occur within nature, people and music.

My photographic opportunities often arrive unexpectedly and I am always fascinated by how our perception of time alternates with various life experiences. I hope my work travels beyond graphic emotional impact and that it will provoke and sustain a subtle dialogue with the viewer.

With my current series, Hydrology: Visions in Ice, my goal was to share with viewers the ephemeral mystery that occurs when water transforms into ice in
a natural setting. The resulting formations are surprisingly dynamic, organically expressive and complex, and pose more questions than are revealed beyond an aesthetic perspective in our relationship with the most basic element that sustains us all.

I was fascinated by the elaborate, unpredictable and beautiful shapes. These formed and morphed on a small lake in a city park over a few days as winter temperatures started to descend and the crystallization process began and then further, gradually evolving into mysterious patterns of solid ice announcing the arrival of winter.

I photographed this project through the use of long exposure times at night to eliminate glare during the day which allowed me to retain detail and texture.


Writing Prompt: What are your reactions to the work presented? When you first viewed the imagery, what did you think it depicted? Did your initial reactions change after discovering the reality of the series through the artist's article?