Project Plan and Research of Jason Horowitz

 Upon beginning my work, I first focused on documenting the actions of hands and feet, so as to bring significance to what would otherwise be considered as mundane, routine actions. Though the some of the shortcomings of my first project were that the piece seemed to disjointed by focusing on different hands and feet doing different actions but at different points of the day. In addition to that, I also didn't quite zoom in enough to make the actions seem more so larger than life. There seemed to be this awkward repetitive nature of simply showing shots of feet walking or hands moving and I didn't at all intend for it to be repetitiveness and mundane. I also did not experiment too much with angling the shots and placing the camera in different environments.

 So with that in mind, I tried to improve my work in my second shot by experimenting in three different ways: a different or interesting environmental, obscuring of the camera lens, and angling. I also expanded the subject matter from being simply hands and feet to covering different parts of the body like the face, eyes, lips, fingers, etc. I also experimented with placing the camera on my hand or shin so as to capture the view of the world as if through the eyes of one's hands and feet. I took stills and videos of my face immersed in water, the inside of a hand shake, the view from my roller skates as I was skating around my room, and the image of lips fogging the camera lens.

 From this experiment, I learned of the artist, Jason Horowitz whose work I find similar to my goals for the project. The photograph and portraits that he literally zoom in onto subject and in doing so the features of the subject become the more significant subject matter of the piece. For example, I find inspiration from his "Drag", "Corpus", and "Corpora" portfolio collection because they take an extremely close-up look into the features of the subject and make them significant. He makes their features characters--he illustrates their lives. These vivid images depict regular people, routine actions, as well as perfectly unique styles and lifestyles and creates larger than life images that almost glorify such things that would be considered plain and ordinary in the subjects' lives.

 So for my final project, I plan to focus my subject matter on different parts of the body and zoom in on them as they go through the daily routines starting from the morning and ending at night. I want to show how their actions and interactions with other parts of the body and the objects they are coming into contact with. I plan to use a lot of angling and zooming to capture the essence of the subject matter. I also plan to experiment with the camera in different environments. For example, when one is washing their hands, I want to capture the action from the perspective of the sink looking up at the hands. Another example is when one is breathing, I want to show the nostrils and how they flair and allow it to fog the camera so that there is a sense of feeling invoked. I will use angling so as to show the insides of hand shakes, the embracing of lips when they kiss, the tango of tongue and teeth when food is being chewed and swallowed. Like the work of Horowitz, my work seems a bit disturbing with such an enlarged and intimate view of actions but again, this is simply meant to bring life to these actions that are overlooked, mundane, simple. To make simple subject matters into people and give them life and significance as well as possibly a story--that is my goal.