Paul Shambroom

My overall reaction to Paul Shambroom’s lecture was positive as well as influential to my own personal work. The way that he considered his photography as pure artwork and observation rather than more narrative photojournalism was a concept that was clear to me and I believe I have been trying to personally focus of my photography in a similar point of view. I found his photography to be impeccably clean and had a surreal tone of voice to me, maybe because of subject matter being either unreal (nuclear bombs) or too real to us (small town council meetings/office-cubical environment). I really enjoyed listening to him lecture in general, it was impressive how knowledgeable he is about his subjects as well as his seriousness about the projects he sets out for himself. I also appreciated his advice on gaining access to restricted locations.

Alix Pearlstein

After attending the Alix Pearlstein lecture, I have to admit I left a little confused. Performance art is something foreign to me, so I don't think I really grasped the concepts behind her work. Her earlier work seemed to be poorly crafted, and I found it hard to appreciate, although I found it amusing. The use of basic sound clips for dialogue and soundtrack were distracting and too familiar for me to understand their relevance. Her ideas behind character interaction and camera movement were interesting to me alone, but combined with the actual performance and dialogue I was overwhelmed with confusion. All in all, I didn't find this lecture to be personally inspiring on any level, but perhaps it just wasn't my cup of tea.