I wanted to play around with Motif #1, which is apparently the “most often-painted building in America,” or at least often claimed to be. I probably would have given up on this in a larger project after having trouble finding a public domain / CC-licensed photograph of it, but I settled for one a bit too small for my liking (600×800.)

The reason this building is painted so much is due — in addition to its location, good lighting, and the fact that it’s in Rockport which has often boasted artist’s colonies — to the idea that it’s an almost archetypal New England fishing shack, down to the color. This attempt to evoke the past through a sort of classical aesthetics made me want to reread Prelinger, especially his note about how “remixing is estrangement […] and yet the raw material remains familiar and recognizable. It’s at once a subversive and reassuring process.” My sort of generic idea was just to recolor or decolorize the shed (which was relatively easy, though the reflection not so much), but I wanted to play with Photoshop a little more and also defamiliarize the Motif a little more severely, so I’ll show a few more in addition to that.

motif7

We could think of this one in relation to Barron’s discussion of the idea of colorizing WW2 film. Colored film — if “authentic” — feels closer to our lived experience, while artificially coloring that film would be a betrayal of the material’s documentary/evidentiary authority, even though color film from the era exists and it would only bring us closer to representing what life was actually like, since most of us experience reality in color. If Motif No. 1 is famous, and famously red, what does stripping that color do? Presenting a black-and-white image of this would be boring,  but does the contrast here have an effect? I’m not sure. I do find it aesthetically pleasing.

motif1

Similar playing with the aesthetic “striking red building” trope, although I couldn’t fix the water/reflection in this one. I almost want the effect here to be experiencing this photo as a digital artifact — the building itself was so clearly wiped out (painted over?) and replaced with an unnatural, intuitively recognizable-as-digital cherry red, or maybe I should say #FF0000. Here the digital format of the experience is a disruption of expectations.

I played around more with basic Photoshopping here — including replacing the building with an image  of the Photoshop “transparency layer” gray-and-white checkboxes, which got me thinking about signaling and framing a piece of material vs. the actual material itself (in this case, the checkboxes signaling transparency more effectively, at least in our current digital era, than actually leaving it transparent could have been.) The image I’d planned to present had thin strips of each of these “effects,” almost a collage of each of those layers, and the overall result was jarring; it might have veered too much into sheer glitch aesthetic, though, and more importantly that’s the only image that seems to have been messed up somehow when I saved (I could pull another copy from the original .psd, because you have to always always always save your .psd file, but I think I like the ones I’m presenting here more.)

I then had the idea of completely reworking the “Motif”: replacing it (since erasing it would be beyond my Photoshop skills entirely) with another building, preferably one that signaled modernity in the way that this signals “classic New England.” So I searched for a few entirely unscientifically conducted surveys on what the most-photographed building in the U.S. was, and the answer seemed to be, of course, the Guggenheim in NYC:
motifgugg
Ceci n’est pas une motif. (I could have gone with something iconic, the Eiffel Tower or the Sydney Opera House, something very modern and very recognizable, but I wanted something American; I was considering that one building on the MIT campus, please mentally insert whichever weird MIT building pops into your head first, but maybe that would have been too parochial; this was a good one for the shape of the building and provides exactly the visual discongruity I wanted, although there’s the obvious concern about deciding that an art museum’s exterior is the “most photographed” building in the U.S. based on geotagging.)

Some fun facts to leave you thinking about authenticity, replicating a “real” material object through visual imagery (of whatever medium), and the artifice sometimes involved with that: this historical building was destroyed entirely in the Blizzard of ’78 and they rebuilt it. My next step working along these lines would be to try to find a shot of it (the original or the rebuilt one) from a similar vantage point to the photos of its destruction and try to splice those together.

They also currently use a red paint that looks weathered even when first applied.