Q&A on DeadPan Photography

1. Does the DeadPan’s detached, distant, analytical, banal approach somehow distill our cultural mood?

            I find that the DeadPan Style does indeed distill at least one aspect of our cultural mood in a way that it highlights how our society has a sort of detachment from the world around it. Specifically, one example of this would be how when we attend an event, be that a concert, a wedding, an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, etc., it has become a societal norm to view our experience through a device, such as cellphones or cameras. The result of this is a personal detachment from the experience – we add a barrier or filter between ourselves and the subject that is seeking our attention. I believe that now more than ever, the DeadPan style of photography is an adequate representation of the disjointed approach we have with the world around us and how we choose to experience it, that being detached and superficial.

2. Does it represent the way people feel disconnected from one another, even if technology makes them more interconnected than ever? 

            I believe that this style of photography does represent the way people feel disconnected from one another, despite the façade of interconnectedness that technology today possesses. While many of us participate in some form of social media and post pictures of ourselves, the places we go, and the foods we like to eat, there is a superficial and impersonal quality to each one. Instead of communicating these experiences one on one with those that we care about or even invite others to partake in these experiences with us, we simply launch these pictures we have absent mindedly taken into the digital world and simply hope that people look at and like them. Even though we have access to endless pictures of friends and family and people that we don’t even know, we can simply pass over them and ignore a photograph of what could quite possibly have been a meaningful moment to the individual that took the photo.

3. And is DeadPan photography a refuge or reflection of emotion when we are overwhelmed with terrorism, war, and ecological and natural disaster? 

            This question seems very conflicting to me when considering that DeadPan photography is stripped of all emotional content or anything that can be interpreted by the viewer. As a result of this, I feel that this style of photography, when applied to tragedies as listed in the above question, is more so of a refuge of emotion in reaction to these occurrences because it allows people to quickly capture a moment in time and invest all of their emotions at once into that one photograph. At the same time, depending on who has taken the photograph and who is observing it, especially if they can identify with the subject being portrayed, this could also be a reflection of emotion.

4. Does its uniformity of the style reflect our mass-produced, chain-store world?

            Depending on the subject portrayed in the photograph, I believe that there is a parallel between the uniformity of this style and the mass production of objects in our world, where an individual product loses its individuality and personality when shadowed by the thousands of duplicates created alongside it. The first example I think of is Andy Warhol’s interpretation of the Race Riots, where by taking a single photo this massive political and racial undertones and replicating it over and over, the meaning within the photograph is diminished and we become desensitized to the subject. The uniformity of the DeadPan style achieves the same affect where we begin to focus on the sameness and the quantity of the duplication as a whole versus individual details and meaning that are drowned by its reproduction.

5. Has our ability to document just about anything made us do just that?

            I believe that there is potential to highlight our mass production-based world, but because of our ability to spread information everywhere and anywhere has proven itself to be more of an advantage than a way of down playing a situation than cheapening it. I do not believe that our ability to document anything necessarily reflects he uniformity of the DeadPan style, but if that information were to be concentrated in one location and depending on the information being brought to attention, then there is naturally the potential to desensitize people to it, due to the fact that they may be seeing it everywhere.