A Response to Jason Salavon

I find Jason Salavon’s work to be extremely interesting because of the abstract quality to each piece and the concept behind it, such as with his series entitled 100 Special Moments. Each of the images that compose this series, I believe, serve as a clear reflection of the society we live in today – a society that does everything within its power to gain and maintain complete control over media and its distribution/presentation. What is also interesting about this series is that it reflects a sense of continuity and similarities in the life experiences most people choose to document and give significance to, in this case weddings, graduation, Christmas photos with Santa Claus, and little league baseball photos. In the case of Salavon’s series Every Playboy Centerfold, when observing these photos for the first time, they may be very abstract and unrecognizable to some; it is only when reading the title do we begin to impose meaning on the photographs. What is interesting to me about this is the fact that modern society and media give so much recognition and places an immense emphasis on sexuality and nudity, yet when we are presented with a composite image of hundreds of the iconic Playboy centerfolds together, suddenly, we cannot recognize or understand what we are seeing. I find these images composite images to represent reality far more than the individual photographs used to create the final image because it illustrates an evolution in photography over the course of thirty years. I question that came to my mind when analyzing these photographs, was why do we choose to place importance on certain categories of photography? What is it about these particular subjects portrayed in photography that we love to exploit and photograph over and over, despite the fact that we are essentially documenting the same situation over and over, just with different sets of people? It is because of this that I find Salavon’s composite images to be so captivating, realistic, and powerful.