I'm taking an Art History seminar on contemporary photography this semester, which I hope will help me plan my summer research project. Photography, of course, is completely reliant on vision. What I want to do is use photography to emulate the other senses, smell in particular, but touch and taste as well. I've noticed two main ways that photographers seem to work to "confuse" the eyes. One is to provide an environment so rich and full of stuff to see, that the eye doesn't know how to process it (Andreas Gursky does pictures like this: http://www.yardwear.net/blog/content/binary/andreas-gursky2.jpg). If, when you look around the photograph, your eyes don't know what to make of it, is there some way that the artist can force the other senses to compensate for what vision is missing? Can we mimic the other senses visually, or do we need to use enhancement that actually invokes the other senses - textured pieces stuck to a photograph, microencapsulation so that the photographs actually have a scent, etc.? Or, rather than give the eye so much to see that it doesn't know what to do with it, would it be more effective to limit what the eye can do, so that the other senses feel like perhaps they can do better? Jean-Marc Bustamantes pictures are a good example. His cypress pictures "eliminate the sense of visual depth". His tableaus seem to be wide, empty expanses that the eye wanders around, but doesn't really find anything to focus on (http://image-imatge.org/images/cache/220bfd7cfa9d098fc41a2cdd3080c78d.jpg). If the eye can't settle on something to see, will the other senses be able to jump in and process the images, or will the observer just lose interest in the image and walk away? How can the photographer encourage the viewer to think with the other senses when "looking" at a photograph? Before I begin my big photography project this summer, I need to find at least my own answer to this question...

In other news, I've had a long couple of months of winter moroseness, which is always coupled by general malaise and low self-esteem. But, I did exercise my vanity a little yesterday and play with Photoshop for a new, springy profile pic: