Art Talk: Saah

I went to Saah's talk on his media work.

Saah started his talk with a brief background. He graduated SMCM with a degree in Philosophy and English, though he had an interest in film and he took photography. After graduating, he worked for a commercial company and started shooting at night. He had not shot in approximately five years. He tried to combine an Old Hollywood feel and new corporate by mixing light. He looked at space as psychological closure, experimenting with light and vantage point to obtain a cinematic quality. He discovered that the feel was mostly due to light temperature. 

From this point, he worked on learning how to color the frame in the selected environment using projection lights to change the hue of the subject he was shooting. Along this line of thought, Saah expressed that he was interesting in looking at how the limited color palettes changed the dynamic of the space and how it was described. He used filters when shooting to bring the colors closer together.  He later expressed an admiration for the plasticity of painting, how one could split perspective and essentially build a landscape. He also admired the old cinema/photograph look of rounded corners. 

Saah gained a lot of inspiration from film. His photos are taken without looking through the lens and they are hybrid - pieces taken from many different shots. His work, now, is sampled and constructed, put together with a kind of frenetic energy. He finds details in different shots that he finds beautiful and combines the beauty from the different photos into the same, fitting the different elements together to form an entirely different composition. This is something I did not pick up on right away, while he was talking. I had been admiring the images and was, indeed, too wrapped up in the colors, etc. that I did not notice that he had said they were false. At first, since I had been operating under the understanding that they had been shot, felt betrayed. As he continued, I found that is methodology interesting. Though I think that it takes away the randomness and eccentricity and recognition of this fact from the nature of photography. It is a constructed beautiful but also speaks to how well the artist understands the nature of reality, as none of the images were shockingly too perfect.