Jungle

I was asked to decide the topic for The Sunday Challenge. I chose one of my personal favourite "style", maximalism.

For me maximalism is actually indeed a very personal reaction on minimalistic pictures taken by my Czech photography friend. This happened in March 2013, at My Opera virtual community, which unfortunately became closed in 2014. I saw my friend posting some wonderful minimalistic pictures, and I suddenly started to wonder if there is such an art movement and style as maximalism. I of course searched for it, and found some documents on this, but I also immediately tried to put my own ideas on this into action.

One of my very first pictures on what I understand as maximalism is this:


I had thought about this style for a day or so, and in this very picture I tried to implement several goals. First is to make none of the subjects in the picture more important than the other, to force the gaze to wonder all over the image. Second goal is to make the viewer realize the borders of image by cutting the subjects close to image borders. And as third goal, which I sort of discovered right on the spot, is to add some story and mystery in the image (wheelchair, items on the table).

Later on, I have sort of tried to "elaborate" the style, by intentionally trying to implement also what others have said about maximalism.

On this Sunday's challenge picture I decided to implement several of my favourite styles and ideas. Urban landscape is a jungle for me, and without going into small details, the whole man made world is very opposite for minimalism! Human made landscape is full of all sorts of mess. Traffic signs, construction sites, ugly cars, and somewhat every building looks different, and yet the same. So, we surround ourselves with myriad of items that look the same and yet also different at the same time.

I chose to combine two shots with "difference layer mode" on GIMP, to give this an unnatural ghostly look. I increased the saturation to make this look colourful as a jungle. Then I used perspective correction tool to "incorrect the perspective", to make it really look like seen from above. And finally I made the image round to take away corners where the gaze could "escape".

To summarize what maximalism means to me, is that it is a satire of and praise for the diversity of artefacts (man made structures). Where minimalism is sort of an escapism from the reality, then maximalism is a way to acknowledge the reality and make people to really see it.

Soundtrack by Data Rebel (Danny Howe): soundcloud.com/datarebel/sets/data-rebel-formant-ep