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Sugar paper Theories is the second major project of Jack Latham's in which adopts a documentative style of photography which creates an unsettling feeling of reality in which sinks into his photographs, the line between whether to trust or dismiss photographs is unclear in the modern setting-a grey area-in which is recognised by Latham himself. Latham utilises this and uses it to explore the notion of documentary uncertainty seen within Mandel and Sultan's Evidence in which-with no context-is up for the interpretation of the viewer due to the absence of captions. This same theme can be found here in Sugar paper Theories, except the context is not entirely stripped from the image, the photographs depict revisitations of key places in Reykjavic decades after the Guðmundur and Geirfinnur case in which struck the Icelandic capital in 1974 however their narrative is unclear, perhaps distorted.
The archived photographs used by Latham to juxtapose his coloured reconstructional photographs create a sense of dystopia and isolation -amplified by the use of colourless images - which symbolises that this is a relic of the past, this theme of time remains significant throughout Sugar paper Theories.
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This image depicts the both unedited and edited photographs of Stalin next to a KPD official who was removed from the photograph in order to sway the public opinion. This image provides a perfect example for when looking at fact vs fiction and the grey area in which we are now, as a technologically progressed society, are reluctant to accept as factual information. This idea can be seen in the works of Jack Latham.
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If I were to take these photographs again I would most likely want to edit them in a lighter shade to match the tones found in the archived photographs, my photographs, in the urban setting, were also very different due to the fact that it wasn't snowing and there were a lot of buildings in the way which obstructed the sky which also had a great effect on the brightness of the tones in the photograph. Despite this I am very content with how my response to Sugar paper Theories went and I felt that I learnt a lot about the book itself by taking photographs of my own with a similar notion in mind and perhaps understood what it is about context that makes a photograph uneasy to look at and allows for questions to rise. Context was a key factor in my research of Sugar paper Theories and I now understand better the significance context has in photography as a whole, the effects it has on viewers and how it can effect how we perceive other photographs in the future as the boundaries between fact and fiction and blurred as time goes on.
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I decided to begin with the 8 page zine as it is fairly simple in construction and a good starting point for my experimentation with different zine types, I used photographs from my other project as I wasn't certain on the photographs I wanted to use in the creation of my final zine production. The photos I chose all follow the theme of selective colour and so linked together well in sequence. I chose to begin the zine with a photograph of a door and end the zine with another photo of a door as 'An important feature of a photo zine is visual storytelling', I felt this metaphor of the zine acting as some sort of journey through a building was an interesting concept to implement into the zine. I chose to print the zine on blue sugar paper as I wanted to see how the colours of the photographs would interact with the blue paper, however I found that the effect it had wasn't something I liked as it stripped the image of it's vibrancy and so the selected colours in the photographs blended in more to the surroundings which defeated the point of their purpose, I would not use coloured paper with photos like this in the future. Overall I liked
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