honorable mention
Ryan Gould united states
title
POV
Photographs have long been regarded as unmediated copies of reality, however visual rhetoric suggests that images conceal ideological mystification.
Language, on the other hand, evokes mental images. The mental images produced resonate with our previous experiences with the associated text. This may be lived experience or virtual. In either case, we often neglect to question where certain associations have been formed.
This body of work, titled POV, situates itself within the framework of pornographic click-bait. If one has come to understand words like ‘wet’, ‘oral’, ‘hole’, etc. to be inherently sexual, do we then—when primed with these words or their visual counterpart—activate some sort of erotic charge?
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entry description
I’m interested in epistemology; specifically, I’m interested in how language and images interact and impact our understanding of the world.Photographs have long been regarded as unmediated copies of reality, however visual rhetoric suggests that images conceal ideological mystification.
Language, on the other hand, evokes mental images. The mental images produced resonate with our previous experiences with the associated text. This may be lived experience or virtual. In either case, we often neglect to question where certain associations have been formed.
This body of work, titled POV, situates itself within the framework of pornographic click-bait. If one has come to understand words like ‘wet’, ‘oral’, ‘hole’, etc. to be inherently sexual, do we then—when primed with these words or their visual counterpart—activate some sort of erotic charge?
about the photographer
Ryan Harrison Gould (b. 1986) was born in Miami, Florida. His parents were importers of lithographic prints and introduced him to the arts at an early age. For Gould, the process of creating imagery begins with deconstructing the implications of contemporary sexuality. This body of work, titled POV, focuses on identifying the pornographic industry as the organization of power that informs and constructs the limits of our sexual imagination, and through its proliferation, has created a hyper-sexualized world. Drawing influence from popular keywords found in pornographic search results, Gould highlights the non-sexual that has become eroticized through language.back to gallery