Allgemein – Page 4 – Reflecting Locations

2nd Assignment Morena Buser

GRAY

While working in the color darkroom, I started to think about Zurich, my relationship with this city and what could I present to you.

There, the assignment was how to do from a color negative a black and white print.

Well, to the ones who don’t know, a color enlarger has 3 filters: Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. Each filter goes from 0 until 199.

If you turn all the filters off your print will be black. It means that you will have no color. If you turn all the filters on in the maximum, the print will be white. The colors are so dense, that it doesn’t let light goes though the filters.

So, for a GRAY, you will have to find the balance with all those three filters.

And here started my fascination about the Gray.

To find a balance.

I started to do a little research about Gray. And what I found is very similar my feelings about Zurich.

Gray is darker than white

Gray is lighter than black

Neutral, Pure

Shy and boring

Unflashy, indifference and modesty

Gray is the color of conformity.

Not having any personality of its own, it adapts to any other color. It will look either dark or light, depending upon the color next to it.

Gray is a color without a color.

Stability

Zurich is my gray. My gray zone.

Switzerland in 80s

In my childhood, Hong Kong people always named food or commodity with Switzerland, for instance, cookies, candies, package food, etc. In addition, their logos were represented in the landscape of nature environment, such as snowy mountain like mont blanc. As a kid, we didn’t have any idea where Switzerland or Zurich is, the image of a country was being constructed through smell, taste or package of snacks, though the landscape had nothing to do with the candy. Later, I realised those food brands manufactured their products in rural area in Hong Kong, which migrated all their production lines to Mainland China. Indeed, they keep their brand in associated with Switzerland. Recently, I am working on my own research project on Communist film after WWII until early 80s; apart its propaganda part, protagonists always struggled with tough nature environment. Perhaps this is part of the reasons that the imagery of Switzerland was idolised and reflected in products.

Panoramas

Visiting the School of Creative Media yesterday I was surprised to find myself in a pretty amazing machine called Gallery 360, which creates an immersive and interactive environment that is one way of representing remote locations. The form of the installation, the 360 degree rotunda, actually goes back to the 19th century panorama. The panorama then was one of the most influential forms of visual entertainment and consisted of a giant painting often combined with extra scenery in front of it. Switzerland has a famous panorama in Lucerne, the Bourbaki that shows a scene from the Franco-Prussian War.