‘The Charitable Times’
Compassion Fatigue:
Noun.
An indifference to charitable appeals on behalf of suffering people, experienced as a result of the frequency or number of such appeals.
As a combined honors student, there has always been a natural influence of other subjects in my photographic work, with ‘The Charitable Times’ encompassing a notable journalistic influence.
‘The Charitable Times’ is an installation combining pieces of found imagery and text, as well as my own elements of created imagery and text. Its aim is to portray the mixed media influence on charity advertising images we are exposed to on a daily basis. The text and images pose as an ironic response to the process of photo-manipulation and its effects on contemporary, digitally aware audiences.
The piece accumulates different textures and elements of compassion fatigued images, combining both child and animal cruelty advertisements, newspaper poetry, (which highlights key words that can be interpreted on numerous levels in connection to the ideas of misleading manipulated charity images and the negative impacts of such manipulations), current slang phrases - #firstworldproblems, and current newspaper advertisements, which highlight the first world issues of not having enough money to donate to charity and yet consumerism of material objects becomes dominant in our typical western lifestyles.
The process was developed over time, much like the concept of compassion fatigue and the influences our digital climate has had on our exposure to charity images (and imagery on the whole).
The piece acts as a materialized form of an exploration into the digitally layered and masked photo-manipulations that dominate much of the advertising world.
The collection of simplified frames acts as a representation of the layers used in Photoshop during the process of photo-manipulation. When observed as a whole, the aim is to represent the entire concept together as one installation. However, when examined individually, they act as a single layer of concept, signifying one of the particular messages linked with the concept.
