Project A Rational

I chose to curate an online gallery. I used 10 untitled pictures taken by my brother who is a professional photographer I did this for 2 reasons

1) It made getting permission to use the pictures a lot easier for me as I could simply phone him and ask.
2) I thought if I was going to curate an online gallery the least I could do was promote my brothers work!

I tried multiple site builders and blogs as my platform like adobe lightroom and wordpress.com. In the end I settled for blogger.com for my platform and Flickr.com for my image host.
I mainly used these two sites because of their ease of use, and because I could upload my images onto their servers without having to host the site myself or use a paid service.

The site is made up of the following:
A header with the title of the exhibition, and the artist’s name. I used one of the photos I liked and felt represented the exhibition title best. I did the editing for the header in Photoshop and inserted it through the layout settings in Blogger.

On the top left is an Artist bio, giving the reader a background on the photographer.
Next I created a RSS feed display. The last 3-4 comments made on the photos below are displayed here. This is to encourage people to make comments on the photos and interact with the site. Its also a quick way for people visiting the site to see what others think about the pictures without having to view the individual comment box from each photo. Next to that is a RSS link so that people can also add a RSS feed to a personal RSS reader if they have one.

How and why the photos were displayed:

I chose to place a slide show of the photos for the first post. This gave people a way to see the photo content without having to scroll down through numerous pictures and also let me play around with embedding. The photos were hosted on a flicker account where I made a private group of images to host from. If this was not for assessment purposes I would have got the artist to create a flicker account under his name to host from so that the title on the flicker slideshow show read “Discarded from Pierre Curry on Flickr” rather than “Discarded from Anthony Curry on Flickr”. I didn’t want to be any confusion on who did the work though
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After that is the Artist Statement where the Artist has given some insight into the background of where the photos were taken and what he envisioned they would represent. (It’s also from that statement that the title of the exhibition came from).

I have placed the images in individual blog posts so that people can comment on them, I also made it so anonymous users could post comments on pictures because I find often when people are forced to create to comment on something they don’t bother. And I wanted people to be encouraged to give their opinions on the pictures.

I used a template from a template site for this and played around with the html source a little. I changed the background colour from clear to mid grey as mid grey apparently is meant to be the best background from which to display photos. I tried to edit the middle section to grey as well but had trouble finding the piece of code. I used a very handy site to find the colour codes http://websitetips.com/colortools/sitepro/. I tried very hard to get a list of thumbnails instead of slideshow but I couldn’t get one to work for me. All in all I’m pleased with how my site turned out. I think it’s simple and effective.