Victory

A Photo Essay by Jeff Feldmann

Introduction

This essay is a compilation of photos representing the victory states of various games, specifically games where the opponent is another player. There are many kinds of games, from casual party games, to sports, each of which has its own victory condition. From such a variety of games, I was able to come across a very large variety of victory conditions, some having a quite clear and defined victor, and other conditions with a quite more arbitrary seeming and sometimes even unclear winner. I attempted to have a collection of photos representing a variety of different games to show the diversity of games and their various final states.

Artist Statement

This Photo Essay proved to be a bit more challenging than I first anticipated. It is much harder to take pictures of a wide variety of games personally than I first anticipated. The ability to use photos from other people was helpful, but it still kept my options quite limited. Due to my primary goal in this essay was to show the last moment of a game, it proved to be quite difficult to find photos that met that criteria. This led me to revise my essay to being the end of the games I selected, instead of just the last moment for all of them.

One issue I came across was the limitation of not having text in my photos to help portray my point. With my goal to show what games look like when they are finished, it proved to be quite difficult to portray some more modern games, such as videogames, where the victory state shows you that you have won with text. To get around this I tried to avoid most of the games that did this, and in the one that did, I showed the instant the game was won, before the victory text appeared. I feel like this limitation didn’t hurt me as much as it helped me in the end. It helped me show that a videogame victory is somewhat cryptic to an outsider who knows nothing about the game if there was no victory screen.

Another issue to overcome was trying to have photo-related design that incorporated things such as repetition. My overriding theme was to juxtapose the different victory states of the games, so making all of my photos have a similar style or overarching color scheme would have hurt my cause. To get around this, I attempted to have photos more stand alone, and a bit more cryptic. This was accomplished by treating each photo as a different small presentation of the game it represents. This allowed me to focus my efforts on making each photo interesting for its own merits. One example of this is my more simple coin flip photo. I tried make it different from the other photos, while still being interesting. One method I used was finding the wood surface for the high level of repetition in pattern. I also tried to use the rule of thirds when placing the coin. After making the photo black and white and adjusting some levels on the photos, I found my boring picture of a quarter to be an interesting photo to look at.

In the process of having a variety of different styles of edits that I did, I also found that sometimes it was more effective to do something more dramatic to the photo that would lower the quality of it than to try to make the picture look as good as I could. This led me to try a much wider variety of edits than I anticipated. That being said the most effective edits I did seemed to be cropping and editing sharpness of photos. After those primary edits, I was able to stylize each photo individually as it was more interesting to look at by itself due to the rule of thirds. This also led me to see what kinds of patterns I could emphasize. If I were to do this project again, would try to do more edits that were more destructive of the photos to portray my ideas more directly.

Works Cited

Boxing Knockout Drawing. N.d. Http://pixshark.com/. Web. 5 Feb. 2015.

<http://desdeelring.com/Content/feed/1416334836/boxing-knock-out-2023717258.jpg>.

Celebration. 2015. Dispatch.com. Web. 08 Feb. 2015.

<http://buckeyextra.dispatch.com/content/graphics/2015/01/celebration.jpg>.

Collapsed. 2013. Http://community.runnersworld.com/. Web. 05 Feb. 2015.

Final 2013 Fencing WCH FMS-IN. 2013. Wikipedia.org. Web. 30 Jan. 2015.

Marathon-kiprotich. 2012. Http://hereandnow.wbur.org/. Web. 08 Feb. 2015.

13 by 13 Game Finished. 2006. Http://commons.wikimedia.org/. Web. 2 Feb. 2015.