PHOTOGRAPHY

Lucinda Chu, London UK Artist/Photographer

When I ran across Lucinda Chu’s work browsing the web, I thought how amazing it is that a piece of artwork – whether it’s photography, a painting, sculpture, or words – can really have an effect on a person.

First I saw the photo of the girl in the chair. Then I saw the photo of the girl wearing the red dress, crying. Immediately I wanted to know, “What’s wrong with these two women? What happened to them to make then look so sad?” Afterward I noticed they were photographs constructed by LC, a photographer known for her still and moving images, musical scores, musical recordings and performance. I’m assuming her goal was to strike an emotional cord with her audience. As we all know, an artist’s intent (whether it’s using words or images) is to persuade and create an effect on his/her audience using one of the three rhetorical techniques: ethos, pathos, or logos.

It’s interesting to note my visual process, which can be found in Visual Communication: Images with Messages written by Paul Martin Lester. The visual process is how we perceive what we see and hear; it’s a continuous cycle that involves: sense, select, perceive, remember, learn, and know. “The more you know, the more you sense. The more you sense, the more you select. The more you select, the more you perceive. The more you perceive, the more you remember. The more you remember, the more you learn. The more you learn, the more you know.”

So, instead of only observing the photographs, I was intent on finding the meaning behind them so I could perceive what I was observing, to learn from it, and remember what I saw, how it made me feel, who the artist is, and the artist’s intent to store it away in my memory.