There was this dank red car that used to park in a space directly out front from my house. It just sat there all the time. This weathered, 1980-ish, faux-muscle, Pontiac; with a roof that might have rolled down into some sort of convertible. Details such as these, beyond creating visual cues and associations, are of little actual importance. I didn’t know this at the time.
In the bottom passenger-side corner of the front windshield was a sticker that became of particular importance. It displayed a stoic black and white sketch of the bust of a Rottweiler dog within a crest, and some written text: “Rottweiler Clube”. I began to refer to the car as “the Rottweiler Clube”. I very quickly and effortlessly found myself crafting a narrative around the car, and the person who would own and drive the car, and the size and ferociousness of the Rottweiler that must accompany such a car.
Months later, I found out that the car belonged to an older gentleman who walked with a cane. He looked like he was in rough shape and did not fit the narrative I had persistently fabricated. In addition, there was absolutely no Rottweiler. When fiction and reality collided, I felt honest disillusionment and the pull of seduction that semiotic influence had cast over me. I unconsciously allowed disparate signs and signifiers to influence emotion, which ultimately pushed logic and rationale aside.
The Rottweiler Clube has become a representation of illusion and metaphor. It is a distinct feeling that continually resurfaces, and is the basis for the very idea that shapes the series of photographs I am proposing. It is a reflection, an idea, an overarching motif for the way I envision grouping photographic imagery together in order to hint at, influence, and skew a viewer’s interpretation of interacting photographs through proximity, scale, and purposely linked visual cues. Much like Ken Schles notes in his seminal book A new history of photography, “A photographer doesn’t record reality they, transform and pervert it. That is the very core of creating a mediated reality”. The moment of realization that reality had in fact been “mediated”, and the feeling which it instilled, is the impetus for my project: The Rottweiler Clube.
