Sarah Ipson- Artist Post 16

Arnau Blanch

1. Arnau Blanch is a Catalan photographer who's recent work involved dealing with euphoria and being high on opium. Blanch decided to take a break from his photography projects and found opium and decided that he wanted to use the drug, but still manage to be productive with his photography at the same time. With a use of multiple scans per image, thousands of images were produced,  but those thousand were reduced to a small fifty to sixty total used for the series "Twilight Zone" Out of the fifty to sixty almost all of them were placed on various objects or settings not mounted to a wall, but a solid six photographs were used as photographs plainly placed to the wall. 

2. Blanch's goal of this experiment was to be high on opium because he enjoyed the high, but at the same time still wanted to be productive. Blanch wanted to be able to produce visual images of the high state euphoria and have it be visual to outside viewers. Blanch wanted to do this so the audience can see what he was experiencing at the time. Typically the photographs were made during the high state, there was seldom a time when Blanch was too high to be able to work. Blanch doesn't want to necessarily promote the use of opium or push it on anyone, he just wants people to see what he sees when he's in a high state. Although he is hoping that even just for the time that it takes for people to look at the photographs of the series he hopes that they feel some sort of out of body experience or another kind of emotion they didn't know they could feel.

3. The feeling I get when I look at these photographs is a feeling of wonderment. I'm just in awe of the images and how sharp the images are for being scans. It makes me curious what kind of liquids or objects that were placed in front of the individual screens to be layered on top of each other to produce solid images. I wonder how much time it took to produce each solid image, also the time it must have taken to narrow the thousand(s) down to fifty or sixty total images. On top of that, the fact that there were thousands of images produced and not one of them were the same. It makes me wish that I was able to see them all, not just the ending/ concluding part of the series, considering that each one is different.