So for Project 4 my main focus is getting the distance of the camera from Teenie Harris subjects. Although I have obtained a formula for this using head length, head width, and interocular distance averages, one of my main concerns is that to use to formula I’d have to make a lot of assumptions. A lot of the information about the camera, lens, and context is based of an art historian’s best educated guess, this means that although the information I am generating will be probable, we never know just how true it is. One of my main obstacles right now is working with Xcode, OpenFrameworks, and C++. All of these tools are new to me as of this semester . So although my ideas and algorithms aren’t that complex, it will be a severe challenge for me to write code that integrates libraries, compiles, and runs. Currently I am working on the T-Sne grid and seeing what compositional information i can derive from those.

Most of my inspiration for this project stems from my fascination with the combination of Black Culture to the arts. Teenie Harris’ archive of photographs are one of the best sources of African American history that we have, especially in a city like this which isn’t known for it’s high minority population. Therefore my interest is inspired by the need to give viewers of his pieces more to engage with than sifting through 60,000 pictures. I am hopeful that the data will give insight into the black experience in pittsburgh between the 30s and 70s.

I hope to create a program that will be able identify subjects of the photo and to deduce the relative angles from which teeny harris captures he subjects.