Semester Summary

With one hand the past moves us forward, and with the other it holds us back. I did not realize how big a part of my coursework this phrase would become, but it certainly has. I have endeavored to explore the things that are central parts of the life that I live, and question why the things so familiar and close to us in this world so often go unnoticed, and ultimately fall apart. To get to the point where I even understood what this is that I am doing, if it really is, took a lot of trial and even more error. I had to experiment and question and hone and practice and lose more often than I actually won until I got to the point where I am now, which is still just the beginning of an ongoing process.

True not just in the Studio, my academic work was challenging as well, and also aided greatly in hammering out my direction. Reading texts and articles, I was able to deepen my understanding of not just what I was doing, but of those who have created work that is in some way similar to mine, be it in final product or conceptual idea.

JANUARY

After the first residency I spent a couple weeks tracking down a mentor and working on my first paper. I ultimately ended up working with Dan Torop out of New York City, and in the beginning of the semester I was still very focused on Winthrop beach, and wanted to continue to explore it. I went there armed with three or four different cameras, a variety of film, and at different times of the day than I had done previously. I spent a lot of time having my film processed, and then scanning my negatives. I would then manipulate them digitally, and was combining multiple images together.

I liked the effect in some of what I was getting, but it left me wondering where else I was going to go with it. As much as I wanted to continue to explore the beach, it was starting to feel a little worn out to me. As a result, my attention started to focus on other potential subject matter.

FEBRUARY

February was a difficult month for me, both academically and in regard to my studio work. I was writing my first research paper in the program, and was struggling to tie together all of the themes I wanted to. [1]The challenge this presented me with, coupled with the limitations of length placed upon me, gave me good insight into how to make my points more succinct and coherent, without sacrificing my point or meaning.

In my photography, I started the month out still at Winthrop Beach, and was becoming increasingly more disengaged with it. I met with Dan for the first time around this point, and was starting to seriously consider shifting to new places/subject matter. I also began to consider what it was I wanted to be doing, and how I wanted to accomplish these things.[2]

MARCH

During this month, I broke away from the beach completely, and started a whole new body of work. I began what would become two separate series, one consisting of an exploration of my world, and another that I did not quite understand. I began to take notice of the things that usually go overlooked in my life, and took note of why they interested me. At this stage it was just beginning to evolve, and I wasn’t really sure why these things were attracting my attention quite the way they were.

The Second series was one that started with just a whim of an idea.[3] I began making photographs off of my television screen, and found it very engaging. There were a lot of interesting questions that arose when I started, and it opened the door to quite a bit of discussion. The concept of making digital High Resolution images from an old analog television screen has been quite revealing. When zoomed in, all one can see are the basic red, green and blue components that make up the bigger picture.[4]

During this time I was looking into the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto, and reading Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment, as well as Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. All of this work was fueling my curiosity about technology, time and how we experience/view both. These thoughts stayed with me, and caused me to seek out more work and artists in the same vein.

APRIL

During April, I focused a lot of my studio work closer to home, literally. I began shooting not just things that were part of my life, but the things most central to it. I spent a lot of time shooting different parts of the interior of my home, as well as my car, both inside and out. I began to question what the concept of “home” means, and how each one of us has a potentially radically different definition of it from the next. I came to realize as I moved forward that these things are not just central parts of my life, but are also roadblocks in it, though not just literally. It is better explained as being about the things that both help us move forward, but can also slow us down and even hold us back. I realized that my work at Winthrop Beach was most certainly tied into this, being a place that I likened this feeling to, but was certainly not enough to be an entire body of work in its own right.

The first shift that occurred technically in my work was from a mix of grayscale and color to all color, both film and digital.[5] I realized that as much as I may enjoy black and white, it was not working for these particular projects. Color has so much to do with the visual language that I am using, that the black and white images seemed to be lacking some of the strength of their color counterparts. The next shift was, I feel looking back, inevitable.

Around this time, I abandoned using film, and went totally digital. It was allowing me to yield more images in less time, and was helping me gain steam on the ideas I wanted to develop. Part of why I like film was that I didn’t have the same immediacy while shooting, and therefore did not try to censor myself, or edit while I was shooting. After tailoring the way I do things digitally, and denying myself the ability to look at my images as I shoot them, I started to find that I was producing a much better body of work. It increased my ability to create images overall by leaps and bounds.

Academically, I was reading a lot more about many contemporary photographers, and discovered Atta Kim and Chris McCay, among others, whose work caught my eye. Their forays into the exploration of time manipulation as a means of altering both the meaning and appearance of their photographs was very thought provoking, and led me into the month of May with a new amalgamation of my current projects.

MAY

I began doing some work that I feel has definite potential for growth during this month, and helped build a link between the two main series that have developed in my work. It started with the idea of what home means, and the ideas I was rolling over in my head that have to do with technology and how it functions in our lives. How people who commute spend so much time on trains and in cars, listening to headphones or watching movies on their ipods etc.

I started shooting from my car, and making photographs of the things I encounter during a normal period of commuting for me. During May, though, this idea evolved into making images from a moving vehicle at night. Abstracting the things I see and know, and using the light and bright colors of the technological world we live in to illuminate these things we think we know.[6]

This semester marked a period of great personal growth for me, as well it should, and I see myself growing as an artist. My work and my meanings are becoming clearer to me, and I am gaining a deeper understanding to how I function as an artist. Next Semester, I plan on continuing both bodies of work, and urging them toward ultimate convergence. I want to branch out from the local places I have explored, and find other places that I have a similar connection to in order to make a less specifically personal and more widely understandable body of work.

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[1] With the paper having to be about the readings from our first residency, I felt a little restricted, and had a hard time formulating what I wanted to say within the confines I was presented with. I discovered just how challenging it is be to write about art.

[2] At this point, I was shooting film and scanning it, and still using a combination of both black & white and color. This method was producing interesting results, but a much less than cohesive product. I also did the majority of work that would become my Holga series around this time. There was such a strong reaction to these images from my first residency, both good and bad, that I decided to go with the idea of making a series of just these images. It ended up being about a twenty image series that in itself didn’t go anywhere, but opened up many more doors to me. This was the first time I started to break away from the beach, and explore other subject matter. It also reminded me how important it can be to just get something out of your system, make something that you want to, even if it is self contained.

[3] Going into this semester, I was told by many to really take this semester as an opportunity to experiment. Anything that I wanted to try, I did my best to. I started shooting all variety of subject matter in all different sorts of ways, and this was one that has panned out rather well. No matter what, however, I found there was just not enough time to try everything I would have liked.

[4] Just like the digital photograph itself, RGB is the base for all of the colors that are presented on screen. To take a high-res image of a low-res screen, and by doing so using the high resolution to expose the low-resolution building blocks of both digital and analog technologies, I started to question the nature of technology and how people view it.

[5] Technically, this was an important time period for me. I was still mixing film and digital, and was also still doing both color and grayscale. Over the course of this month I made a lot of decisions and streamlined my process greatly. I had been doing digital for my television series, and film for my other images of home, but found it did not work for me the way I wanted to.

[6] As the month progressed, this idea was really just beginning to develop, though, and as of the time of this paper it is still very much in flux. It is an idea that I feel will eventually help me gap the bridge between the two separate bodies of work I have been doing, and, though I may not fully understand it yet, I know that it was a big step forward in the progression of my work.