Final Wrap-Up

This term gave me a lot to think about in terms of the place of photography in our ever changing world. How can one find their personal voice in a world where billions of images are produced each day? One thing I've noticed is my attention to detail has seen a definite improvement. Often, I will notice details that escaped me when I took the photograph that give the image a different meaning when cropped to emphasize certain elements. The meaning of photographs is not static and fixed at the moment they are taken; it is constantly in flux, and at the mercy of society, the viewer, and the photographer themselves.

For my curated gallery, you may notice there are a good deal of photographs that did not appear in my previous blog posts. These either did not go with the theme of the week, or were taken in between projects. Some images I previously posted in color I have converted to black and white, to provide consistency and to fit my theme.

Though I did not realize it at first, I believe my photographs this term have been influenced by surrealism and surrealist photography. The kind of surrealism in my images is very different from the dreamscapes of Dali, however. The surrealism comes not from the objects themselves, but from light and framing, and the strange contexts in which they find themselves. 

I've been trying to relinquish my innate obsessive perfectionism in many ways, as it is oftentimes more detrimental than helpful in my artistic pursuits. I find that I am much more at ease when I view photography as a sort of "treasure hunt" in which I walk through the world naturally, and practice "looking" and "seeing", and when something catches my eye I capture it in a photograph. Though I believe it is best not to preoccupy oneself with "gear" (cameras, lenses, etc.), I also believe that the camera itself can have a profound impact on one's mindset and method of shooting. For myself, wielding a DSLR camera immediately brings to mind the stresses of event photography and commercial shoots, and will have me clicking away, zooming in and out, trying to capture every possible angle and framing. With a fixed focal length compact camera however, I am much more limited. No zooming, no 15 different autofocus modes, and most importantly it fits in my pocket. I try to bring it everywhere I go, treating it as an extension of my arms and my eyes. If something catches my eye I can bring the camera up, click the shutter, and move on in a matter of seconds. Even when I don't have a camera I try to practice "looking" in the same way as if I do have one. 

Since I my interest in photography first began to blossom, I have been continually surprised by the details of the world I had overlooked before. So much of our lives we walk with blinders on, essentially lost in our own heads, the world we walk rendered in crude shapes, paths, and obstacles.

I have always struggled with meaning in my photographs, and while this term and Rexer's text helped me think about meaning in different ways, it is a struggle which I am still going through. I have few ideas about what "meaning" a photograph will have at the moment I take it. I simply keep an eye out for what I think will make a "good" photograph. What is a "good" photograph? I don't know yet. But I'm excited to continue my journey toward finding out.

With that, I give you my ten "best" images. Rendered in black and white, faces, figures, light, and shadow come to the forefront. Taken on the street, inside the home, at the mall, and in the sea, the images know no boundary of place. Instead, they are conjoined by their questions of figure, form, and architecture. The antithesis of a traditional "untrammeled" landscape, these photographs are intensely human, even in the instances where human form is flat shadow, and built landscape is the only remnant of human life.