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Final Project

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Final Project Theme Proposal

a) Explain what you plan to photograph, and share facts and information about that subject. It's a good idea to do some research here so you can cover this thoroughly. 

I will be taking photos of traditional hmong womenswear. The Hmong diaspora is very dispersed so there are many different looks to them. Usually the different groups are identified by the different designs or colors on their clothing.

(b) Explain why you want to photograph this subject. (Relate this to who you are and your background and interests). 

I am Hmong so photographing anything Hmong-related is part of my interests. I also want to photograph this subject specifically because my maternal side has worked with textiles, embroideries and the sort until my generation. The skills are pretty much lost in my generation and it was a struggle when I tried it out myself so I want to showcase their hardwork.

(c) Discuss how you'll make these pictures. Here you should cover your strategic and technical approach. Will you capture scenes as they happen, or direct your subjects? How do you plan to do this? How will you get permission, and access to your subject? Is there any special equipment, lighting, etc. needed?  

I plan to take still-like or close shots of different articles of clothing to showcase their intricate designs. Then do portrait shots of someone wearing them to show how and where each clothing belong.

(d)Finally, share a bit about your overall objectives for this project. What do you want your audience to walk away experiencing, and learning? Do you want to teach your viewers something, create an emotional response, or change their views about an issue? 

My overall objective for this project is just to showcase and present the beauty of Hmong clothing and textile-work.

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Project 3: Theme

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Project 3: Theme Proposal

a) Explain what you plan to photograph, and share facts and information about that subject. It's a good idea to do some research here so you can cover this thoroughly. 

I plan to photograph some of the musical instruments I have. These include a keyboard, violin, viola, kalimba, a bamboo flute, a ukulele, a toy guitar, a karaoke box, music sheets.

(b) Explain why you want to photograph this subject. (Relate this to who you are and your background and interests). 

I used to be in orchestra and I played the violin and the viola. I also tried out the different instruments so I thought it would be interesting and memorable to photograph these objects.

(c) Discuss how you'll make these pictures. Here you should cover your strategic and technical approach. Will you capture scenes as they happen, or direct your subjects? How do you plan to do this? How will you get permission, and access to your subject? Is there any special equipment, lighting, etc. needed?  

I plan to take still life photos of each instrument, making the scenes for each one a little different. Majority of my light will likely be direct light from my ring light or natural light.

(d)Finally, share a bit about your overall objectives for this project. What do you want your audience to walk away experiencing, and learning? Do you want to teach your viewers something, create an emotional response, or change their views about an issue? 

My overall objective for this project is really to just create something to remember all the things I did once with music. 

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Artist Research 8: Dimpy Bhalotia

Dimpy Bhalotia is an Indian photographer based in London and Mumbai. She started out with studying fashion design and going into the world of haute couture then fell in love with photography making her become a full-time photographer. With nature, birds, and all the chaos on the streets as her inspirations, Dimpy Bhalotia’s work mainly revolved around street photography. What makes her work stand out is the use of high contrast and interesting angles to frame her subjects. Another big aspect of her work is that she also sought to capture movement. Her work are all unstaged photos of humans, birds, and animals in motion, often times around bodies of waters. She is also the first female photographer to pioneer the use of mobile phones for street photography. She started her photography career using samsung galaxy and nokia phones in the early days then evolved to using iphones. She is now an award-winning photographer with multiple awards including the IPPAWARDS Grand Prize.

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Artist Research 7: Elisa Miller

Elisa Miller is an award-winning French photographer born in 1981. She is based in London, UK and began exploring with photography after moving there in 2017. Prior to that, she worked as a model and had experiences with photography and brought that into her own work. Her work mainly revolves around the questions of identity, self-perception, and the representation of women. She uses cinematic lens, elaborate lights, and vintage settings to portray the impacts of societal pressure on women. She has won multiple awards, including some from 2021 to 2023 with one being the Photograher of the Year Julia Margaret Cameron Awards. 

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Artist Research 6: Book Report

Multiplex is a photobook published by Minor Matters, a collaborative publishing platform for contemporary art, and highlights the work of Paul Berger. The book is organized around four key ideas of his work: Site of Notation, Mechanics of Narrative, Arenas of Evidence, and Automaton. Each section starts off with either a text or description and is sprinkled with additional insights throughout it.

Paul Berger was born is 1948 in The Dalles, Oregon. He has been working with photography since 1965, received his BA from UCLA in 1970, and his MFA from the Visual Studies workshop in 1973. He taught at the Washington School of Art for 35 years, where he co-founded the the school’s photography program in 1978. He also initiated a sequence of digital-imaging classes there in 1985. His artworks has been exhibited both domestically and internationally as well as being published in numerous books.

Sect 1, Site of Notation, Mathematics 23. “Site of Notation” starts off with a quote by mathematician Carla Diane Savage which says “A forest is an undirected graph which contains no cycles. A connected forest is a tree.” This section is composed of a series of artworks all titled Mathematics. This is because the photos are of the slate blackboards in the mathematics department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This started with his impulse to document the interaction and longevity of the written contents on the boards which eventually evolved to become contact sheet images through overlapping and juxtaposition of each photo film.

Sect 4, The Automation, Weft & Weave, VEG-1A

In The Automation, the variety in his work is shown: there is abstraction, digital imagery, nature photographs. I particularly liked the photo arrangement of his pieces with the warp and weft. 

One thing that I didn’t particularly like was the long list of publisher acknowledgments and list of exhibitions that he was in. I feel like this is stuff that you can search up if you want to see even more than what was shown in the book. 

Berger, Paul, et al. Multiplex. Minor Matters Books LLC, 2018.

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Artist Research 5: Gregory Halpern

Gregory Helpern is an American photographer and teacher currently teaching at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He was born in Buffalo, New York in 1977. He attended Harvard for his bachelor's degree in history and literature, and California College of Arts for his MFA. He has published multiple books with Zzyzx winning photo of the year in 2016. Gregory Halpern’s approach to photography is documenting the everyday contradictions and sublimity. This means that rather than just documenting, he photographs the chaos and complexities surrounding us every day. In 2018, Helpern became a nominee for The Magnum Photos and won Immersion to start his series Let The Sun Beheaded Be. He went on to become a full member of Magnum photos in 2023 while his series Let The Sun Beheaded Be was exhibited at Immersion in France.

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Artist Research 4: László Moholy-Nagy

László Moholy-Nagy was born in 1895 in Borsod, Ausrtia-Hungary and died in 1946 in Chicago, USA. László was a photographer as well as a painter and professor at the Bauhaus school, Germany’s most famous design school. He was a strong advocate for the use of technology in the arts and did many artistic experiments throughout his career. He worked with camera-less photographs which he called photograms. His works were characterized by unconventional perspectives and angles and strong contrasts and shadows. He also worked with photomontages in which layers of photographs would be combined together to create representational abstraction. His works paved the way for abstraction in the world of photography.

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Artist Research 3: Bernd and Hilla Becher

Bernd (1931-2007) and Hilla Becher (1934-2015) were German artists and a couple who worked with photography since 1959. They spent close to fifty years photographing architectural forms which they called anonymous sculptures. Their work sought to document the disappearing architecture of the industrial world which comprised of water towers, blast furnaces, coal mines, houses of mine workers, and many more. Their works present a visual study of the relationship between the forms and functions of these architectural structures. They used a large-format camera under overcast skies for shadowless front and side views to produce black and white photographs of these structures. They then matched them to groups by function, which they called typologies. Throughout their career, they created a massive series of these photographs which are still being categorized to be published as books.

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Artist Research 2: Allan Sekula

Allan Sekula was born in 1951 in Erie, Pennsylvanie and died in 2013 in Los Angeles, California. He was an American photographer, author, filmmaker, and critic. He is best known for producing works documenting the maritime world. He was an activist of the labor force. He spent a lot of his time at the port and the sea documenting people and objects that portrayed the hardships and intricacies of human labor as opposed to the increasing globalized capitalism and outsourcing of labor. This in addition to his own family’s circumstances as part of the middle-class labor force, Sekula sought to figure out how photography contributed to the current social order and how it can undermine it. Much of his work included images of old ships, containers, the ports, and related objects. He received multiple awards throughout his life, and even had a posthumous symposia after his death for his influence. 

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Artists Research 1: Robert Frank

Robert Frank was born in 1924 in Zurich, Switzerland and died in 2019 in Inverness, Canada. He was a Swiss American photographer and filmmaker best known for his published book The Americans (1958). Frank first started studying photography in 1941 and spent the first few years working for commercial photography and graphic design studios. He traveled to the United States in 1947 where he worked in fashion photography, then freelanced for photojournalism and advertisements. From 1955 to 1956, he traveled throughout the United States to take photographs through the sponsorship of the Guggenheim Fellowship which resulted in the publication of his most famous book The Americans. Frank’s publication was both impressive as well as controversial at the time. It was impressive because of his deviation from photography norms by using unusual focus, low lighting, and cropping. It was controversial because he depicted the realities of American strifes compared to the more positive aspects that photojournalists tended to show at that time.

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Weekend Photos

Mother and Child

Photo 1: My baby cousin watching the sunset. Every morning when she wakes up and every evening during sunset, either I or my aunt always take her outside to get some fresh air and watch the sunset because she is constantly in the house.

Photo 2: My baby cousin relaxing on the bed after a long day. She puts her hands up, perfectly aligning with the doorway leading up to the lights.

Photo 3: Nightly routine of my baby cousin being showered by her mom.

Photo 4: My baby cousin chilling on the sofa, watching her favorite baby shark music videos.

Tidying Up

Photo 1: My sister washing the dishes after dinner.

Photo 2: My uncle getting himself ready to go to work in the morning, taming his wild hair.

Photo 3 & 4: My sister getting ready to go to school versus when she barely got up on a weekend.

Shamanism: A Belief of the Hmong People

Photo 1: A tray of sweets, eggs, and flowers used to celebrate the completion of a shamanic ritual. Usually, the candies are divided among the children while the eggs are to be eaten by whomever the ritual was done for.

Photo 2: The altar of a shaman. It is covered in joss paper and has incense holders, bowls of water, candles, flowers, and finger bells atop it.

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Self-Intro

Hello, my name is Pa Chia Vang. I am currently a senior at Fresno State University with a major in 3D animation. I hope to use photography to help me in my artistic work as well as capture important moments in my and my family's lives beautifully or interestingly.

Some of the things that I like to do are creating art, reading, gaming, cooking, playing sports, as well as being out in nature. Many of my pictures are either photographs of family and friends or nature-related.