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Images that could not be uploaded in the previous batch due to image caps. I also have a video component that I have not been able to get uploaded but I will be uploading to Youtube and linking below.

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This past year I have spent far more time in my dorm room than I ever have before. In that time I've found myself, again and again, standing at the window, looking down at 3rd Avenue, at the empty but still constantly lit AMC, at the homeless people shuffling aimlessly through a parting sea of speedwalking masked residents, at the rows of apartments with floor to ceiling windows, through which I can see almost the entirety of their living space. In the past I've always been aware of my across the street neighbors, I would sometimes notice them watching TV and try to figure out what show they were watching, or notice that a single man had someone over for a romantic dinner, but never really thought too hard about it.

Returning to the city in the pandemic I found myself having trouble ignoring all the people who I see outside my window, I would often catch myself hyper-focusing on deducing what each individual might be doing on the street. I would sometimes do this for hours, and as my isolation went on it became one of my primary procrastinations. I would stare out the window listening to podcasts or youtube videos as my various deadlines ticked closer and closer, desperately trying to distract myself from the knot of anxiety in my gut by watching the stream of traffic flow by.

For this project, I took a series of images from various angles through the window of my dorm throughout the day using tape markings to get the tripod reset to the same place and eyeballing the angles to create images that are similar but slightly disjointed in their perspective. I made a large number of images at 4 different color temperatures and bracketed 3-4 stops per color temperature to both give me distinct color tones and shadows to make edits more apparent and to give me options to find cool edits with pedestrians and cars once I brought it into Photoshop. In editing, I collated all the similar photos into different folders and imported selected ones as layers into Photoshop. Then I lined them up and used masking and layering via cutting to create an almost shattered or stained glass effect where pieces of each different time of day are collaged into a single image. I then did a second series of edits where I decreased the opacity of each layer to create a hazy impression of the original photo set, trying to compress all of that time into a few frames. My hope is to convey the way that time slips by without frames of reference and invoke the voyeuristic pleasure of staring idly out one's window watching the world go by as I have done so much this past year.

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One photo from the reading that really caught my attention was Tina Barney’s 1996 photograph Phil and Phillip depicting what appears to be a father and son pair, the father standing squared to the lens while the son sits on a couch in the background. The photo compositionally invokes 19th-century portrait photography with its use of classical composition while embracing the imperfections and awkwardness of her subjects. Upon looking into her further I was pleased to find that this is a theme through her work, particularly in Theater of Manners.

In that same collection is this 1996 portrait of a man and a woman standing together titled: Jill and Dick. Here Tina uses a similarly classical composition, staggered subjects with overlapped shoulders, to lend a sense of formality and intensity to what might otherwise be a casual portrait. This composition tells the viewer that Tina had to ask these subjects to pose and that the photo is documenting their reaction to such a request. The woman, presumably Jill, looks intensely into the camera, her powder blue floral print shirt complementing the blue tile wall. Her hands, clad in a ring and bracelet, are blurred from her fidgeting but her face is as sharp as a statue and her green eyes pierce directly through the camera, making one feel much like a child that has done something wrong. Behind her stands an older man, presumably Dick. His heavily wrinkled hands rest comfortably in front of him, clutching a white fedora. A fanny pack is strapped around his waist, acting as a belt around his English colonizer-style collared shirt. His face is soft, either from motion blur or leaning out of the depth of field, and he is caught mid-blink with a neutral expression on his face.

I like this photo for a few reasons, first, it reminds me of one of my favorite paintings American Gothic. The two works share very similar framing, with a taller man standing to the right of a shorter woman as the one closer to the camera spikes the lens. Although Jill and Dick inverts the gender roles by placing Jill closer to the camera and having her spike the lens and removes the explicit weapons the looks of the Father in Gothic and Jill seem to carry the same quiet hostility boiling under the surface. Gothic was about the anger and pettiness that lurks behind the surface level niceness of midwesterners, and I think that this photo does a similarly good job capturing the feeling of being around old-money white people and the constant distance they will hold you at.

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Preliminary documentary/narrative photos shot with initial concept

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Final Photo Proposal

Finalized proposal: In this project I want to take a series of images from various angles through my window and then repeat those photos at different points during the day, using tape markings to get the tripod reset to the same place and eyeballing the angles to create images that are similar but slightly different in their perspective. I will bracket the photos with both color temperature and exposure in order to get the most diverse array of color temperatures and lighting conditions from each angle. In editing I will collate all the similar photos into different folders then import selected ones as layers into Photoshop and then use masking to create an almost shattered or stained glass effect where pieces of each different time of day will be collated into a single image. My hope is to convey the way that time slips by without frames of reference and invoke the voyeurism of staring idly out one's window watching the world go by as I have done so much this past year.

Initial Proposal: In this project I want to take images of stoners and their pieces, trying to study the individual objects used to perform the social or meditative ritual of smoking. Perhaps presented as separated diptychs or triptychs along with portraits of the user before and after using their equipment. A thought I had that I'm not sure if I will be able to incorporate is to do the portraits in the style of American Gothic with a bong or other piece replacing the pitchfork the farmer carries.

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Portrait Assignment

For the first roll of this assignment I challenged myself to find ways to frame portraits that created a clear subject without getting close to them. I walked around Alphabet City with ISO 400 film a little after noon, mostly shooting at f/5.6 t/50 on my 50mm but occasionally opening up to f/2.8 and compensating by increasing my shutter speed to t/125 for a crisper final image. It was an overcast day so I didn’t need to meter and was able to simply lock my settings and focus on focus and composition.

For my second roll of this assignment I used ISO 100 film to photograph my friend and strangers on the street in a more traditional close up fashion with my 50mm. It was a warm day and about 5:00-7:00pm so there were a lot of people out and about enjoying the low 60s weather. Unfortunately a lot of my portraits of strangers were taken at t/25 to compensate for the slow film and as a result were mostly blown due to lack of stability. The shots that did come out well were mostly shot at t/60, stopped down to f/5.6 initially and opening up as the light faded. There was golden hour light so the light was soft but intense and high contrast which put me into a couple of particularly tough situations especially with my low ISO film.

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A man takes a coffee break while fixing an awning outside of a cop bar, 400iso 1/50. I have lost my notes for this shoot but I believe this was shot at F/5.6. I didn’t ask his permission or talk to him, but I was struck by the way he was framed against the sky so I made the picture, spot metering off of the sidewalk.

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I found this man tending to a small community garden in Alphabet city, he was standing behind a fence trimming trees and I found myself struck by both the visual clutter and his wrinkled face so I asked if I could take his picture.The lighting conditions weren’t amazing, with a heavy backlight from the sky and the garden itself being in shade, thus being far from ideal for my 100iso film that I had loaded. To compensate I opened up to 2.8 and turned down my shutter to 1/25, hoping that I would get some sort of decent exposure. I think that overall I’m pleasantly surprised by how well detail was maintained despite the underexposure and the motion blur confined to his hand really helps give the photo a sense of motion and candidness it would otherwise lack.

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Responding to Teju Cole’s ‘When the Camera Was a Weapon of Imperialism. (And When It Still Is.)‘

In Cole’s essay he outlines how the photographic medium was embraced as a tool of colonial oppression by the vast rapidly industrializing empires of the 19th and 20th century, serving as a medium through which human beings were logged and objectified. David Graeber in his book Debt: The First 5000 Years outlines how the structured and quantified nature of ‘civilized’ society largely came about as a result of rulers’ desire to extract taxes from their subjects and to this end money was introduced to quantify the value of goods so they could therefore become taxable. This serves two purposes, to have an essentialized ‘accurate view’ of the economy removed from human context and to extract as much in taxes as possible from said economy. I see a similar process occurring in the use of objectifying photography by colonizers in these empires where capitalism was quickly taking over as the dominant form of economic activity. The photographs of colonizers served two purposes, to create an essentialized image of the ‘other’ to fill European imaginations, and to document colonial subjects so as much profit as possible could be extracted from them. Where before a prisoner might be able to escape and melt back into the larger society now they would be hunted forever. It wouldn’t be until the 20th century that a lot of these practices would become properly institutionalized and bureaucratized but arguably these colonial experiments in documentations represent the first seeds of the surveillance state that underpins our modern late capitalist society.

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My Personal Pandemic Commute

I make this walk multiple times a week between my friend’s place and my own, except when I go out to get food it’s the place I probably go most often since the pandemic. I’ve spent a lot of hours listening to podcasts or music and looking at this skyline as I walk home and I’m glad it renders so well in Black and White. I will never get over how when you look at it just right the New York sky seems to just stretch on forever into the horizon like that.

I shot most of these photos during the same walk with shutter speeds between 100 and 25, hence why one or two are a bit blurry, on a 35mm f/2.8 lens with ISO 400 film. Shots were mostly taken at sunset metering with my reflective reader. I had a lot of trouble focusing and framing with the ground glass screen which resulted in some blown shots so I have now swapped that with a prism and that has helped a lot.

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When I saw this image of Malcolm X with his wife and daughters I was immediately struck by how it contrasted with what is to me one of his most iconic images, Malcolm X stands at the Window With Rifle in Hand. Both images are heavily composed but seek to tell entirely different stories. The first, shot by Richard Saunders (longtime collaborator of Standard Oil PR documentarian and former FSA official Roy Stryker) balances the frame by forming a triangle between the painting of Elijah Mohamed on the wall, Malcolm, and his Wife looking up at him. He underexposes to lose Malcolm dark suit into the shadows and isolate the exposed area to his skin, white shirt, and book, creating an effect of a portrait within a frame and creating a comparison to Elijah Mohamed image. Meanwhile the other image, taken by Don Hogan (who would later go on to become the first black photographer hired by the New York Times) for Life Magazine, uses posing and Malcolm’s gun to create a frame that I find extremely striking. Malcolm is posing for effect in the photo, there is no-one outside that window and yet the intensity in his eyes is palpable. Malcolm X said that this pose was representative of the measures he would take to defend the family that Saunders captured in his image. This image has proved to be a rorscharch test of sorts, while Malcolm may have meant it in an entirely defensive and domestic context the image of him, a black man, with a rifle combined with the propaganda around how radical he was helped build the largely ashistorical image we have today in pop culture of Malcolm X as some sort of insurgent violent revolutionary. If you’re on the right, particularly if you’re a white supremacist, that image is terrifying, but if you’re on the left it’s inspiring and badass. I think that this legacy is definitely part of the reason why Hogan’s image endured in the public consciousness but I think there might also be a second reason why it is so iconic, Malcolm’s posing forms a golden ratio spiral. Not that golden ratios are inherently amazing, but that framing and posing has allowed it to outlast the other photos taken of Malcolm posing at the window.

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Description from Memory of a Time Capsule Shot

Taken at F2.8 on ISO 400 Black and White stock with a 1/50 shutter speed (possibly 1/25 but I am pretty sure it was 50) on a 35mm lens. This shot features in the right third a man standing next to a pug wrapped in a blanket on the ground, likely waiting for a cab or for the dog to warm up enough to walk again. In the background, a bus waits for the light to turn green so it can begin to move and a building sits covered in scaffolding. The left third is largely empty, mostly taken up by the crosswalk but allowing a peek into the street beyond. Shot at sunset at the southeast corner of 14th and 2nd Avenue looking north/northeast. I had to open up completely and set my shutter speed so low because the light was fading and I was afraid that I would underexpose and lose the shot.

Another exposure I took was framing my friend’s balcony through her window. Exposing with my reflective meter for the dark brick building across the street as it seemed like halfway between the bright sky and the darker interior, I closed down to F4.0 on that same 35mm with a shutter speed of 1/100. I tried to place the closer edge of the window on the first third line from the left and allowed the brick wall next to the window to create understated texture in the shadows with its patches of lighter and darker brick. The window was facing north and the photo was taken in late afternoon so the sky was bright and although it wasn’t quite golden hour the light was starting to soften.

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The first roll of film I ever shot, Kodak Gold 200. Didn’t rewind it properly so I accidentally exposed most of the film to light when I opened it up. They managed to salvage these but the artifacts from the light in some of the more damaged photos look pretty cool so I want to see if I can control this effect at all.

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I chose this photograph of the artist lying in the midst of a sandy field because I found myself feeling extremely nostalgic when looking at it. Especially after this past year of harsh restrictions on movement and the long winter break I spent in my dorm the space the artist occupies and the life that surrounds him brings back some of my best memories of losing myself while camping. What really struck me was the mile of distance between the world he occupies and the world that I have found myself in so in my image I set out to highlight all the things that made me feel good about that image by inverting them and substituting his reality with the one I've found myself subjectively experiencing. Where the artist lies on a cushion of sand warmed in the sun and soft young plants I placed myself on the lifeless snow, where the artist's setting seems like untouched nature mine is covered in footprints, where the artist looks comfortable and serene my arm is bent unnaturally, and where the artist has placed himself in the frame it appears as if I have simply been discarded into it. I flipped to a landscape aspect ratio, lowered the camera, and shot cool with a 35mm lens at sunset on a cloudy day. I placed myself closer to the camera which, combined with the lower angle, hides my face and most of my head from view and depersonalizes me, further contrasting with the original image.