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Project #3 - Smorgasbord (Final)

I had no idea what I wanted to do for my final. I really enjoyed shooting street photography for my last project but I wanted to do something different for the final. My original plan was to do an outdoor shoot with a friend but that shoot just didn't come out like I was hoping. So, I tried it again and got a few shots that I did like but I was still unhappy. My next idea was to shoot a portrait of 10 different people using window light from a large window at my home. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get this done because of scheduling issues. I was able to shoot a few of my fiends before I decided that I wasn't't going to have enough time to shoot the rest of the portraits. By this time I had already shot 5 rolls of film and it all felt like a waste. As a last ditch effort, I went back to downtown with a new roll of film and shot whatever caught my eye. I like the photos that I took but I'm not happy with my final. I wish I could have put together something more cohesive and had more of an impact. I enjoyed working in the lab this semester. I see myself continuing to develop film and make prints.

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Project #2

Project #2 - Street Photography

I decided to attempt to do street photography for this project with the focus being on people, trying to capture a slice of life. I spent a lot of time downtown walking up and down Fulton. I went on different days and various times, but I didn't have that much success as it is pretty dead. Still, I did get a few shots that I am very proud of. I would like to continue shooting street but I might be better off traveling to another city to do so. I think I did a decent job zone focusing but there is still room for improvement. I'm pretty happy with my exposures even though a few came out darker than I would have liked. Shooting in the sun I was at f/8, 250, 400 speed and changed my aperture to f/5.6 while in the shade. I played around with the shutter speed while in the shade too. I was trying to shoot a stop brighter than what the camera's meter was telling me.

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Weekend Project

These are my final images for my weekend project and I am pleased with how they turned out being my first time using film. The hardest part of this project for me was all of the uncertainty. I struggled to roll my film onto the steel reel and I lost some of my photos. I know that I will get better at this the more I do it, so I'm not too worried about it. The process to develop film is fairly simple but it is a little more challenging because the water coming into the lab is not temperature controlled. We can make adjustments to your development time based of the waters temp but I wish it was a repeatable process instead of having to make adjustments every time. Developing the prints was the most enjoyable part of this project. It was a little challenging getting used to working with the enlarger, but after that it was a fun process. This was my first time working in the lab and it was a pretty smooth process. I did come in early so I could have the lab to myself which I enjoyed. It made the work a lot more easy to complete without having other students in there so I will probably continue to work this way.

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HCB - Decisive Moment Reading

Henri Cartier-Bresson's essay "The Decisive Moment," reflects on his journey as a photographer and his philosophy on photography. I don’t want to spend a lot of time just recapping the main points of the reading, but rather how I responded to it. I found this reading to be a great resource for our black and white photography class. It is packed full of knowledge and reads almost like a guide for aspiring street photographers. There are a lot of quotable lines that could be pulled from this reading that could inspire photographers of any kind. One line that I do quickly want to mention that I feel like encapsulates the entire reading is. “Photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.” I enjoyed reading this essay and it went on to read more about HCB and I spent time exploring his work. I find a lot of his work to be inspiring but I think paired with this reading takes it to another level. I am primarily a corporate headshot photographer and this type of work is often very calculated. I find this element of headshot photography to be enjoyable though as I like to have as much control over the session as possible. For the most part, this type of work is repeatable with little uncertainty. In past photography classes, I have tried to push myself to shoot more than just portraits and I found some success shooting abstract images. After reading HCB’s essay, I want to challenge myself this semester by attempting to capture street photography and find my own decisive moment. I intend to use the reading as a guideline to help me get started. HCB’s philosophy on photography has helped me to begin to shift my own mindset when it comes to photography. I’m looking forward to completing the weekend project and learning the technical aspects of developing film so that I can spend time shooting street photography. Although I do enjoy the current weather this time of year, I’m excited about the sunny days to come so I can spend more time outside shooting.

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Final Project - Tri-Color Gum Bichromate

Here are my five final prints for the gum bichromate project.

I would say that I have one nearly perfect print out of the group, two that are good and two that are okay. After figuring out exposure times, my main struggle was reregistering my negatives. I prepped my paper my shrinking it in hot water and coating them with gelatin. I made my dichromate solution and prepared my pigment and gum all before I got started. I coated my paper in solution and let them dry in the dark for an hour before taking them outside to expose. Finally, they went into the water bath for 15 minutes and then into fresh water for another 15 minutes. I found that an exposure time of 1-1:30 minutes in the sun worked best. I am very pleased with how these turned out for my first attempt.

Here are some photos I took during the process.

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Artist Post #8

Tabitha Barnard– Sisterhood Summer

Tabitha Barnard is a photographer who experienced growing up in very religious female dominated family during the 1990s in rural Maine. Her work explores the themes of femineity, religion and ritual. Barnard described her upbringing as being incredibly isolated. Her contact with others and the outside world was limited. She was raised in a close-knit religious culture where sexuality was never discussed. In church, she witnessed the demonization of sexuality and femininity. Barnard decided to make images that documents her younger sister as she transitioned into womanhood, changing from a child into and object sexualized by older men.  She describes this work as an exploration of the religion and the community she has created with her sister. This allows her to reveal what was formerly intimate and private. Growing up in the church, Barnard realized how anti-woman the people were. Their rhetoric condemned growth and feminine sexuality. She realized that her experience wasn’t something that everyone shared so she used photography as a tool to reveal this once private part of her life. The series explores secrets and untold stories that question faith. I was drawn to this series because of the use of color and place that bring us into an almost dreamlike world. It is interesting to learn more about what other people experience growing up and how different it is from how I grew up. 

http://lenscratch.com/2019/07/2019-lenscratch-student-prize-tabitha-barnard/

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Artist Post #7

Kat Bawden – Perceptual Isolation

Kat Bawden is an artist working in fine art, experimental photography and self-portraiture. Her work explores the mind and consciousness. Perceptual Isolation is an ongoing project that examines the relationship of anxiety, trauma and consciousness. Bawden regularly experiences sleep paralysis which plays a big role in this body of work. Her goal with these images is to describe the sense of suspension between waking and sleeping. Working exclusively in her apartment, she photographs herself while actively experiencing the mental state she is trying to describe. While in front of the camera, she pushes herself to reenact memories, fantasies and nightmares. Behind the camera, she switches into director mode which allows her to critically review the images. She also mentions that a lot of these images were created in isolation during the covid pandemic where she experienced a prolonged period of sensory deprivation. Anxiety overpowered all of her other emotions during this time. Bawden describes the process as being very performative and comments on how she has been influenced by feminist performance artists because they use their bodies to explore trauma, memory and emotional release. These black and white images caught my attention right away and I enjoyed learning more about them and how they were created. She shares a lot of herself in these images and I think it is something we can all relate to. 

http://lenscratch.com/2020/12/kat-bawden/

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Artist Post #6

Lynne Breitfeller - After the Fire: Water Damaged

Lynee Breitfeller is a photographer from New Jersey who explores the ordinary details of everyday life. Her work features themes of human relationships, memory loss and humor. Breitfeller created After the Fire: Water Damaged, after she discovered that a third of her analog archive was destroyed by water after a fire in her studio. She had to come to terms with the loss of her entire photographic legacy. Breitfeller felt like sometime our best work comes from failure. Although, this failure was out of her control, it created an entire new body of work out of photographs. Salvaging the negatives that weren’t completely destroyed, she realized that the water damage transformed them into new images. She related these new photographs as an exploration of memory and how a memory can change each time it is revisited. This new body of work makes you consider the ideas of transience and the impermanence of possessions. The idea of creating something new from your old work has always been interesting to me, especially work that has been damaged outside of our control. I think Breitfeller did an amazing job recontextualizing her old work that was damaged instead of letting that be the end.

http://lenscratch.com/2023/11/lynne-breitfeller/

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Artist Post #5

And Every Day was Overcast

Paul Kwiatkowski is a photographer and writer from New York City. He created an illustrated novel called And Every Day was Overcast which also includes text, recordings, interviews, animal sounds, ambient noise and electronic music. Paul created the illustrated book to reflect on his experience of adolescence in the 1990s. This was an important time in his life because this was when he first revealed himself to the world. Paul used whatever was available and cheap at the time to make his photographs. Most of the photographs in the book were taken with a disposable camera. Paul said that his favorite photographs in the book are the ones where the photographer presence feels anonymous. These photographs were taken in South Florida which Paul says is a fucked up place to grow up. It’s a place where anyone can vanish, commit a crime or give up. Growing up in America is a unique experience and I think Paul’s photographs capture that very well. These photographs create feelings of nostalgia for me. I was born in 1993 so I didn’t experience my teen years until the 2000s, but I had two older brother who were. In a way I experienced pieces of their teen years from the side lines before it was my turn. A lot of the environments in the photographs feel family as well and I think that is because I didn’t grow up in a wealthy family. My teen years took place later but my environment was one from the decade before.

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Artist Post #4

The American Family Cemetery

Edwin Averette III is a photographer from North Carolina who specializes in large format aerial imagery. Edwin began documenting cemeteries in the south after experiencing the feeling of potential loss. Many of these cemeteries are occupied by a single family that has lived on the piece of land for several generations. As the world evolved, small agricultural communities began to slowly disappear. Families either moved away or died out. Edwin starts out by scoping out these places through research and tries to familiarize himself with the history of the land, people and cemetery. He takes aerial photographs from above and stiches them together later on a computer. Edwin talks about wanting to take more aerial photographs of remote cemeteries. North Carolina is experiencing erosion and sea level rise along their rivers which have made hundreds of cemeteries inaccessible on foot. I think this body of work is really important because there is so much history that is lost to time. These photographs represent the passing of time and how important it is to make documentation of your family’s history. My favorite photo featured in this article is named Hardee-Smith (1860s-1930s) which features a new suburb development around an old cemetery. It goes to show how the American suburb has taken over the old farming landscape in the south. 

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Artist Post #3

Jeff Smudde is a digital and analog photographer who recently created a series as part of his thesis titled “Perennial which explores the ideas around perceptions of place. This work is a collection of photographs from his travels through the American Northeast, Midwest and Southwest. Smudde spends a lot of time in these locations, trying to familiarize himself and make sense of it all. This body of work has a familiarity to it, almost like we’ve been there before. Critics have labelled this collection as “road trip photography”, but Smudde argues that it is much more than that. He describes the work to be about the human experience and how we perceive place and the identities associated with it. Smudde credits Ron Jude’s “Lago”, which was one of the first examples he came across of using sound with photography. Introducing sound while looking at the work opened up a whole new world of interpretation. Smudde comments on what music you’re listening to while photographing can change the final outcome of the photos.

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Project 2 - Salt Prints

Here are my five final prints for the salt print project.

I probably made somewhere between 30-40 prints total. I struggled to get an even coating and clean boarders. I coated each paper with sensitizer three times, drying in between each coat. After that dried, I applied two coats of the silver nitrate solution, drying in between each coat. I found that an exposure time of 2-3 minutes in the sun worked best. I rinsed each print for 15 minutes, then into the fixer for 15 minutes and then back into water for a second rinse. After all of the time spent sizing paper and washing, I am very pleased with how these turned out.

10/26 EDIT: Sharing some more photos of my setup and process.

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Project Two Proposal - Salted Prints

My idea for project two is to take a series of portraits while mimicking the feel of early photography. This past weekend I gathered my friends and took their portraits using natural light and studio lighting. I didn't pose my subjects other than sitting them own on an apple box so each person brought something different to their images. I also included a self portrait of myself in this series because I always shy away from capturing my own image.

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Artist Post #2

Kei Ito is an installation artist who works with photographic media and sculpture. Eye Who Witnessed is a body of work that features 108 c-print photograms of eyes. Half of the images are of Japanese victims of the atomic bomb dropped by the United States in 1945. The other half are of American Downwinders. American Downwinders are some of the first victims because they were unaware of the invisible threat of radiation. The original images come from books, interviews and even from his own family album. Ito decided to mix up the images before installing to make it unclear which eyes are Japanese, and which are American. I think this is a really cool idea that highlights the idea that nuclear weapons affect everyone. I wonder what people think who see this installation without knowing the context behind it. I think most people would be drawn into the work intentionally as I was but I’m glad I took the time to learn more about it. It makes me wish that I could come up with ideas like this. I wouldn’t consider this to be a simple idea but I think it is done so well that it comes across like that.

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Artist Post #1

Jacob Black is a British photographer who works with both analog and digital. He explores the idea of isolation and how some embrace it, while others struggle. Black published a series of images earlier this year called I Cannot Wipe Sunrise Down my Jumper to get Rid of my Fingerprints. This series was created after Black suffered from a concussion after having an accident. It left him unable to collect his thoughts which made him feel lost and confused. The piece that grabbed my attention is titled Untitled_01. It is a black and white image of a woman standing with a harsh pocket of light on her face. It is a very dramatic image because of this. Black chooses to shoot in black and white because it highlights the idea of clarity and confusion. The pockets of light represent small moments of clarity. I really enjoyed this body of work visually but also the interesting concept behind it. I feel like the use of black and white is a great way to represent clarity as light and confusion as black. For me this makes a visually interesting image to look at. The use of small areas of light highlight specific areas in each image which draws you right in. I like the simple yet thoughtful compositions of these images. 

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Update Project One

As I mentioned before, I decided to print my images on pieces of fabric instead of watercolor paper. I thought this was fitting because the original images are of fabric captured in motion. I also like the texture that the printed on fabric added. I chose to work on this project over the weekend so I could expose my prints earlier in the day which made a huge difference. I started my exposures at 12PM in full sunlight. After some trail and error, I came to the conclusion that about 10 minutes of exposure time looked good. I washed my prints and added hydrogen peroxide to the water to help speed up the process. I glued the pieces of fabric to pieces of watercolor paper to give them a backing and then trimmed them down to size. The final images here have cleaner edges then I could get on my own because they are slightly cropped.

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Project One Update

I decided to print my cyanotypes at home over the weekend so that I could expose them earlier in the day. I decided to make my prints on fabric rather than watercolor paper because the original images are of fabric in motion. I also liked the added texture that the fabric added to the final prints.

I started my exposures about 12PM on a sunny day and after some trial and error, I found that I was getting a good exposure at around 10 mins.