photography thoughts

With this assignment, I wanted to create a sort of garden of memories. In order to do so, I decided to draw on my cyanotypes with ink. For me, this is symbolic in two ways.

When I was younger, my introduction to art and creation was through drawing. I always considered it to be my main medium until I came to college and really fell in love with photography. In this way, drawing on the prints that I made through a photographic process took me back to my love of drawing and combined the two mediums that made me an artist. It brought back my memories and love for drawing and displays it on the page.

I think drawing the outline of the flowers themselves on the blank silhouette of said flowers also brings life back to the plants. Usually, when I create cyanotypes with objects sitting on the page, it lacks the dimension a digital negative would have. By drawing the outline of the flower, it breathes life back into the print. I decided to put the prints in actual pots because the pots I used once had plants in them that have since died. Putting the image of a flower in a pot that once held living plants is sort of my way to pay tribute to the plants I’ve lost.

I don’t have any pictures to go along with this, but a lot of my work recently has focused on objects in my apartment—objects that I already own and have memories with. In a way, I think this has added a history and more of a personal story to my work. Before quarantine, I would take photos around Iowa City or of places that I didn’t have much personal history with. So now my work feels more like me in a way. This has also inspired me to try and use what I have from past projects in my current work. I kept all my test strips and failed prints from my past classes (probably for sentimental value, but I told myself it was because paper is too expensive to waste) and I want to start using them in my current projects. Even though they are flawed and imperfect, I think I could create something new and unique with them. If I did use all of the test strips, failed prints, and ruined negatives, I think that would tell my story in its own way—as if my photography journey would be shown through the prints that only functioned as a learning process in the first place. This is all a new idea, as it’s my first time even writing it out, but I think I’ve already started shifting my practice to fit this idea.

you may forget but

let me tell you

this: someone in

some future time

will think of us

Over the weekend, I observed a natural phenomenon while at work. Since I work at an apple orchard, my job on Sunday was to help with parking. Before we opened, I sat on top of the hill overlooking the orchard and just observed my surroundings. If I looked toward the southern hills of the orchard, I could see the rows of apple trees. If I looked it the west, there was a small wooded area where, if I looked hard enough, I could see cattle lazing in the grass on the other side. Cold winds blew through the trees, causing the turned leaves to fall to the ground. All was quiet. I looked toward the sky, which gradually turned darker as the rain approached. When I looked back down, I felt the first few drops of rain on the back of my neck. Later, the wind picked up as well, causing the leaves to fall in dozens, all flying at me until I was soaked and freezing, with leaves clinging to my shoes.

After coming to the realization that it is now undeniably fall, I started to think of ice and the leaves surrounding my feet. I thought back to the cyanotypes I have seen in the past of icicles and snow and wondered how I could incorporate that into my process. Once I got home, I looked into the idea and found an artist I have already researched this semester—Alexis Doshas. In her cyanotype collection, she includes an image of icicles (which I added below). Now that I know ice can be captured on cyanotype paper, I’m excited to experiment with different layouts of ice and leaves.

With this project, I wanted to express how it feels to mentally and physically fall apart. Over the past year, I’ve constantly had issues with my body and my mental state that seemed to all come to a peak within the last few months.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, all the progress I felt that I made managing my anxiety and mental health disappeared. The constant fear of my friends and family members getting sick at work while I was stuck inside made me feel overwhelmingly trapped and powerless. I felt like I could barely think, much less make sense of the thoughts inside my head. In order to illustrate this feeling in my work, I took parts of different images and separated/reorganized them, so the original images were no longer clear. I also added floral imagery throughout to represent the more lucid moments I have when I can finally focus well enough to make sense of my classes and what’s going on in the world.

I’ve really never thought about power in my own work before. I don’t think of myself as a person who ever holds power over others. But as I think about this question more and more, I think the way I use certain materials (aka not the way I should) kind of holds power over the viewer in a way. My unconventional use of the materials may either throw them off or confuse them because it’s different than what they expect to see.

This is really only applicable to a few of the projects I’ve done, but those few were closer to the work I really want to create. Experimentation is part of the joy of art for me, and I thrive when I can experiment in odd ways with new materials. And, while the methods I find odd and experimental may not be too out of the norm for some, it feels different in a way that’s new and interesting to me.

I’m answering this question a little late, but I honestly just realized I had never posted my response. So, here it is: Personally, I believe hope can be an artistic material in so many different ways. Hope is threaded into my daily life and my art practices whether I’m consciously aware of it or not.

Hope is there when I’m trying to create a print I like or when I’m testing a new technique. Hope is there when I’m sketching out an idea for a photo shoot or when I’m actually in the studio and praying the lights will work for me (for once). Hope gets me through the process of creating, otherwise I’m not sure how I could create. It’s odd to think about, but hope guides my art practice and leads me to all of my best ideas. I put so much hope into everything I create that when a project fails, it takes enough out of me that I don’t want to create for a long time after.