Photography Blog

I wanted to explore the ending of one part of my life and the beginning of another and how things that were everyday become forgotten over time. Each of the photographs is a head shot of someone I encountered during my daily routine. They were a conglomeration of my best friends and people I had just met for the first time. In the final image the pictures that are the darkest represent those who I had not made any lasting memories with. As for the rest they are a mix of recognizable faces and those that I cannot quiet perceive their identity any more. The shape of the piece is representative of a mind in that it is not symmetrical and seemingly without order. The spaces between some of the images are meant to further establish the gaps in memory.

The final piece is a representation of my mind and the faces that are going to start fading as time passes. At this point in the distortion I am still able to recognize a few of those who I am very close with and see almost every day. The rest are practically unrecognizable and the ones that are almost black represent those people I shot who I had never met before and will most likely never see again.

All of the photos distorted and made into contact sheets to print on 11 x 17 paper to then cut up and reassemble.

I have had an overriding theme in all of my projects this semester. That theme is memory and how photography can enhance and also degrade memory. As this is my final photography project of my undergraduate career I have become very sentimental of late about the possibility of never seeing the friends I have made over the past four years ever again. While I was shooting the head shots I noticed I was only taking pictures of people I had an interaction with. Most were friends but some were people I just happened to bump into and have a small conversation with. I realized this after I had developed the roles of film and was looking at the negatives. There were some I could recognize immediately and others I could not at all. I noticed that there was a mix of close friends in both categories and so I started developing this idea in which the faces of people I interact with any given day will eventually fade from memory.

The top one was the original ‘wave’ distort that I created and after a lot of tweaking i ended up with an amount of distortion I feel speaks to the feeling of the project. (update on project goal in next post)

Finished the last two rolls. One came out black and white but the other yet again an odd green, but no red this time.

While I was filling the last two rolls I began testing different distortions in photoshop. These were the final 6. However I have chosen the top static one to be the distortion. It is called ‘wave.’

The first roll came out oddly colored. But I am now going to be scanning them into the computer so turning them Black and White will not be an issue. The second roll lost its grip half way through and I ended up losing a quarter of a roll and double or more shooting another quarter. However, I am in love with how some of the doubles came out.

For the fourth and final project of the semester I wanted to work with film. I was inspired earlier in the semester, by Timothy Pakron and his silver drips, to photograph faces with film and distort them before putting them all together to form a final piece.

The “The fire is gone but we have the light,” by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Korakrit Arunanondchai, was interactive in a completely different way. It felt like we were directed in a certain direction and shown a video in a certain way. It all felt very forced. However, the documentary that was playing was superbly done. I really enjoyed the message of losing culture by showing it through a very de-cultured format of travel documentaries.

-Rousseau Nutter

The Final Image. This width is much more relatable to the feeling the bathroom exudes. The black and white of everything other than the Tub helps create the glow around the tub I was aiming for as well as the flattening of the background and obscuring the Ghost in the background. I will be posting the image installed in a future post as well as the article written about the piece.

Just to give a scale of the size. Each one of these images was a piece fo the final scene. I had to split it into three so I could save the progress. Photoshop will only save images smaller than 2 GB so each of these is around 1.9 GB. I could not flatten the images until everything was put together and the lighting in each image was where I wanted them. As you can see I turned most of the image black and white but I will touch on that in the next post.

Final look of the interior with the frame. Not loving how wide it is or how dark the figure is.

I pieced the frame together. This will become a flat layer that is placed on top of the scene. I also laid out the general location of the bodies to start piecing together the final scene.

Shot the frame in pieces so that their quality held up when printing large.