#final-statement

For my book I decide to do it based on my hiking trip to Sabino Canyon with my boyfriend. We hiked most of the Seven Falls trail but decide to hike back at sun down. In my book its in order from the first moment we started hiking to the last as the sun was going down. But the first picture in the book was taken at night and i decide to put in in the front because i wanted the viewer to see i was with someone and i wanted it to just be random. And i also wanted it to be from my perspective so you never see my face just everything im seeing. There's a few photos that show im with my boyfriend because my book is mostly about nature and having an amazing experience capturing breathtaking scenery photos and getting to experience that adventure with him.

The idea behind my book was for it to be a reminder that I have beautiful people in my life and also that there is beauty to be found in everything even dying things. I incorporated portraits of my friends along with photographs of dried wild flowers that are from my home in Flagstaff. These pictures make me happy. This book was an opportunity to make something that I can go to when I’m feeling bad or think that everything is pointless. I included a Jack Kerouac poem in the book because he is one of my favorite poets. This book is about appreciating life even though we are really just dying. I wanted the dried flowers to show how even when things aren’t flourishing, they can still be beautiful and have purpose. I used a simple black and white color scheme because I didn’t want the layout of the book to distract from the images within. The black pages linked with the flowers because they are dead. The white photos are linked with my friends faces because they are still living. 

My project is on the culture of paths, that is, how paths paint the world in which we live. In other words, imagine a beautiful statue situated in a swamp. Would you go to see that statue, knowing you would need to traverse the swamp first? The swamp, changed the experience of seeing the statue, that is, the experience of reaching the statue was considered along with the experience of the statue itself.     If the experience of the location is altered by the locations traversed to reach that location, what does the traversal say? What language is used? When was the statement made, and why is it still being said?

I decided to make my project based on the life of a college student sugar baby. Being a sugar baby is something many don’t know much about and it’s a whole other world. That’s why i decided to depict why girls become sugar babies and what a sugar baby does. For instance, in the first photo you see a girl who goes to school stressed out by all the bills she has to pay but doesn’t have enough money to pay them off. So she decides to date a sugar daddy who can help her with all her financial needs. In the second photo you see the girl dressed fancy meeting her sugar daddy who is a mature wealthy gentleman. Next, you see them in public with his arm around her back as if he were showing off his “trophy”. Its like when a man gets a new sports car they feel alive and powerful with a new car, its the same idea with his new young “trophy” girl showering her off. Lastly, you see the sugar daddy putting on a diamond bracelet on his sugar baby. You can also see the money he gave her coming out of her purse. The picture is basically trying to show in return for the girl giving him her company he gives her money for her financial needs and gifts as a thank you.

The idea that I had for project 2, “Forced Entry”(The Environmental Portrait), was to produce a series of four or five refined photographs in which my sister was the central subject matter and focus. Not only did I want to do four a five photographs of my sister, but I wanted her to be smoking in them, representing her feelings and emotions she goes through on a day to day basis. My sister lives in LA, so I took these pictures the weekend I went to visit her. I wanted to capture how she functions throughout her day to day life, and how life is so hard to live through without easing her addiction to cigarettes so often. She has been addicted to cigarettes since she was 15 years old and she has dealt with depression for most of her life. I wanted to capture her loneliness and sadness and how sometimes, smoking is the only way she can ease this pain. Whether she is sad and lonely or not, she hides her emotions to the public around her very well, usually going through life with a very monotone approach, expressing very little emotions, even though she has such powerful emotions bottled up inside her. Although I wanted to express her loneliness and sadness, I didn't want to express it so straight forward, because she does not do that in real life. I wanted to express her smoking with little to no emotions, because that is how she lives her life. I felt that using a black and white effect on these photos would help express these emotions and give it more of a depressing, lonely, dark vibe.

For this project I wanted to show the progress of procrastination and how a person procrastinates in his everyday life. The pictures are saturated in a way to show time going by. There is also a clock that signifies how quickly time is going by as well. I also attempted to convey stress for the very last picture in order to show stress and the effect of procrastination.

The project's topic is on self censorship and personality change relative to the brain. The general “pink” tint is to symbolize that these photos occur in the brain. The invader, is the owner of the brain and the one removing memories. The memories are represented by the actor. Specifically, the memories are intentionally generic; they are a placeholder for some habit or character trait that the invader would want to remove. The invader, has focused on the memory, and all its variants, into a single point, the actor. The invader, focusing on the actor, then removes him using the 'weapon'. This removal, technically, is actually a disassociation from other memories, the process causes the memory to change. Because memories are just collections of associations of memories, removing a memory is more a dismantlement than a removal. This process, in turn, is fairly mechanical on a conscious level and thus is represented by a square-ish cast shadow with wires to further indicate a robotic nature. In the second photo, the result of this removal is shown. In the place of the actor, memory, is simple abstract shapes, figments the brain created to fill the lost connections caused by deleting the memory.

The photo content was focused on office gear and general campus paraphernalia. Specifically, items that had been left out in the open, in public spaces, for no purpose outside of being out of the way. All photos were darkened, so as, to counter Arizona’s wonderful weather.