#summerresearch

In this video, I talk about how premeds should approach when going into these opportunities, it’s important to not only focus on what you want to gain, but also on what you are contributing to the lab, organization or job.

today we were instructed to run our code and visually pick out any galaxies that were not a good fit, we then took the data from our code being ran  and created a spreadsheet so we could see the all the data in a centeralized area. 

How can everyday scenes be displayed in a way which subverts their initial understanding

I realized I had no intention of documenting the transitition from urban to rural and acting out its visual representation via its social construct. What I was interested in was looking at the connection to the area and this was formed by my attraction to space and solitude, how I felt lost. So the work has become more of a reaction to that, seeking out scenes in the world which represent this feeling. It does not serve to create a factual depiction but allows for ambiguity and layering to move away from a preconceived or pre-held narrative. As it is more interesting to me to make work at this time which does not serve photography’s traditional role of illustrator.

“In early August, I took a train to Melton and walked the last mile or so to Sutton Hoo. In British politics, the summer of 2019 feels like another prelude to conflict with our European neighbors. Since he became Prime Minister, in late July, Boris Johnson has steered the country toward leaving the European Union, without a deal, at the end of October. In Brussels, officials acknowledge that this is now the “central scenario.” There is talk of negotiations, but no one believes there is much point now. Nostalgia for 1939 and Britain’s privations, and ultimate victory, in the Second World War are rivets in the world view of the most ardent Brexiteers. In 2014, Johnson wrote a biography of Winston Churchill, which repeatedly cast Anglo-Saxon liberalism as fundamentally at odds with the bureaucratic, centralizing impulse of the Third Reich, or, as Johnson had it, “an infernal Nazi EU.” On Downing Street, Johnson has set up a “war cabinet,” which he chairs himself, to deliver Brexit regardless of the consequences for the population or the economy. There is a nationalizing myth of Britain’s long history as an island—that it has made us more free and more resilient—when the facts in the ground invariably argue the opposite: that we have always been attached, dependent, part foreign.”

One of the interesting things about this project is its inability to confined to a certain image. At the start my pool of interest was to develop on the interests I had in the elasticity of the word rural but now having been out in the world I cannot overlook the interlinking elements of how our countryside is formed. It is a web of rural, non-rural, urban, suburban sectors all of which have boundaries which blur into each other. Who we are and how we think these places look still remain and are easily found but if you look closer at their makeup and the surrounding spaces you get a sense of the messy truth which builds this picture. Together, these social structures represent modern man in nature, in rurality. They can help us to understand the fluidity of these borders between us (the urban) and them (the rural) and enable us to confront the constructs that enforce them. The identity politics and socio-economic problems faced by people living outside of urban centres can be increased by their distance from our view. Through the navigation of a road which separates a traditionally industrial area with a remote and rural area, it was possible to view the rapid transitions made in modern rural Britain. The importance of focusing on such areas lie in their resistance to change and as such their connection to tradition and history. They present a timeline and enable comparison with modern societal events such as urbanisation through housing and transport along-side slower, more intimate rituals and cultural practices which are connected to the land. Over 90% of the UK is rural and much of our pictorial image is built from our idyllic landscapes. But away from the chocolate box landscape there is more to its identity.    

“In the same way, there is more to the American culture than these big events of the Viet Nam War and the reactions to the War, and to the Watergate hearings that were going on in that period of time. There is more to the country than all that. And I was interested in the small events of life.”