For this final project, I originally wanted to make a collection of photos extending the project I did called Invisible and using different materials to represent the Coronavirus. Since spending time with family, I realized I missed out on a lot of memories. I actually left my home and family to go to boarding school when I was 15 and I sacrificed a lot of family time. Now for this project, I decided I want to capture and highlight my family and the memories I am making with them during this time. I feel like I am getting to know them all over again. I really have been trying to take in every moment at home. I have already shot five rolls of film: one b&w and the rest color. I have been constantly taking photos and the camera has been basically glued to me. The rolls have been sent to the place by house and I will hopefully get my printed photos and film rolls back by Thursday. All of the printed photos are going to be on 4 by 6 in paper. I chose the printed photos to be on fuji matte paper because that is what the place recommended and researching online I found that I personally like fuji matte better than kodak matte. 

I first thought it would be nice if I made my own type of scrap book/photo album, but since I have changed the direction of my project, I decided to make a blurb book. Throughout each memory that I have made with my family during this time, I consistently journaled and wrote down the songs that were playing in the background of the car rides or in the house. I really want to include this in the blurb book because I feel like it completes the whole moment. Some photos I definitely want to edit and play with color, overlapping, and collaging. I also want to integrate family photographs in the book. 

This project is really important to me because it is helping me create a new bond with my family. It relates to some of my past work because almost all of my family living with me have been some way included in my work and they were my subjects. 

Materials: 

Camera 

Kodak Portra and B&W film 

• Processed at Richard’s Photo Lab and will hopefully receive everything (prints, digital photos, and film Thursday)

Tripod (used in some of the photo)

ISO 400

Timeline: 

April 30th or  May 1st: receive photos 

May 2nd: choose photos for blurb book

May 3rd: edit some photos and insert everything in blurb book 

May 4th: Finalize blurb book and purchase

May 6th: Share Blurb book

Before all of this happened the idea that I was beginning to formulate for my final project was to create what would essentially be portraits in the form trading cards of friends from Bowdoin, specifically seniors. It was built on nostalgia and wanting to hold onto these people, to create some sort or relic or embodiment of who they are. I wanted it to be tactile, to pull the images out of a box in our exhibition, as if they were baseball cards (or maybe Pokémon cards if that’s more relevant for our age group), or to just have them feel like a box of photos. I wanted them to be almost like carte-de -visite of these people that had come to impact my time at Bowdoin so much.

With everything that is going on, I figured that I would have to give up this idea, but I just couldn’t. In many ways it felt more relevant than ever, especially given that we are no longer able to make physical photographs in the photo lab and instead are stuck working through the screen. So, I have chosen to continue with this idea with some edits and elaboration on what I was thinking before.

From the start, my goal with this project was not to try and somehow distill or capture the character of one of these people in a single photograph. I am not trying to manufacture a “Winter Garden Photograph.” Instead, I am hoping to critique this idea with some sarcasm.

So far I have reached out to 12 of my friends, fellow seniors who are all over the country and have asked for them to think of skill, trait, hobby, characteristic of themselves that they want to represent in a portrait. I have left the choice up to them. The goal of this is to play with and challenge  the practice of how we distill people down to a certain trait or skill and how that really fails to capture who they truly are. In addition, I have left the choice up to them as an experiment and challenge for people to choose how they want to represent themselves. I have told them to somehow represent this characteristic with a prop or props (or an outfit) and then to stage a portrait of themselves taken by someone around them. I am hoping these will look like the very staged trading card photos that are made for kids playing T-ball or rec soccer. I will also be making one of myself.

Another idea that I want to address in this project in relation to the initial idea of nostalgia, and perhaps more so corrupted nostalgia, is how we so often now “need” evidence of connection and friendship with people and how this manifests in social media (i.e. photos of friends, tagging people, etc.). Friendships begin to shift more so into collector’s items for some in this practice. On the flip side of this, during this pandemic, our ability to connect with the people we care about is strained and made far more difficult. So many of us just trying to hold onto and maintain these connections that we have made and “collected” in our lives.

These portraits that I collect I will edit and then format to be made into actual trading cards. This will include the person’s name, and likely some arbitrary facts about them on the back. I also have opened up the opportunity for some people to come up with a title or nickname for themselves. It certainly is odd to not be the person that is actually taking the photos for this project. I am relying almost entirely on others ( of course with lots of my direction). But, I kind of think that this approach to my project really captures the experience of this pandemic. I am trying to forge this connection, to in some ways acknowledge and ignore the distance. I am dependent on others as all of us are, as the whole world is right now. I know that doing this project would be so much easier and in many so much better if I was able to standardize and be the photographer. However, that is not possible right now. This project will go on though, just as life will.

Details:

Digital images that will be formatted into “trading cards”

Timeline:

By 4/28: Reach out to portrait subjects to be a part of the project, research possible printing locations for the trading cards (Nations Photo Lab, Topps, etc.)

5/3: Receive photos from portrait subjects

5/6: Format and send trading cards for printing

For my final project I want to create a blurb book compiled of photographs that highlight the beauty in the little, and conventionally ordinary, things in life. I plan to mainly use nature photos of seemingly insignificant things like a rock, or a tree trunk to show how such objects that we inherently cast as mundane can actually be pretty spectacular. I anticipate I will mainly use photos I have taken during this semester on my iPhone and photos I will take in the upcoming days. But I will look through my digital photo library as well to see if I have any additional photos that may work well under this theme.

This project is important to me because I have found that for me personally, life becomes a lot more pleasant and meaningful when I consciously take the time to appreciate my surroundings. My senior year of high school, my English teacher would start our 8am classes by asking us to share something beautiful we saw that morning. Although this may seem like a pretty basic warmup for the class, when I was forced to reflect on my morning, I found that there were a lot of beautiful things I came across that simply passed over me. I didn’t take the time to acknowledge the sunlight reflecting off the morning dew, or the fresh breath of the crisp morning air, or the smile on my friend’s face as we passed each other in the hallway. This daily exercise helped me see that the simple act of being more aware of my surroundings can help illuminate the beauty in life. I hope to illustrate this belief in my final project through photos that capture the beauty in seemingly ordinary things.

For this project I will not be manipulating my subjects in any significant way in order to replicate the idea of stumbling across the natural beauty in life. I will also mainly use more formal composition methods to present each subject’s beauty in a clear manner. I am not totally sure how I will arrange my photos as a series yet. But I like the idea of placing the photos in a more random fashion throughout my blurb book to reflect how we often stumble across beautiful things randomly. It’s easy to forget to take in our surroundings, but I think that the process of compiling this book will help remind me to consciously acknowledge the beauty of the little things in life.

Timeline:

4/28: Take photos

4/30-5/1: Take more photos

5/2: Decide which 20 photos to include in blurb book

5/3: Design blurb book with images and possibly text

5/4: Revise book, make changes if necessary, then place order

The Black Interior by Destiny Kearney

Proposal: 

Originally for this project, I wanted to focus on representing Blackness in relation to the physical. I wanted to highlight Black Skin, Black Hair, and the Black body in my project. As the semester comes to a close, I altered my motive slightly and decided to create a response piece to my class Black Heat, Black Cool: Theorizing Blackness, but specifically I wanted to respond to a book we read in a class titled The Sovereignty of Quiet, by Kevin Quashie. Quashie pushes readers to look past theorizing Blackness through the lens of resistance that is public, loud, and dramatic. He encourages readers to analyze the Black experience through the interior, or what he calls quiet. Quiet highlights “one’s inner life—one’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, fears.” (6). This speaks about the “full range of one’s inner life” that is absent from race/racism but focuses on the essence of their being. So I titled my piece the Black Interior. 

In this project, I aim to highlight interiority through photographs. I want to capture the essence of my Blackness by examining my interior. Mentioned In the quote above, I’d like to highlight desire, ambition, fragility, vulnerability, and spirituality as my guiding themes to support “the interior.” I plan to achieve this by using a combination of people and objects as subject matter. I would like to play around with “black objects”, meaning things I would associate with my culture and/or society would and contrast them with a composed image that I put together. I can’t see the final product at the moment, but I look forward to seeing my ideas play out into bringing the interior into the light. 

This project is important to me because as I think about that course alongside this one along with our current situation, I think about how my art can speak volumes through this time. Being stuck at home reminds me of a lot of the concept of interiority because we are forced to deal with our inner lives at home, but also in our heads. I’d like to use this theme as a way to reflect on the pandemic not directly but focus on my growth as an academic and as an artist by combining the two as I shed light on the current circumstance. 

Timeline: 

4/29:  Buy Props needed for photos

4/30: Start shooting object shots 

5/1: Shots Featuring Myself

5/2: Family Shots 

5/3: Go through photos and select top images +Photoshop / Edit anything that needs work 

5/4: Design Photo book

5/5: Revise label for final and finalize photobook and place order! 

5/6 : DONE!

I. Proposal —

For my photo project I’m going to compile photographs of my life before the pandemic, while also including photographs of more recent days in its impact on our lives. I am going to create a photo book through the Blurb Photo Book service. Most of the photographs I will be including in my photo book will be digital as most were taken with an iPhone. I did shoot a roll of film before COVID-19 resulted in city lockdowns and remote learning, so I hope to send my film to a processing lab then consider it for my book. Additionally, weather and public safety permitting, I would love to go into the city and shoot in both digital and black and white film to capture the stillness of the city during this pandemic.

I’m motivated to work through a photo book because I believe it will allow for me to tell a personal experience of how I lived and interacted with the world. Specifically, about how I noticed spaces around me, went about my day to day and tried to make the most of my last few weeks as a Bowdoin senior. With the speed of an overnight train, the pandemic turned the way in which we thought about our sense of normalcy. Additionally, this is a processing that allows me to reflect on how I have been learning and experimenting with photography. I was so used to pulling out my phone for everything but taking photos of shadows, but now I can see that there is a gift to capturing other moments, even when we are not thinking in the long run. I hope to bring my photos from the past year into the book, because it is almost a bittersweet experience of reliving those feelings and memories.

As we have mentioned in our class discussions, most generation-zers (post millennials) do not develop or have photographs printed. A photo book will be a great way to self-curate a personal experience that friends and family might ask about in years to come when they come across it. Much like I have been able to explore family photo albums, this will be something that will survive these days when the pandemic is still in our minds, but will feel even more comforting when we are back to our regular normalcy and able to see the people, places, activities and things we miss doing. For me, I feel my friendships and ties getting stronger during these difficult times as we all have a sense of having had lost something together, this photo book is going to allow me to share the pages of memories that, hopefully will give others some comfort when I share it.

II. Timeline —

04/28 — Select 20 photographs from my digital archives and think of their placement in Blurb Photo Book. Try and get into the city to shoot with 35 mm camera. Share with class and get feedback on work-in-progress.

• Photographs will be both color (digital) and black and white (film).
• Digital will be photographs pre-pandemic. Film will be the leading-to and current realities of the pandemic.

04/30 — Sending any needed film to Chicago photo lab for processing – delivery.

05/03 — Finalize decisions for photo book, length, photo organization, text or no text.

05/06 — Share Blurb Photo Book pdf file.

05/08 — Join in on the class critique/conversation!

Proposal:

For my final project, I would like to use my 35mm film camera to shoot images that represent my experience since quarantine. I am choosing to take film photographs rather than digital because I feel as though film better captures specific naturally occurring moments. I am drawn to the surprise effect of shooting over a period of time and having to wait for a specific outcome, not really knowing how things will turn out. This effect is representative of the time we are in as it is uncertain and suspenseful. I would like to use 400 ISO for half of my photos capturing the feelings of togetherness and the beautiful small moments that have occurred over the past month. I plan to use a mix of 400 ISO and 100 ISO to capture feelings of darkness, discomfort, and uncertainty that I have experienced through this pandemic. This project is important to me because this is a time that I’m sure generations to come will be asking about and I want to make a lasting memento of my experience.

I will be sending my film in to be processed (developed, printed, and scanned). Using either the prints from this film or the digitized copies, I will be making a photo album or photo book. I would like to do side by side pages tying my photos of discomfort to those of comfort as this is the back and forth that I have been experiencing. My source of inspiration for my “discomfort” photos is Edward Weston. I would like to pull out the emotion, uncertainty, and uneasiness in mundane objects in my house and yard to represent being stuck inside and not knowing when everything will be resolved. On the other hand, I want to be sure to contrast these with the photos I had started to take at the beginning of spring break when I thought we would be returning to campus as well as pictures of joy and family and natural beauty that have been revealed through this experience.

Timeline:

4/28: Shoot 2 rolls of film

5/4: Shoot 2 rolls of film

5/5: Send film in to be processed

Create book (not sure if I will be including text or not)—to be done whenever the photos come