Questions.

Recently we were posed these three questions in Senior Thesis, and I thought it would be a good idea to post my responses. You get a gold star if you actually decide to read all this....

Concept:

Please respond to the following questions:

1. What motivates you to make your work?

2. How is your work made, generated or produced? What is your process as an artist?

3. What has been the evolution of your work to date and in what direction do you see

it moving in relation of your thesis?

A camera enables me to capture a moment that my memory would not serve justice. I surely would be able to remember these places and people without this aide, but a memory with time begins to fade and the edges become fuzzy much like an out of focus image. Its both fascinating and satisfying for me to have the ability to capture an image that will conjure up a memory, an emotion, a human connection in a way that a memory may lack. My mind does not tend to remain still, and I feel that a camera, as an extension of myself bestows an ability for me to focus on a moment and let everything else fade away. I have a strong interest in history, and I always have. I can remember sitting in history class and we would get an assignment to read a chapter in class and fill out a worksheet. Every single time we did this I would continue reading for chapters beyond before I realized that I needed to be filling out this paper to turn in before class was over. The interactions between our choices in the past and the effective consequences on the present are interesting to me. Furthermore, I am also interested in the choices that are being made today and the subsequent results these will have on our future. I strongly believe that the world would be a far more harmonious space, if we as people are exposed to as many different ways of life as possible. Through these exposures to culture we can really start to understand the rest of the world, as we are only one species, the only thing that truly separates us is geographical distances. Much, if not all, of the hate, intolerance, and misunderstanding is from a simple lack of knowledge. So, ultimately I am working to expand my own knowledge and personal experiences to try to get a grasp on the realities in this world and the causalities for the actions that occur within.

My work tends to be made in a very similar way for a few reasons. The square format of each image is dependent on the camera I use. I use this camera for a particular function it can afford me that many cameras are missing. That is the waist-level viewfinder. For me personally, since I am (obviously) a fairly tall person, using this kind of viewfinder allows me to remove the camera from my face which serves two primary functions in my mind. The first is that because of my height, a normal eye level viewfinder makes me approach subjects from an angle of looking down upon, which has connotations that I don't particularly find to be well suited to the images I make. Secondly, this allows me to not have a camera in my face when I'm shooting, which I think lets people feel a bit more comfortable in the fact that if I am interacting with them and about to take a photograph my face is still present and they can interact with me fairly normally without an additional barrier between me and them. (seeing as we already have a somewhat barrier of being strangers)

I think my process is very driven from the world around me and my own personal experiences and history. Maybe it could almost be considered reactionary to the world around me. I see many disquieting things going on in just the small bubble of space I inhabit and the world around it. Ultimately, I do not think I have truly been able to confront the issues that I continue to grapple with in my head and that I feel most passionate about. It seems like an extraordinary feat to move them from their current location into tangible object.

I would have to say one of my largest interests early on was the idea of street photography. I loved the idea that Gary Winogrand shot somewhere around 1,000,000 rolls of film in his lifetime – and perhaps that was more so for the sake of that massive life of continual documentation of spaces and the people interacting within. That interest started to wane coming into my sophomore year of college at KCAI. I cant exactly place why or what made me lose interest but I can perfectly understand why. I thought that street photography was SO REAL. It was perfect. It was truth. It was pure. But then I learned time and time again that truth is seemingly unobtainable, particularly in a singular photographic image. Anyone looking at an image is going to come up with their own concept of what is taking place and what it means. But what was really striking to me was that street photography, was often without hardly ANY context. The stories drawn from the image could be so far from the truth that it almost seemed like a joke. I disliked such a large disconnect in the information contained in an image. For awhile I floated around aimlessly taking photos of whatever. I was disheartened by my new discovery within myself. I feel like this discovery is what led me away from the city, and away from my familiarities within larger population centers. Taking to the road I got to be somewhere that I had very little concept of what daily life is – at least in a very real sense. Seeing something on TV or reading it in a book cannot be a replacement for a personal interaction with the subject matter at hand. Moving through these rural spaces I got to get a glimpse into a life I was unfamiliar with but completely interested in learning more. So I think my main interest has always been people, but the way in which I go about approaching the subject matter has shifted. Will it continue to shift? I think so. I'm not entirely sure where yet. I think that the more I look at other people the more I start looking back at myself as well.

Oh and new photos coming soon...