Journal Entry

So, today I had a crit in photo and it sort of put these past few weeks of school in perspective. Over the summer I spent the majority of my creative energy on music, putting photography (and  any other visual art form) slightly to the side. This made coming back to school and making art a process of getting the wheels moving smoothly again and I think I’m starting to groove. Annie keeps pushing our “experimentation” with the medium and the images I showed, I think, exemplified that rather well. I’ve explored other photographic process outside simply photographing (photograms, photomanipulations, inverted lens photos, etc etc) and I think what it’s allowed me to do is get directly to what is in my head. I’m looking for rhythm, something that I tried to closely examine and explore with music this summer....

The images have time (one is a long exposure) and repetition of form and whatever else you might want to take from them. But what I find important about them is that these are vague hints at what is going on in my head and how I’ve presented that to the viewer. In other words, during the crit everyone was saying how there is this very muted tie between the images that they can’t place a finger on and when it gets down to it I think that tie, outside of simply being physical, is me. Yeah I TOOK the photo’s but the overall idea behind the photos are thoughts and themes that I regularly think about and find myself returning to unconsciously, and I’ve tried to present that unfiltered.

Moving on, (although Annie hasn't gone into great detail on the specifics) our project is to expand upon this work and the experimentation involved. Themes I worked with before will be revisited and ideas addressed in my class Social Evolution will be explored. Addressed in class and in the course book, Evolution and Human Behavior by John Cartwright, natural selection and more specifically, reproductive success, and their extremely powerful impact on everything we know and do is something I've been giving a lot of thought to and will attempt to address as my work progresses.

Moving on I want to:

1. Explore the themes that continue to interest me in a similar way to what I've been doing with the work above.

2. Find new process of image creating (color photograms, darkroom manipulation, who knows what else)

(I have drawing in my sketch book of possible ideas)

3. Read more into the topics addressed in my social evolution class that interest me and inspire my work.

Work thats been inspiring me lately is from all over the place....

http://salavon.com/work/

This guys work is AMAZING, really bending what you expect out of a photograph. I'd post pictures here but I can't seem to grab them from his site so a link will have to do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNIlQSSOv0Q

This is a song by one of my favorite bands. They really inspire the way I think about music and making art in general. They're not afraid to bend and break the rules

"Contact" by Michael Flomen

Michael Flomen does amazing work with photograms, really changes what you might think about the ability of the medium.