Week 10

My focus for this project is on manmade structures that are not given much attention by the better part of the population. Not given attention because they are do not directly serve us, because they are under construction, because they are behind a building, and so on. I am photographing them for no other reason than the fact that they are beautiful - I often make the composition symmetrical to emphasize this beauty, and to make it more complete.

I was inspired by the thinking behind Anthony Hernandez's Automobile Landsscapes.

This photograph in particular appeals to my thinking. It appears to be a junkyard - something we don't typically focus on, but that is still just as important as the brand-new car dealership. Its existence helps define our world, the landscape that we have manufactured.

I am also inspired by Shai Kremer's work. Much of it is landscape-heavy, but his body New York - Notes From the Edges, reminds me of the work that I have been making this semester. Kremer went to - you guessed it - the edge of the city, on the river, to take pictures of things that we don't normally look at. The twisted metal of a bridge no longer in use. A deserted construction site. Stacks of palates with the skyline in the background. These are not the things we choose to surround ourselves with; they are out of the way for most of us. But they are there, and they are beautiful because they are so rarely seen.

Looking at Kremer's work also inspired me to go a little further to take pictures. It is clear that Kremer scoped out every angle before taking a shot, went to the outer edges, nooks, and crannies, to find the shots for his body New York. Perhaps if I try going into the further reaches of my photographing locations I will find something even more interesting than I have before.

I was intensely drawn to a photograph belonging to Lucinda Devlin while flipping through a book. This photo was at first very clinical - white lights, rectangular composition, void of a human presence. But like many of her other photographs, it was very eerie and sobering because it was a photo of a lethal injection chamber. This kind of photograph is very eye-catching because it takes advantage of our tendency to be morbidly curious. It's disturbing, but you can't look away.

I hope to combine this eerie-ness with the beauty of Hernandez and Kremer's photos. I hope to represent these unseen structures and locations under the context of "art" so that a few people can see them for the beauty that I see them for. However, the scenes I photograph are not completely out of the way, mind you. You can pass them by on the street any day. They do not require special access, like Lucinda Devlin's work. The structures I photograph are somewhere in between those that we see every day, and those that are off-limits.