Final for Concept of Photography (Academy of Art, PH 601)

Artist Statement:

The majority of all my concepts come to me in day dreams. It took me a while to embrace that notion, and start jotting down every idea — no matter how outlandish or crazy. As a commercial product photographer, I felt my work had to feel simple, clean and dominantly depictive. I never contemplated bringing my fantasies and daily distractions to life. It was only after I started finding my influences, role models and mentors in the world of photography, that I knew I could leverage my dreams to tell a linguistic based concept in my work. Gregory Crewdson, Philip Lorca di-Corcia, and The Parkeharrisons topped my list of works that I could spend hours staring at and contemplating. 

Perhaps it was the experience of liberating some of these deeper creative ideas that lead me to create this particular body of work; SPACED. As I found myself embracing my day dreams and making time in my schedule to do activities that fostered my creativity, it became easier to drift away and put on blinders to reality. I’ve learned to live for these distractions and dive in deep for the sake of the progression of my work. 

Those moments are exactly what Spaced is meant to mimic. Those departures from reality when we’re so engrained in our thoughts that nothing around us matters and our bodies are nothing more than an anchor keeping us moored to the physical realm. These moments can be positive or negative; the celebration of a new love or the loss of something important in our lives.  

It was around the time that I started developing this concept that I also decided to create lighting setups that looked alien in nature. Many of my dreams are deeply seeded in my love for science fiction. I worked with large scale custom diffusers, made from an array of diffusion materials; large soft boxes, bed sheets and old silk curtains. Each creating it’s own unique looks for the setting. It was the marriage of my day dream concept and these newly acquired lighting skills that lead me down the road for this project. The light source acting as a sort of secondary or tertiary subject in the photo — representing that dream world that each of my characters are subscribing to in the shot. 

I knew from the get go that I wanted to keep the literal subject matter very archetypal in nature. This probably comes from my love for di-Corcia and Crewdson, who go to meticulous lengths to nail the details of the space they’re shooting and the subject they are working with. I also desire my photographs to feel cinematic in nature, like a still from a decisive moment of a movie.

Even though many of these were longer exposures it was important to me to keep the time still (not extrusive) so that the feeling of stillness that comes from this sort of mental state is expressed. I also used a slight desaturation of all colors to continue that feeling of time frozen — for me saturated color can easily accentuate movement and be the antithesis of stillness. Decisions about depth of field, focus, framing, lighting, and focal length were all subject to the environment I was shooting in and what felt most natural to achieve the desired archetype for that scene. 

Although there is a staple of truth in these portraits about the subject and their  environments, I still consider this a constructed reality body of work. I am placing my subjects in their locations, telling them how to feel and what to contemplate and I’m creating a highly artificial light source to illuminate them. As an illustrative piece of work, I’m hoping that nailing these archetypes in each photo help tell a specific narrative in the work, yet still leave room for the viewer to take time to contemplate and ask questions. 

As for physically representing the work, it seemed only natural that these images be back-lit with a transparent media instead of traditional paper. I worked on one of the large format printers at The Academy to print on duratrans paper — designed especially for this purpose. If I were to present these in a gallery, each would have their own viewing light box, either represented as a table (photos below) or hung from the wall. This image was blown up to it’s largest native size (without down sampling) at 14”x22”. For further pursuit of this concept, I would shoot with a larger format that allows for much larger native printing size.