In the Blue Notebook

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Welcome to, "In the Blue Notebook", a blog dedicated to the students of Shala Miller.

Posting now: International Center of Photography - Creative Practices Seminar students, fall 2025.

Previous posters: Cornell University - Image Text Ithaca MFA students, summer 2025, Parsons School of Design - Conceptual Practices BFA students, spring 2024.

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Crit 11/25/25

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Final Crit

New color for the truck images

2 new pics

I feel like I need to connect my settings

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Final Thoughts

- work on the design aspect of my collages

-add more supported text

-rather than a big block of text i would like to split it up

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Updates on project: - new image (image #8) - removed white borders - new sequencing - trying to be more consistent with square crops in all but the final image

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I want to have the innocent eyes of a child and look at the world for the first time.

I noticed I have a growing desire to be an aniaml-like and primitive.

Someone photographing  her experiences and memories on the fringes of identity, before they become more complex.

Understanding that I  find more creative vitamins in dirt on earth than mingling with angels in the sky.

It used to be different, it used to be the everything I knew, the screams and the pain that attracted my eyes, the ones whose hearts been damaged. 

Only because perhaps it was easy to capture something I understood but no one knew I did,

Usually I don’t take pictures looking for reality.

Reality is overrated and means so many lovely and contradictory things.

But obviously, I like this confusion.I like the quietness of a photograph,

So I keep trying to ask the same questions without ceremony knowing there is more hidden than visible. Always surprised by the unpredictable.

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My project seeks to create a visual language to express my awe about birds and the urban wildlife around me. I have always felt a powerful connection to animals and have had some life altering experiences relating to it. Birds are not only ecosystems pillars, but also powerful entities that realm the skies and make the cycle of life possible. As liminal beings and messengers or the underworld. I want you to remember how lucky you are to be under the same sky, I want everyone to know how important they are. For everything. For my memories. For my struggles. And for giving me back my voice and my memories. In my visual explorations about the natural world, I want to instigate awe wonder, love and respect.

See what I feel.

Am I a hunter? Am I a bird? Not yet. But what I know is that when I photograph, I am often sad. The birds are so far away. I’m always trying to get close to them. And I’m sad, and I’m cold and I’m tired. But maybe tomorrow they will finally come to me, and see that I’m just one of them. At least I captured part of their magic. Not all of it can be captured, but at least a part. At least I can look at them again and again, until the sun raises and the hunt resumes. Will I ever become a hunter if the birds don’t come to me?

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Sequencing for Crit #4 part 1.

This was after my group mates did some re-sequencing of the work, I unfortunately forgot to take a photo of my original sequencing.

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Cydnii Jones

Crit #5 - Mid-Year Review Practice

I'm happy with these final images I've come to for this critique. As I've mentioned in some of my other blog posts, I see certain narrative threads arriving in the work, and I'm particularly happy with the ways I've been able to shift focus back towards self with explorations in self portraiture, complimented by portraits with my family that speak to a tension, and push and pull family dynamic that is definitely one of those threads.

A couple issues that came up in the work for me, is that I felt like I was loosing myself in this narrative. I've gotten a lot of positive feedback on the images with my family, but I still want this to work to lead back to self and my inner world.

Another thing I'd like to work on is finding ways to make my work more conceptual and less representational or "on the nose." I want there to be an emotional current, but not rely too heavily on symbols or literal imagery. Any suggestions for technical or conceptual methods I could employ to improve this work would be greatly appreciated. I already plan to reshoot some of the images with more intention to lighting and framing.

I definitely know I want to explore more abstract interpretations of these themes, alternative processes, and more self portraiture. I'm particularly excited by the still life/altar building process I've begun to explore in the final image.

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FINAL CRIT

Key words:

The creative act that is translation

The distance between our subjectivities // How we still manage to meet each other

More-than-human

Attention as a devotional act <--> Foraging

Things in my head:

This work feels very process-based. It's about me, foraging, in new york. getting to know the plants here, looking particularly for familiar plants from Korea. researching about the sensory organs of a plant; the ways it communicates; and also about different mythologies and legends about herbalist knowledge. Thinking about what it means to belong in a new land.

it's a ritual of devotional attention. one that's in communication with foragers before me: my uncle, who was a ginseng forager, who passed away a year ago, leaving behind a room full of foraged herbs and plants submerged in alcohol // my ancestors, who decoded our relationships to plants in nation-building mythologies and traditional medicine // my maternal side, who had a lived knowledge of the sea, the edible seaweed, how the seas speak //

Things I want to work on:

Carving out a text to be interweaved with the images; suggestive, less descriptive. I want to give vignettes of the different experiences and stories I was thinking about.

More explorations based on the sensory capacity of plants. Electric signals.... mycellium networks....

Paring down the conceptual part of the work to what's really important. Too many branches right now.

Questions for crit:

Which images detract? What works?

How does the flow feel?

What information would be helpful, vs. detract?

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Blog Post #11

I think that this project has turned out to be about the gaze..

Surrealist psychology

chiaroscuro lighting

darkness as architecture

negative space

fragmentation of self

objectification— the human form becomes shape, sculpture

horror-adjacent?

body destabilizes the self?

what is the relationship between the self and the body?

beauty and dread

domestic interior— psychic intrusions

light interrogates, tension

depersonalization as tool

violence of being seen and displayed?? critiquing how women are visually consumed in media

women in horror

domestic uncanny

tensions between vulnerability and armor

body//embodiment as material, tool, vessel, medium, archive, boundary,

body as instrument and subject

opacity, agency, politics of looking

alternative to the hyper-visibility and overexposure of contemporary digital self-imagery.

^^^Does this make sense? Come across? Am I off the mark or missing anything important?

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Caution: Images contain nudity.

Description: This current body of work feels dark, heavy, and emotionally draining. It reflects where I am right now, but it’s not something I want to face every day or carry with me into next semester. Although I appreciate the honesty in these images, I’m ready to move toward work that brings joy while still holding purpose and intention.

Next semester, I want to step beyond straight photography and explore mixed media. I’m drawn to collage, painting, writing, zine-making, and working with cardboard, found objects, and materials from the Jarmon Archives. I’d like to build a process rooted in curiosity and play rather than emotional weight.

I don’t have a complete project statement yet, but here are elements I hope to incorporate:

Photography

Painting

Color (Red, Orange, Brown, Pink, Blue, Green, Yellow, Black)

Collage

Zines

Books

Cardboard and found objects

Written text

Jarmon Archives

(I'm sure I want to add more to this list)

I’m excited to take my work in a new direction that feels more open, intentional, and creatively sustaining.

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Research - Mallory

Dianne Markosian - Father

Academic Text

Claire Vaye Watkins - I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness

A FIlm

Aftersun (2022)

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For my research, I’m looking at a range of photographers—such as Coreen Simpson, Cam Hicks, Dana Scruggs, James Van Der Zee, Tyler Mitchell, Zanele Muholi, Mye Shaevon, Zora J. Murff, Kwame Brathwaite, and Denisse Ariana Pérez—whose work explores identity, portraiture, and Black visual narratives. I’m also studying painters like Firelei Báez, Amelia Peláez, Carla Accardi, Marisol Escobar, and Felipe Baeza, along with collage artists including Deborah Roberts, Lorna Simpson, Letha Wilson, Sara VanDerBeek, Pierre Molinier, Wangechi Mutu, and Mark Morrisroe. Across these artists, I’m focusing on ideas of color, mimicry, fragmented identity, and how a self-portrait doesn’t have to represent me literally. I’m especially interested in collaging, archived/colored photographs, text, and paint.

Deborah Roberts — DeborahRobertsArt.com (Deborah Roberts)

Friedman Gallery)

Lorna Simpson — LornaSimpsonStudio.com (lsimpsonstudio.com)

Wangechi Mutu — MoMA profile (The Museum of Modern Art)

Tyler Mitchell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjJL_qQ0exU

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Academic Text:

Daniel

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Bringing a liberation through deformation, what's behind ?

To what extent can I explore the exhaustion of a construct through the revelation of a body, a hidden feeling that is never showed in the first phase of what is asked from us.

Anamorphosis

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Crit #4