Foot Stories
(Faceless Portrait)
In the Summer of 2010, I moved to Seattle for a journalism internship at CBS. The move was quite the departure, as I was born and raised on the complete opposite side of the country, in Florida. I was seeking ways to capture what my experience was like for all my friends and family back home and started taking more photos of my everyday life than ever before. Out of curiosity, I took a photo of my feet on a rainy sidewalk one morning and found that I really liked the emotion it conveyed. There I was, in “Rain City,” standing in the right place at the right time in my life. From then on, it’s been a sort of habit of mine to capture travel or major life moments by taking a photo of my feet in the environment. For my first photography assignment in Media Design, I thought I would juxtapose the idea of this series with photos “from where I stand” in my day to day. The mundane nature of the photos, I thought, would surely make for an interesting comparison to the rest of my photos in the series. At first, this was true. But, as I went on, I took note of the fact that I was manipulating my typical environment in order to make the photographs for the assignment more interesting. It made me look back to the aforementioned photographs in the series and wonder, What else in my environment have I altered or unnaturally captured in order to express the sentiment of the moment? Are those experiences really just a simulacrum of the real thing?
The first photos featured here are of my day to day life in New York, shot from February 17- February 20, 2014. The bottom photo is a snapshot collage of my series of foot stories over the past 3 years.
My office environment. Unfortunately, here at my cluttered desk is where I spend a large portion of my time. This photo is lit by fluorescent lights and features a soft fall off, as you can see there is still a bit of shadow in the corner and on the tops of my feet.
I am traveling in a cab over the Brooklyn bridge to a doctor's appointment. This moment represents the monotonous stuff I was hoping to capture. And I do not feel that it is manipulated, as I have often ridden in a cab this way. The light is coming in to the top of the frame from outside creating a medium, soft light. Though, the photo is a bit overexposed.
This moment is perhaps the most manipulated photo of all, and yet I like it the most. I sat down on the ground on 42nd street so that Grand Central station would be in the background of my photo, with my feet in the foreground. I am happy with the way it turned out, especially since this woman walked into frame and created a ghost figure in the right third portion. The lighting is even.
My favorite of the bunch.
The most awkward experience of the group.
This is the first time I realized I actually often interact with others, and should perhaps try to capture that in this series.
The depth of field in this particular photo is really interesting to me. I focused on my bag lunch instead of my shoes in this one and I think it made for an interesting photo.
Prior "Foot Stories"
From top left: On a log in the forest with my best friend in North Carolina, a graffiti wall in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, driftwood on La Push Beach in Northwestern Washington, sidewalk in the Wynwood Arts District Miami, FL, the Grand Canyon, my mother and I in Mt. Rainier in Washington state
*These photos were shot with a Canon 50D.