#imagingworkshop

[ranphotography]

Fade Out

I wanted to explore the ending of one part of my life and the beginning of another and how things that were everyday become forgotten over time. Each of the photographs is a head shot of someone I encountered during my daily routine. They were a conglomeration of my best friends and people I had just met for the first time. In the final image the pictures that are the darkest represent those who I had not made any lasting memories with. As for the rest they are a mix of recognizable faces and those that I cannot quiet perceive their identity any more. The shape of the piece is representative of a mind in that it is not symmetrical and seemingly without order. The spaces between some of the images are meant to further establish the gaps in memory.

[ranphotography]

Fourth Project Idea UPDATE

I have had an overriding theme in all of my projects this semester. That theme is memory and how photography can enhance and also degrade memory. As this is my final photography project of my undergraduate career I have become very sentimental of late about the possibility of never seeing the friends I have made over the past four years ever again. While I was shooting the head shots I noticed I was only taking pictures of people I had an interaction with. Most were friends but some were people I just happened to bump into and have a small conversation with. I realized this after I had developed the roles of film and was looking at the negatives. There were some I could recognize immediately and others I could not at all. I noticed that there was a mix of close friends in both categories and so I started developing this idea in which the faces of people I interact with any given day will eventually fade from memory.

[ranphotography]

Visualizing Nothingness

In this piece I chose to depict the history of Houghton House in the room that most resembles its purpose throughout the ages. The bathroom has been updated and altered over the years but its general feeling and look has remained the same. This bathroom has seen the house as a mansion, as a dorm, and finally as a Architectural Studies work space. With all of those different inhabitants the house has seen everything and retains it all through stories passed down through the generations of inhabitants. One such story is about death and late late nights. Houghton House is said to be haunted, but the ghost does not reveal herself to all. She only reveals herself to those who have stayed up later than their fellow classmates and may be sleep deprived, oversensitive to the bumps in the night. I myself have experienced this ghost, who I know as Consuela, at a few different points with doors opening on there own or footsteps on floors bellow when I am all alone. I wanted, for this piece, to recreate that feeling of unease that comes from not knowing what is on the other end of a sound late at night. The unease that comes from overthinking the normal sounds that mean nothing but at that moment late at night transform themselves in to the very soul of Consuela. She is not made of one body or one thing, she is constructed out of the very things we see around us in Houghton House. She is a friendly ghost but when one is cannot visualize nothing then nothing becomes something.

-Rousseau Nutter

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The Final Image. This width is much more relatable to the feeling the bathroom exudes. The black and white of everything other than the Tub helps create the glow around the tub I was aiming for as well as the flattening of the background and obscuring the Ghost in the background. I will be posting the image installed in a future post as well as the article written about the piece.

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Final look of the interior with the frame. Not loving how wide it is or how dark the figure is.

[ranphotography]

Project #2 Artist Statement

Stuck Behind a Lens

For this project I focused on the idea of the home travel slideshow. The one where everyone sits around a screen and looks at the photos one of the other members took while traveling the world. These photos are usually not very informative for the audience, they are usually just proof that the presenter was actually in the places they said they were. I wanted to use the idea that tourist photography is useless to everyone except the person taking them or in them. Even to that person the meaning of the photo can be lost over time as they did not for any physical memories while at the place in there photo.

To do this project I went to a free media site and found photos from all over the world. I then took photos of my shadow while I posed in “touristy” poses. I overlaid my shadow onto the found photos in Photoshop taking care to obstruct the subject of the image but not fully obstruct to allow some sort of recognition by the viewers. Then I printed them out at the size of 35mm film and put them in slide holders to present on a slide projector in the same fashion as a home travel slideshow.

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Project #2 update

I plan to take the word projection and use its many meanings in every aspect of shooting, processing and displaying. Narrative - “A transforming change.”

Subject - “The attribution of one’s own ideas, feelings, or attitudes to other people or to objects.”

Method - “Control of the volume, clarify and distinctness of a voice to gain greater audibility.”

Material - “A view of a building or architectural element.”

Display Space - “A part that juts out.”

[ranphotography]

Project #2

The goal of this project is to use projection combined with photography to improve the readability of the message.

The first thought I have is inverting the word projection from the idea of projection light onto something to display an image to the idea of an object projecting outwards to influence the viewer.