#oliviakierstead

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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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BLOG POST #10, Crit $3

RESEARCH

PHOTO BOOK: THE GREAT ROOM BY KATHERINE HUBBARD

Katherine Hubbard – The Great Room

Katherine Hubbard’s The Great Room explores memory, grief, and caregiving through intimate photography with her mother during dementia’s ons

ACADEMIC TEXT: Gaze, Identity, and Textual Body in Photography: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Representation of Female Body in Contemporary Photography by Lian Duan

Duan, Lian. Gaze, Identity, and Textual Body in Photography: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Representation of Female Body in Contemporary Photography.

Gaze, Identity, and Textual Body in Photography: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Representation of Female Body in Contemporary Photography

This article aims to address the social meaning of representing female body in photography 1 . In contemporary art, particularly in conceptu

EXHIBIT: Alix Cleo Roubaud

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Blog Post #8

I find the way Campt thinks about physically touching her archival images to be arresting. She says, “I prefer to handle and touch photos as much (or little) as an archive or their owner will allow. It gives me a feel for the image, and the contact intensifies the impact and impression they leave on me” (108). Throughout the whole book, Campt reads her images through a multi sensory lens—the material informs the image itself. This is the way I feel about images and print, for I am a lover of the object. I wonder how this lack of touch when it comes to the images we see online every day affects our relationship to said images. The physical experience necessarily becomes the keyboard or the screen. In a certain sense, the images we see online lack weight. The physical sensation of viewing an image on our phone is the exact same physical experience we have when we check our email, the weather, AI platforms, and basically anything else we do on our phones. It is harder to read an image, to lean in and feel close to it.

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Crit #3

The sequencing I want can't really be done on here, so please reference the screenshot! The turning on of the light feels like a beginning. I put the other darker one to close it off for symmetry purposes. I might still move around the middle pieces, but for now this is my sequencing.

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Blog Post #6

Campt's listening is now extended to our other senses, as well as other genres. In this chapter, Campt tackles the prison album, and distinguishes it from something like a family album by its unique purpose: "that they were made for the purpose of accounting—to account for and to hold accountable" (80). While tracing the many steps of the creation of these albums and their accompanying ledgers, Campt comments on the uncomfortable "sensuousness" (90) of these photos, how many intimate details were on display.

In terms of my own work, this chapter has me contemplating about the presentation of my work, what might be concealed, the level of intimacy I allow, the information I choose or choose not to include. What the body and the different senses can say.

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Blog Post #5

This chapter of Campt's really has me admiring her method, for the way that it can hold complexities and nuance. With these ethnographic portraits, Campt attempts to pull apart "A complex entanglement of social, historical, political, and, perhaps most important, visual tensions structures these images’ depiction of their African subjects" (50). Campt listens so closely that she listens to the muscles themselves. This close, close listening to the body itself, as well as her ability to see many truths at once, has me rather in awe of Campt's framework.

While it has little to do with the content of this reading, I have really been enjoying Carla William's "Tender" lately, as I am thinking about the body and self portraiture. Campt has me wanting to spend more time with each image, to look at the pose of the body and wonder at all of the possible truths it can hold all at once.

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Blog Post #4

Campt's introduction outlines how her work is about animating the quiet, the things that are unsaid. She uses the metaphor of the hum to signify the possibilities of quiet: "A hum can signify a multitude of things" (4). Campt makes sure to distinguish between quiet and silence (6) as she describes how she mad this method in order to represent "a sublimely expressive unsayability that exceeds both words, as well as what we associate with sound and utterance" (4). In order to do the work she needs to do, Campt creates a new language of listening.

Housed in the archival library at which I used to work is a book covered with human skin. I always wondered about it, wondered what its mere existence says without saying.

While I don't have and wouldn't really wish to share a photograph of the aforementioned, here is another, more fun picture of a letter of Jane Austen's held at that library.

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Olivia Kierstead, she/her

These first images were taken in my home, in the suburbs of Massachusetts.

The following images were taken on my travels in Barcelona and Cartagena.

These were taken at my grandfather's home in Connecticut.

And these I took a week or two ago for a class.

I am just starting my photographic practice (formally speaking). I've loved cameras ever since I was a kid, but growing up, I didn't understand that photography or any kind of art could be considered a career. School always came first. This program is my first formal photographic educational experience.

I am interested in investigating style, intimacy, beauty, and femininity through analog. I am a horror film fanatic, and a connoisseur of all things spooky. Of course I am here to develop my technical skills, but I am equally if not more invested in fine tuning my aesthetic voice. Most of my free time has been spent looking at photographs by artists who border the lines between fashion/editorial/fine art photography-- I want to be heading in this direction.