Berenice Abbott

Soooo finals are coming up soon! It's all very stressful and like everyone else I have tons of work to do. For my history essay we are doing research papers, and I am talking about photography from the Great Depression. Normally I'm not a huge fan of wicked old photography but some of the stuff I found was actually pretty cool. For my paper I'm focusing on the photography Berenice Abbott. She looks at the depression from a lot of different perspectives, and focuses on the architecture of New York as well as the effects of the Depression on different social groups.
This pictures seems to be one of her most famous and influential photographs:
Some of her other photographs, like this one, look much different:
I think that she has an interesting style, and she seemed to be pretty different from many other photographers at the time.

This is My Title

Today we submitted our photos for the portrait assignment. It's good to be done with them (especially the self portraits), mostly because now I can focus on my final project a lot more. I don't have that much done at this point, but hopefully I'll get going on that and have a bunch of film for next class. I think my biggest problem is that I'm trying to give each of the four shoeboxes an overall theme and wanted to make that theme about various emotions, like happiness, fear, anger, anxiety, etc. For each one I wanted different aspects of the scene to convey one of these emotions by combining a few different images. I'm not sure if I wanted the scenes to be more realistic or not realistic at all, but either way I wanted the perspective and the locations of the pictures to create some abstraction.
...we'll see next Tuesday what I can do with the pictures I take by then... hopefully it'll work out the way I want it to!

In my photography class last year our work was in an exhibit at a local photo museum, the Arthur Griffin Museum of Photography. I focused on double exposures for my photos. This is one of them:

http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/gallery/student_photography?pg=7

Our last class left me with a lot to think about. After looking at the photos due yesterday we all came to the conclusion that I like stairs, which I had never really noticed before, but I guess it makes sense. I think it's a combination of things, really. I like angles, shapes, and symmetry, in some cases, which is why I liked the picture that I took of the stairs with the railing at night, up close. I also like people pictures on stairs because I think that people pictures are interesting, including crowd shots. Stairs are just a good location to capture those people. There is also some element of mystery involved in pictures of people going up or down stairs: Where are they going? What are they doing? How does the expression on their face or their body language convey these elements of mystery? There are many things that draw me to those similar themed photographs. Maybe I should include them in my final project...

...which leads me to another thought about yesterday's class. We discussed our ideas for the final project and I am very excited about mine. It seems like a unique idea and will be something that interests me. It will be very interesting to see how this all works out. Hopefully I will have some good ideas for each shoe box scene that I put together... I have started to think about it but there are so many options and so many different directions that I could go in that it's difficult to isolate certain ideas. I'm sure it will all come together in the end, though. As for now, I mainly need to focus on the next assignment due Tuesday: portraits. Self portraits are difficult, though, and I don't personally like taking them all that much, but I'm hoping that they come out well anyway.

Assignment due tomorrow

I think the six pictures that we were supposed to print for tomorrow went well. I did have some problems with the developer, though, that affected the quality of my pictures. It gave them a strange color and they were very difficult to develop. I'm not really sure what was wrong with the developer, though. According to another girl in the darkroom, the developer was not old but it was a different type that didn't work as well or something. That was on Friday.. hopefully it has been fixed since then!
My pictures came out pretty good, anyway, though- different than how I thought they would look based on my contact sheets. I'm interested to see how everyone else did, as well.

Abelardo Morell

I definitely would have to say that Abelardo Morell is one of my favorite photographers. I found out about his work a long time ago and thought his pictures were really cool but it wasn't until last year that I really got interested in his work. I went to see him speak at a local photography museum and he explained how he made a bunch of his photographs, focusing on the camera obscura ones, which are his most unique pictures by far. Recently he has been focusing on color photography but in a way I like his black and white photos better, but that could be just because I tend to like the original ones more and also because I don't do much for color photography so I might have more of an appreciation for that than for the color pictures. It's hard to pick a favorite, though, but these are a couple that I like:

First 2 rolls of film

Today our photos are due for the motion shots and the depth of field roll. I am interested to see how they came out, especially the motion ones, which I think will be more interesting. This weekend I took pictures both in Boston and around Stonehill. I am more excited to see how the Boston ones came out because when I went to fanuel hall there were many good photo opportunities. Although trying to make interesting photos out of something that may not seem interesting is challenging and can be fun, Boston is probably my favorite place to take pictures.