Under the Sea: Summer Photography Fun

Sometimes the best way to love your own photography is to put it away for a while, especially if you've been critiquing a project for too long. When you pull those old friends back out of the virtual filing cabinet and reacquaint yourself with them, you often see the photos in a new light and realize you could have been happy with them in the first place. 

A couple years ago, I hit a mind-block with this film shoot. Right after I uploaded the scanned files to my computer, I spent an hour or more looking back and forth through the album trying to tell myself that the excessive graininess and the "incorrect" focus were artsy effects, that they added interest. At the time, the message would not get through, but now I realize that I was correct. As I was culling through my external hard drive trying to find sneaky ways to create more space, I stumbled across this fun underwater session and fell in love for keeps this time.

These ethereal little models are, in fact, my cousins, and this shoot was a far cry from the high-drama, high-tech (I used an $8 Fujifilm point-and-click disposable waterproof camera) underwater shoots that grace magazine covers. But, that does not mean I had any less fun shooting it.

I fervently believe in the importance of teaching kids to love and embrace art, in any medium they choose. I also strongly believe in enjoying artistic pursuits - the "art" disappears when it begins to feel like work. So, while babysitting one warm afternoon when they were chomping at the bit to cannonball into the pool and I was itching for the click of a shutter, I decided we had the perfect opportunity for some creative fun. And what splash the idea made!
 
To be honest, half of my motivation came from the need to occupy these two crazies. I thought we might wrestle out a few funny action shots of the kids cannonballing before they got bored and started splashing each other (and me.) But I gave my cousins far too little credit, they rose (and sank) to the occasion in true energetic-child fashion and turned out to be wonderfully fun models.

The difficult thing about underwater photography is that the photographer and subjects have to compose themselves and the shot while chlorinated water fills their eyes, taking into account the lighting, body positions, facial expressions, and overall composition. (Oh, and you can't breathe. Perhaps a snorkle would have been a good investment.) Nonetheless, we braved the elements, first just practicing holding our breath under water long enough to get a decent shot, then having the kids jump into the water to explore what bubbly results we could get. By the end of the roll when we'd really hit our creative stride, we tested the capacity of our lungs with both subject and photographer swimming to and fro, but mostly toward each other, taking more care in creating interesting compositions.

The end result was a series of beautifully grainy, somewhat unfocused, bubble-filled, blue-saturated shots capturing the unbridled amusement of an afternoon of family swimming. The kids even enjoyed themselves enough to hug each other for my last exposure.

An afternoon time-killer, a way to get kids outside and active, an introduction into art - and a fun one at that - for said kids, and a beautiful keepsake for years to come; photography in all its versatility is truly the art of the people.

Fun in the Sun: My Story

"If we don't tell our own stories, no one else will tell them." Lately, I've been reading Spark: How Creativity Works by Julie Burstein, a collection of anecdotes from the author's radio show Studio 360 showcasing and investigating various noteworthy creative people's artistic processes. Filmmaker Mira Nair's discussion about using her personal history to inspire her films stuck out to me.

 I rarely turn the camera on myself, instead focusing on telling others' stories. However, there is something to be said for remembering your own narrative. So this year when my family took the annual beach trip, I brought along my trusty Vivitar 3800 and a couple rolls of Fujifilm color to document the vacation. I didn't want to just take the typical beach selfies and ocean shots that troll the Instagrammaverse, but I wasn't striving to capture any mold-breaking photos either (although I certainly wouldn't throw them out.) I wanted to just capture the essence of fun and relaxation, however I saw it. Because I can't just casually take photographs of family fun at the beach (for better or for worse I had to turn it into a thought-out series; one of the hazards of spending too much time in photography class, I suppose) I decided to see how my family takes on a beach vaca versus the rest of the burnt-to-a-crisp ocean visitors.

To do so, I layered generic "beachy" shots with images of my family, myself, or things I found interesting, sometimes even just with other "beachy" scenes. I did this through multiple exposure, meaning I shot the roll and wound it as far back to the beginning as I could go without completely winding in the film for development (I probably made a rather funny site standing on the beach camera in one hand, grasping the reel with the other, intent expression on my face, turning the reel ever so painstakingly as I tried to feel the tension to know how far I'd wound the film) and then shot the whole roll again. I had to, of course, take into account that layering exposures in-camera necessitates shutter speed and aperture tweaks to avoid overexposure, so the whole experiment was fun and a bit nerve-wracking since I didn't really know how the photos would turn out.

I was very happy with the quality of the photographs overall - a pleasant aesthetic change from the sharp and color-saturated digital shots I tend to capture - and am especially pleased with the 1960s quality of color that the multiple exposures created. That the exposures did not overlap exactly within the same plane makes them all the more imperfectly interesting, the darker lines simply create a geometric frame. It is the story that these collaged images tell that I'm most excited about. Of course, the narrative probably means more to me than it does to the general public, but sometimes the more personal the images to the photographer, the more relatable to the audience. Scenes of playing in the ocean, reading on the beach, enjoying time spent with family - all normal beach activities - interwoven with visual metaphors for my propensity for daydreaming (guess which surreal photo that is) and distaste for large crowds, create a collage of what comes to my mind first regarding the beach.

A lot of artists don't like explaining their work, rather they let it speak for itself. There is nothing wrong with that. But, to me, there is a kind of vulnerability in telling how I conceptualized and perceive my finished project, allowing the viewers to decide for themselves whether they see the same message. What's more, as a soft-spoken observer, I rarely share my thoughts candidly, instead choosing to illustrate them through photographs and vivid writing, an art in itself. This series, capturing my personal experience in a place by overlaying generic popular images of it and personal experiences there, is one that I intend to continue in my (hopefully soon) world travels in a pursuit to devour culture and drink in art of societies around the globe. I create art not solely for the joy of the creation (though that is certainly part of it) but to share that joy of my creative experience with others, to show the importance of art in all of our lives. So in continuing this series, I intend to share the beauty of personal artistic experiences (relatable to all) with whomever will listen - and see.

Positively a Negative Critique

When I first began shooting film, I greatly admired Ansel Adams' work, for no other reason than its appreciation by the masses. Yet, as I've grown as a photographer, I've slowly joined the ranks of "cynical artists" rather than being a purveyor solely of beauty. Artists - photojournalists especially - seem to have a collective reputation as skeptics, yet whether this image fits may really be in the eye of the beholder. I explored this concept - that art which is critical of culture is often construed as negative, but can have a positive message - through an experiment in "New Topographics," or "man-altered landscapes" as the pivotal 1975 exhibit at the George Eastman House dubbed the style.

The beauty of New Topographics lies in its irony, originally depicting urban and suburban American landscapes with a critical eye, commenting on civilization's "progress" and its (negative) effects. Though the style came to prominence almost 40 years ago, in this age of "green initiatives," climate change debate, and other seemly tree-huggerisms, this social commentary has truly caught hold - now with the added twist of media and technological analysis.

In my personal interpretation, I played upon the theme of [digital] photography and technology's impact on the viewing of landscapes. Photography has the ability to tell a story to the world of subjects many or most people would never know, and this applies especially to landscape photography.

In the first image, I wanted to show photography's ability to tell a story, even one not entirely truthful. With the ability to crop out unwanted information, a photographer can tell their version of a story, tailored to fit their motive. For instance, in my examination, I shot a still of my digital camera set up at the top of The Cut in Asheville overlooking the city with the mountains surrounding. Although the film capture shows the juxtaposition of man vs. nature, the viewfinder of my digital camera shows my ability to crop in closely on the mountains to show only nature, cutting out man's "destruction" (as some would call city-building - although I personally love architecture, culture, and all the bustle that cities have to offer.) True to the New Topographics style, while the photo shows a majestic landscape, beautiful in spite of and because of the contrasting geometry of the city, the addition of my camera creates a social commentary on the photographers' (politicians,' scientists', anyone's) ability to spread only a partial story.

My second image shows the increasing commercialism of photography, now the medium of the masses, and its decreasing difficulty. By overlaying the image of a computer screen on top of a landscape, I wanted to again show the basic contrast of technology (man) vs. nature.  The Google screen displaying a search for "how to photograph a landscape" is meant to demonstrate how lazy technology allows picture-takers (not everyone with a camera is a photographer, in my humble opinion) to be, with the ability to simply ask a search engine how to photograph a landscape or to find landscape images to emulate, rather than going out on an artistic adventure of their own. 

This final image is my favorite, possibly because it took me three hours to print correctly, and maybe because of the rich quality of the contrasting darks and lights. In this diptych, I picture two dissimilar scenes; one a landscape photo opened on an iPad which sits on a bed, the other an actual view of plants with a mountainous backdrop. This again is supposed to show technology's laze-inducing nature, where anyone with an internet connection can "visit" exotic and foreign lands vicariously through others' photos from the comfort of their own beds, instead of traveling there themselves. (The Cut may not entirely be exotic, but it is quite a steep hike to the top.)

As an added commentary, I shot these photos in black and white film (35mm and not large format 8"x10" like the first New Topographics photographers, but closer to the basics) on my fully manual camera in an attempt to distinguish the photos from its digital counterparts which I critique. As I said before, the beauty of art is its differing interpretation based on the viewer, and this series can be either positive or negative, both or neither. Photography has come a long way since the first cameras (arguably camera obscuras, which were quite literally holes in walls that let in light to show an image, although the image could not be "captured" in the traditional sense) and many would argue that this progress is a good thing. Technological progress's modus operandi is to create shortcuts, to generate comfort, to manufacture ease. For many, this is everything. For others, a little hard work - developing their own photos rather than transferring them from an SD card, for instance - is the fruit of life. New Topographics is about bringing these choices into visual perspective. Skeptical or hopeful, destructive or progressive, like much of photography, your opinion is all a matter of vantage point.