Photography final

My inspiration for my photography final this semester came from a couple different places. Throughout the semester, each of us had to give a presentation on a different artist. The artist that I was assigned, Nan Goldin (just a warning, if you google her to see her images, some of them are explicit), takes a lot of self portraits. And while I don't really like her style of photography or her subject matter for the most part, I admired her courage in taking photographs of herself. So towards the end of the semester I started wondering if I had the courage to do the same thing. Then, right before we got our assignment, Jason starting giving me a hard time about my "difficult" life and how I basically just sit in the loft all day and play games on my computer or scrapbook while occasionally working on my photography. So when our professor gave us the assignment, he talked about how a montage can be an elongated narrative, and I immediately thought about taking photos of myself in the loft doing all the things that I do. Well, logistically that didn't work out because my loft is just small enough, or the areas that I sit are small enough, that I would have been sitting in front of myself so I would have been blocking myself in the photo. Instead, I started thinking about a photograph that a friend of mine did in our class at the end of the semester of her laundry and it got me thinking about all the things that I actually do around the house that my husband doesn't always see me do. I decided to focus on the kitchen because it is the room in the house that I spend most of my time either with, or doing things for, my family.

I'm blessed to have a big, beautiful kitchen that gets incredible light during the day so one day I decided to just see what would happen if I tried. Jason was working from home that day so he got to laugh at me getting all giddy when my test shots looked like they were actually going to work--I know, I get really silly when I find a way to produce the art that I see in my head. So this was my end result (if you click the image, you can get a larger view):

When assembling a piece like this, the point isn't to get it to line up perfectly, by creating repeating patterns (in areas like the cupboards and the chairs) it adds to the sense that time has passed, so when you're telling a story like mine, that is a good thing. Another deliberate choice that I made was that while my upper half was never broken up, my bottom half was. In this choice, I was trying to show the movement that I make as I go all over the kitchen working during the day, but keeping up my upper half intact shows the strength I have as a mom to get my chores done and take care of my family. 

When I think back about the short amount of time that has passed, ten months since I first set foot in a photography class, I am incredibly amazed at what I have accomplished in such a short amount of time. Next semester I'm going to be challenging myself in a whole different way as I take my first film class, so I'm excited to continue to grow as a photographer, and I look forward to the challenge.