Writing an Artist Statement for Art 80D- Intro to Photography
Christina Z
Student_Sample_Artist_Statement_1.pdf
Jia Chen Professor Karlic Vis167 Term Project Artist Statement June 8, 2016
A Life· Alive Photography has become my passion in artistic expression since two years ago
when I first touched a film camera. Observing, exploring, and analyzing society has also been another daily activity I like doing for at least a moment. When these two obsessions of mine started integrating simultaneously, I started to improve myself, identify myself, and find multiple facets of myself through this process. I used to make photograph about some “decisive moment” from urbanity and from my daily life to call the audience attention on the tiny moment one would typically not take a few seconds to think about. In the other words, I use photography as my words to describe how the world looks like from my perspective.
My term project of social engagement is a work on a sequence of “California life” through my personal perspective based on my exploration of how California is for me and for the local people. During the process of this project, I have gained a clearer idea on what California looks like, what is the California dream for the local people. These processes have also transformed my personal California dream. I titled my series of these photographs simply “A Life · Alive ”, which simply means the demonstration of how life in California is conscious and alive. However, my photography series is diversiform. To be specific, I decided using landscape, typical mundane or symbolic objects, representative human figures, and the abstract or detail on partial description to present what my understanding of “California life” is and how my understanding changes. My photography work is always a way for me to express how I feel and what I see. Therefore, every single photograph in this project is directly from my personal view and is the documentary on the subject matter I chose. As for the non-human figures photography, I am mainly focusing on using different composition to frame them to speak out on what I think and how I feel. Additionally, the different times of day (day time or night time) to shoot the subject, and the tone of the entire imagery is the way I express my subjective view on my project.
Also, I always focus on making my photography to bring my audience a different new way to see and ponder about what they used to see. In order to achieve this result, I focused on subject matter choice, creative composition, and lighting of every frame. Furthermore, I put my whole sequence in a specific order on two different levels. Firstly, I ordered my project in a geographic order from the west coastline to inland California based on the locations of the photographs. Then I ordered the sequence based on the photographs’ diurnal variation. The geographic order of the photographs present how I changed my personal view, feeling, and my dream of California, but the diurnal variation is to diversify the project itself. As for the sequence of my work, I am looking for a progressive but also harmonious and gentle rhythm. (which may have break through moments in future work, but this is still undecided). Therefore, I have multiple aspect ratios of the frame in 3:2 horizontals, vertical, and 1:1 square for the presentation of different types of photographs. I didn’t do human figures in portrait aspect this time but in landscape, because I wanted to make it contain more information about the background in order to bring more information and objectivity in every piece of work.
In addition, in order to avoid extreme subjectivity, for exploring the questions,
“how does the local neighborhood really think about California”, and “how did I change my California dream and feelings” in the process, I conversed and interviewed with the people I took photographs after took photos of them. In the processing of taking photos of these human figures, I first received their permission, and then took natural moments of them (they did not pose for camera). During the interview, I asked them questions such as “How do you feel California, U.S.A.?”, “How do you feel about your life and the place you are living at?”, “What do you think about yourself in this city or this area?” And then I transcribed their name and the words they gave me, and made a title based of their words on the back of that piece. I did not put the quotes part of their responses before the human figure photography not only because it follows my processing when I took the photograph, but also because I want to make my audience/viewer to see the imagery first in order to contemplate more about the imagery on their own, and then finally to see the text in order to rethink. The text captions in my sequence also led to a start of another chapter.
This photography experience not only helped me to shoot a few nice photographs from landscape and improve the strategy of selection and presentation of the photographs, but also built my idea on social context and documentary photography. My presentation style (the decision on combining photography types) is most inspired by the way Alec Soth worked on NIAGARA and Sleeping by the Mississippi , which integrates landscape photos (how outside people see the great and beautiful landscape), typical area, and people together. However, I put my sequence together based on my personal objective feeling and my own logic. The documentary of Alec Soth that we watched in class also encouraged me to knock on strangers’ house door, and talk with them. “If you want really know a place, get into it. Don’t only get close to it, but also be a part of it, and see it through your own perspective” was what I told myself throughout the process of this project. My goal was to interview people more so then just receiving permissions of taking photos, because the Humans of New York gave me such huge influences. By reading stories from HONY’s website, I felt that the conversations really helped construct engagement with society, and the variety of people’s options helped me as a photographer to understand the society at a more profound level
I am also trying to build my personal style through this photography project. However, as a student, the first part of the process is learning and then creating. On the single photograph style, I received influences from William Eggleston, Thomas Hoepker, Chris Killip, Chien-chi Chang, Stephen Shore, Doug Rickard, Robert Adams, and Lewis Baltz. By studying these photographers’ work, I tried to involve more typical elements to make a portrait in landscape composition. In particular, in every photograph of Chien-chi Chang’s work Immigrants in 1900’s and ChinaTown , I recognized typical elements besides the human reflection on culture and the time period. By this influence, when I explore to seek my object, I was looking to see if the environment of the human figure contains typical California or American elements. For example, in my work “Teenage Dream”(The 17 years old boy standing behind the fence with a “anti-war” wood piece hanging on the eave and a basketball on the grass), “Melt Summer” (an old gentleman in a beach style shirt with an ice cream in hand), and “Still Alive”(an old couple in the living room) all have the typical elements like sign, advertisement, daily supplies which show they live in California or some specific area in California. However, since I asked for the permission to take photos of them, I decided to spend time waiting for the right natural light to make my
photograph more of a cinematic style than documentary style of my portrait works. When I studied about William Eggleston, I learned more about how to distinguish the vernacular scene or subject or even color in daily life, and make the composition more interesting. Learning about Lewis Baltz was helping me to better flatten imagery on visual. I also learned how to use the lighting in images to make a new composition in my project. Through studying Robert Adams and Alec Soth‘s works, I started making my first practice on landscape in this project. I also believe Robert Frank has a huge influence on my recent work since he is one of my favorite photographers, but I think his works influenced me incurably. Even my decision to explore California through my eyes, a foreigner’s eyes at the beginning of this project was influenced by his Americans .
As for making my work as organic as possible, I was inspired by not only those photographers’ works above, but also by my idea of sharing information and multiple cultures of other artists, such as music and painting like Edward Hopper’s work. Edward Hopper’s paintings were all about his personal vision of modern American life. After studying the concept and color usage of his painting, I was really into his choices on different people in different spaces at different times. Like in the Nighthawks and Summer Interior , I drew attention on the following questions: “How much information is contained in the painting?” “What kinds of people are in this situation?” and “How was the color affected by the time of day?” The details and overall color style in Hopper’s painting really influenced my decisions of my work like the Window and Lamp , even though some of those works weren’t presented in the project this time. As for the music, the American Pop music and some music describing California also led me to choose some specific subject matters like the typical California teenager. Since the music was based on my imagination and my California dream before I came aboard, I also decided to involve them as a part in my project. Thus there is one photograph of three music albums, which contain the typical and classic description of California.
This term project started with my research on how many modern buildings and how many abandoned places there are in California, which was a project on the compare and contrast of the city buildings and abandonment. However, during the practice and due to more studying, I changed it to be my recent project. This project will be a long term project, so I have not made it as a book yet. Instead I will do more practice, more research on it, and enjoy the progress of creating this project.
(Other researches on “Strawberry field”, “Strawberry Festival”, and “Salton Sea”
also helped me to decide include the photographs of these theme in my series. “Strawberry Festival” of this year is the 33rd in California annual strawberry festival, which showed a typical and traditional California features. Also, the last chapter in my recent series is the exploring of the abandon inland of California -- Salton Sea area which was the Utopia Planning placing in California once. According to the Ted Landphair introduced in The Incredible Saga of the Salton Sea on Voice of America , “But dreams and schemes of paradise along the shores of the Salton Sea, a tranquil, buoyant, low-lying inland sea in the bleak and blistering desert at the very bottom of California, never came close to reality”, I decided exploring that area to see how the dreaming place is in California and how the people live there now.
It’s a wonderful experience to have all the processes and progress in this project.) Reference and inspiration on my work resources from:
Leica Internet Team. "Leica & Magnum: Chien-Chi Chang: Chinatown (New York and Fuzhou, 1992-2011) - The Leica Camera Blog." The Leica Camera Blog. N.p., 04 May 2012. Web. 08 June 2016.
Landphair, Ted. "The Incredible Saga of the Salton Sea” Ted Landphair's. Voice of American, 05 June 2012. Web. 08 June 2016.
O'Hagan, Sean. "Alec Soth: America's Most Immaculate, Intriguing Photographer."
The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 06 Oct. 2015. Web. 08 June 2016. And other photography print in books studying such as Prints from the "New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California" portfolio, Baltz,
Lewis Adams, Robert. The New West: Landscapes along the Colorado Front Range.
Boulder: Colorado Associated UP, 2000. Print. Adams, Robert. Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews. New York:
Aperture, 1994. Print. Karlic, Karolina Lectures, 2016 Spring UCSD. http://alecsoth.com/photography/ https://pro.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_2_VForm http://strawberry-fest.org/
