A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words

As an illegal immigrant, his safe haven is the home of college girl who has taken him in out of love for him. Being uneducated, unemployed, and in hiding, he is forced to spend much of his time inside her house,sometimes being useful in cleaning, but mostly just wasting time while she is in class or at work.

War Photographer

Throughout the entire film I was most amazed seeing how confrontational James Nachtwey had to be to get his desired shots. He goes above and beyond as a documentary photographer by becoming involved in the situations he was shooting. I think there is a certain self-confidence I still need to build in myself and my photography before I have such courage to ask a community if I could document their suffering in hopes of bringing change. I still wonder the reason, but if I am not bringing my subject into my own world, I am shy to photograph in theirs. I’m not sure if I should overcome my fears or know my limits because so early in my photography career it is difficult to determine what limits I may have. At least for the moment, I still lack the courage to put myself into dangerous situations, physically and mentally.

Nachtwey had a control over his emotions that would take me ages to master and because I do not have a strong desire for any kind of photo journalism, it is a kind of control I will be lacking until it proves to be what I want to do. He seemed to lack emotion to me at one point of the film, until I realized he channels all his emotions into photographs to not only show the pain and suffering of war but also possibly as a means to express his own pain and suffering. I wonder what else could attract him to such a subject besides a purely compassionate, sympathetic soul. If it can be held true at all, I wonder what style of photography will be best to express myself. If I were to be a war photographer, I would have to get a better grip on my emotions and convert their energy to my photography. As Nachtwey hints in the film, if I were to give into them, I’d be setting myself up for disaster. I would have to better believe that my photography could help them before I could be a war photographer, or other dramatic subjects of documentary photography.

The photographs I enjoyed most by Nachtwey were those of the families who had developed their own community near train tracks because I found their lifestyle to be unique, though the most compelling photographs by him were more in the moments of violence. However, all his images silenced my mind with sadness. It is amazing what life will make us get used to in order to survive, even to the lengths of dangerously living between road tracks. The people seemed as if they didn’t even notice the train passing, as if they didn’t hear it or feel it push past. When they could not afford anything else, they worked with what they could get. Although comparing to my life would be too much of an exaggeration, I can understand getting used to something out of necessity.

A particular skill noteworthy that Nachtwey has is to stay calm and centered, to pre-vision situations, to make decisions quickly in a very subconscious manner, to manage your fear and be precise. This level of working, namely staying calm and centered, is part of what brought me to photography. I appreciated that it allowed me to slow down and become very aware of what was around. Working in a field like war photography would be the ultimate test for my ability to slow down and stay calm. I do not think I’d ever be so extreme, but maybe another dramatic photography field that is less dangerous would be worth experiencing to broaden my photography horizons.

FinalShoot 1

Final Proposals

[ONE] It will be displayed in a hardcover book with little text, not only because I believe the pairing of the pages will benefit my concept but also because I have struggled with book projects in the past and I feel it would be a valuable skill to improve. The pictures will be organized in a diptych series that compare and contrast staying with my family in California and living in Arizona without them. After rare interaction with my father for seven years, I was reintroduced to him and his family in 2006. Having grown up in a quiet home and now without family in the area, I now visit my step-mother, father, my sister and four younger siblings. It is a jolt to go from my calm, personal space to a place where eight of us stay, a place I call home but did not grow up in with six members I barely know. I will explore my experience in each atmosphere because my dad is pressuring me to move into his house after so that his family live together under one roof for the first time and build our family business. This is a new subject I am trying to see if it brings me to something more.

Because I do not have regular access to half of my project, I will have to dedicate two or three weekends to the six hour drive to Moreno Valley and back. With gas being inexpensive in Tucson lately, it will help cut down on cost. I will only lose money in the long run because of the hours I would have to take off work but this is exactly why I have a savings account. I am currently trying to find a part for my car to stop my power steering fluid from leaking. The cost of the part I need is upwards of $250 but this will also be pulled from my savings along with many other things as my part time job mostly only covers my rent and electric bill. It should not take more than a month to finish. In between the times I photograph in California, I will focus on aspects that creatively express living on my own apartment and caring for myself in Tucson. By mid to late October I will be able to go to California for three to four days to observe and be a part of my family. My second visit will be for Veteran’s Weekend, and a third, if needed, during Thanksgiving break. I expect that these pictures will somehow describe the person I’ve become through pictures of the family who I do not spend enough time around but who are still like me in character.



[TWO] Smoking a cigarette is sometimes seen as a chance to escape from being inside, being bored, at work, stressed, or upset, or sometimes simply out of habit. For this series of photographs, which will presented in a photo book, I would to like begin exploring aspects of smoking and why people decide to smoke. I will visit places with smoking patios and walk to streets and campus to sites that people gather to smoke. Depending on how my shoots go, I may want to try to integrate photographs the shelf life of cigarettes in stores or any tobacco farm that may be near. I will not have regular access to these places and will need to get permission if the photographs with strengthen my project as a whole. In most cases I will ask for permission to photograph people smoking their cigarettes. I will interview people about why they smoke and if what they say speaks something that will compliment my photographs I will include text in my book.

This will be my first project where I photograph random people in different areas. I am challenging myself to ask for permission from these people instead of having models I know. This project shouldn’t require much of my money, but a lot of my time as I am bound to have many circumstances where the person or people do not want to get photographed. I will keep my camera handy at least two times a week so that any time becomes a convenient time to photograph. I will also research tobacco and its production to see if any other aspects become worth including later in my project. I expect that my photo book will bring a diversity of answers to why people smoke besides a reason like that they are addicted. Although it is not a healthy for your body, maybe it does help the mind to an extent.

Space Ship Photo Album

I have a tendency to dwell on my past while longing for change. Transitions are not always the smoothest, so I like to remember how things used to be for comfort; but wanting something that just cannot be weighs my mind down. If one way or another I parted from the world into space, I would not only want to remember how good life was, but also that it was not perfect and that maybe the future will hold something better.

For Memories Sake

I am fascinated with Angela Singer’s compulsion, her fixation, her passion of taking a considerable number of pictures, whether they came out interesting or mind-numbing, no matter what the occasion. No matter what this obsession is called, I would not draw any negative connotations. Singer doesn’t even seem aware of the beauty in her pictures; she just takes them, as she says, For Memories’ Sake. When she is talking about her work with others, she is not noting anything about technical or formal aspects; nothing on composition, balance, lighting, texture, or tone, just the memory she captured in the photos. Although she may be the Allen Iverson of photography, where she takes a lot of shots before she makes some good ones, what makes Singer’s photographs most important is her natural eye and raw skill of capturing beautiful moments. And because she captures life naturally happening, her photos hold nothing but truth to their subject matter. Because she has not been trained as professional, she does not consider herself an artist, as her photo-filled books sit in storage as her personal archives. When her work was exposed to the public, it made me curious if she started to see herself more as an artist, a photographer.

I used to drive around my hometown and take pictures aimlessly but now I feel like they need be considered more. When I take a picture I feel pressured to know its concepts and compositional reasoning, I feel like I must take a step further and stage the scene in a particular way to find this meaning. I tend to shy away from snapshots, as I am more comfortable and feel I take a better picture when staging to capture something particular. When I first took an interest in photography, all I knew was pictures similar pictures to what Singer takes of family, friends, and the home around her. As I began to work more conceptually, I found it to be much more stimulating than a snapshot could be. Just recently I realized I was bored with taking pictures of what I could find, causing them to be lacking.

As busy of days I tend to have during the school year, I don’t think I’d be able to commit to even just a couple pictures. More than anything this is because with doing many different tasks throughout the day, I forget about the trivial things I could set time aside for like reading a book, writing, or taking some snapshots. What I enjoy most about photography is the ability for it to slow me down a bit; in as a student and retail worker my life feels a bit rushed, and it is hard stop to see it before me. The snapshot is a reminder of the simple beauties of life. Right now I tend to forget about the joy of taking pictures of things I stumble across day to day. I’d rather save my photo taking time for class to create something that’s wholly sound conceptually and compositionally.

What Remains, Sally Mann

Sally Mann opens the documentary film with saying that she believes as photographers, we will capture best what’s closest to us and what we love, giving instant reason to why she photographs her family. I agreed entirely, and maybe because my family is not what is closest to me, they never strike me as good subjects. Right now, I am more focused on coming to some sort of understanding and acceptance of materiality with regards to the quality of being physical and also to consumerism.

My immediate family serves great inspiration of all sorts and is worth documenting for at least the experience of documenting them. There is no telling how much success I would have in doing so without trying, but as it stands, I do not see them being the drive as the subjects of my photographs in any way similar to Sally Mann. I cannot see myself photographing any nude member of my family mostly because of the awkward family tensions that unfortunately exists between us. The emotions of Sally Mann’s family captured on film made me feel like modeling for her is not really what they wanted to do, namely the daughters. For all I know they just don’t like being filmed by strangers but it’s hard to tell. No documentary documents it all and I wonder how much choice her children have, how willing they are to model or if they are guilt tripped into it. The looks exchanged on camera at the dinner table when she brought out a picture of the kids topless and a few conversations throughout the film made me question they’re relations. I feel like my family would only cooperate with me to some degree if I guilt tripped them into it, in which case, as things have a tendency to repeat themselves, I would then catch negative vibes from them and unable to not let these negativities affect my photograph. I feel I would be better off searching for models outside my immediate family mostly because of family tensions. Over the years the original four in my family have spread out to three different states, not being united for years. I am scared of the heartache it may cause, but again I will never truly know how it would go until I try it.

Recently I came to notice I tended to feel rushed in my shoots with models in general. If that feel was indeed there or not, I am working on putting it out of my head and focusing on my work especially because I don’t always have the time for many reshoots. Because I have seen a rushed series looks like in comparison to one I pushed off that rushed feeling, I know what I need to do to improve my photographs. Slowing down is something I would be forced to do if I used a large format camera like Sally Mann. In every photo she takes she has to take time to set up, and allows that time to fully consider her composition There is no click and go with a beast camera like that. I nearly exclusively shoot digitally, because its portability, it gives me the time for not only my photography during the school year, but also time for the remaining essentials of my life, for work, for rest, for a little fun. And in an still increasingly digital world, I feel its where I need to be. However, I also sometimes to feel like my life needs traditional photography to help me slow it down to take a better look. Nonetheless I do admire Mann being able to become famous with her black and white prints in such times.

The documentary provided a sense of how she got into the photographs as seen in her work; how the first three years of her life she didn’t want to wear clothes somehow makes sense of her photography of nude children; how she grew up around death in art and watched her father die makes sense of her death photographs.

She made a comment in the film about how each amazing print we, as artists, create makes the next one have to be even better, which I also felt held true on a personal standard through my own experiences. Now that I finally feel like I have completed successful projects, I can look back at my previous ones and see how I have matured in my photography in my concepts, compositions, and techniques. The exciting part is going to be making something better than these projects I have just put on a pedestal.

She differentiated her husband as an artist and herself as a photographer, found for beauty in the decaying human body, and took photographs of her nude young children. At first it seemed to bother me how uncanny she came across as In the documentary but one thing that she helps prove is it pays to do something as off the wall as she does. It may not bring the desired fame, but it is fame no less. When word gets out about anything that is controversial and light will be shed upon it like on Sally Mann’s. Sally Mann is also a reminder that if you simply do what you love to do, you will get your deserved recognition. With persistence and dedication to what she wanted, after getting a show cancelled days before it opened, she was able to get other shows and galleries. Rejection is going to happen no matter how hard we try in the market. Though it is difficult to continue to make time for something that costs but does not earn, if we do it to fill our souls with passion and love then when we take that great photograph, one way or another it will be known by the public. She is a reminder that I have to dig deep into the depths of my creative soul and pull out something that hasn’t been seen and will leave people in awe.