Emma

I took these pictures to fulfill my 'emotional appeal' assignment. I, personally, can't look at a little child and not feel some kind of an emotional pull...especially this child. I regret that I had to use my on-board flash because of the indoor lighting and hyper-active subject but I edited each photograph to the best of my ability.

Walker Evans

Walker Evans was born on November 3, 1903, in St. Louis Missouri. Looking at the respectable status of his family, the time period, and his high level of education, it seems a surprise that Evans became a photographer. His decision to do so was, perhaps, a surprise even to himself. In his young adulthood, Evans resented both Americans' preoccupation with money as well as the fact that he had none of his own. Furthermore, he resented the smug self-satisfaction of a nation dedicated to business, and its seeming lack of interest in his own literary and artistic concerns. So, in 1928, at the age of 24, Walker Evans acquired a vest pocket camera. At the time, he had only a modest knowledge of and very limited respect for the camera's achievements. Appropriately then, he found himself drawn to a very particular kind of photography, one "so plain and common, so free of personal handwriting, that it seemed almost the antithesis of art: the kind of photography seen in newspapers and newsreels, on picture postcards, and in windows or real-estate dealers"; photography that spoke with a blunt and simple vocabulary.
In 1935, Evans shot a photographic campaign for the Resettlement Administration in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. He continued to do work for the RA and later the Farm Securities Administration (FSA), primarily in the southern states. His work for the FSA led him to co-publish a ground-breaking book in 1941 titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. This book contains a series of photographs by Evans combined with text by James Agee, detailing the two men's journey throughout the rural South during the Great Depression. It serves as a detailed account of three farming families, and paints a deeply moving portrait of rural poverty. Evans used a large-format 8 x 10-inch camera to capture the "fragility of the capitalist system." It is for his work for the FSA in documenting the effects of the Great Depression that Walker Evans is most famous.
In 1938, Evans discontinued his work for the FSA and in the same year, an exhibition was held at the Musuem of Modern Art in New York called, Walker Evans: American Photographs. This was the first exhibition in the museum to be devoted to the work of a single photographer. Evans' photographs were admired for the quiet, magisterial beauty they evoked, and for his ability to create visual irony while backing the irony with valid social points. Evans stated that his goal as a photographer was simply to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendant." It seems he did just that. And aside from being a successful photographer, Evans was also a passionate reader and writer. In 1945, he became a staff writer at Time magazine and shortly after, became editor at Fortune magazine, where he remained through 1965. That year, he became the professor of photography on faculty for the Graphic Design department at the Yale University School of Art. He died in his home in Old Lyme, Connecticut in 1975.

Walker Evans Emulation

The following photographs were taken in Selma, Alabama for my artist emulation. I was hoping to capture the same simplicity and honesty as Walker Evans did when photographing rural Alabama. It was amazing to look through the lens at a town so seemingly unchanged by the times and to imagine that perhaps I was seeing things exactly as they were when Evans travelled through Selma.

Spring Assignment

This group of three pictures was taken at Aldridge Gardens to fulfill the 'spring' assignment. I performed basic editing maneuvers on all three, adjustments like cropping, hue/saturation, curves, shadow/highlights, exposure, and sharpening. All contain some combination of the above. To attain the color on the first two shots, I cranked up the saturation and then added another hue/saturation layer that was more desaturated and played with opacity until I found the look I liked.

Maggie-Taylor Inspiration

Rejection

This is a piece I created for our emotion assignment. It is my interpretation of the emotion associated with rejection. It is a combination of images from stock exchange, as well as text, which is an excerpt from a poem in The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Documentation

The following three images were taken and edited for the documentation assignment. I took the day and drove around Bluff Park, visiting many of the places and spots that intrigued me as a child. These three shots are not necessarily an accurate representation of my childhood but they were the most artistic of my shots. Although I don't feel that any of the three assignments I fulfilled for this quarter were, by any means, my best work. But they are here for your critique.

Horses

The following three photographs were taken for the animal assignment. The animals were to be, ideally, nondomestic but this was about as nondomestic as I could get. Horses are my favorite animal and these pictures were taken at a barn where I used to ride. I think horses are beautiful and make good subjects because of contrast between their strong muscle tone and bone structure, and the natural grace and elegance of their bodies and movements.

Feet-No-Head

The following three pictures were taken for the feet-no-head assignment. I did various different adjustments to each image. All three shots were taken in Chicago and capture, I feel, a sense of the spirit and diversity of the city.

Wink

I took this picture in the studio for our human abstract assignment. I converted the image to black and white, messed with the gamma correction and exposure, curves, and levels, and ran a smart sharpen filter. I also used a quick mask to get rid of some distracting pixels around the eyebrow.

This is a picture I took earlier this fall in Chicago. I think homeless people make very powerful subjects, I only wish I had gotten a more focused shot..however, I just snapped a quick one because I didn't want to disturb her. I cropped this photo, converted it to black and white, made a curves adjustment, ran a smart sharpen filter, set a color overlay, and used the burn tool to darken some hotspots. Not one of my best shots but it's a shot I feel an attachment to.

6th Assignment- Attraction/Repulsion

These three photographs were taken for my attraction/repulsion assignment. Logan showed me an old graveyard and abandoned neighborhood that was very eery/interesting.

5th Assignment- Night Photography

The following three pictures are for my night photography assignment. I went to downtown Helena and took pictures at the dam. While I edited all of these photos in photoshop, the blue casts, and funky colors (such as the orange in the third image) were not created in post, but rather, were a result of the purple spotlights they have on the dam.