Advertising

While flipping through magazines, I found an advertisement for Campbell's soup which I found particularly deceiving. It had a comparison of two bowls, the first of which had a small portion of salad and was captioned "100 Calories of Caesar Salad", the second a better-looking bowl of soup with the caption "100 Calories of Campbell's Soup". The intention of the ad, which was explicitly stated on the page, was to convince possible consumers that Campbell's soup is much more satisfying and healthy than other "healthy" alternatives. It was probably targeted at the kind of people who are constantly watching what they eat or trying to lose weight, in other words: middle-class, middle-aged women.

My problem with that advertisement was its attempt to sell soup as a healthy alternative when, first of all, the soup was being compared to Caesar salad, already not particularly healthy; secondly, that the soup's ability to sate someone's hunger lies in its high water content; and lastly, that canned soup is notorious for containing high amounts of unhealthy artificial flavor enhancers such as salt and MSG. I focused on combating my third problem in designing my photograph, emphasizing the salt in canned soup by taking a picture of a soup bowl filled with nothing but salt. My photograph also has the added bonus of showing the health cost incurred with the convenience of canned soup.

Body Images

When tasked with a project to look into the depiction of the human body in photography, I was immediately interested in calling attention to people's perceptions of their own body parts. I wanted to cause questions of perception mostly due to the work of the artist Cindy Sherman, whose photographs question gender roles by highlighting elements of common scenarios which are contrary to social norms. I decided on depicting hands because they are at once one of the most intimate and most used parts of the body, while also being commonly ignored in their detail. People are generally identified by their faces, but the hands contain just as much information about someone's character, if not more. This tied into my interest in our study of physiognomy, which seeks to determine one's personality from the appearance of their face. However, the documentation of hands is a rather more credible form of physiognomy than that of faces, for the same reason that more of a person's experiences are recorded in their hands and in how the person carries their hands.

To achieve these goals I chose to photograph the hands of a large number of college students. Rather than taking the series in a very rigid and structured physiognomical setting, I allowed the subjects to pose their own hands as they pleased. Although this degraded my desire to directly document all of the hands, it did make the images of the hands much more organic and familiar due to the presence of varied but familiar backgrounds, which calls greater attention to the use and perception of hands in daily life. This also provided me with the chance to photograph the variety of ways that people utilize their hands: for communication, to do work, and as accessories to an image. I also made sure not to include any of the subject's faces in the images, in order to keep the face from being a distraction from the hands.

Documentation

For this project I chose to document the events of a radio show broadcasted from the local university station, KAMP. I felt this was worth documenting because few people get to see the inner workings of a radio station, let alone one as amiable and interesting as KAMP. Being a college station, the offices of KAMP are very informal and disorganized, making all of the stories of those who pass through there come out. And many do pass through there, with student DJs only being on the air for hour long shows once a week. The large number of DJs and the need to teach new ones also provides for a documentable dynamic: that of new DJs having to intern on a veteran colleague's show before being allowed one of their own. The particular show that I photographed had two interns working at the time, which tripled the number of personal interactions present for that particular show. However, the primary interaction that I attempted to capture was not one visible in the studio. The most important relationship in a radio show is the one between those running the show and the listeners at the other end of the speakers. Their interaction is not just one of broadcaster and callers in, but one that searches for a deeper connection of mutual understanding.

Pattern

For this group of images, I decided to explore the patterns inherently created by the shadows of the palm trees. Since the trees are arranged in a geometric form, there is always overlap of trees and their shadows to see. The shadows were especially interesting during the time I was photographing, so I mainly focused on the lines that the cast shadows created, especially their intersection with the trees themselves and the bricks underfoot. This allowed me to create images with sharp angles and repetition of dark and light areas.

My first image looks at the angle between a tree and its own shadow. It also has some good repetition of other trees' shadows.

In this image I tried to emphasize the right angle that exists between the shadows and the trees.

I also liked the pattern the shadows made by themselves on the ground, especially against the pattern of the bricks.

Texture

With this group of images I decided to look into the texture of the palm trees I was photographing. The stem and bark of the palm are interesting because they are not woody like most other trees. Instead, palm trees have much softer, more fibrous trunks which can take damage very easily. I tried to find places on my trees which demonstrated these different qualities, resulting in some similar but notably different images.

My first image demonstrates the softness of the bark using the holes punctured into this tree.

This image is a better representation of the fibrous composition of the outer bark.

In this image, the outer bark has been stripped away, revealing the texture of the inner trunk.

Perspective

Nine photographs exploring different perspectives of viewing an interesting group of palm trees on campus.