Photography is how I learn about people. It is the way I get to spend time in places I might otherwise not enter and to interact with people I might otherwise not meet. By exhibiting my pictures, I try to connect people who might otherwise never be connected.

I have photographed in Clover Nursing Home for the past two years, spending most of that time getting to know the people who live there. Many of them have welcomed me into their homes and I have tried to photograph what I see with an open and sympathetic eye. It is very important for me to develop reciprocal relationships with the residents; I return again and again and I give them copies of the photographs that I take.

My photographs focus on the objects that people choose to bring with them, to what may be the last room they will ever live in. Some of these objects are used practically while others are commemorative possessions. I focus on the mundane in order to find meanings suggested by these everyday objects that are often overlooked. I want to honor the feelings that these objects evoke and I see them as portraits of their owners.

The absence in my images is as important as the clutter. I see the emptiness I find in these spaces as metaphors of the inevitabilities that come with aging.

My photographs are taken full-frame, they are detail oriented, and they ask the viewer to focus. I have no overarching message. They are simply meditations on people, the objects they chose to surround themselves with, and certain truths we all must succumb to. My photographs are not just about death but also about loss, memory, and some of the ways we adapt our lives to new spaces.

Matthew Reynolds

When I first considered the idea of working with animation, it was as a solution to my inability to commit to one medium. I thought it at least struck a fair compromise between my interest in film and my propensity to doodle. Then I discovered the work of surrealist animator Jan Svankmajer. Svankmajer showed me the magnificent technique of stop-motion animation, and an absurdist sensibility that inspired me and my work.

For a film nerd, practicing the technique of stop-motion is like taking a clock apart to understand time. I can see the mechanism of cinema at its most basic level – the change in one frame to the next, and the unseen manipulation that occurs between. It may be a tedious process, but it’s entirely manageable for a film crew of one.

As I grew more comfortable with the medium, I began to think about using this project as an opportunity to challenge some formal conventions in animation. Instead of creating a narrative with footage taken from a variety of camera angles, I thought about making a set that would resemble a page from a book of manuscript illuminations or Persian miniatures. The complete narrative would unfold within a single frame instead of an assemblage of close-ups, shot/reverse-shots, and tracking shots. Maybe this was a way to avoid laboring over many different sets, but I also thought it made an elegant reference to a medium of storytelling that predated cinema.

I do use software programs for sequencing the images that I capture with a digital camera, though as a whole, my production process is relatively barbaric compared to Pixar. But I think there’s something charming about just barely conveying an effect, movement, or structure; it exposes the magician’s trick, but showcases his ingenuity.

I want people to like watching my films. I’m not interested in posing questions of meaning to my audience, but I do want people to think about how the films make them feel – confused, happy, sad, angry, or if nothing else, I want them to be entertained.

Sarah Ewing

I like shocking and provocative art. The medium, genre, and decade do not matter, as long as the art makes you think and feel. When it comes to my photography, I am never satisfied unless I have created something that causes me to stop and think.

In my work I take an intimate look at the female body. I don’t direct or control my models, my process is a give and take, a conversation about the images as they are being created.

I am not trying to create aggressive feminist art; I did not begin shooting with the intention to defy preconceived notions about the female body. Rather, I shoot to make each of these pictures. I shot for hours, trying to find the one image that made me stop. Then that image took root in my work, and led into this body of work.

I was influenced by the photographers Robert Mapplethorpe, Sally Mann, Lillian Bassman, and John Coplans. Their various approaches to photographing the body have affected the form and my understanding of my work While I would not want to mimic or mirror any of these artists, I aspire to the elegance I see in their images.

I am still coming to terms with my work. I don’t know if I push the boundaries enough. I don’t want to make soft and pretty work, but then at times, I worry I have gone too far. I am in love with these images, the tactile nature of the skin that makes you want to reach out and touch it. Rather than worry about the boundaries I’m pushing and the reaction of the audience, I focus on creating. I hope by keeping some of my process unconscious, I will stumble upon something provocative and beautiful.

Allie Spangler

My studio thesis is composed of digital and analogue photography. My subject matter is models who I pose in an outdoor setting that I find visually stimulating. I enjoy using different lenses and cameras that introduce elements out of my control and play off of my compulsive desire to have full jurisdiction of everything in a photo. I have specifically chosen each setting, model, positioning and frame to meet my personal aesthetic. Despite all these controlled factors, I am consistently surprised by the ways in which my camera and lenses I use affect my images.

My models are nude. I began my project with the idea of juxtaposing the human form with a vast surrounding environment. I wanted the body to be naked, with no protection from the natural environment. As the weather became colder, I encountered difficulty having models pose outside. I began to realize that having a figure take staged poses in a cold environment can be comically unnatural. The scenes I construct are not normally something one would stumble upon. I want my viewers to feel a sense of displacement.

Over the year, exploring a range of poses lead me to focus on having my models take one consistent position, turned away from the viewer with their backs exposed. This has been a constant in my work. By obscuring the face I make it difficult for the viewer to identify with the model. By having the model’s back to the audience, the figure is less confrontational. I want viewers to identify with my models as “the figure” rather than a specific person. I have experimented with how scale relationships between model and environment affect the reading of the photograph. My goal is to make images of visually thought-provoking situations that evoke a sense of discomfort or dislocation in my viewers.

Lincoln Benedict

When posed the question “what are you?” I answer, a photojournalist. My photographs are mainly of people, places, and events. Yet sometimes I take a photo possessing an eerie quality. The photo goes simply beyond telling a story and starts to ask questions.

The images here are photojournalistic in their nature. They show human tragedy, human triumph, human ingenuity, and I hope most of all, human life. In this sense they are the straight definition of newsworthy events. An accident, an election, a ski race. They are even at the right moment for a news event. The shutter is clicked exactly as the racer crosses the finish or a part is retrieved from the inside of an airplane wing. These two factors should add up to a photo which would grace the page of a local or national newspaper. Other factors however make the photos a bit harder to pin down.

Looking at the images, with the exception of July Fourth, all are clearly manipulated. This is done both through the computer as well as through the use of a specialized lens, which creates an artificial depth of field, creating the illusion of a smaller scale. Beyond the alterations however lies another fact: These shots use different framing than news shots would. Instead of zooming in and cropping to vital information they are much wider, displaying not just the recordable moment but also the surrounding environment.

Viewing a scene through a wide angle lens gives the image a very different feeling. The impression is unnatural and even seems to imply a staged event. In this sense the image is like the work of Gregory Crewdson, whose photographs are elaborately fabricated scenes of unease and sometimes horror. I am intrigued by the interaction of reality and fiction through the camera lens. Where one starts and the other ends is a question I am constantly asking.

Rachel Kaplan

I am interested in the things we encounter while outdoors. For my senior thesis, I have examined how human activity interacts with the natural landscape. In my work, I try to capture instances where technology has somehow intersected with or interrupted nature.

I have worked exclusively in black ink drawings because I wanted to simplify my subject matter and examine it in terms of line quality and tonal changes. I also used this medium to give the subject of nature a graphic and mechanical quality. Newspaper text has been used in some of my pieces as an additional aesthetic component, and as a way to give my work a current applicability.

This project began with a desire to find and create beauty in objects that are not traditionally thought of as beautiful. I began to photograph anything that aught my eye, such as puddles, gutters, rocks and tire tracks. I was particularly drawn to interesting contrasts, such as the softness of snow or dirt around rigid man-made structures.

When I began this project, my intentions for its meaning were mainly aesthetic. As the work progressed, however, a subtle theme related to the impact of technology on the natural environment began to emerge. Images of snow banks created by plows and tire tracks through mud and grass became testimonies to the marks left on the earth by technological innovation. My work is about finding the beauty in marks made by humans on the landscape and translating hat information into line drawings.

Elizabeth Mitchell

My work is intimate and personal. Books are tangible and tactile; books can be picked up, moved though, understood as parts, moments, or as a whole. The book as an object can be seen open or closed, but all parts must be relevant and related. Books are things, they are not just images or text, but they are places, units, enclosures, and homes for information, stories, pictures, and secrets.
The moment I was introduced to book art, the spring of my freshman year, I wanted to pursue it as my medium. Suzi Cozzen’s, a book artist and professor, was the first to introduce me to the world of book art and since then I’ve become fascinated with it. With book art as a medium, the results can be vast; sometimes, final pieces do not even look like books.
When creating, I tread a fine line of craftsperson and artist. The content in the work is original and personal to me: home. My original ideas for thesis transformed over the many months spent in and out of the studio. When I began my thesis, I started to research the meaning of home in a very academic sense, reading academic essays and conducting formal interviews. Months later, I decided it was time to stop researching and planning, and time to start making. I turned to my own home, my own definitions and my own experiences for my content. This work explores the home, my home, and the idea of home through it’s physical structure, memory, and meaning.

Hwei Ling Ng
Artist Statement

A press of a button and a click of a shutter….For many people, digital photography may appear simple, but for me, it has come to represent a way of life and a mindset of keen observation that forces me to stop and take stock of how I view the world. In many ways, it is a way of coming to see something new in what is already there.

This year, I have worked with a combination of digital projection and photography to create a body of work that has taken me on a journey through various questions of identity and self-value. My work has culminated in an exploration of the pertinent and personal quest of the artist to discover his or herself within the work he or she makes. A large part of my struggles throughout the year have stemmed from difficulties in identifying with my work and attempting to find a connection to and representation of myself within it.

This series of portraits of artists (both myself, and other students) in combination with their work asks the questions: how much is the artist part of the art he or she creates, and how much is the art part of him or her in return? Instead of viewing art as something typically taken from within the artist to be realized externally, these photos seek to place the artist within their own creations.

Photography represents a medium that is still associated with truthful depictions of reality. Working with these expectations of reality allows me to create images that may occasionally startle or confuse the viewer. I choose to work with projection as a technique that effectively blurs the lines between what we understand to be real and fabricated, hopefully culminating in intriguing images that require deeper perusal to really be understood.

Tyler Schoen

The images I am presenting were inspired by earlier work where I explored the photographic possibilities of typical cooking eggs. I was drawn to the contrast between the exterior shell and the delicacy of the fluids inside and it has become a very important aspect of my work to involve the breaking of eggs in the process. I have explored the introduction of items that contrast with the formal simplicity and naturalism of an egg into the setting of breaking or hatching. The inherent cultural symbolism of the egg and the juxtaposition of items that heighten this meaning is of interest to me; providing a subject through which various concepts can be conveyed.

In any culture the egg has its symbolic implications. The ideas of birth, incubation, the culinary arts, rebirth, and the cosmos are all concepts that I consider when choosing particular items or compositions. In this body of images I draw on genetic engineering/manipulation as a foundation for my studies and it has been very enjoyable to work with an array of choices to construct the scenes. I have used the studio set up within this context in an attempt to create an iconic visual appeal.

Surprisingly, working within the context of a studio with a small seamless backdrop has broadened my ideas of what is possible in art. Having complete control of the photographic environment makes the manipulation color, form, lighting, and composition infinite. Operating within the framework of genetic engineering has stimulated me throughout this process and has given important direction to my work. Before I had limited myself to one particular idea, I had felt a bit lost in the expanse of possibilities and this, albeit loose, agenda helped to focus my manipulation of color and form.