Date of Submission

Spring 2015

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Photography

Project Advisor 1

David Bush

Abstract/Artist's Statement

It is an innate function of human behavior to cope. Even if we are not cognitively aware, this defines an ever-present process that we commit to every day.

We create our own reality.

These realities are built through small daily fragmentations of truth and fiction. We submit to a conversational apparatus that maintains, modifies and reconstructs this notion. We tell ourselves that we are good. We tell our friends that we are successful. We tell our partner that we love them. These conversational mantras codify and convince ourselves of who we are, every day. We become our stories, making and remaking ourselves through the memories that we trust and reflected in the anecdotes that we prefer to share.

My images reflect this notion of created reality through the anonymity I feel when I photograph. I take my camera and aimlessly walk up and down the streets. Sometimes I am drawn to strangers and cannot help but follow them as I tactfully examine the way they live in their reality. I become obsessed with the way a ring glistens in the light and implore these strangers to let me cross this imaginary threshold; let me into their world just so that I may capture it. Who I am in these moments, does not matter. This anonymity ultimately is cathartic, allowing me to abandon any piece of of myself that I may not be willing to yet disturb. My reality becomes a form of escapism, pared down to the fifteen minute conversation I have with strangers.

There is a duality in my images between light and dark within segmented frames. This imagery alludes to the internal catechism of questioning the true and fictitious ways we see the world. In spite of mirrors, windows, refractions, and shadows, an image becomes merely a version of reality. "..and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things, and those born of inward dreaming, and no cause to value the one above the other." Reality can be just that.

Open Access Agreement

On-Campus only

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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