Date of Submission

Spring 2011

Academic Program

Photography

Advisor

Larry Fink

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Malted Milk Photographs by Zoe Freilich These photographs, taken throughout the past year in various places including California, Montana, and New York, are explorations of American popular culture and its physical landscape. Like the-two minute pop song, they reframe and dislocate and re-contextualize mundane places. I ventured into the transient world of motels—a world replete with iconography that reeks of despondency. I was attracted to these particular moments, on a very basic level, for their aesthetic value. They are evidence of a world made up of too familiar symbols and decrepit surfaces. The title “Malted Milk,” taken from a Robert Johnson song, refers to a sugary, and in a sense, too-innocent way of “driving my blues away.” The traces of forlornness—a feeling rhythmically ensconced in a blues song—that pervades the photographs seeps out of the feeling of estrangement I experienced as I captured these scenes of loneliness. The project represents my attempt of looking at the relationship between an actual location and the repeated image of that place, similar to the sort of effect you get when you repeat a word over and over again until its meaning warbles and refracts and becomes lost.

**Please note: While no online version of this project is available, there is a printed book for this project that is available at Stevenson Library. You can ask at the reference desk for access.

Distribution Options

Access restricted to On-Campus only

Download

This work is protected by a Creative Commons license. Any use not permitted under that license is prohibited.

Bard Off-campus Download

Bard College faculty, staff, and students can login from off-campus by clicking on the Off-campus Download button and entering their Bard username and password.

Share

COinS