Date of Submission

Spring 2011

Academic Program

Photography

Advisor

Stephen Shore

Abstract/Artist's Statement

"Old Habits Die Hard" attempts to explore photographic motifs through the blending of familiar genres. Here, within the influx of complementary and competing styles, references and authorship, the images embrace an idea of the inherent mimicry of photography. Rather than adhering to the tendency to cohere to one style, this work aims to question more traditional approaches to serial photography. Consequently, the project strives to exert itself outside of one specific categorization (i.e street photography, landscape, portraiture, still life etc). Instead, the work surveys such popular approaches to the medium and investigates the capture and release of these images into 'genre' as form, as cliche, as convention. Exploring a range of photographic representatives in each genre allows the work to reference/question accepted notions of conventional photography. Today, in a world over saturated with images, pictures stream reality in such a way that shifts the practice of image viewing. Rather than viewing one image at a time, pictures are consistently bundled in random relation to one another (predominantly by means of the internet). This project addresses that relationship and ultimately seeks to question the legitimacy of making photographs within such a framework. The title "Old Habits Die Hard" suggests not only a break from the habitual or learned response to serial photography, but also acts as a metaphor for my own personal relationship with the medium, one that entails a string of traditional projects which consequently lead to a disillusionment of voice thereafter. In the end, my hope is that this work stimulates a curiosity within the viewer equally met with a level of puzzlement; a puzzlement that would ideally lead to a thirst for knowledge. Such a feeling might then sufficiently simulate my own attraction to the medium.

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