Date of Submission

Spring 2012

Academic Program

Photography

Project Advisor 1

David Bush

Project Advisor 2

Stephen Shore

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Humanity deems us foragers. We are seekers co-existing in nature, taking from the only resource we know, the world around us. It is a title generally steeped in ideals of a romanticized communion, yet in this seemingly symbiotic act, it is notable that there is often only one recipient, a single forager, taking from a source that gains little in return; it is yellowed flowers I picked as a child pressed between the heaviest book’s pages, it is a photograph.

In Foraging is a reductive study of the impulse to take in its most simplistic and broad terms. It began as a social critique, addressing my awareness and fascination with nature and mans evolving ability to re-create that which we destroy, but this process quickly turned inward as I began to ask myself of my own compulsion to take. The act of photographing is derivative of such concerns; in photographing I claim possession, I take what I do not grow, to immortalize, to glorify. My drive to take and my relationship to nature have become analogous to foraging. These photographs at their core are internal reflections, they are often rooted in memory and begin a discourse of ideals in a rapidly changing landscape.

The 8x10 ‘studies’ were created to address these concerns at a microcosmic level. They were developed with some sense of subconscious drive, as I found myself going out to shoot and returning with a camera bag incongruously strewn with remnants of nature. This means of transference from an outside space into a domesticated one fascinated me, as did the impulse to photograph it. The product and process in its most reductive terms embody the idea. The remains which hang in grids are meant to revert the viewers attention back to its source, that of nature, beauty, and the need to take.

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