The objective of this project was clearly stated as “To build an understanding of photography’s unique relationship to time and space by intentionally compressing, extending, and altering both. To build an understanding of how a 3-dimensional space is rendered on a 2-dimensional plane and how it relates to perspective.”
Personally, I find photography to be one of the most difficult mediums to work with and I completely reject the notion of photography being easy or just a matter of point and shoot to render a three dimensional object from two dimensional pieces of paper is one of the most difficult challenges I have faced as an artist and designer. I am not a photographer and have seldom worked with the medium.
All of the photos that I have compiled to create my final work have been rendered using a single iPhone. No editing, no effects, and no Photoshop. Since I was lacking a sufficient means of taking photos I decided to make use of what I did have and present it in its raw original, untouched form. From this I developed a theme to my project. I began to navigate around one word; raw. What better way to understand time and space than delving into a personal aspect of ones own life minus the theatrical effects?
To take the objective and skew it to conform to an emblem of a city or a campus was too broad and too overwhelming as well as too much of an un-relatable experience. For this project I decided to focus on myself (selfish, I know) based on the simple key word ‘understanding.’ I cannot say that I have gained much more of an understanding of myself or of my job from the subject that I chose to photograph for this project, but I do hope that this college; this arbitrary array of objects from my everyday life can impose a sort of stale excitement in the mind and eyes of those who look upon my work.
For this project I chose to photograph my workspace. Technology is evermore present in our lives and as time persists it only gains more momentum and we, human beings, are destined to succumb to its power and overwhelming sense of animate presence in our world. With my photo collage I hope to convey this presence. I work Monday thru Friday in a cubicle office with white walls, grey-blue fabric covered dividers, and windows that grant viewing privileges only to those who stand at a mere eight feet in height. The sun does not shine here in this office and when it does it is either too bright or too dull. There is a constant influx of phone calls from angry professors and irritated mothers that only amplify the clutter and chaos of the divided space. In my college I have incorporated various mediums (although this was not advised by the parameters of the project) because I felt that to convey this insanity, I would have to fill the voids with the objects I encounter on a daily basis. The phone calls and emails consistently pervade my life and as time passes I find it harder and harder to ignore their presence. From this project I have learned to accept the fundamental values of photography, but to also accept what the eye sees and what it means to the individual, attempting to exploit or explain its presence. It would have been simple to photograph a building and express its three dimensional persona and how its presence in space can be rounded out and expanded upon with numerous photos, but I abandoned this thought early on because of its lack of meaning in MY space and in MY time. My desk is where I spend my time; It is my space from 9am-5pm (as indicated by the Times New Roman name tag that reads ASHTON CAPPS a619c533) and this college is how I have rendered that space and its meaning in time.
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