Final Project

Blogger wouldn't let me upload one of my other pictures and I'm sure why... but perhaps I'll try again later. However, I was very happy with the way these panoramic pictures came out and I was pleased with the response they received on Tuesday.

Art Break Lecture #2

I went to the Art Break lecture featuring the BFA candidates: Katharine W. Austin, Shayna Bicknell, and Joshua Torbick. I really enjoyed listening to these students talk about their work and their process for producing the amazing pieces that were showcased in the museum. I enjoyed listening to Shayna describe how she stumbled upon her abstracted painting style and how Katharine utilized the art buildings as her main subject. Josh's pieces particularly impressed me. I had a hard time preventing myself from going to test out the pieces of furniture. I enjoyed listening to the reasons why he combined steel and wood together to create a natural form. I think that Josh's pieces stood out the most to me because I was just in awe that he was able to bend wood into a smooth curve to imitate the flow of nature.

Overall, I enjoyed all three of these BFA students' talks about their work in the past year and I definitely could see growth and change within all the pieces they chose to show us.

Book Critique

I was so impressed by the variety of books that were passed around today! Everyone was so creative with the different styles. It was definitely exciting to be able to look through them.

Amanda Markell- I love how you did an Accordion book but chose to bound the covers together. The pictures were very interesting and I felt like I was right there and could hear the music! I want to know where those pictures were taken. I like how simple your cover and your overall design was.

Sophia Lupi- I really like how tiny and pillow like your book is. I saw you sewing a couple of days ago and wondered what you were doing! It took me a little time to figure out how to open it up, but I really like how you didn't the covers. I'm not quite sure what exactly your topic was, but I like how small the pictures are because it made me have to get up closer to the book to see the pictures more clearly.

Amy Bergeron- I enjoyed how abstract your photos of glass are. I like how some of them I could figure out what was beyond the glass and some of them I couldn't at all. I really like how your pictures filled the whole page and how your design was very simplistic.

I really liked this project and I'm hoping to be able to make an accordion book at some point but with time constraints I figured the e-book would be the best solution for my own book this semester.

My Book!

My book came in earlier this week & I'm very happy with the way it came out. It's made up of pictures of my sister and me growing up with quotes about sisters & siblings on each page. I'm planning on giving it to my mother after the semester is done.

Beyond The Single Image

This project didn't come out exactly as I envisioned it,  but I think that I may rework it for my final project... maybe.

Artist Lecture : Michael Cardinali

I was excited to see that Michael Cardinali was going to have an artist lecture because I have him as a professor for the second time this year and I was interested to see what his work was really like. After already taken one of his classes, I knew that he had worked mostly in New York and a little bit in Boston after moving up this way to go to school at Mass Art. I wasn't quite sure, prior to the lecture, what he actually liked to photograph or what inspired him. I learned that he particularly enjoyed photographing things he saw on a pretty regular basis. He mentioned how many of scenes he has photographed in the past were from his running route or his route to work/school. I found it especially interested to learn that his process of choice (for most of his work) was a platinum palladium process. I knew that he enjoyed film photography more than digital photography, just from being in his classes, but it was very interesting to learn about how he went from shooting only in black and white, to expanding to color film and how it opened him up to a whole new world. I enjoyed how enthusiastic he was about how photography can sort of trick the viewer into thinking an image might be one thing, when it's actually another. He told a few childhood stories that explained his path into majoring into photography. I liked how with many images, he related back to some of his stories and his earlier images. Although, many of the photographs he chose to show during the presentation were landscape or nature photos, I think the ones he chose to show of the figure worked nicely. I like how the presentation showed his growth throughout college and I could definitely see changes and maturity as a photographer. Overall, I thought Cardinali's lecture was inspiring and definitely made me see my professor differently (and more positively) than I had prior to attending the lecture.

Criticizing Photographs: Chapter 8

In the final chapter of his book, Barrett finally talks about writing about photographs. He makes an important point: you need to be interested by a photograph in order to write about it. He suggests that while you're looking and studying a photograph, to write down some notes of things that come to mind when you first look at an image. This simple exercise will help to get your mind thinking artistically and help you remember what you originally thought of the image. He also mentions that it is important to try to look at the photograph from a point within the photograph. It's sort of like placing yourself inside the frame and looking at the scene in front of you, as if you were the photographer. I've never really done this exercise before, but I think it would be interesting to try it out. He also says how important it is to talk about photographs, like in the critique setting we have here in our photography department at UNH. I personally enjoy the critique setting we have here because it allows us to all build off one another, maybe seeing things we hadn't originally noticed. It also gives the artist a chance to listen to the other students' impressions of the work and maybe the viewers see things that the artist hadn't intended. This type of critique setting also helps for future projects, because as the viewers are discussing a particular work, it can trigger ideas in the artist's head about things to do differently next time, etc.