My Artist Statement

This series of photographs are a representation of a spiritual inhabitance of an environment. I have always been interested in the afterlife and I find myself curious to know what a spirit or being would look like if I were to see one in everyday situations. In these photographs I have used motion, camera tricks, color, and unique environment to recreate what I believe would resemble a spirit if it were walking the earth beside us.

By using motion I was able to capture the human form in a very untraditional way. This caused the form to shape into very awkward positions and mold into atmospheric movements within the frame. Using this motion within the frame enabled me to create the illusion of a “ghost”. Having this technique present in the photographs created the sense that the form may or may not actually be there, or could have existed in that space at one point in time successfully creating the emotion and awkwardness of my idea.

Camera tricks were also used to exaggerate movements and manipulate the environment. This style of motion within my photographs closely relates to some of the paintings by painter Francis Bacon. Using this eerie, painterly quality captured with motion allowed me to recreate some of the intense blurs, the awkward atmosphere, and uneven color that Francis Bacon embodies, adding more to the awkwardness.

My use of color creates an aesthetically pleasing composition for the viewer and also solidifies the theory that spirits or beings attract to things they like, or have had some relation to. The color in these photographs also helps to create an emotion or feeling within each frame for the audience so that they can relate that environment to the spirit. This makes each photograph appealing to the eye.

When choosing the environment to shoot in, I wanted to create a backdrop that we would be prone to coming across a spirit or just setting the mood in which we would think about a spirit. The environments that I chose were either awkward in set up, bare, broken down, abandoned, or dirty. I chose places that if you were to be walking around by yourself, you would potentially be uneasy, or very aware of your surroundings. Doing this I have already started to create the awkwardness in the frame so that the viewer is interested and starts to look closer. Having the selective environment also helps to establish the emotion and feeling of each photograph so that you are willing to keep looking at them.

When editing these photographs, I wanted to use very dramatic color with intense saturation to blind the eye of the entire figure. I want the viewer to have to stop and look at things and see what’s really going on within each frame, and almost mask what I want the focus is so that you have to determine your own story. This reinforces the concept by getting the viewer interested in what I want to show.

Project One

I thought it was necessary to post the first series of photographs and explain my thoughts when making the "transitions" into project two.

In the first series of photographs I wanted to create an environment where one spirit existed and interacted in the frame. When trying to come up with an idea for the second project, I thought of spirits interacting or co-existing. That's when I came up with the idea to combine photographs [since I took a gazillion] and see what I could come up with when putting some of my ideas together.

Here are example pieces from project one:

Project Two

As I started to combine my photographs from project one, I realized the tricks that I was experimenting with in photoshop were helping my overall concept in a lot of ways. It allowed me to create even more motion within the frame with more direction throughout the composition, it added more atmosphere by the use of blending tools, and it also added more interacting between the figures.

I plan to do some test printing on different types of materials, and also various sizes. I am thinking that going big will be most successful when printing.

Here are the images for project two!