I'm Awkward and Emo...Sorry :)

Friday is finally here! Praise Jesus!

Ummm, sooo, okay, awkwardness…let’s dive right into it

I’ve been playing with this idea in my head, right? I don’t know where it’s going but I’ve been doing a lot of fruit lately. And it’s been a fruitful week (geddit? Fruitful! Like full of fruit literally and also fruitful in what has come out of the week in terms of photos…you get it)

Well, I can’t tell if it has really, I feel okay about my photos which isn’t necessarily indicative of how they will be received. Because when I threw up my peppers I thought they were going to be a disaster and they turned out to be well-recieved. Actually, usually my most successful images are those that I think are just ridiculous.

So I’ve had this idea. I mean, the thing is that I’m in three Holocaust and Genocide classes (Holocaust: Agency and Action, The Armenian Genocide, Jews in Modern Europe) and my head is just filled to the absolute brim with these concepts and these horrors. I was really excited about this semester…and nervous, apparently with good reason…I thought I would be engaged but now the classes are seriously taking a toll on me. I just did not anticipate being so emotionally drained…well, sorry, I did, but it was more of a passing fancy while I secretly believed I’d be able to handle it.

Good gracious, no. I have never cried so hard studying for an exam as I did for my last Holocaust test, and I’m sure I’ve shed plenty of stressful tears over tests before. But redoing readings, looking through notes, finding examples to use…I am at wit’s end.

So I thought about it, and I’m in these three classes and my fourth class is photography. And I thought, well maybe I can try to use photography as an outlet for all my frustration with the world and my frustration with cruelty and death and horror. I just wasn’t sure how I could do it.

And when I figured it out, I couldn’t even properly express it at critique the other day.

AWKWARD. I knew I was affected by my classes and I thought I’d be able to explain it without a problem and then Wednesday came around and my photos were up and I just…couldn’t. I actually physically was incapable of explaining my photos…well at least my banana photos. I had not expected that and I am really sorry. I suddenly became really choked up, my entire body was shaking and the words just would not leave my body. I was really taken off-guard by how physically I reacted to that. I guess I managed to squeak out “Well, these photos are really for me” and some other gibberish before I had to stop myself to prevent myself from bursting into tears.

And they are, completely, totally for me. I don’t expect necessarily for these to evoke anything in anyone else and if they do that’s awesome and if not, they were really a personal project and I’m happy with what they accomplished for me on a personal level in terms of my dealing with these overwhelmingly depressing subjects that I deal with 5-7 days a week, depending on how much homework I do over weekends.

And I know that fruit can in no way represent people, I understand that my representation of victims of genocide through fruit cannot possibly represent the magnitude of the horrors that actual human beings faced. And I also realize that just studying genocide can never make me understand genocide nor can my frustration from just studying it even begin to compare to the frustration and pain of those who actually lived it. That is incomprehensible to me and, god willing, it will forever remain incomprehensible to me.

Back on track…

Fruit! Why not do it through fruit, right? Fruit is so expressive for me…I don’t know what my thing is with fruit but it just feels right to me and it’s something I feel I can express myself through.

I hope my images don’t offend; my friend seemed to think they might but my intention wasn’t to offend, it was to vent, it was my own cathartic expulsion of these thoughts that haunt me.

I’m sorry this entry is a little more…it’s a lot more depressing than my others. Here I’ve been taking these classes where there just seems to be no hope and I have all these happy photos. The thing is that there is hope in these classes; I’m just at a point in them where I can’t seem to escape the oppressing thought that this is humanity; this cruel, manipulative, repulsive treatment of others based on a perceived difference is humanity.

I hope that isn’t true. I hope there is more curiosity, friendship, love, hope, strangeness, goofiness, anything that maybe some of my other photos have captured (or attempted feebly to, they are such strong emotions, after all).

Wow, this feels like an ultra-lame downer post…ummm, I’m sorry? I’ll post a happy one next time?

I crushed an orange with my foot and took photographs. I don’t know how I feel about them as photographs, only that they were well worth taking for my own sake.

The photos I took of the bananas were my real project though. I’m not sure what I was going for at first, only that I came back to this death march through the snow I was just reading about in a memoir. How you can just become completely desensitized to your surroundings in these horrific situations. I mean, how can you not? If you have to witness these horrors every day for years how could you not let yourself become desensitized? You would go mad if you didn’t. My first photo I was trying to capture this, I’m sure you can only see it with the explanation, and even then maybe it’s something only I see. But anyways, the bananas worked well for this shoot, just because they have that kind of slumped look, exhausted, shoulders sagging kind of look. Sagging but still determined to survive, not giving up. Not to mention I had this rotten banana that I was able to use to kind of be the body on the side of the road, a fallen companion, yet minimal reaction from those still marching.

My second photo was a much more painful process. We’ve been learning about gas chambers in our most recent Holocaust classes. I had initially just planned on having the stripped bananas standing in a line. Bananas don’t like standing in line. They don’t like to stand at all, actually, especially after having their peels removed. They actually like to turn into piles of mush that get all over your hands and slide down your background. Anyhow, I ended up getting them to stay still for five seconds and decided that I was actually more intrigued by their peels. I set the discarded pieces of “clothing” up in the foreground, set a low f/stop and allowed the line of bananas to disappear into some unknown in the back.

Well to not be too much of a downer, I was reading a Holocaust memoir recently and found that you can find, even in the most dismal of situations, a fragment of hope. Even if I don’t see it right now, I hope that as the semester draws to an end I can start to see it more. This passage is when the girl is in a camp that is surrounded by an electrified fence:

“‘It won’t be long until our turn comes,’ she said matter-of-factly.

‘Maybe it never will,’ I replied

‘You are silly!’ she exclaimed. ‘Do not tell me that you still hope.’

‘I do, and you do too!’ I snapped back. ‘If you did not, why wait? There it is.’ I pointed to the charged wire that ringed the camp.

She smiled wanly and walked away.”

From All But My Life by Gerda Weissmann Klein, a Holocaust Survivor, page 196.

Yaaaaaaaay hope!

Promise my next blog entry will be less awkward.

Tarzan and Fruit Massacres

Apart from being overtired from preparing a presentation for my class today (that I didn't even present because we ran out of time, lovely), I am also in a smidge-tish of a rush as I don't have a car and therefore need to catch the consortium bus. Not a huge rush as I'm planning on catching the bus that arrives in an hour but at the same time I have other stuff that needs to get done before I leave for Holy Cross for the day to visit my friend Joey. In other words, if my blog this week isn't as excruciatingly wonderful as usual (read: shorter! huzzah!) I apologize.

I've been feeling particularly violent this week for whatever reason and have decided to take my aggression out on fruit. I collected a lot of fruit from the caf this week and have summarily planned their demise. A centrally planned fruit genocide, if you will. That's for next week though, for now, some nice, unharmed (if a bit lonely) happy fruit.





My friend handed me this apple and said "I thought you might like to photograph this"

What a doll, in fact, I greatly encourge the handing of anything to me if anyone has something they think I'd like to photograph...as long as it don't breathe...scratch that, I don't want any corpses...as long as it don't breathe and has never breathed

Anyhow, back to the photos. This is the proper order...actually you could make a story out of any order of these photos so use your imagination. I see it as "Lonely Apple" "Pathetic Apple" and finally "Happy Apple!" Only friend your own reflection, and then finally, meeting another apple. It makes me think of Tarzan a little bit, the Disney movie one...he's an outsider and doesn't understand why he's different. That works, Tarzan the apple. I really like using mirrors. I agree with Frank that maybe a seamless background would work better for the mirror photo. At the same time, I had a lot of fun making these images and I'm happy with them. I took a lot of photos...a lot...and I actually worked with the same model yesterday (with seamless background) and I've already taken a ton more. Tarzan will probably be spared in the fruit massacre that is to come.

Okay, that's all for today! Seriously, I got stuff to do, no time to spend an hour writing like I did last week.

These are...The Days of Our Lives

Blog time!
Halloween blog time!

Happy Halloween to everyone!

I love Halloween, it's just so magically delicious
(seriously, this time of year is just so sugary good)
I don't think I ever eat as much candy as I do in the weeks immediately preceding and immediately following Halloween...there is just always candy around

which is a magical thing

So, anyways, pre-photo posting, I guess I'm just gonna chatter a bit...feel free to scroll ahead to the actual photo.

Wednesday I got up at 7:50 a.m.

I went to bed Friday at 2 a.m.

That's a long fucking day...mostly because that is actually almost two days

I had a test Thursday and in my frantic stress-mode (as usual when it comes to tests) I decided I should just stay up until the test...that way there would be no way for me to sleep through the test and I wouldn't be groggy...why bother getting a solid two hours of sleep anyways, right?

And then AFTER the test I figured why not just stay up? I didn't feel THAT tired

And then stuff piled up, blah blah etc etc somehow I had ended up being awake for a solid 42 hours

Anyways, my window in my room is lovely...except at (depending on when the sun rises) between 7-9 a.m. when the sunlight comes pounding through my window directly into my eyeball when I'm sleeping. Okay okay, so it's helpful because it starts to wake me up, I know...but it doesn't make me any less resentful of it in my sleepy/groggy/grumpy state in the morning...not a morning person...seriously

But since I was already awake at 8 on Thursday morning...awake and chipper...I finally got to see the light in a way that wasn't intensely irritating and oh my fricken Jesus was it gorgeous! I was flipping out about how nice the light was by myself for about twenty minutes...possibly in part due to the fact that I had been awake for twenty-four hours at that point...but seriously, FLIPPING OUT. I think when I'm over-exhausted I get into a very "Oh my god! Life is so beautiful! Look at all the wonders of the world!" states which is very very strange for me because I'd say I'm generally a fairly cynical, bitter, sarcastic person with very little appreciation for the world...for fuck's sake, I'm taking three courses this semester about mass murder and persecution of peoples based on their religious/"racial" affiliations...I'm not generally in a very "love the world" kind of state, I'm usually in a "people are awful, I hate everyone" state.

This relates to photography, I swear. Point being, I really hope I can convince my lazy ass to wake up early one day this weekend and take some pictures in this light. I managed to distract myself from studying by deciding I "simply had to" take some pictures in the light. I even thought all the papers/books strewn across my bed were suddenly very beautiful when minutes before I had been resenting them pretty strongly. I'd like to actually have something I planned to photograph ready to be shot in that light, rather than whatever I happened to find enchanting in my half-crazed, semi-delusional, cracked-out-on-lack-of-sleep state.

WHOA, off topic, back to my photo for this week. This one I did not take yesterday morning. I decided to revisit the pear...I had done another pear photo a couple of weeks ago and I wanted to try it again because the original wasn't particularly satisfying. I suppose you could say I was feeling a little soap opera-y with my pear, the poor dear...As the Pear Turns...



Scene: Pear-l is returning home early from her business trip to Peru. Hoping to surprise her husband, Mirror-angelo, she doesn't call him ahead of time to let him know she's coming home. She walks into the house, expecting him to be at his desk, reflecting on life like he often does...only to find him with another woman in his arms! That young twig from next door with the perfect smooth skin and long flowy hair! Dun dun duuuuun

Well, I think you get the idea...really you can make up whatever story you like with it. I took a lot of photos, trying to figure out what I wanted...and as with everything in life I actually had no idea what I wanted...(directionless, headless mannequin that I am ;) )

I enjoy this photo, I like the dramatic light, the dramatic shadow of the mirror on the left side of the photo dominating over the pear, the dramatic sweep of the curtains in the background (Annie pointed that out to me while I was working on it)

In working with pears I was trying to play off this "pear-shaped" idea. As usual, I picked up an object one day and said "Hey! I want to shoot this...what's my concept?" I do that too much, maybe I should try concept first...object later.

But honestly, everytime I see a celebrity magazine or article or photo or whatever, I just can't believe how fuckng prevalent all these "way skinnier than can possibly be healthy" women are. And they're everywhere! I already mentioned this but I'm taking three out of my four classes in the Holocaust and Genocide study stream...if you've never seen photos from the Armenian Genocide, look them up. It's absoultely incredible and totally sickening. I see these photos all the time in my classes and I get a much stronger feeling of resemblance between models/actors/actresses/etc and the victims in these photos than I do between models/actors/actresses and the people I see walking down the street everyday. So I brought the celery into it...sorry, total rant...I just feel like this vanity and obsession with the image of being "the celery" instead of "the pear" is really a problem...not that the pear shouldn't eat right and exercise, you know, but there's a range...obesity isn't good either but, guess what? There is a totally healthy middle ground! A love handle, "thunder thigh"-filled middle ground that is perfectly beautiful. Crazy!

I'm making this sound far stupider than I intended to...I hate pretentiousness and now I feel like I'm being pretentious...lame! I'm not trying to be, promise, I'm just soap-boxing because it's election season and everyone is soap-boxing, it's in the air!

Whoa, next time I post we're going to have a new president elected, that's weird.

Jesus, I've done it again, posted far more than I intended to...I'm really sorry guys, I hope you skim this sucker because I would keep writing until my hands fell off if I could

OH! And A Quick (like you believe me) Treatise on the Defense of My Friend, the Lamp

So I have my lamp photo somewhere on this blog and I love my lamp friend. At midterm critique Frank said he knows I love the lamp but that, when posted up on the wall with my other photos it just didn't seem as vibrant and my other photos seemed to have this deeper quality.

And I completely understand that, Frank, I really do. Honestly, even when I was working on lampy not next to really bright, colorful peppers or mannequins I was thinking that the color just was not what the photo was about at all. I had thought of making it a black and white actually (I'm not sure, looking back now, why I decided against it). But anyways, yeah, definitely up with those other ones it seemed to pale a bit.

At the same time, for me, and this is definitely not true for everyone, the feeling I get from the photo is a lot more striking than the feeling I get from say the pepper photos. I love love love my peppers, I'm a proud mama, but for whatever reason I just feel this real connection to my lamp. And I thought about it alot, because I wanted to understand what I was getting out of it that maybe other people weren't.

The conclusion I came to was that I am truly madly deeply a very shy/awkward/introverted person. And I think that is the feeling I connect with that photo. That anxious/excited/butterflies in your stomach feeling of interacting with someone you don't know is something I feel a lot. My freshmen year I didn't have a single friend all of first semester because that feeling overwhelmed me and I was just too damn scared to actually approach anyone and say "Hey! Let's be friends!" I have friends now but it took me time to finally suck it up and make the approach.

And for me, that is what I relate to the lamp. And it struck me that there are a lot of people in the world who maybe don't know that feeling very well. I am constantly amazed at how easily some people can meet new people and just talk to a total stranger. There are a lot of people who are really outgoing and totally confident in meeting new people. I think that the lamp photo may not resonate really strongly with people like that.

Maybe I'm completely off with this, but I think that is why I really love the lamp. Maybe other people, even outgoing people, like it for other reasons, maybe introverts don't like it at all but that was my conclusion for my own love of it.

Okay, I'm DONE! Sorry sorry sorry for the super long entry! Frank, I expect you to read every single word of it! I want a three page summary of it on Monday morning, double-spaced, twelve point font, one inch margins.

Happy Halloween everyone! I hope you all have a great one! Don't get too crazy!

Aw, here it goes!

e gads, I feel all this blog-pressure...I'll try not to disappoint!

My older brother likes Alice in Wonderland (so do I, I wrote my high school English research paper on it, good stuff). It's a sick book...and Lewis Carrol was a sick man (double meaning, oooh! Seriously though, he was a pedophile...that isn't something to joke about) but anyhow...this relates to my photo this week, I swear (not the pedophile part...unless you somehow interpret it that way? I mean, to each his own). This was the photo I was talking about in my last post (I said "I have other images that I want to work on more before I post them so maybe I'll post again after I work a bit on the other ones")

Well now I've worked on them! And decided on only one! Huzzah!

I was home over Columbus Day weekend...as in long weekend...October...(I'm sure you know this, I'm not being factitious, I just want to make a distinction very clear)

My family rarely uses our dining room and we're not really ones for putting stuff away

Ere go, our dining room table has been set for Easter since Easter...and now it's October (see? made the connection)

That led me to this lovely scene...the salt and pepper shakers so woefully left to their own devices. They seemed okay, I think they preferred it out there to being shoved away into some cabinet.

Mid-afternoon light streaming in through the window, not the easiest light to work with but I like the effect it gives, the shadows created especially the play of light on the glass.

Part of what I really like about this photo is that there is so so so much white in it and yet it comes off as really colorful to me. Those little accent colors really do it for me.

I'm sure everyone is familiar with Alice in Wonderland and if not, look it up. One of my favorite parts is the whole shrinking/growing Alice. I feel like that feeling is captured here, it is for me with the figures being dwarfed by the glasses and the candle around them. That hadn't been my sole intention in shooting this but I like that that came out of it.

Did anyone watch Kenan and Kel on Nickelodeon? Because at the end of every show Kenan would have some hair-brained scheme and he would list a bunch of seemingly unrelated objects, call Kel some strange name and then Kel would say "Awww, here it goes!"

Example:
"Kel, grab a clown, a flagpole, and a submarine, and meet me in my room! Come on, Buffalo Bottoms! "

My point being, sometimes I feel like Kenan with the stuff I photograph (which is ironic since Kenan used to stress me out hardcore with his ideas because I knew they would never work). But that celery, vaccumm and hairdryer aren't going to photograph themselves!

Shits and Giggles

Okay, I'm not sure we're even supposed to be doing a blog this week but fine, you know what? I'll admit it, I have nothing better to do on a Friday night than update my blog. There you have it.

I don't have much to say this week because I feel very disinterested in life in general.

I have a couple images, I'm not sure how I feel about them. I have other images that I want to work on more before I post them so maybe I'll post again after I work a bit on the other ones.

Well, no, let me think, I have stuff to say. I very much like kind of lonely objects (surprised?) and this particular object struck me as pretty lonely. If I recall correctly, she lived in the attic for most of my childhood. That's pretty lonely. She now lives in the laundry room, certainly a step up but how exciting can life in a laundry room be? I mean, I hate just being in the laundry room for a few minutes to throw my clothes in the wash, it's b.o.r.i.n.g.

I decided she had secret ambitions to see the real world, but she's trapped...see for yourself

My mother made the very strange suggestion that I dress her up and give her a pumpkin head. What a weirdo, right?

I'm trying to figure out which I like better, I keep going back and forth.
I like that the second photo has her cut off ( I know, cutting off=BAD, bad Shaylyn!)
But I also feel like the mannequin is cut off from the world...cut off...geddit?
Maybe I'm just lame

I liked the lighting too. It was a little too intense at first but I waited a couple hours and the sun had gone behind some trees which helped (in addition to ample burning)

Know what? I didn't think I liked these at first. I do though, I've decided officially.
And I'm glad that the shadows aren't completely dark, I think it looks better than my apple...which I didn't post, did I? Guess you won't know what I'm talking about then.

Oh Burn

Week 4!
First things first, a very very happy birthday to Mr. P'tchertaker aka Frank
I hope it is filled with ooey gooey wonderful photo-related awesomeness...
and tequila, you like tequila, right?

Now, to the photos!
I should forewarn, I'm on two hours of sleep, a three hour genocide class and an hour long car ride
Grumpiness may ensue

No photo-related injuries this week and my room seems to have made it through relatively unscathed. I did burn my hand on the frickin heat lamp in the caf though so now I'm flying high on rug burn, curling iron burn and heating lamp burn.
I'm having heat issues

But I digress.

Back to my ridiculous inanimate object photographs
(and a real live person photo too! Just to shake things up a bit)

First things first. I was shooting something, god knows what
I had my lovely little old creepy lamp out on the floor, focused intently on the scene.
And the poor dear caught my eye.
Always the light source, never the subject of my attention

Poor baby sat there, doing his job as usual, curiously regarding the subjects
Not a single complaint, not one.
My shy little lamp just sat there quietly,
just watching,
waiting,
hoping maybe one of the models might approach him and make friends after the shoot
He just wants a friend
Poor lonely fool

I'm overly sympathetic towards inanimate objects, truly I am
I felt bad throwing out this toy horse I never used when I was a kid
I pictured it sitting in a trash heap all alone with a single tear running down his cheek

I think that horse is still in my attic
Is this just me making excuses for my pack-rat tendencies?
Perhaps

Back on point,
I felt bad for my lamp
So I allowed him the spotlight
He peered curiously over at the telephone for some time for me, barely daring to inch closer
and I snapped away:



I think I made him a friend
I hope I did.

I feel like you can feel the personality of the lamp, I hope you can, that's all I want...
Just for people to feel the same tug at their heartstrings that I do with inanimate objects
If you've never watched the Brave Little Toaster do so immediately
I mentioned it last post but...
It will change your life

Now for a little more vibrant picture
( color-wise I mean, I do like the subdued nature of the lamp photo but I like color)
This was my fall photo.
My friend Beth was kind enough to pose for me, her coat was just too fall-y for me not to use her for my fall photo.

I desaturated the photo a bit and cropped some of the right side down since critique
It was a little too saturated, I thought so too.
Now it might be too desaturated, I can't tell
A little less bench is helping I think

I liked what someone (Anna maybe?) said about liking the empty bench space making her seem more lonely
Honestly, I'm not crazy about fall
Fall makes me feel kinda bleh
So I didn't want a crazy, having fun playing in leaves kind of fall photo.
I think the big, lonely, dull bench
and the model's expression and body language accurately express my feelings about fall
Contemplative, lonely.
Dead leaves gathered on the ground around her
Fall is lonely

Week 3 and October is upon us!

So I've been concentrating on still-life this week and it's been an interesting experience. In the process I've managed to get severe rug burn (that still has not healed and looks like it's gonna stick around for a bit) and completely trash my room

So my pepper project took an ugly turn, basically, but in the end worked out well and I'm gonna go ahead and say that while I wasn't thrilled by the project at first, I like how it has turned out...and can only hope against hope that I can continue to like what I do.

Enough nonsense, on with the show:

Okay, right...

So I'm not entirely sure how this happened...but I am evidently a clandestine pepper worshiper...which is weird because I don't even like peppers...not big ones, at least (I have always been a fan of Dr.Pepper...I wonder...)

But, apparently deep down inside I worship the pepper.

I took a lot of photos during this shoot. A lot. Like, a lot a lot. I don't know how long I was shooting but when I came out of my photo trance my room was trashed and I had taken five million pepper photos (glory be to the almighty Pepper)

I had started just with the peppers. And I was not feeling it...at all. There was something missing. On a whim I grabbed my desktop mirror and threw it onto the set. And then (one hour later...) I came too and everything in my room had been rearranged (by my frantic hands trying to move the table into the right light or against the right background or what not) and I had a whole bunch of photos glorifying peppers.

As my friend looked through them, she kind of scoffed and I asked her what was funny. In a number of photos I had balanced the peppers on top of the mirror and shot from below it and she said "It looks like you've put the peppers up on a pedestal"

So these are my photos of the week. Honestly, I don't know when these peppers became so vain but throw a mirror in front of one and snap some photos and they suddenly think they're the shit. Granted, they are pretty hot stuff (geddit?? peppers...hot stuff?) but that is besides the point. I think the mirror was a good choice. I liked these two photos in particular. Peppers have really great colors to work with, especially nice fresh peppers and these peppers were beautiful models to work with. Their inner beauty really shone through their malformed bodies...I mean, the peppers I bought were pretty deformed but these babies were still photogenic.

I like the photos for their colors, the shine on the peppers and the absolute ridiculousness of the mirror, whose focus rests solely on these peppers. I like in the top one the way the mirror is tilted down on them, almost like it's alive and watching them, like they've captured the mirror's attention. The second one I liked because it really isolated one of the peppers and I'm a big fan of shooting things up close and personal...which is one reason I suspect I have trouble shooting people, I'm timid and don't like invading people's personal spaces.

In case you haven't noticed, I like giving inanimate objects a loooot of credit and personality...*see week one post* but I think the Brave Little Toaster really struck a chord with me when I was a child and therefore all inanimate things, to me at least, have some life behind them.

Once again, I've gone way overboard in my writings. I get carried away (mostly because I don't talk much in person, I'm awkward like that, I'm sorry).

I'll leave you with that.