Projects in Photography

During my last semester at NYU, I had the privilege to take Projects in photography with professor Andreas Valentin. I will Post some of my photography here. The final class project, Shell, was a large collaborative Interactive Instillation using 8mm film photography, which deserves its own portfolio post.

My main classic photography project for this course was a curated series of photos. Below I have posted a low resolution version of the photo as well as the essay I wrote about the piece.

Bus Home

In February, I took a bus ride from Dubai to Abu Dhabi. This was one of those late-night, dreamy rides that I had done so many times before. On rides like this, it is easy to drift in and out of consciousness. Lights of the road, the cars, and the city whirr by, giving the place within the bus a transient quality. With only man-made light to provide context for your surroundings, the lack of definition gives the space a sense of timelessness. An experience like this could happen anywhere, in any city, but the particular way that the light is placed and emitted is so distinctly unique to Abu Dhabi. It made me think about how the same drive along another route might feel so foreign, even if the only thing providing context for the surroundings was the lights of cars, street lamps, and the occasional distant building. I recalled nighttime arrivals back at my home in Salt Lake City, Utah, and the feeling of familiarity I felt looking out at the looming outlines of mountains in the distance, lightly peppered with the light of remote encampments. I thought of the feeling of a dreamy, dozing childhood car ride, where my own lack of directional capabilities made the vehicle seem like a magic portal that picked me up in one unfamiliar place and dropped me off at my doorstep. The passing street lamps reminded me of the late nights as a child when I suffered from painful lung problems, and my father would put me in the car, roll the window down, and drive slowly through the neighborhood until I had sucked up enough fresh air to calm down. The moment felt transient, deep, melancholy, and timeless. I wanted to capture the essence of this feeling and share it, so I took a picture.

The first picture I took was dark, grainy, and full of noise. The shutter speed was automatically set based on the available light to a value that not only required a high ISO but also was slow enough to blur the points of light into small lines that followed the trajectory of the bus. Looking at these lines, I recalled long exposure pictures of nighttime skies that, in one image, encapsulate the light of an entire night of drifting stars. I had been experimenting myself with long exposure and decided to crank the ISO down as much as I could and set a long shutter speed of around 10 seconds. This was not enough to expose much other than the lights (and their immediate surroundings) as they passed. The bus itself was my spinning earth, dragging these points of light across my frame with its steady movement. I held my camera against the window, taking two pictures. Upon inspection, I noticed the minute differences in the paths of light as the bus moved, bounced, and jostled me. I took some more pictures, beginning the cycle of holding my camera to the window, waiting for the shutter to close, and reviewing the picture. I captured image after image for an hour and a half, noting the gradual change as the traffic and nighttime scenery rolled by. After the journey, I put the images away for a few days, unsure of how to communicate my feelings, especially because the moment was now over. I had these abstract, contextless images that I found quite beautiful, but no way to show them that adequately communicated the emotion that spurned their creation.

I found my answer partly in the works of Bernd and Hilla Becher, a German artist duo who are best known for their work in the field of conceptual photography. Their series “Pitheads” from 1974 features photographs of coal mine headframes taken in different regions of Europe and North America. The photographs in this series, like much of their other works, are presented in a grid format, with each image featuring a headframe that is isolated against a clear sky. By presenting the images in this way, the Bechers sought to emphasize the similarities and differences between the headframes and to highlight the visual poetry of these industrial structures (Cotton, 2020). The series has been highly influential in the field of contemporary photography and has been credited with helping to define the style of the New Topographics movement in the 1970s. Two things about the Bechers’ works connected deeply with my project and helped me to contextualize my own work. First, I found myself approaching the theme of New Topographics almost unknowingly through my interest in the way that nighttime landscapes are altered and influenced by the anthropogenic addition of light and energy. Without the lamps, cars, and buildings that allow humans to take on the dark part of the day, landscapes all over the globe may feel the same, especially on a cloudy or moonless night. This connected with my image’s sense of spacelessness, as well as the deep and complex emotions that led me to take them. The second thing that I found myself drawn towards in the Bechers’ work was their choice of format. Each of their works consisted of nine images displayed in a 3×3 grid. Importantly, each of these images cannot stand alone. Only all nine images together create the artwork. With this in mind, I began assembling my images. I needed to tell a story that used the abstract nature of each individual image in order to give context to the array of images as a whole. Through careful sequencing and repetition, I began to form “Bus Home.”

In the end, so much of this work is defined by the presentation format. No image on its own tells a story. The final piece consists of a large grid of images, separated by white lines of about a finger’s width. The piece can be read top to bottom, bottom to top, left to right, right to left, or out of order. The images themselves are not sequenced in the order taken, only for aesthetic. This aesthetic is meant to create a small amount of chaos, an illusion that explains the emotion of the bus ride in a way that a video of the same journey could never. It encapsulates an entire journey in a single image that can be experienced in a moment. The grid tells a story about an emotion of longing, timelessness, journeys, and temporality. Through its scale, it communicates the feeling of smallness that comes when you find yourself confronting the universe. Looking at the image myself, I am reminded of Andy Warhol’s “White Disaster [White Car Crash 19 Times],” 1963. While the scale, repetition, and content of Warhol’s silkscreens take a single moment and expand it into a larger than life drama of cascading emotions, “Bus Home” uses the same components in the opposite way. “Bus Home” works a deep temporal experience into a single moment, which expands or contracts based on the connection to the viewer.

The work is placed high up on a wall, forcing viewers to look up like a high painting in a 19th-century French salon. The sense of majesty and scale allows for the work to be viewed from a considerable distance, where the details of each image are obscured, forcing viewers to experience the work as a whole before stepping closer. Only once you get close to the artwork can you begin to make out the details in the closer images on the bottom row. These images give the viewer a better idea of the content of each image but also obscure the entire piece through the forced perspective facilitated by the height of the photos from the ground and the grid of white lines making up the negative space between images. The result is a visual illusion that can be experienced differently from many angles. The grid of white lines itself invokes a Hermann Grid Illusion, tricking the eye into seeing ghostly black dots at the intersection of each line. Overall, the effect is meant to be mesmerizing. Like I hoped, it is an image that can only be explored by interacting with and moving around it.

As a final framework for deconstructing my piece, I am going to look to the words of Alejandro Cartagena, a photographer featured in Sasha Wolf’s Photo Work: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice. Cartagena examines how photographers can deepen the impact of their projects by deliberately incorporating multiple layers of purpose or ways to enjoy or take meaning away from the piece. “The more layers a project has, the more possibility there is that one of those layers will relate to someone.” Cartagena gives examples of what the different layers of the project might be: Aesthetic, Technique, Concept, Historical relevance, Social Commentary, artistic vulnerability. In this essay, I hope to have explained how my project “Bus Home” has connected with these various technical and conceptual components in a way that connects with different audiences. By exploring my process in capturing the transient quality of the experience and the way that the city lights create a sense of timelessness, I have wrestled with my own relationship with photography as not only a practice but also as a tool for communicating emotions.