The end of the year and the end of my first MFA semester

Semester 1 of 4: done

Image from my ongoing thesis project

With everything going on from the still very present COVID-19 pandemic to the most ridiculous Formula 1 season in years (yes, I am an avid Formula 1 fan), it’s safe to say that this year has brought out a lot of change in big ways and little ways, for better and for worse.

But through that all, I’ve been working on my pursuit of a Master’s degree in photography. I knew that going in to this wouldn’t be easy, but it’s something I’m incredibly passionate about. By studying alongside artists of media I’ve seldom used, I’ve gotten invaluable insight into progressing my work. I feel that this is something often over-looked by those (especially photographers) looking to get a Master’s degree — the value of a small and diverse program, without the “silos” of media that reduce the interaction of the students of other media.

Studying in Southeast Massachusetts has been an interesting shift of pace from that of the Midwest. Being close to Boston and Providence and relatively close to New York City has brought up many opportunities that I sadly have not been able to take advantage of yet. The first semester of any Master’s student is full of settling-in, getting to know our peers, working assistantships and, of course, figuring our what the hell we’re going to do for our thesis work. This unfortunately affects out abilities to really dive into the art scene that is flourishing around us in the metropolitan areas not too far away.

Regardless, my work has developed greatly, changing nearly every week in one way or another. I see this fluctuation in my work as integral to my progress. My approach to this current body of work is a bit different from that of my Route 66 work, Dune or Moth, which all three of still have different approaches. I feel that it’s important as an artist to use tools your familiar with to then push yourself in ways that you haven’t done before, to develop ideas that challenge you just as much as they will the viewer. What’s the point in doing the same thing over and over again?

Of course, you will all be updated through here or social media about this ongoing work. As this first semester has drawn to a close, I’m starting to have a grip on the direction I want to take this work, as well as what imagery I can make to further that direction. More to come.

Who I’ve been looking at

There’s been a few artists that have really guided me in this first semester, some for months others are new additions to the roster.

Jon Horvath, from This is Bliss

Jon Horvath has been popping up more and more on my social media, with his book This is Bliss coming out in 2022. This book about a small town in Idaho feels more than that of a road trip or documentary style project. Jon’s work captures a kind of abstractness and narrative form that I’ve been looking at diving into more. Particularly, his use of non-photo photos as artifact-like images in the body of work really appeals to me, and their relationships to the other images conducts the narrative nature of this book. This is one that I’m very excited to add to my library soon.

Alec Soth’s work is no stranger to me, as I’ve been enthralled by his work since I was introduced to it in 2016. In my recent studies, I’ve been looking at his lusted-after Broken Manual more and more. Similar to Horvath’s work, Soth’s use of artifact-like imagery has always attracted me. The studio shots of objects to the hand-written inset pages and of course the ultra-cropped photos with extreme reduced detail all contribute to the book’s theme of "how to disappear.” It’s been quite a long time since I’ve seen this book in-the-flesh, but working off of what I can find online, interviews of Soth and the selected images in his interview book Ping Pong Conversations have sufficed.

If you’ve made is this far

Thank you for taking a few minutes of your day to read through this rambling update. As this is a new idea to me, I’m hoping to keep this up in some kind of schedule. As I begin talking to and viewing more artists, exploring my new area of New England and going to shows (art and concerts, of course), I’ll be talking about my responses to them here. Hopefully, those of you reading these newsletters will get something out of it — whether educational, a new artist to look at, upcoming shows or really anything. Even one take-away is enough for me.

Of course, be sure to follow on my social media to see more work and random pictures I share:
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Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one.

The new project, which I've been working on for a year

View the gallery containing a portion of the images for this project

I’ve been working on a project for just barely under a year. The project began after a semester of casual shooting with not much in mind other than a few loose themes and ideas. One photograph included a subtle detail that made me think a bit more.

The photograph, made on March 27, 2019, is a panorama of an old full-service gas station shot just before sunrise. The garage was filled with junk at the time, including an old Shell sign, which likely was the gas station’s original sign. Stuffed animals lined the old shelves in the former shop, and a small “Route 66” sign was displayed on the window of the garage.

That small sign made me start thinking about where I could go with it.

Full-sevrice gas station, Bloomington, IL, 2019

Originally, the project was going to be a series of panoramic images similar to this first one, made into 6x12 panoramas similar to what you would shoot with a Hasselblad X-Pan or 6x12 medium format camera. After shooting a small handful of panoramas for my final project, I realized quickly that it was too limiting. I’m all about limiting myself with my artwork, but this was one limitation that was a bit too far.

I found myself wanting to shoot more than just panoramic contemporary landscapes of the Mother Road. When I would go to a location to shoot a panorama, I found myself shooting other scenes just as they were. Causal, but still carefully composed like the panoramas.

All the while, I knew one thing was missing in this project. Humans. I’m very good at making photographs without people, but i’m awful at including them. I’ve barely done street photography, let alone ask a stranger to take a portrait of them for my personal work. This was something I knew I needed to work on to really pull this project together and springboard it into the next major phase of its process.

Pam, Bloomington, IL, 2020

Fast-forward to 2020. I’ve been shooting more film than digital, and actively trying to make sure my film and digital photographs can sit together without being clear that one photo is digital, while another is film. I went shooting with my friend Ashley in and around downtown Bloomington. We ran into some people on a couple different weekends, Ashley or I asked to take a photograph of them. Needless to say, a couple of the photographs are thanks to Ashley being there with me.

After I got those rolls of film developed that contained those portraits of strangers, I scanned them in right away. I was enthralled by the photographs. Not only because they came out, but also because they showed me I was really, really on to something with this project.

A major goal with this project is to depict the real contemporary landscape of Route 66 within Illinois. There’s plenty of tourist activities, many of which will definitely be included in this project in one way or another, but the reality is that the towns that line the Mother Road are intimate, humble towns, dotted by the larger cities like Springfield and Bloomington, and bracketed by St. Louis and Chicago. People are part of the landscape, too, which means that I must include people in order to tell this story in a way that will impact people more than just photographs of old cars and vacant lots.

While I’ve made a few projects already, including one large-scale project in 2018, I truly feel that this project is my first project worth pursuing. It’s a story that I’ve become connected to, from my time living in Bloomington, to my undying love of Chicago, to my fascination with car culture in the United states. This project is going to be more than just telling the story of Route 66 in Illinois, but it will be connected with who I am as a photographer.

Back to where it all began

In 2013, I went on a trip to Rocky Mountain National Park. I was three years into being a photography enthusiast, I had a Canon SX500 IS that I got for my 16th birthday, and I had been teaching myself manual controls on the camera. Going to the mountains was the ultimate test of my developing skills with this small but powerful camera.

Emerald Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, 2014. I attempted to re-create this photograph in 2018 on my Canon 80D, but the peaks were snuffed-out by clouds very quickly after arriving at the lake. A disappointment, but not a wasted morning .

I was shooting one of the most incredible natural landscapes in North America I had a small tripod and essentially no hiking experience. It was a new experience all-together.

My family went back in 2014 to explore the park further. I had grown more as a photographer, and by then I already knew I wanted to go to school for art (at the time, graphic design).

Some of those photographs remain some of my favorite photographs I’ve ever made. Are they anything gallery-worthy or “award-winning”? absolutely not. Rather, they’re those photos that told me I was onto something — and ultimately led me to becoming the photographer I am now.

In 2018, I started shooting photos that later became the catalyst to my first large body of work, Arbor, Neighbor. A foggy morning on January 21, 2018 with a small handful of images led to the creation of the 60 photographs used in the series.

I was hiking and shooting photos nearly every week in 2018. I went on a nine-day road trip that year; I was in the Rocky Mountain National Park yet again while many of my friends were still taking finals. My opportunity to photograph not only the Rockies again for the third time, but the Tetons, Yellowstone and Devil’s Tower was one that I will never forget.

But maybe I went too far with my landscape photography in 2018. Maybe I was too gung-ho about being a landscape photographer that once I started shooting more vernacular photographs, I switched lanes entirely. I stopped shooting landscape and began shooting, well, the vernacular landscape.

On January 21, 2018, I made this photograph. Conditions like this are fleeting, and the thrill of encountering “rare” conditions like this makes landscape photography one of the most enjoyable styles to work in.

I’ve always been one to get interested in something and go all-in. I’ve been like that since I was a child, with interests in Star Wars, Halo, Pokemon, and so on. Photography is no different. Not only about the medium, but about the styles I shoot.

I always say that “I’m a landscape photographer at heart,” but don’t go out and shoot the natural landscape anymore. I haven’t been to a state park or national park in months. I have only a very small handful of traditional landscape photos from this year (including a couple large-format black and white photos in Starved Rock). However, that small handful of photographs hasn’t really filled that void I have been ignoring.

Not only have I been missing this piece of me as a photographer, but I also believe that it has taken a health toll on me. While I was out hiking almost every weekend shooting in 2018, I was exercising, burning calories and I was in relatively good shape. My endurance was higher, and I felt better overall. This year, i’ve been a lump. The extent of my “hiking” has been walking around a small area of the city (being my university, for the first half of the year) and walking up and down a couple flights of stairs.

My pride and joy, my one-hour exposure at the Snake River Outlook in the Grand Tetons in May, 2019.

This is likely the biggest goal of the coming new decade for me. Get out — hike more — shoot more landscape. Remember my roots, and find that balance between my vernacular photography i’ve been doing almost all of 2019, with my slow, controlled tripod-made landscape photographs.

In 2020, and on, I will make this happen. I have built a list, that is still growing, made up of state and national parks, natural areas, forests, and monuments to hike in and photograph within the Midwest. For the start of it all, I’ll be keeping things pretty close to home. No more than three hours away (maybe three and a half) on the interstate, and I would take the “long way,” using US and state highways instead of the dreaded interstate to get there. This will allow me to explore the cities and towns on the way to my destination, letting me shoot my vernacular photography then, and once I make it to my destination of the state or national park, I’ll break out the tripod, hiking boots and flannel to begin my exploration for a more traditional artistic view.

And to top it all off, I’ll be continuing to shoot film while I’m out there. I’m hoping that I can budget more for film stock and developing, make use of that beefy RB67 and my beloved X370, but, of course, using my workhorse 6D MKII (especially for digital doubles, in case the film photos fail).

I believe this is more than just a new year’s resolution. I believe this will help better myself physically, mentally, and artistically. It will take me back to my roots, back to the kind of photography that sparked my passion so many years ago.

Needing a break

I shoot photos a lot. From work to my personal photography, a camera is almost always in my hand. But one thing I never though would happen is feeling over-saturated with making photographs.

I dedicated my life to this medium, I received a degree in it, I’ve been doing this for almost ten years, and I’m always trying to learn more and improve my work. But recently, I haven’t wanted to go out and shoot photos for myself. My cameras sit on my desk waiting to be used, but they’re simply unattended.

I don’t blame my job for this feeling. I’m shooting hundreds of images every day for stories for my newspaper, and I’m grateful to have this job where I can use my skills to their fullest extent and expand upon them every day. Even if I didn’t have this job, I think I still would have reached this feeling with my personal work.

I need a break.

Quite honestly, making my first zine has helped me tremendously. I’m working with other peoples’ photographs instead of my own and I still get to provide some sort of finished product at the end of it. I’ve found some incredible photographers through this project. Making zines and books really is just a hobby to me, as I don’t plan on making money off of it and it’s something of a therapy to edit other people’s work into a book format.

After I ordered over 700 prints of my recent work, the photographs that don’t have a home in any projects yet, I started to feel overwhelmed. I haven’t even looked through them beyond organizing them into subject matter. They’re sitting in a box on my desk with my unattended 35mm film camera on top of that box.

Recently, I haven’t been shooting for myself much at all. I might grab a photo or two here and there, but it usually ends up being maybe one photo a week, unlike over the summer and during my final semester where I was making ten to twenty photos a week. Granted, I was on road trips this summer and had much easier access to developing film than I do now.

I think that taking it easy with my work and just sitting on those 700-plus photographs for a while will help me get over this. I’ll still be making photographs constantly for work, but I don’t see a reason for me to make images for myself lately.

I still have a growing list of things and places I want to photograph, but I’m letting those simmer, especially since I’m low on film for the first time in over a year. I still plan on driving out to towns in central Illinois just to photograph the living hell out of them, maybe make a series or two out of each, but I can’t get myself to do it lately.

This break from actively making photographs for myself is important for me to re-gain sanity and lower my stress. Photography is supposed to be a therapy to me, something I’m comfortable with and always lowers my stress, so to keep it that way, that means I need to set the film camera down for a bit and just work on my job’s photography.