a small sampling of photos you can now find on digitalriver.neocities.org (lincoln bio) a website that i coded myself and which is still very much a WIP (and a very fair warning that your computer will get throttled by image hosting sites and i still need to troubleshoot that) but i have created so many things recently to the point that it would be a disservice not to show them off a little. and i hate what instagram has become and i'm trying to wean myself off this app with varying degrees of success and the hope is that this website will allow me to display my creations w/o falling victim to endless scrolling/algorithmic slop. right now the only sections that are active are the about section and the photos section, but you should click around and explore a bit if you like. i'll probably continue to post on here because i'm still addicted to that damn phone but hopefully this will get me to unplug a little more than i already have.
for my final photo 1 project, i knew i wanted to explore my interest in light and how i could manipulate and even “paint” with it (see my previous concert photography). this ultimately led me to experiment with long exposures and moving/rotating the prisms that @ethanpzylam (shoutout) left behind for melisma in front of the camera. the result are these otherworldly signatures of light that are burned onto the negative that i think look really sick. to me they feel eerie, but also comforting in a way, and they kind of remind me of fingerprints, or ripples in a pond, or the alien language from arrival. taking these helped me realize the direction i want to take my pictures in the future, as a recording of time that goes beyond the scope of a single instant, as well as how i can further manipulate the image to evoke different emotions.
all gelatin silver prints, 8x10”
some prints i made for my first photo 1 project! i ended up walking around south medford hours before class trying to fill up my first roll of film so i could develop it later that day, so most of these are from around there except for the last picture which i took in my room the night before 🐇
two self-portraits with family 🪞
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been thinking a lot about the pictures i’ve amassed in the past 5+ years since i got my first digital camera, as well as how i represent myself/others in those photos. my senior honors thesis has me exploring different modes of trans* selfhood in early modern theater, and as someone who has little experience in performance outside of middle school drama club, it’s been helpful for me to think of theater through the lens (zing!) of photography. in other words, how does one communicate their existence within the four walls of a frame? how are identities asserted within a space, theatrical or photographic or otherwise?
i think a good chunk of my thesis will be informed by these ideas, as well as the struggle to integrate the trans soul into a depiction of the body that exists at odds with this “soul” and how i and others push back against this dissonance. these two photos don’t necessarily do that, but i think there’s something to be said about how the photographer (me) is figured into the image: hidden behind the camera, a body without a face. both of these were taken before i officially came out, and in both of these i render myself inaccessible to the viewer, separated by multiple layers of people and objects in the spatial plane.
(i’ll probably be posting more original stuff with long rambly captions like this in the days/weeks to come, not only so i can track my thinking but because i’ve been sitting on some of these photos for wayyyy too long and it’s high time i finally like post them or something. thanks for reading this if you made it this far, and i’m excited to share more 🙇)
