Final Renditions

Reading over Berenice Abbott's "Photography at the Crossroads," I contemplated my own usage of the camera fused with my photoshop knowledge and skills. One statement from that article resonated well with me, "The photographer creates, evolves a better, more selective, more acute seeing eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on in the world." Considering the theme of this project combines the seeing eye combined with the that of nature, I found this statement to be very fitting. I usually do find that when I am in nature I see my surroundings much more acutely than at any other time. It reminds me of how animals are in the wild when they are searching for food. Their sight becomes intensified, hearing is sharper, sense of smell escalates, etc. Not only are these senses enriched to help them search for food, but also as a defense mechanism to keep them safe from predators. There is no immediate danger for me as I hold my camera and search for that perfect composition, yet I still feel my senses heighten!
The final four images I chose to include in this series are as follows (prior to digital manipulation):

My final renditions are here:

I am EXTREMELY pleased with this series and cannot really say I have a favorite now! As I look at each of them I feel a connection with that moment in time and with each particular object. I have not only captured a memory with the camera, I have added a piece of myself, literally AND figuratively.

By the way...this is the original picture of my African Grey:

Artist Statement

From early childhood, through puberty & the raising of my children, to this present day, creating art gives me a freedom that nothing else can. When I work with pencil, glass cutter, camera, or any of my other favorite medium, I escape to a place of no boundaries, no real “set rules” and nothing but my imagination to guide me. It is when I am engulfed in an art project that my mind is most clear and I am able to focus, to observe; I can better understand my own connection with our world. There has been a grand sense of personal achievement, self-realization & self-discovery involved throughout my life artistically as I evolved from finger painting my bedroom walls to redesigning a multilingual lifestyle magazine, to creating avatar clothing, to capturing newborn babies at their most tender moments, and so much more.

My inspiration usually comes from one of two things: children and/or nature. As a mother of four, and grandmother of four, I find such pleasure in watching children observe and explore their world; they do it with such awe and exhilaration, I can't help but become ecstatic while capturing it all on camera! It takes me back to my own childhood with my own inner thoughts and wonderment, and it reminds me how life changes the way we look at our environment, society, and the world around us. It helps me to remember to appreciate the little things. When I step out of our paved paradise and into a forest or on to a nature trail, I almost immediately feel a sense of oneness with everything that surrounds me. I am no longer just a human being, instead I feel like a hybrid of sorts, intertwined with my own roots, leaves, and all else that comes along with that life. It is what I call “the simplicity.” When I use graphic design as my media of choice, I often spend time out in nature to free my mind of the daily clutter. By taking this one step prior to my computer design work, I find that my creations become much more clean and simplistic. I have learned that less is more in this aspect of art.

I find that much of my earlier photography work was generally zoomed in and cropped tight in order to create abstract images of everyday objects, however as I have grown older I have noticed a shift in how I photograph what I see. I do still enjoy the abstract look and closeness feel to those earlier photographs (and still do those shots), but I typically find myself creating more of a “gazing” ambience when photographing animals and people. Meaning that when I later look at my photographs, the subject matter is looking away from the camera and off into the unknown (out of the composition), and I am left wondering what they were gazing at. Creating my images in this way, and then later gazing at them myself, I find that my mind wanders to great lengths with imagination and recreating a story to go along with what they may have been watching.

Besides what I have already mentioned above, the greatest joy I take from creating my art is the conversations I hold within myself. It is my “Me” time. I multitask mentally, addressing and letting go of that which needs be, and inhaling the goodness from all around me. When I am alone, creating my art, I am free.

Contemplating That Eye

Mulvey stated in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (p. 835), "It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it;" how very correct she is! As read over a selection of articles, I am reminded of how much I dislike analyzing beauty. The media has distorted beauty to such an extent, I believe society may never recover. It is interesting that the female body is (and seemingly has been for quite awhile) so much on the forefront of advertising...even if the product has nothing to do with a female body at all. Cars, for instance, are rarely ever in an ad without a woman half naked to help "display" it. Even in television commercials a woman's body is the image to help push the product. Oddly enough, you don't even need the entire body to do so! Parts of the body will do just fine, whether it is the long slender legs of a woman, or in my case, the voyeuristic eyes of Leah! Mulvey also made another point that got my mind cranking; she talked about how main stream film focused its attention on the human form (p. 836) which draws in the viewer who is entertained by the search for likeness of themselves. People are naturally voyeuristic; I, myself, possibly a little more so than most people. Maybe that is one thing that is fueling this theme of the Eye in Nature. I view animals (and, in many cases, parts of nature that have no eyes) as "people" too. I am always looking for myself in them. I feel very connected when I do this...when I take the time to "see" our world as they do. Somehow, when my eyes meet those of an animal, I feel they can see our world as I do too! David Friend wrote an article discussing Henri Cartier-Bresson's Decisive Moment in The Digital Journalist, December 2004. H.C.B. was quite a character. According to Friend, H.C.B.'s prevailing ethic was that Instinct always triumphs over mind. With concern to capturing the Decisive Moment on film: "You mustn't know too much. There's nothing to know. Cats know more than human beings on the subject. Cats sniffle: sniff-sniff. Intuition. People use brains too much. Brains are not used for making love." How true this saying is! I recall my own processes as I work in the hospital capturing the smile of a newborn infant. Silence takes over the room and I can feel the parents wondering why I am just sitting there with my finger half holding down the shutter button...and then SNAP! The baby smiles and that perfect image is recorded, to last for years to come! I stand up and turn around to say to the parents, "Sometimes you just KNOW when to wait." I can tell by watching the baby in the hospital (or an animal in nature), that I am about to get "That Shot," the shot I am looking for (so to speak). H.C.B. is right...it really IS intuition.

So out I went with my Rebel and my intuition in hopes of connecting with animals and nature on a different level. I wished today to search for likeness of myself...to find ME out there. I decided to work with these four images:

The first image struck me as I saw an eyeball in the center of the knot...as if I was stuck inside and I wanted to break free, unable to move my "head"... I needed to look around. In the second image I saw a sleeping "Me," VERY upset at the waterfall right by my ear! With the pumpkins (this one is most bizarre), I saw the "Me" that was thinking "OMG WHAT is going on here, how did I get here?!" I am in shock at my new forms and I can feel my eyeball protruding in an attempt to pull myself from these limiting bodies. And finally, the sweet elephant. I took many different shots of this wonderful girl! We made eye contact many times, and I could tell she was just as curious about me as I was her!

The following are the final images:

I experimented with additional layers on this one trying to keep that "rock skin" look around the fleshy part of my eye! 

After completing these images, I considered how they may look if they were hanging together on a gallery wall and decided to make the sizes more uniform. The two below were adjusted to meet these new standards, and more work was done on the Eye Flower:

One last thing. H.C.B. helped me to remember one important aspect when dealing with image. He had saved some of his favorite negatives, in doing so he cut neglected to save the ones to the left and to the right of the treasured image. As someone who has worked in Print Shops I can imagine the frustration the printers felt in trying to reproduce a printed copy! I have kept not only the original RAW files of these photos but have also remembered to save the layered .PSD files as well! Made the mistake of not doing that before, it is a costly and heartbreaking one!

Eye of Nature

I had an idea today that really excited me. I have always been fascinated with the eye...human and animals. Even as a young child I have always found myself getting lost gazing into the eye of another being. So while snapping photo's at a local Botanical Garden, it occurred to me that I could possibly explore the combining of human eye into various parts of nature, such as a flower, tree, or animal. The first step was to see what others may have already done with this. I did a random google search and became very inspired by what I saw.

I then expanded on this idea to include more of our "senses," (this would be sight) but I wondered how I might show smell, touch, hearing, and taste ...and a step even further would include other possible senses such as intuition, balance, thirst, hunger, etc.

Hmmmnnn.....
Here is one of my renditions:

...and another one with my 9 year old Congo African Grey Parrot ("Willy-Chaz" and my own eyeball: