I wanted to share some photos from the Between a Dog and a Wolf project that I edited out of the final selection. I excluded these from the final seven because either I felt like the quality wasn’t to the standard I was aspiring for, or the composition wasn’t as engaging. Not that a photo has to be perfect quality to be valid, but that is the sort of craft I am aiming for at the moment. Here are some unedited shots that I enjoyed taking! Photos are posted in the order that they were taken.

9/5 around 6:30am in my parent’s front yard. The moon 🙂

9/5 around 6:45am, Point Lookout.

9/5 around 8am, Point Lookout. Shallow depth of field is one of my favorite camera techniques. I like how dynamic it can make something simple like this, and for some reason I think my camera likes doing close-ups more than far-away shots.

9/5 around noon.

9/5 around noon.

9/7 mid-afternoon. This is a spot along one of our family dog’s favorite routes to walk. There is a creek behind the white flowers. When we were little, my siblings and I would wear rainboots and follow the creek to its end and back.

9/7 around 2:30pm. A lot of branches still around from the storm a couple weeks ago. I like looking at these crunchy leaves.

9/7 around 2:30pm featuring Blue the Dog! I took my camera with me whenever going on walks together.

9/8 around 9pm on Stony Brook campus. I always pass this spot on my way home from class. This was one of my favorite places to shoot at night, because of how many screens and street lamps light up the area.

Prof. Maurides presented the Between a Dog and a Wolf project to us as a way to think about how time affects the light and color of the day, and practice photographing during the different conditions.

Leslie Hewitt popped into my mind when I was working on one of my mid-morning photographs, because I was photographing printed photographs, which Leslie Hewitt does. Hewitt uses layering and photographs of paper. I like this artist’s work because for me, the direct cultural references give me an entry into the artist’s message whether it is political or abstract. On her photographs of books, she says, “Books play a huge role not only in my work as an aesthetic object, but also as a conceptual symbol…it’s this pandora’s box.”

Leslie Hewitt on Riffs on Real Time, 2006–09

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Hello! I wanted to share this video from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. I’m writing this slightly forward in time, this video came to me a few weeks ago when we began our research projects on past photographers. I like this video a lot, and I like to archive the things I consume while I’m studying because it helps me understand my thought process and relationship to the research. This was the first thing I consumed when we were assigned this project, and it framed the way I thought about the research going forward.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya talks about the exhibition on view, Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin (curated by Lanka Tattersall).

“Los Angeles–based photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya skillfully collapses traditions of the studio portrait and self-portraiture in compositions that are distinctly contemporary. Using art historical tropes and his own subjectivity to explore assertions of the gaze, Sepuya turns his careful eye to the exhibition Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin. Guiding a tour through a selection of the works on view, Sepuya draws connections to his own artistic practice, which also consistently depicts those who make up his world—friends, peers, and lovers.”

So here’s the video that turned me into a Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Brassaï fan!

This is a documentation of work from Patricia Maurides’ Fall 2020 class: Introductory Photography. I am studying studio art at Stony Brook, and this class was recommended to me by my major advisor in order to work on my foundational digital camera skills which could help me document my art works and more.

I will be photographing with a 2006 Canon EOS 30D camera. My goals for this class are to gain more control over the technical aspects of digital photography, with sensitivity to light, color, and focus, and to reflect on my relationship to photography. I also hope to learn from my classmates and photographers of the past.