I was walking the woods in late November, and I was surprised to see the forest not entirely dead. My fingers were chapped, clutching a camera, clenched in my pockets, and I felt a chill in my boots. But the leaves I was trudging through were warm.

I’ve walked through the woods in November before. I’m running, or I’m wandering, and I’m lost in my head. I don’t pay attention, so I don’t notice.

November doesn’t shout about its work, like May or June. October, its sister, screams. November is quiet, working through frosty dew, painting with a subtle brush. It takes the cold and makes it glow.

 

References and Influences:

• Sue Abramson, photographer
• Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening“
• Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
• Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, “Into the Woods“
• Tim Burton, The Corpse Bride
• Imogen Cunningham, photographer

 

 

Teja Cole reflects on Robert Adams’s legacy as a landscape photographer in his article, “Dispatches from a Ruined Paradise,” published by The New York Times. Cole discusses how Adams’s work sets up landscapes in an alluring, mysterious way, and he describes the open road in the picture above as something “full of promise,” that “suggests… something more is there.”

When I look at the picture, I feel like it almost represents the twentieth century’s version of the American Dream: An open road, a frontier that’s still rugged somehow even in its civilization, and a promise for potential. Its emptiness, however, is almost reminiscent of Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, which mourns, in a way, the death of the idealistic “dream” that may or may not have ever existed. The main character, a mediocre salesman named Willy Loman, works all his life to get there, and objectively, he does it. He gets married, he buys a house, and he has two kids. But his fixation on winning – something he is never able to achieve – makes his life devoid of true happiness. I think that an analysis included in the book I read said that when the play came out in 1949, the men in the audience had tears streaming down their faces. Loman’s struggle was their own – working down an endless, empty road to a dream that only exists when their eyes are closed.

In turn, along with the death of the American dream, the picture seems to represent the death of the American West, the two of which are near synonymous in Americana mythology, and the death of a way of living that people still struggle to adhere to. Cole touches on this seemingly symbolic death of the West, something he wrote is a common theme in Adams’s work, and he points out that Adams’s work fails to acknowledge who the West really belonged to – European settlers, or dispossessed Native Americans?

“Roads, whether we like it or not, are reminders. Can there be any escape from the feeling that we have squandered our responsibilities?” Cole wrote. “I’m reminded of lines from ‘Where,’ a poem by Wendell Berry, that think so: ‘that abundance might/have lasted. It did not./One lifetime of our history/ruined it.’ But I’m also mindful that it’s not quite accurate to say that the commonweal is grievously fractured: It never cohered in the first place. The work of a superb artist like Adams can’t solve anything for us, but it can give us a chance to see what we have done. It contains what supports hope but also lays out the evidence against hope.”

I chose to focus on hemispatial neglect for my altered perception project. It’s a disorder that sometimes appears after a stroke. Part of the brain is damaged in such a way that the sufferer can only perceive one side of their vision. They can still see like normal, but for whatever reason, they can’t acknowledge the other side. If a person approached someone with hemispatial neglect from their “blind” side, they might act as though they couldn’t see the person, while if that person approached from their other side, they’d be greeted as usual. In one experiment, patients were shown a drawing of a house and asked if they’d like to live in it. They said yes. In the next trial, patients were shown a picture of a house that’s caught fire on their “blind” side. When asked if they’d like to live in that house, patients said no and insisted that the house was bad, although they couldn’t say why. Although they couldn’t acknowledge that the house was on fire, their brain registered the threat. I wanted to show what it might be like to see only one side of the “story,” if you will, so I used pictures of books. I altered each of them in different ways to represent how a person with the disorder might perceive the pages.

My narrative sequence is meant to draw on elements of both “Phantom of the Opera” and Little Red Riding Hood, as the protagonist “veers from the path” and walks into the woods. The lyrics in “Masquerade” – “Masquerade! Paper faces on parade . . . Masquerade! Hide your face, so the world will never find you” – serve as a backdrop to the story.

The two elements combine to represent a coming-of-age story, or bildungsroman, as the protagonist needs to find her way out of the metaphoric woods. She leaves the path, like Red Riding Hood, and might be a little lost, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. The Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale is often interpreted as a coming-of-age story, symbolized by the girl’s “rebirth” when she’s cut out of the wolf’s stomach by the huntsman.

The “Phantom of the Opera ” lyrics represent her need to find her way on her own – she doesn’t want the world to find her, she doesn’t want people to see her face. She can’t present herself to the world if she doesn’t know herself yet. She’s hiding her face in part to add an air of mystery – you never see her full face unobstructed because she’s composing it for herself too.

The final image, with her standing in front of the building, presents the clearest view of her face. She’s not completely out of the woods, because is anyone? But she’s found her way for the most part.

 

A girl walks into a forest she’s not familiar with.

As she walks further into the woods, she starts to get nervous.

She’s lost.

But then she sees a path she knows she’s walked before.

She finds her way out.

 

I participated in part of the Art Crawl, and what I saw was immensely creative. I was particularly moved by the art in the Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery. I had the opportunity to examine the art before it was explained by the artists, and they were all attention-grabbing and interesting.

One exhibition, I think it was called “Pillow Talk,” was especially interesting. The artist recorded the stories of people who have lived in places other than the U.S. and put their stories inside pillows. Each pillow was then affixed to the wall at the storyteller’s height. I thought it was moving and thoughtful. The artist explained that she herself was from China, and she explained an animation that she had set up that was meant to portray the fuzziness of memories, and the darkness that comes with feeling alone in a foreign country.

Another favorite was an artist’s project at a university in Oregon, I believe she said. She set up plastic lights on a stick (I included a picture below, with the artist in the background), that were solar powered, and lit up when the wind pushed them in one direction or another. I also liked another project she did, where she made a half circle of “moons” in New York City that were actually molded with the topography of the moon and absorb light so that they glow at night.

I thought I would be able to whack this assignment out of the park in one day.

The first weekend we were assigned the project, I was already planning to go into New York City for its annual Comic Con. I go every October with two of my best friends from high school.

My friends – twins – plan cosplays for the con all year. They put all their savings towards buying materials. One hand-makes her costume. I don’t dress up anymore, but I used to, and I’ve watched my friends and countless others at the convention for four years now. When they make those costumes, they’re laying their hearts bare.

They take a character, a myth, or maybe nothing at all, and they add their own spin. Sometimes it’s subtle. Sometimes their costumes are so precisely fitted to a character, you couldn’t tell they made it themselves; but it’s still their face. And that perfection is a spin itself in a way.

Somehow, Comic Con – an explosion of capitalism, pop culture and extreme crafts – morphed into a place where people take off their everyday masks to put one on they want to wear.

That’s where all my portraits of strangers are from. People wanted their pictures to be taken there;  it was a form of validation.

When I asked, they didn’t just pause. They posed. After a while, I found that all I had to do was lift my camera in a querying way for someone to assume a position.

I’ve taken portraits of people on the street before for other classes, and I usually get tentative smiles and tense shoulders. Sometimes I don’t even get a smile.

The contrast in experiences showed me that setting matters.

I didn’t finish the assignment that day. I have hundreds of pictures of my friends I could have used, but then it was my mom’s birthday and I was playing with a camera for another school assignment. I was trying to adjust the settings and I happened to snap a picture of her looking at my dad and sisters. When I was going through my pictures later, I stopped when I came to that one. I deleted the rest, but I kept going back to her eyes. She looked so happy. Setting matters.

The self-portraits were more difficult. You never realize how poorly you know yourself until you’re asked. I struggled to think of characteristics that define me. Sweet tooth. Sleep deprived. Book lover. Someone who’s still figuring things out.

It was even harder to think of ways to represent that.

In this case, setting wasn’t as important. I am who I am, no matter where I am, though I might present different parts of me to different people. I felt like the things that surrounded me spoke louder than where I was. If I’m in a place, doesn’t that automatically make it a reflection of me? I chose to be there. Whether I’m there for a day or a year, I can’t take that experience away.

I paid careful attention to my clothes, my pose, and the objects surrounding me instead. I tried to manipulate them to present my personality traits, likes and dislikes.

Setting was more important when I was taking pictures of others because being the focus of a camera can be stressful for a lot of people, especially when they don’t know the person behind it. They’re not the one in control, and if they have insecurities, those might flare up. People are also significantly affected by those around them. The atmosphere in different environments will affect the way people respond to being on camera.

When I’m taking a self-portrait, I’m the one in control.

 

Jordan, Green&Orange

Nadar, revolving self portrait   YOUTUBE

Omar Victor Diop, self portrait as Frederick Douglass   AUTOGRAPH