Work in Mundane Photography

The process was fairly straightforward after synthesizing the idea from the reference pieces, particularly Contraband by Taryn Simon and El Sueno Americano by Tom Kiefer

Contraband, 2010 23 Archival Inkjet Prints in 4 Plexiglas boxes and Letraset on wall #1,2,3: 9 1/4 x 44 1/2 inches, #4: 9 1/4 x 37 1/4 (23.5 x 113; 23.5 x 94.6 cm)

El Sueño Americano, 2007 – Ongoing. Screenshot of tomkiefer.com

With the arrival of my lightbox, I assembled it, set the lights and established the general camera settings I used for my shots.

Using a Sony a63000 with an 18-200mm F3.5-6.3 E-Mount Lens, I took most of the shots at 1″/100 at f/6.3 and ISO 160. Some of the later shots were shot at ISO 125 due to my moving the dial and not noticing.

One of the challenges in shooting this series came with the size of my lightbox. It was great for the consistent lighting and backdrop, providing an air of documentation to the series. It was only a 16″ cube so space and subject size was the trickiest consideration. For small objects, there was no issue as the photo could easily be cropped to only show the white background. Larger objects however, like a box of pizza and a 2-liter bottle of soda are much harder to fit into the lightbox well.

This shot demonstrates what happens with larger subjects. Given the limited volume of the lightbox, the reflective sides and PVC pipes show on the edge of the shots.

My original thought to deal with this was to take a shot of the backdrop by itself and use it to patch in a white background over the undesired parts. I took the shot but never ended up using it.

Unused reference shot.

I ended up deciding on a simpler process for large objects, and it only applied to two shots in particular. I backed up and increased the focal length of my lens to flatten out the background and to prevent the subject from spilling over the white background. I then cropped the shot into a square and used Photoshop’s content aware fill to remove the non-backdrop areas.

With that resolved, the rest of the process is just photo editing before getting ready for the installation.