final post

Carrying on with everyday life let alone making work is so different. At this point it’s hard to remember what my life was like before the pandemic, and it’s scary to think about how things are going to continue when things go, “back to normal.” Not knowing what normal is going to look like or how things are going to pan out is a huge source of anxiety for me. I think throughout this whole thing I’ve been in denial of sorts. I tried to carry on by doing things I’d been putting off because of work and school; rework the forgotten storage room of my apartment into a studio, then rework the whole apartment and switch rooms with my roommate. After that there was repotting my plants and some spring cleaning, but once I had accomplished everything I wanted to get done I didn’t feel motivated to make work. In the short time between school being let out before spring break and quarantine officially starting, I shot three rolls of black and white film and a roll of color. Although things were scary and uncertain then, I thought we were potentially going back to class and wanted to have things ready for when we got back. Since that time, I haven’t been making much work because I haven’t been doing much of anything. Luckily, I’ve had access to chemistry to develop my own film and decided to buy a scanner with stimulus and tax return money. The scanner is one of the best investments I’ve made. Being able to process my own film and scan it at home has been empowering and made me feel like I was still able to make art outside of the school and continue my work no matter where I’m living.

            Before the in-person part of the semester ended, I felt like I had just discovered what I wanted to make work about. I wanted to focus on interactions; interactions between people, people with their environment and with themselves. I’ve been thinking a lot about nostalgia and the way my social anxiety has affected my life up to this point and want to portray that in my work. Being in intro to photography and color this semester allowed me to start developing a style in my photos, and a large part of that included the people around me, traveling to my home town and places with the people in my life. The pandemic didn’t allow for too much of that to take place. Interaction is that last thing we were supposed to have with other people which makes photographing it difficult. I shifted to focusing on photographing my walks and bike rides and the things I saw on them that gave signs of people and life. There’s so much life in objects and places even when people aren’t present, and interactions between objects can stand in for people. This representation can have an empty, lonely feeling which represents how I, and I think a lot of us have been feeling during this time. That’s what I’ve been trying to capture in my black and white work since quarantine.