Haystack Mountain School of Craft: Fall 2009

I got to spend several days again at the Haystack Mountain School of Craft in Deer Isle, Maine in October of 2009. This time around I concentrated strictly on photography as opposed to the poetry installations I worked on last fall. This year I wanted to take a few different approaches to making images here, especially since a lot of the images I see come out of Haystack are fairly traditional landscape photographs. I wanted to make something a little different then that. While some of these images are on the more traditional side, others explore different means of the idea of a landscape photograph.

The images with the pure white backgrounds are a new idea I am looking to explore extensively in the near future. I originally wanted to be able to take photographs that imitated my unique c-print series. I wanted the viewer to not be sure if they were looking at a photograph, a photogram, a unique c-print, or something completely different. I still like this idea of blending different kinds of imagery, but for this particular method of photographing, I started to find other interesting aspects to it. One thing I was trying to do was to single out certain parts of this landscape. I remember when I was there last year, there were particular things I wanted to shoot without the rest of the forrest taking over the photograph. It was hard to just take an image of a certain kind of flower without other distractions in the image.

I toyed with the idea of the title and location of the photographs to still play an importance to these white background image. Though the images seem like specimens, I wanted their location to still be relevant. I thought maybe I would let the title of each image be of the location it was shot in, or at least of the area. I feel this would allow the viewer to purely focus on the object I singled out, while imagining what the rest of the scene may look like. Mixing reality with fantasy a little bit. I'm looking forward to seeing where this idea may go down the road. Please enjoy what is here thus far.