Semester Reflection

This semester ended up being a very rough one for me and I am more than happy it is over. That being said though, I did not get to spend nearly as much time on the projects for this class as I really wanted to. I had pages full of thumbnail sketches in my sketchbook and all these elaborate plans and I only got to go through with three of them fully. I love the photography classes that I have taken in college and ideally, I could spend a semester focusing entirely on that but my schedule just won’t allow it. Instead I was so overwhelmed I found it hard to find opportunities to sleep, let alone spend quality time with my work. Lots of things were rushed and just did not turn out as extravagant as I had pictured them. But I am not entirely disappointed either.

For some of my projects I knew what I wanted to do right away, and the only struggle was finding time to work on it. But for some of them I only had a vague idea, and due to time constraints, I kind of just had to get into the studio, or go out shooting and hope it came to me as I went. I found myself in an academic, emotional, and artistic slump a lot. As stated in our reading for the semester Start Ugly, starting the project was often the biggest hurtle and sometimes, even when you start you do not really know where you are headed and where things are going to end up. Like I said, that is how a lot of my work ended up going. I started, got shooting, hoped something turned out well, went back and reshot, just like the author, David Duchemin, rewriting his chapters. In his writing he said, don't wait to be certain. Don't wait until you have it all figured out to begin. And I certainly did not. In the end, I did come up with some work that I liked, but some of my work was definitely a learning experience in terms of, “I never want to do that again”.

This semester I found that my work was a lot more subtle in some ways than what I am used to, but I did not hate it. If you look back on some of my work from previous semesters, you see a lot of color and exaggeration. That is typically how I prefer things to be and I try to keep my work pretty consist. This semester was not that. A lot of my work, even when I tried to bring out the exaggerated and colorful qualities that I usually stick to, just did not appeal to that same part of me and it was hard for me to look past.

A portrait I took last year. Bright, colorful, a lot going on. Vibrant.

A portrait from this year. Dark, not vibrant, primarily taken for Photoshop experimentation but we didn't get that far.

It felt like I did not accomplish as much this semester I believe because it simply was not what I expected it to be. As David included in Start Ugly, we fear ugly and we fear we may never get better. In my case it was not so much that I feared ugly. It was more so that I feared that my work would not fit the criteria I had set for myself. I felt like things had to fit a certain set of standards to be okay and when things just were not working out that way, it started to get a little discouraging. But the more that I worked and experimented with things, the more my work this semester has grown on me. It is still not my preference, but I think that this semester has taught me that your art does not have to be perfect to be desirable and differentiating from your typical means is okay sometimes.

My theme. though, stayed fairly consistent. I ended up straying away from my plans to depict memory and nostalgia and turned more so into the depiction of things that make me happy. I got to take pictures of, and with, some of my favorite people. I got to spend time with nature and looking at cute animals. All of these are things that I thrive on and that make me happy. And I think in the end that is what art should be. Art should be a creative expression of your thoughts, feelings, and ideas and you should be able to feel happy with your work and proud of the things you have accomplished. Even if things do not turn out exactly the way you wanted. You should be able to feel happy in knowing you are making progress. I just want to have fun making art with people and things that make me happy.

That is something that I want to try and focus on more moving forward in my work. It is so easy to get caught up in aesthetics or trends on the internet and to think that your work must look a certain way for it to be good or for you to gain joy from it. Sometimes it is easy to overlook creating things that you want to create because you think your work must fit a certain mold. That is something that I want to work on from here on out. Creating work just because it is fun and it makes me happy.