The Infamous First Post

Welcome friends and countrymen to my blog. Here I'll be sharing my thoughts and musings (hopefully) as I continue towards the coveted MFA degree at the Art Institute of Boston/Lesley University. At this point I am about three weeks into my second semester at the college, at a point where the blur of activity experienced at the 10-day residency should be wearing off and I should be getting back to work on lots and lots of art. Well, um, yeah. Not so much.

What I am working on, instead of producing artworks one can touch, is figuring out the conceptual elements, the meaning, behind what I've been working on during the first semester. No longer can I "shoot first, ask questions later;" now I really need to sit down and think about why I photograph what I photograph, and how I can use this knowledge to create a fully fleshed-out body of work. Easier said than done.

So what I've done in these three weeks is LOTS of reading. I've gone through three books already, including the very interesting Forget Me Not: Photography and Rememberance by Geoffrey Batchen. He explores portrait photography of the 19th century and how it was used to infuse its viewers with a not-very-accurate sense of memory. He fills an important hole in the discussion of the history of photography by exploring what can best be described as "fetish objects:" portraits mounted in lockets & frames with locks of the sitter's hair, dried flowers, butterfly wings, and other sentimental objects. Batchen makes the wise argument that these portraits don't enhance memory so much as replace it, creating new realities that never quite existed except in the viewer's mind. It's already given me lots to think about in terms of the mannequin tintypes I've been creating.