Portfolio: Teresa Meier

Teresa Meier graduated from AAU with an MFA and now is teaching classes of her own. This fall, you can join Teresa at "Making Meaningful Photographs," Sept 14-15 in the nature reserve at Sitka Center. She says she has a couple of spots left!

On October 21st she is giving an artist talk at SPENW in Corvallis, OR entitled "Image Maker: The Artist Within."

Below you can see some of her work from The Witness Within.

“You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between a truth and a human being is a story.”  ~ Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

In the words of Frida Kahlo, these images are the most honest expression of myself that I can show you. They represent all the things that I saw, all that I witnessed and experienced, disassembled, an-alyzed, and meticulously rebuilt into my own personal mythology. I sought out landscapes I’d ven-tured through, mimicked the unnerving symmetry of the suburban neighborhoods from my child-hood, remembered my constant cat companion, and realized that vivid pink skies will always signify home to me. I carried around a box of family photos that as a child I had spent hours poring over, trying to make all the pieces of family fit together into some kind of whole.  I thought about the reli-gion and father that damned me before I was born. I packed it all up, carried it with me, and let each place tell a piece of the story as I came to know it—slowly, in bits and pieces, out of time, and from many different points of view.

This series continues to be a cathartic journey of self-exploration and identity, investigating and de-ciphering place and personal history, and its effect on my visual style as an artist. Aesthetically, the work is inspired by magical realism, the universally understood characteristics of fairytales, as well as my own personal history. Narratively, it is influenced by the classic hero-quest literary structure. The final images are presented quite large at 48”x72” due to my penchant for detail, and are con-structed with a super computer named, Thor. As I continue to work on the series, I have begun to reconstruct my childhood family home from memory, both digitally and in reality, adding yet an-other layer of intrigue into how we construct fact and use it to navigate the world.

See the completed body of work at: https://www.teresameier.com/

We're Back! It's Fall Semester, 2017

It's fall again, and the School of Photography is in a flurry of activity! We have some exciting announcements:

• Don't miss the newest exhibition at 688 Gallery. This month, the gallery hosts work from the School of Photography's prized faculty. The exhibition opens tonight, September 7th, from 5:30pm to 7:30pm, and runs until October 2nd.

• Students enrolled in PH325 Advanced Digital Capture will now be eligible for Phase One certification! Phase One products mark a new industry standard; our students will now meet this popular demand.

• The MFA program rolls out new classes this semester -- take a sneak peek here:

We hope to see you all in the classroom or in the field!

Norman Maslov Agent Internationale

by Heidi Volpe

Who printed it?
The Agency promo catalog was printed in Asia in coordination with The Workbook.

Who designed it?
Designed by Anita Atencio at the Workbook and our upcoming promo-catalogue has been revised by the Workbook’s new designer, Andy Carey. The booklet is an expanded extension of our Workbook directory advertising.  

Who edited the images?
My photographers submit images to me and we discuss what we want to showcase each year. I edit the order. 

How many did you make?
2500 copies each year. Mailed to creatives nationally and given out at portfolio shows. 

How many times a year do you send out promos?
This is the one full agency group mailing we do once a year. The only one that includes all of our talent. Other mailings throughout the year are separate pieces from the individual artists. 

Where did you get the buttons made?
Buttons made by the Busy Beaver Button Company in Chicago. Designed by Scott Miller

What photo is on that button and why?
The photo is an image that has been a primary part of our identity for over twenty years. We have modified its use over time depending on the application. Hats are an ongoing part of the Agency’s image identity. The round button version was adapted by designer Scott Miller. 

Tell us about the Hat theme.
We’ve been doing the Hat Cover theme on our promotional catalogs for about 12 years. Each year I select one of my photographers to create the wrap around cover/back image. I send them a selection of my hats and they can concept and shoot anything they want with any of the hats as long as it fits the booklets design and front and back cover needs.

This article originally appeared on May 15, 2017 as part of The Daily Promo on aPhotoEditor

Susan Mah's Loss Project Finds New Home

Los Angeles-based support organization HealGrief.org will now host Loss Project, an ongoing body of work by AAU graduate Susan Mah. Loss Project is "a merging of psychology and photography, an artistic exploration of the human condition as it relates to loss." Says Mah,

"My images, along with stories from those who participated, are there as an empathic display of grief and mourning. Additionally, there is a "call for entries" to the public, i.e., an invite for others to share their own imagery about their losses. Thus the Loss Project becomes a therapeutic intervention, so to speak, wherein anyone in the world can share their story, whether or not he or she identifies as an artist."

To view more of Loss Project or participate in the online community, click here.

Photography In An Evolving Media Landscape

by Kris Davidson

SOCIAL MEDIA AND COLLABORATIVE DOCUMENTARY WORK
It is only natural that a shift between how photographers and subjects collaborate on documentary work is underway—manifestations of collaboration are increasingly visible. “Citizen journalism” is made possible by the widespread availability of smartphones and other digital recording devices—yet, the question of what defines a photograph as effective amid the incomprehensible volume of images flooding the world remains. As a result, many documentary photographers are assuming a multifaceted role of collaborator/mentor/curator/director, working with their subjects to cultivate and distill subject-created work and incorporating it in a larger commentary.

A screenshot of the Everyday Africa Instagram feed. Photographer Peter DiCampo and writer Austin Merrill had a simple goal when they launched Everyday Africa in early 2012: to provide another alternative to the tragic narrative that defined so much of the reportage from the African continent. The two men never imagined that they might start an international movement, but that is what transpired, thanks to the power of social media. Today Everyday Africa is a thriving Instagram (@everydayafrica) and Tumblr feed with content delivered from a growing group of photographers (both Africans and expatriates alike) that reveals daily life on the continent from multiple perspectives, moving beyond the visual clichés and stereotypes about war, poverty, and disease that permeate conventional media coverage of Africa. The group’s mission statement articulates their motivation: “As journalists who have lived and worked on the continent for years at a time, we find the extreme not nearly as prevalent as the familiar, the everyday.”

Academic and researcher Mandy Rose, who looks at the intersection between documentary and networked culture, has identified four specific areas of collaboration in documentary work:

The Creative Crowd Model: This model includes multiple participants who contribute fragments to a highly templated whole, analogous to the separate panels within a quilt. The units of content may not make much sense on their own, but value and meaning accrue as they come together, producing a distinctive aesthetic that’s about energy and repetition.

The Participant Observers Model: This model utilizes distributed (in differing locales) documentarians who each contribute to a work that’s concerned with contrasting experiences of place. The participants decide when and what they shoot and what story they want to tell, but their role in the final contextualization of that content can vary dramatically.

The Community of Purpose Model: In this model, a group of participants take part in a production with a shared objective around social change.

The Traces of the Multitude Model: The projects that fall under this model introduce a new aspect to collaboration by drawing on social media content—linking to a multitude of potentially anonymous contributors. Here we can start to see documentary that is continually live and updating, with static video linked to live web data.

Every age brings forth its own attendant visual vernacular; the current technology-fueled era is especially defined by a rapidly evolving visual literacy. With the rise of social media—especially visually driven social media such as Instagram—there has been a discernible shift from a professional photographer-led visual vernacular to a new expression that is heavily influenced by the manner in which social-media platforms organize (or rather, disorganize) images. With more than a billion smartphones sold each year, cameras are now among the most ubiquitous technologies on the planet. Reportedly, a trillion images were created last year, more every minute than in the entire 20th century combined. Everyone is a photographer. Everyone has a unique point of view, a story to tell, a version of truth to share with the world. One thing is certain: It’s a fascinating time to be making and consuming images; as a society we are redefining the fluid parameters of objectivity, subjectivity while reframing all-too-human quest for some larger ephemeral truth.

Kris Davidson is a Part-Time Instructor at AAU. This feature is an excerpt of the full article, which can be found on Davidson's blog: http://blog.krisdavidson.com/2017/07/13/the-subjective-gaze/

Portfolio: Jen Frase

bluebirds

I gave birth to twins eight years ago and although I knew it would be life changing, I really had no idea what a complex period of time this really is. My days are filled with moments of joy, stress, wonder, love, fear, humor and wistfulness. Not only do I experience a wide gamut of emotions, but they can all happen simultaneously. This series, entitled bluebirds, is a personal story about my life with my children, but it’s also a universal story about this peculiar, complex and beautiful time in life.

These images tell a narrative – a universal story of childhood. They tell the story of this remarkable time in life. The images illustrate the sweet, the profound and the peculiar – moments that are sometimes sensitive, sometimes odd, sometimes humorous, but always filled with love and appreciation. Each image can be taken at face value - the moments illustrated are unremarkable, just snippets from our daily lives. However, they are more complex than everyday depictions, as there is a deeper story embedded. They somehow embody a child’s world, a parent’s feelings and everything in between. I believe the images transcend the everyday to tell an evocative, universal story of this time in our lives, as a scrapbook of light, color, love, humor, telling moments, meaningful gestures and metaphor. There is beauty and poignancy in the complexity of it all. This stew of all things childhood is the essence of this body of work.

This series is an exploration into the world of childhood and I would love for viewers to see the images and relate to them - either as a memory of a simple snippet from their own world or a stirring of deeper emotion in what this time in our lives means to us. However, as a mom and a photographer, this work has also given me some power; choosing what images to capture and determining how I do that, allows me to slow the pace of our lives and gives me some control over something that is essentially uncontrollable – the passage of time.

More of bluebirds can be seen at http://www.jenfrasephotography.com/bluebirds/

Portfolio: Paul Q. Thai

Conjunction Scenes

In the 1910’s and 1920s, Kuleshov conducted a now-famous experiment in film. He edited together sequences that make psychological connections from one clip to the next. This is significant because Kuleshov realized that editing shot A + shot B = C (new idea). This is the underlying idea in the theory of montage.

In film, we string an edited scene to the next to create a new idea. In this series, both scenes shared the same plane to create a new suggestion. In each image, the subject walks across the frame without creating any particular meaning. But when a mural is present, our minds try to make sense of the relationship of the two – creating what I call conjunction scenes. Many of the conjunction scenes have interpretive meanings. The wall incurs division and confinement and is a break away from traditional views.

More images from this series can be seen at http://paulqthai.com/gallery/conjunction-scene/