Including last night’s class, I spent over seven hours on the Shoreline campus yesterday. I’m making clear progress. I developed two more rolls of film and made contact sheets for each. (I’m happier with the results of these contact sheets than with the first one, that has rather radical exposure variance.)
The extra time on campus is worth every minute. I love having access to all of the equipment, but the access to the people is priceless. As you can imagine, I’m starting to identify which of the students are serious enough about their photography to be found in the photography lab on a regular basis. I’ll be very interested to see where their inspiration takes these devotees.
Back in class, our first photo assignments, photograms, were due. We all brought our mounted photograms and taped our artist statements to the back of them. We passed our projects “to the right” and “to the right” until there was sufficient randomization to conceal the identity of the individual writing a critique of our work. (Um, yeah, Microsoft got mine.) We then spent most of the class time sitting in a circle, reading each other’s artist statements aloud and critiquing each piece as a group.
I think I’ve found how those crappy artists at Art Walk get started. Just for example, there were at least five “self portraits” consisting of the immediate contents of the artist’s pockets. Since the instructor had already talked about this strategy when the assignment was handed out, I was far less than impressed. Keys, coins, a few crumpled dollars, a hair tie, a blob, whatever. The student’s lack of interest was obvious. (I really wasn’t expecting much, so I wasn’t disappointed.)
There were good, thoughtful pictures as well. These are a little harder to explain. I loved the way crystal and glass scattered the light. One scene portrayed a spider dangling from a tree branch and a field under a summer sun. One student’s photogram was a picture of a squirt gun with some crystals arranged to resemble water dripping from the tip
