Today in my Senior Portfolio class we did what our teacher Nigel Poor called a Quick snap challenge. The rules for this exercise were simple; we had to go for a walk and collect things we found interesting, bring them back to our studio space and photograph them. Our time limit was ninety minutes, and then we shared one photo with the class for discussion. I thought this was an incredibly fun exercise, I got so carried away with re-arranging the objects that I almost didn’t get it done in time to share.
Exercises like this are helpful because I think that when you let loose and have fun with something like this you open yourself up to new creative possibilities.
I used this as a way to further practice some ideas I have had recently about how I document things I find interesting. Below are the results from what I made and a few from my classmates. Enjoy!
J. William Kraintz II
Try it yourself!!
Go for a walk and pick up things you find
Bring them back to your space and photograph them in any way you like
Give yourself a time limit if you like (playing around with setting different limits to what you are doing can also encourage creative thought).
Ronado Howard 2021Alyssa Dougherty 2021D’Ajuah Gordon 2021Franny Kenney 2021Franny Kenney 2021Patrick Wilson 2021Jesse Bjork 2021
The incredible nostalgic quality of the photograph. At 36
The more I learned about photography and expression through visual communication the more I wanted to rush home and reexamine the world that created me. It wasn’t the act of photography but the new way of communication that I had never really understood before. Why wouldn’t I want to take pictures that would remind me of some of the happiest moments in my life. To record them in a way that relies less on fading memory but gives me a tangible thing that I can revisit and reexamine and I can share with others a slice of the human experience and hopefully communicate something they hadn’t thought of or had seen before and pushed a little self reflection and creates a connection between myself and the audience. I remember fondly when I was a child my father catching some crawdads in the creek that ran by our town. So when I had the chance at 36 to catch some crawdads with my dad I made sure to bring my camera. I’m not trying to reconstruct my past in any way. I just wanted to make something that would spur such a good memory from my childhood and now connect it to something positive in my present.
The consequences of the pandemic sweeping the globe has yet to be fully realized, millions of people are under social distancing orders or are being required to stay home to help slow the spread of the deadly Coronavirus; as a result, we are learning how to adjust to spending more time at home. This has caused a lot of disruption within our societies, and can cause anxiety or fear of what to do with ourselves and the spaces we occupy. To many the home is little more than a box to store the objects that make us instantly happy and offer a short respite from the increasing call to work more and more.
Maybe it is time we start to as a society, demand that we have more free time than work time. This situation we are in has allowed me to explore my ideas of the home and space we occupy and what it means to find happiness. One thing that connects humans is our ability to empathize with others; one method that can facilitate this is photography, it provides an excellent medium to convey thought or further explore a concept through visual language intertwined with the human experience. Photography is my method and this is my perspective and that is all I can share.
“To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell. The old word bauen, which says that man is insofar as he dwells, this word bauen however also means at the same time to cherish and protect, to care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine. Such building only takes care – it tends the growth that ripens into its fruit of its own accord.”
Martin Heidegger
There is an incredibly grounding effect that takes place when I am working on the tiny garden that we have on our back porch.
“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.” – Marcus Aurelius
“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
Wendell Berry
“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
Carl Sagan
“There is no detail in photography there’s only focus because, once, there is a focal plain… everything in it, is sharp, therefore whats the detail? There is no detail.”
Jeff Wall
Photographs have yet to provide exact truth as I have learned, I feel strongly that by embracing the artifice of the object of the photograph we can explore ideas that result from simple electrical impulse in the human brain. Sometimes when viewing another artists work I get this sort of fuzzy energetic feeling in my brain that I really can’t describe, this is what I push for in my work.
Kraintz Photography 