The Book Begins...

take a look...

Vulnerable

You would never believe this dripping liquid off his face actually came out of his mouth. We viewed Oliver Herring photographing this man after he spit water with food coloring up in the air and let it land on his face. through all that filth...you can't help but stare at his eye! They capture you.

Typography or Design?

We viewed the work of Reza Abedini, Saed Meshki, and other Graphic artist from Iran. Their work was incredible! I can't wait to build around some of their ideas. The use of typography in certain page layouts was fantastic. Nothing is written in standard format. There is text on top on images, on top of other text, shaped around things, scrunched together, extremely large, and so many other styles. Being unable to read to text gave the graphic designs another design element. The text wasn't text any more, just design. How beautiful! i wasn't caught up in trying to understand the context or meaning, just admiring the images. I have many items of clothing that contain text in the graphics and people are always trying to understand and make reasonable sense of my clothes. Is that really the reason there is text abstractly place and interwoven with the graphics? maybe we should just let it be art instead of trying to make something of everything so we can have the power again.

Time=Change

I listened to Arturo Herrera talk about his experience of moving from New York to Berlin. He reflected on his artistic process and realized he previously had been producing without thinking, but in this new location he had time. Obviously, something that had been bountiful in his prior location because this singular element changed his whole artist process. He could now think. Wow, what a realization. To find that you now have time to think and you didn't even know you were missing that in the pass. This really spoke to me about the power of location. I've lived so many places and seen that live does so down and speed up depending on where you are, and more so who you are in that space.

Herrera states that he is "REcreating life through the camera". how interesting that it creates NEW life. the photo doesn't repeat it creates new. I feel as if I could see here staring at the screen and thinking about that idea for hours.

He combine many non-related images into the same space so the viewer was forced to combine them. We all think in such reasonable terms. Things have to make sense. What happens when they don't? do we make sense of them through our prior knowledge, our emotion, our third eye speaking to us what we do not think we see. Every viewer will have different internal experience and feelings and consequently every viewer will have a different message. What a more advanced way of commmunicating. It truely tells us that as humans we only see what we want to see. maybe what we see isn't even there.

Be inspired...

The beach, my favorite place. We may visit it every day and never see it all, never appreciate what it has to give, and how extraordinary it's little elements are. It's no wonder this location was such an inspiration for Tom Scott. He focused he's series on patterns seen at the beach after he saw shapes and figures formed in the sand. This brings us back to the basics. The basics that compositional beauty is that of line, shape, balance, color, and more. When we see these elements in nature, they capture us communicating beauty that we don't know how to understand. It's no wonder these are "the elementary design elements". We can only strive to recreate the beauty in the world by combining these things.

As Tom talks about his singular moment at the beach when he felt inspired and began his series. I think of my defining moments which have inspired me to contribute to my photographic book of the city of San Diego. I recall a moment as I was walking rapidly(as i usually do, many people have told me I need to learn to "stroll") down second street around 5pm I spotted a tree, barren of it's once bountiful leaves. One red five pointed leaf remained midway through the branches. It captured me. It reminded me of the nature we ignore because we are overwhelmed with traffic lights, construction, and constant noise. I looked up at this leaf and admired it. It created it's own foreground against the high rise buildings and the setting sun behind it.

San Diego View

The last picture here is one of the views from my office. Its the best part of my day to walk in at 9am and see that horizon. SD rocks my world!

"Dancing is the closest you can get to Flying"

On Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 I had the privilege of watching an arts and lecture event performed by Lux Boreal. They are a dance company based in Tijuana, Mexico and create contemporary dance performances concerning border issues. One of their dancers spent about half an hour explaining what they use as inspiration and how they illustrate their message through dance. This young man and another dance member performed a very powerful fast-paced contemporary dance about humans constantly working and therefore they are similar to machines. The dance included two bright red tables which they danced around, on, and under. They were very creative in using this architecture and even though they repeated the same dance phrase many times it only became more and more interesting because of the varying use of the table and the music's tempo. The performance left me in aw and made me want to dance on my desk back in the classroom. I encourage anyone to go see Lux Boreal if you get the chance.

sliced

I decided the photo below was too boring...

Book of Self Transformation

Probably one thing not many people know about me is that I've moved over 30 times in my life and I'm only 21. Another thing many people don't know is that when I was 12 years old I saw downtown San Diego for the first time and fell in love. I came home to central california and told everyone I was going to grow up and move to San Diego to live happily ever after. When I was 17, not even 2 months out of high school, I did just that. I jumped at the first window of opportunity to migrate to the city and create my new life. I fall in love with this city more and more everyday. Opportunities have arisen to relocate and embark on a journey in a new place, but I couldn't bare to leave what I now call home. 

I would like to share this evolution of my traveling life through photography and my accompanying textual inspirations. I intend to photograph my immediate surrounding in downtown San Diego and beach territory as well as reference older imagery of my experiences. I would like to include things I've learned, placed I've been, and personal conceptions. I hope everyone will enjoy the glimpse into my personal transformation of location.