Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Photo Class Assignment


For class we needed to create a portrait of a place and were assigned to different areas in the city to shoot. Here are some shots in uppermanhattan mostly around Columbia and Harlem.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Man of the House

This semester I was taking documentary photo and the following images are selections from the larger series called "man of the house". Stephen is a 21 year old living at home with his mother and working as a waiter in a local restaurant. As I began shooting, I wanted to document this person in relation to the working class and within the context of our capitalist economy. However, my project then became centered on Steve's life when I realized I was spending more time with him outside of his place of employment. He is financially independent from both parents and often feels out of place at home. I wanted to show the other side of Steve, what is actually going on in his head, issues he deals with everyday but no one else sees. The series is a work in progress as I would like to document his life over the course of three years. For this work I shot with a DSLR and converted to black and white photos when I was editing. There is also little photoshop used on the photographs as I wanted to preserve the original content of the image and stay true to the traditional documentary style. And for the record for you film crazies, I would have shot film, should have too, but you know how it goes, time is money. Thanks Ben Frank.