 "Photo:")
While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see. - Dorothea Lange
For anyone seeking to earn a bachelor's degree in fine arts, the final hurdle is a daunting one. In order to graduate, art majors must prepare one final project that demonstrates their skills and hard-won knowledge. For UCD art majors planning a spring graduation, the pressure is mounting. Between now and the end of the semester, they must pour all their energy into creating a project that will impress a panel of professors and prove they have mastered their craft. The Advocate is following three seniors - Laura Hamilton, Carly Moser, and Theo Mullen - as they progress toward the finish line.
All three students happen to be photographers, but they each have their own distinctive style. In this article, the first of a three-part series, we check in with the budding artists as they begin the process.
Laura Hamilton
In a parallel universe, Laura Hamilton might be called a voyeur. In this one, she is a photographer, merely seeking to satisfy her curiosity about the world. It's a vocation with roots in her childhood; a childhood marked by curiosity about the mysterious worlds hidden behind her neighbors' curtains. In a pleasing symmetry, the boxy windows that framed those curtains and granted partial access to long-forgotten enigmas have neatly dissolved into the square viewfinder of a camera. Those windows, those other lives, were set to be the focus of Hamilton's project, until it took an unexpected turn.
"Last semester I started out with the idea of photographing people from the outside of their houses at night looking in. As a child, I was always intrigued by what other families and other people were doing with their lives, because it felt like nobody else existed in the world but me and my family, because that was all I knew. I never really knew what it was like to be a part of another family. So as a little kid I was constantly intrigued by that idea, and I remember driving all the time in the back of my mom's car and the world seemed so big, and I would just glance over and look in the windows and imagine and make up stories about what their life was like. It's still something I do nowadays. It's intriguing to me.
"So I started doing that, and it just technically wasn't what I was used to, because I've always photographed inside my house and photographed myself. I've never had to leave my natural environment that I'm comfortable with. So I just began taking the whole voyeurism inside. So I became the voyeur and the subject at the same time. I became the person that was watching me. I began imagining, if somebody was watching me, how they would be doing it. So therefore, I became the mystery [in front of the camera] and the mystery behind the camera. That's why, a lot of my images, I use studio lights where I pull the subject from the scene or I pull the area from the scene that I want the eye to lead to. What I'm trying to do in my photography is create these journeys through the image, where you see one room but there's a hallway and there's another room, or maybe you see a faint shadow of somebody in a back room but it's all lit in the front room, and it makes you want to move through the space. That's what my photographs are doing right now."
Carly Moser
Carly Moser became a photography major through an unexpected brush with serendipity. Initially Moser was a biology major at Metro State, studying the intricacies of cellular activity and all things organic. After transferring to UCD she found herself in need of an art elective, and signed up for a photography course. She fell in love with the camera, and soon found herself switching majors. "I knew I liked photography, but I didn't realize that I could love it as much as I do," she says now.
Her project, tentatively titled "Refract," is all about the female image. "It's about body dysmorphia - distorted body image," Moser says. "How women view themselves, and how they get this distorted image of what they should look like, and what they do look like. It's a subject matter that's been done in photography, but I think I'm taking a different look at it. I'm using reflections in every single image. Every image has a mirror or some sort of reflection of the person looking into themselves. Reflections are very important, because the only way you can see yourself is either via a photograph or your reflection. That's the only way you can see what you actually physically look like. So it's all about how someone views themselves physically, through these reflections."
She didn't have to go far to find inspiration for her project. "I grew up in a household full of women and they have influenced my photography to the brim. That's what all my stuff is about - femininity, and my family; their experiences, my experiences, with being a woman."
Theo Mullen
Theo Mullen is full of surprises. Although the art major - who works in both sculpture and photography - owns six or seven cameras, his favorite is an inexpensive, point-and-shoot 35mm camera. "I think I like the ease, how you can snap off a picture really quickly and it can be representative of a lot of things. Just the simplicity of it," he confesses.
His final project should be equally surprising - once he decides what it will be, of course. It's still early in the process, and Mullen is grappling with defining his vision. Ideas swirl through his consciousness like so many chemicals floating in an emulsion, inhabiting that inchoate netherworld between conception and crystallization.
"I have a lot of stuff shot, and I will continue to photograph," Mullen says. "One body of work that I'm trying to include is a series of images that I made called sleeping pictures. I photographed myself sleeping through the night. Instead of record - like film, motion picture - I used one camera, one negative, and it's over the course of eight hours. What it creates is motion and it's frozen at the same time. It creates a lot of layers and textures. That, and kind of everyday snapshots.
"I have this quote by a [philosopher] named Adam Phillips - 'Ordinary language is used with economy in order to express a truth in a manner which almost inevitably provokes further thought.' As you can see, it's all kind of abstract in my mind right now, and it will sort of progress. What I think about that is, having images that can sometimes be banal or about everyday life or about something that I see, and they express in a manner that hopefully, in turn, provokes that further thought. I guess what I'm trying to look for is the metaphor that the land and the body and everyday events can express."
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