Taylor McCormick - Digital Photography I

Taylor McCormick Professor Jaime Aelavanthara Digital Photography I 7 May 2020  Artist Statement     Topics such as inclusivity and accessibility are spoken about now more than ever before. The world is constantly changing and adapting to meet the needs of those with disabilities. Despite the fact that individuals with special needs are often recognized and provided with the support that they deserve, no matter what, their lives do not always completely match up to what is considered the life of a “typical” American. Specifically, when examining the home life of an individual with a disability, one may learn that they have to do things in their own, special way in order to best cater to themselves. In my series, titled, “There’s No Place Like Home” I address this idea and utilize still-life photography to provide my audience with a glimpse of the home lives of those with disabilities. For inspiration for these photographs, I used interviews I have conducted both with individu

Taylor McCormick Professor Jaime Aelavanthara Digital Photography I 4 May 2020 Final Project: Sophie Calle     For my final project, I am drawing inspiration from French photographer Sophie Calle. Specifically, one of my sources of inspiration is Calle’s series, titled, The Blind . In this body of work, Calle asks individuals who are blind what their concept of beauty is. She then proceeds to create photographic compositions that accompanied those responses. For example, in one of the works within this series, Calle photographs a patch of grass, and next to this photograph hangs the caption, “Green is beautiful. Every time I like something, I’m told it’s green. Grass is green, trees, leaves, nature too…”  In another work from this series, Calle photographs a woman with long, curly hair and captions the photo, “Hair is magnificent. Especially African hair. I curl up in women’s long hair. I pretend I’m a cat and meow.” An important idea to note when observing this ser

For my final project, I will be drawing inspiration from Sophie Calle, specifically from her The Blind series, in which she asked individuals who were blind what their idea of beauty was, and then accompanied those responses with photographs. Since I have been interviewing individuals with disabilities/ those who work with children with special needs for my capstone, I have many recorded interviews from people who are, in some way or shape, related to the topic of disabilities and who have touched upon that with me. I would like to use their perspectives and unique stories as inspiration for photographs, and to create still-life images that are representative of their experiences of life. These still-life images would reflect the black and white style Calle utilizes in her Hotel series. If this works well, I would like to have captions/quotes from my interviews under each photograph, to provide a simple and vague backstory of my work.

 So after reading all of the comments, I decided to go ahead and re-do the self portrait that was focused on my hair, and expanded on it a lot. Although some of you mentioned that I should re-do the portrait with my dog sitting in the chair, I felt that it was hard to expand on that photograph and be creative with it, while also handling my dog. Some of the comments mentioned that I should incorporate more grass/green into this photograph... That was attempted, but I don't have a tripod and was directing my mom to take the photographs, and it was hard to explain to her exactly what I wanted in/out of the composition.... I felt that, for her sake, it was easier to take a photograph with my fence as my background. So that's what I ended up doing. I then used some fake flowers to bring in a "nature" element and photoshopped in my hands holding the flowers at different levels.